Trance–formations. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Structure of Hypnosis

New Behavior Generator

Today we want to teach you other specific ways to utilize trance states. First we want to give you a very useful procedure that you can use for a wide variety of behaviors: the new behavior generator. You can use this for any situation in which the person makes some response they're dissatisfied with. That description could fit the major complaint of most of your clients. I'm going to assume that you've already put the person In a trance and established some kind of ideomotor yes/no signal system, either overtly or covertly.

The first thing you do is have him select some behavior that he is dissatisfied with. Then you. have him watch and listen to himself behave in that situation. You want him to see himself doing it out in front of himself as if he were watching a movie. This is an instruction for dissociation; this makes it possible for him to watch and listen with comfort to something that could be unpleasant if he were actually in the situation. You say "Give me that 'yes' signal as soon as you have completed watching and listening, with comfort and security, to this piece of behaviour that you want to change."

When you get the "yes" response, you ask "Do you know what new behavior or response you would prefer to make in this situation?" It's important to phrase everything in terms of yes/no questions so that you always have clear feedback from the person.

If the answer to that question is "yes" the person does know what response he would prefer to make, you say "Good. Now watch and listen to yourself as you make that new response in the situation that used to be a problem for you. Give me a 'yes' response when you're done."

Then you ask "Having observed yourself making a new response to that situation, was that completely satisfactory to you?" If you get a "no" response, you have him go back and select a more appropriate behavior.

If you get a "yes" response, you go ahead to install the new behavior by asking him to re–associate with the dissociated experience. "This time I want you to run the same movie, but from the point of view of being yourself doing the behavior. Put yourself inside the movie and experience what it is like to actually carry out those behaviors in the situation."

When he has done that, ask "Was that still satisfactory?" and be sure that you get a congruent "yes" response. Sometimes a behavior looks great from the outside, but doesn't feel good once you get inside. If you get a "no" to this question, you need to back up and make modifications in the behavior until he is satisfied when he experiences it from the inside.

Now that you've got the change in his behavior, you need to do something to be absolutely sure that the change transfers automatically to the appropriate situations in his life. We call this future–pacing, or bridging. You can ask "Will you, his unconscious mind, take responsibility for having this new behavior actually occur in the context where the old behavior used to occur?" If you want, you can be even more explicit. You can add "Now raise your 'yes' finger as soon as you, his unconscious mind, have discovered what specifically you'll see, hear, or feel, that will indicate that this is a context where you are going to make this new behavior occur." You are finding a contextual cue that will automatically trigger the new behavior. Automaticity is one of the characteristics of changes made by a refined hypnotist. When you make this kind of change, the conscious mind doesn't have to remember to do anything. If the conscious mind has to remember the new behavior, you haven't wired it in appropriately. Why tax the conscious mind? It's the most limited and undependable part of the person.

With some people, explicit future–pacing isn't necessary. They have a good future–pacing strategy and they will do it themselves. Other people will not be able to do that bridging on their own, and you need to do it explicitly if you want to be thorough and systematic in your work.

If the person doesn't know what new response he would like to have in the problem situation, then you begin a step–by–step selection process. First you say "Go back in your personal history. Have you made a response in some other situation that you think would be an excellent response to make in this situation?" If the answer is "yes" then have him relive that situation and incorporate that response, going through all the steps that I just outlined.

If the answer is still "no" then you have him continue the search for a model, using what we call "referential index shift." You say "Do you know anyone who responds to that kind of situation in a way that you think is quite appropriate, elegant, and effective, and a way in which you would like to respond?" You can say "I know by the fact that you are dissatisfied with your present behavior, that you have some standard for what kind of response you would like to have. Pick some human being—someone whom you respect and admire–who has what you consider to be a much more integrated and appropriate response to this kind of situation." The model they select can be "real" or "fictional." A fictional character from a movie or a book is as real an internal representation of a possible response as are actual people in your life experience, and can serve as excellent models.

Once he has selected a model, you have him go through a three–step sequence to incorporate that model's behavior into his own repertoire. First you have him see and hear the model responding to the situation that he wants to have a new choice about. You can ask him to raise his "yes" finger to indicate when he has completed this. Then you reach over, push the "yes" finger down gently, and say "Good. Having watched and listened to this other person do this, do you now believe that this is the kind of response you would like to be able to make?" If you get a "no," you have to back up and ask him to find another model, or see the same model respond differently. If you get a "yes," you go on

in this second step you say "Now substitute your own image ana your voice into this film strip and sound track. Watch and listen to it again, and raise your "yes" finger when you are done. Here he watches and listens to himself doing the behavior, but he is still dissociated kinesthetically.

When he finishes this step, you ask him "After seeing and hearing yourself do this, do you still want this as a piece of behavior? Do you Still think that this is appropriate for you?" If you get a "no" you back

up and modify the behavior until it is appropriate—either by making small changes, or by going back to selecting a new model.

If you get a "yes," you ask him to step into the image and have the experience a third time, from the perspective of being there and having the feelings that go along with that particular response. When he has done this, you ask "Was that still satisfactory?" If the answer is "no," you back up and modify the behavior. If the answer is a congruent "yes," that means that the new behavior has been tried out in that situation and found to be satisfactory.

This is a really respectful and graceful way of approaching change, because you keep the change dissociated from him until he has decided that it would be useful. Then you wire it in.

Next you do a future–pace in the same way I described earlier. You can ask his unconscious mind to give you a "yes" signal as soon as it has discovered what external cue it will use as an automatic trigger for the new behavior.

At the end, you can give him some general suggestions for amnesia. "It is important to remember to forget the things that you don't need to remember" is one way to say it. Your outcome is behavioral change. You don't care whether he has any consciousness of it or not. You might suggest that he will remember only as much as his unconscious mind believes is useful for his conscious mind to know about. If his unconscious decides to give him nothing, ask minimally that he has a warm tingling sensation as he comes out of trance as an indication that something useful has happened, and that he can look forward to being delightfully surprised by some new behavior when he gets into the context.

Man: What do you do if you get a "no" response when you ask the question "Docs your unconscious know what the cue is?" You could say "Then I would like you to recall to your unconscious mind the particular situations that you watched and listened to in which you want your behavior to be different. I would like you to create exactly that context again with those same people, those same surroundings, and watch and listen to what it is that happens right at the beginning of that experience, which could be used as a cue to trigger new behavior."

that I think it's time to act. Go through this in pairs so that you get some experience now with the basic outline. Let me reassure you that it is quite appropriate for you to stumble a bit with this material. I'm asking you to employ an entire strategy for generative change, with a brief amount of instruction. If you were already able to do these things gracefully and smoothly, you would have wasted your time and money coming here. So I'm delighted that you are courageous enough to feel free to limit yourself to the choices I offer here. I remind you that these are simply more choices to be added to your general repertoire as an effective communicator. With some practice these choices will become as smooth and graceful as any other techniques you have learned to use.

New Behavior Generator Outline

(1) Select situation in which new behavior is desired.

(2) Pick a model.

(3) Watch and listen to the model behaving in the situation.

(4) Substitute your image and voice for the model's.

(5) Step into the movie to experience the kinesthetic feelings.

(6) Future–pace: What cue will trigger off the new behavior?

* * * * *

The strategy you all just used is designed for straight behavioral change. The only difficulty I noticed people running into was in dealing with "secondary gain." Let me use the problem that Nora worked on as an example.

Nora was interested in learning to have choices about smoking. Smoking is a habitual problem that has a profound set of secondary gains for most people. In other words, there are certain things that smoking does for Nora and other smokers that serve a positive purpose. It's actually better that she smoke, and get access to those experiences and those resources, than it would be for her to quit smoking. She wants to give up something that she knows is physiologically damaging. The difficulty is that if she were to give it up without anything else happening, she would lose access to certain resources and states of consciousness that are important to her.

I'm confident that if we were to get Nora to stop smoking without doing anything else, her unconscious mind is flexible enough that she would begin smoking again within a few months. If we were to make an overall judgement about her functioning, it is probably better that she smoke—even with the damaging physical consequences—and retain access to certain resources, than that she stop smoking and lose access to those resources. Any difficulties that involve secondary gain can be dealt with easily by using reframing. The new behavior generator is primarily for simple behavioral change. If there is secondary gain, use reframing.

The new behavior generator can also be combined with reframing in a useful way. If on the "generating new choices" step your partner doesn't create new alternatives quickly enough to satisfy you, you can say something like this:

"And as you continue to work, developing and considering various alternatives … I'd like to remind you of … some additional resources … sources of models that you might consider… . There may be other times and places in your life … when you had alternative behaviors which are more successful … at protecting you and getting you what you want and need … than X… . If there are, you might consider those alternatives. … In addition … you might quickly go on … a thorough search visually … and auditorily … for people whom you really respect and admire … who seem to have alternative choices … which are more effective than X … and still allow them the kinds of experiences that you desire for yourself …. Evaluate each one of those … allowing the part of you that runs X … to determine for you which, if any, of those are more effective than X. … Of course once your unconscious has determined … that it has these three methods of proceeding to do what X was supposed to do … more effectively than X … it will give you that 'yes' signal, and cause you to arouse … taking all the time you need."

The procedures we are teaching you do not have to be used in isolation. As you practice them ana become more effective in using them, you can begin to combine them and vary them in ways that make your learning more interesting for you.

Man: Have you ever gotten a congruent "yes" signal, and then not gotten the new behavior?

No. If I get a congruent response that says it will happen, it will. Sometimes the person has the new behavior for three or four months, and is just delighted, and then he goes back to the old behavior. To me that's a statement that I'm an elegant master of the art of change, that the person who was my client is quite responsive and easily able to make profound changes, and that some context in his life—his job, his family relationships, or something else—has changed so that the old behavior has become more appropriate than the new behavior we found. It's now my job to create new alternatives more appropriate for the new context.

Larry: I've heard that you could just take a person into the future and ask him what he would like to be like.

You're talking about pseudo–orientation in time. When you do that you put the person in trance, orient him into the future, and presuppose that he has already solved the problem he had when he first came to see you. Then you ask him to recount in detail just how he solved that problem, and what you did with him that was particularly useful. We've actually used this method as a way to develop new techniques that we then use with other clients.

There are lots of ways to do pseudo–orientation in time. It's one of my favorite approaches, but it's a little more advanced. If you can do the steps I just gave you, you've got the essential steps for making useful changes. This is the bare skeleton of how to proceed effectively. Variations such as pseudo–orientation in time require some artistry. I'm giving you what I consider the essential ingredients. The particular flavoring of the cuisine that you cook up in your office is going to be your artistry. I recommend that you feel free to restrict yourself to this bare outline until it is an automated part of your repertoire, and then get artistic. The bottom line is to be effective. After you can do that, you can get artistic.

1 like the work that you all did very much. Are there any other questions or comments about your experience that I might respond to now?

Beth: Kitty did this exercise with me, and I was dealing with something I've worked on for six or seven years in all different kinds of psychotherapy, from Reichian to gestalt to everything else around. This was something that happened way back in childhood which I alienated myself from, and couldn't get closure on. Anyway, using this new behaviour generator with the help of Kitty, who was doing it for the

very first time, the whole thing just fell into place. I don't know just what words to use. It just happened. There was unification, acceptance, and forgiveness, that I had never been able to experience before. And I have spent a long time trying to get at this with many different approaches. Thank you.

That was a testimonial, not a question. But I also asked for comments, so it was perfectly appropriate. Thank you.

Deep Trance Identification

Using exquisite models for the new behavior generator is based on what we call a "referential index shift" — "becoming" another person. If you do a really complete referential index shift, it's called "deep trance identification," one of the hardest hypnotic phenomena of all. Deep trance identification is a state of consciousness in which you assume the identity of someone else. You do it so completely that for that period of time you don't know you are doing it. Of course, there are varying degrees of this. It's possible to adopt the nonverbal and verbal behavior of another person so completely that you automatically acquire many skills that he has, even though you have no conscious representation of those skills. It's essentially what we did with people like Milton Erickson in order to learn quickly to be able to get the results they got.

There are certain necessary elements to assisting someone in doing deep trance identification. First, you have to remove the identity of the person with whom you are working. That presupposes a lot of amnesia: he is going to have amnesia for who he is. Secondly, it presupposes that he is going to have the ability to generate his behavior based on what he has observed about somebody else. In other words, if he is going to do deep trance identification with Melvin Schwartz, it means that all of his behavior has to be generated from Melvin Schwartz' verbal and nonverbal behavior. You need to give instructions to his unconscious to sort through his experience of the model's behavior: This includes voice tonality, facial expressions, posture, movement style, and typical ways of responding.

There are many ways to go after deep trance identification. Let me give you one way. The first thing I would do is work for a total age–regression to get rid of the identity of the person that I am working with. By the way, doing this will tell you how much work you are going to have to do to get deep trance identification.

Now, how could you get age–regression? What kinds of experiences would lead to age–regression? Think of universals for a moment. What universal experiences do people use to age–regress themselves?

Woman: The first time you learned to walk.

Man: Childhood memories.

No. Let me rephrase the question. You are mentioning things that are out of people's childhood, but not things that you've used to age–regress yourself. Let me give you an example. One of the things that people use to regress themselves is their college yearbook. People pull out their yearbooks specifically to regress themselves. College reunions arc another classic example of an age–regression technique. What else?

Woman: Photograph albums.

Man: Boxes of memorabilia.

Yes. Exactly.

Man: Odors.

Odors is one way it happens spontaneously, but not a way that people deliberately use. Woman: Old music. Now there's a zinger. Man: Souvenirs.

What else do people do? People return to their home town and go back to the old neighborhood. The things we're talking about now are things that people characteristically do. If I'm going to go for a hypnotic phenomenon, I want to design an experience in which the spontaneous reaction is the response I want—in this case regression—so I'm going to use these kinds of universal experiences.

One of the ways of doing age–regression is to induce a trance and have somebody see before himself the book of time. "And in that book there will be photographs from your entire life, and the page you are open to now is your present age totally and completely. But as you turn the page back one year, suddenly and completely, you are back there again … feeling what you felt then … and knowing only what you knew then and nothing more … honestly and completely … such that you can turn back one page … of time … at a time … going back fully and completely in each year … until you go all the way back to age six … such that when you are back there fully and completely… at age six … honestly knowing what you knew then and only then , . . will you be ready to continue … spontaneously … one of your hands will begin to float up, only as an indication to me … that you are honestly six years old."

That's how I design a technique to accomplish any phenomenon. There is no trance phenomenon that people don't already do anyway. Age–regression is not something that only hypnotists do. It's something that people do to themselves. They open a box of memorabilia; they pick up each object and they return to the age they were when they had the object. They discover that the box is really a time machine. "So you can cut a small hole in the side, and pick up something from your childhood and make it very small and you see the door … the opening in the box before you … and slowly you begin to walk into the box of time … and as you step through that door you have strange and confusing feelings. As you step through you look around and there are big objects lying all around you and each object has a door …. And you know, although you arc slightly frightened, that if you walk through any of those doors … you will become the age … at which that object appeared in your life… ."

You see, it's utter nonsense that I'm saying. However, I'm designing a context in which it is possible and logical for people to experience an alternative reality. Of course, you always use feedback to notice if the person is responding or not. You use all the usual behavioral cues to let you know if the person is actually regressing.

Once you get age–regression, you can do something with it. You have a six–year–old sitting in front of you. What do six–year–olds do to become somebody else?

Man: They play dress–up.

Exactly. They go up to the attic and play dress–up; they play "pretend." So you have them put on a set of clothes, only they don't know whose clothes these are, 'This is a funny set of clothes. It's not like mama's clothes. It's not daddy's clothes. It's not army clothes. I have no idea whose clothes these are. It doesn't make any sense … but suddenly, unconsciously … you begin to forget that you are the child … and you begin to become a person whom you don't know at six years old … but your unconscious knows who it is … and can take that person's tone of voice … that person's responses … only that person's movement … and only that person's behavior such that for the next ten minutes you will sit there … and develop unconsciously … a personality which is based on only what–you know … about that particular human being … so that in ten minutes your eyes will spontaneously flutter open … and you will be completely that particular human being."

Does that make sense to you as a way of doing it? You see, we could give you many specific strategies for using hypnosis to get different results. What we are trying to do now instead, is to give you an idea about how we conceive of using hypnosis to do anything. I build any particular hypnotic phenomenon by figuring out how I can get to it as naturally and easily as possible. If you can't get age–regression and identification this way, you can always use refraining to get it.

Man: Isn't there a lot of variation in how fast you can go when you do deep trance identification? And don't clients have to have some flexibility before they can do it?

Yes. Typically I don't attempt to do deep trance identification until I have somebody who is an exquisite subject, and who is trained to respond to me quickly. I would try to get many other trance phenomena before I would try deep trance identification. It seems foolish to me to attempt it with somebody who does not already know how to do amnesia and negative and positive hallucination, because those are minimum requirements. So I would do many other things first.

If I were a teacher in elementary school, deep trance identification would be one of the things I would teach. I would get videotapes of Albert Einstein and Irving Berlin and other great geniuses of our culture. I would have videotapes of them doing different things: talking and interacting with people—and especially talking about and doing whatever they are famous for. Then I would have the kids use those samples of behavior as the basis for becoming these people and accessing their abilities.

Man: It seems to me that this is what other cultures have called spirit possession.

Yes. What people experience as demonic possession, as far as I can tell, is nothing more than deep trance identification. I know a man who is famous for working with multiple personalities. He always has about twenty clients who are MP's. He's also a good Catholic, so of course a lot of his clients are possessed. He does exorcisms out on the helicopter pad behind a hospital. He gets national awards for being a straight psychiatrist, but I'm considered weird!

I went to see him because I was curious about his multiple personality clients. I met one of his clients in an altered state and met four or five of her personalities and the demon that possessed her. As far as I can tell. I can induce that in anybody. In fact, the way he went about introducing me to these personalities is exactly the way I would go about inducing them as a hypnotist.

The woman was sitting there in a chair, talking to us about how she has a lot of amnesia in her life. Nobody else does, right? Yet this psychiatrists convincer for knowing that you are a multiple personality is if there is any period of your life that you can't remember! He makes up a name for whatever period you have amnesia for. According to this psychiatrist, the period that you don't remember wasn't you; that was another personality. He would give it some name like "Fred." Then he ignores your ongoing behavior, hits you on the head unexpectedly and calls this name "Fred! Fred! Come out! Come out!" If you say "What do you mean 'Fred, come out?'" he ignores you until suddenly some other personality emerges. That's a great way to make multiple personalities. I'm convinced that MP's are manufactured by parents and well–meaning therapists; they are not spontaneously derived.

Man: When you do deep trance identification, you don't want to have the person become someone else at six years of age. How do you get him to grow up again?

You just tell him to be someone else. Children don't pretend to be somebody else who is only six years of age. They pretend to be someone else at whatever age they know the person at. You can tell children anything, and as long as you do so meaningfully, they'll obey you. Once you have age–regressed the person, you say "Now, while you continue to play and have a good time, your unconscious mind is going to learn about… . " Then you just give him direct suggestions: "Sort through everything you know unconsciously about so–and–so—the way he looks, the way he sounds, the way he moves, the way he responds—and make that a single unit so that you will emerge spontaneously in fifteen minutes being totally that adult."

Let me caution you again. Deep trance identification is fairly complicated and difficult. It's useful as a learning strategy, but there are much easier ways to accomplish most of the things you want to do. For most changes, the new behavior generator or some other technique will work equally well and be a lot easier to do.

Pain Control

Pain is a fascinating thing in that it's very useful up to a point, and then it's no longer useful. This is true for a lot of other things as well. A little adrenalin in an emergency can be useful, but too much can be incapacitating, depending on the task. For something really simple ami strenuous, like lifting a car off someone, the more adrenalin the better. But for any task that requires fine coordination, like fixing a watch or putting a key into a keyhole, too much adrenalin is disastrous.

One thing I do to deal with pain is provide a context in which the natural response is to miss pain. This is an overall strategy for hypnosis: to create a context in which the natural response is the one I want.

In the classic Erickson story on pain control, they brought in a woman who was dying of cancer. They brought her to Erickson in an ambulance, put her on a gurney, and rolled her into the office. The woman looked at Erickson and said "This is the dumbest thing I've ever done in my life. My doctor sent me here so that you could do something about the pain. Drugs don't help my pain. Surgery doesn't help my pain. How are you going to be able to help my pain with just words?"

Erickson, sitting in a wheelchair, swayed back and forth and looked at her, and paced all her beliefs by saying "You came here because your doctor told you to come here, and you don't understand how just words could control your pain. Drugs don't even control your pain. Surgery doesn't even control your pain. And you think this is the dumbest thing you've ever heard of. Well, let me ask you a question. If that door were to burst open right now … and you looked over and saw a great big tiger … licking its chops hungrily … staring at only you … how much pain do you think you'd feel?"

The point is, he presented a context in which nobody is going to be aware of pain. Pain simply doesn't exist when you're about to be eaten by a tiger. An experience where there is no pain is something that can be anchored and continued as a particular altered state. Erickson said "Later the doctors didn't understand her when she said she had a tiger under her bed and she just listened to its purr."

There are lots and lots of ways of approaching pain control. You have to think of what it would take, if you had physiological pain, to get you to not notice it. Going to the dentist and having him drill through your tooth hurts. When he hits a nerve, physiologically the signals go through your nerves and your brain goes "Uggh!" That happens. Yet there are people who go to the dentist, get no novocaine, and feel nothing. They don't do hypnosis, either. Dentists will tell you about them. The dentist drills right into their nerves, and they don't respond. The last dentist I went to said "I can never understand this. It hurts me, but they don't feel a thing!"

Who are the people who can do that? They are people with no consciousness of kinesthetics. They are people who haven't got any feelings, so they can't feel pain. The only thing that will get through is putting their hand on a hot plate. By the time it burns up to the elbow, they may notice, These are people who typically get hurt a lot. They have a tendency to get skinned knees and bump into things, because they have no consciousness of their kinesthetics and haven't learned to be cautious. As a strategy to work with pain, you can make somebody into someone like that.

The questions you always need to ask yourself are "What is it that you want?" and "Where would that happen naturally?" There are contexts in which you can move around and feel things but not feel pain. Have you ever hurt your hand? Have you ever cut your finger so that it really hurt? Or have you smacked it with a hammer so it really throbbed with pain? And during the period of time when it was throbbing, did you ever forget about it for some reason? In what context would that occur? Man: In an emergency.

Sure. An emergency is one classic example. For most people it doesn't even take an emergency. All they have to do is be distracted by anything else. Humans have such a limited amount of conscious attention. The rule is that 7± 2 chunks of information is all people can attend to. So give them nine chunks if you want to distract them. Give them something else to do–anything else.

Once I worked with a man who had severe pain. He had been in an accident that had resulted in a back injury. I don't know the medical details, but there was some physical reason why he ought to have pain. He came in and said he wanted hypnosis. I said I didn't know if I could help him with his pain, I had a procedure that worked very well, but only on people who are mature and intelligent, and frankly, I didn't know if he was mature enough.

I told him "Look, the most mature and intelligent people arc the ones who are able to see things from different perceptual points of view." By the way, according to Jean Piaget, this is actually true. So I explained Piaget's theory and test of intelligence to this man.

According to Piaget, being intelligent means being able to tell what things would look like from different perspectives. If I wanted to test a child, I could use a block of wood and a thimble. I'd bring the child over, show him the thimble, and place the block of wood in front of the thimble to block the child's view of the thimble. Then I'd ask "Is there anything behind the block?" If the child says "No" he's not very "mature." The "mature" child can visualize the thimble when it's hidden, and he can also see what the thimble, the block of wood, and they themselves would look like from the other side of the table. The testers literally ask "What would it look like if you were over there on the other side of the table?" The better you can see things from different points of view, the more "mature" and intelligent you are. One consequence of that kind of visualization is that you become dissociated from your feelings. This is what some modern methods teach kids to be able to do. They teach kids to grow up and be dissociated from their feelings, because that's what it means to be "mature."

I told this man that there was something I wanted him to go home and practice, because I was going to test him extensively on it the next week to find out how mature and intelligent he was. What he needed to do was to find out what he would look like lying in his bed, first from the perceptual viewpoint of one corner of the room, then from the viewpoint of the opposite corner, and then from every point in between. I told him that next week I would pick one viewpoint at random, and have him draw it in detail. I would measure it and find out exactly what the angle was, and by looking at his drawing I would be able to compute his intelligence,

He went home, and when he came back a week later he had done this task. He had worked on it methodically. He was highly motivated; he wanted me to treat him and thought I could help him. And when he came back, he said "You know, the strangest thing is, I haven't had much pain at all this week." Giving someone an appropriate task is another way of going after the same outcome.

There are other bizarre ways to deal with pain. You can do anything in trance as long as you presuppose it. Once I told a man who came to see me "I want to speak to the Brain. As soon as the Brain is ready to talk to me, and no conscious parts know anything about what is going on, then the mouth will open and say 'Now.'" He sat there for twenty minutes and then he said "Nowwww." I said "All right, Brain, you fouled up. Pain is a very valuable thing. It allows you to know when something needs to be attended to. This injury is already being attended to as well as it can be. Unless you can come up with anything else that needs to be done, it's time to shut off the pain." It said "Yessss!" I said "Shut it off now, and turn it back on only when it's needed: not before." Now, I have no idea what all that means, but it sounds so logical, and presupposes that the brain can do what I ask. After that he had no pain whatsoever.

Amnesia

I want to comment on something from one of the exercises. One man did something that can be used to get amnesia. He did the exercise, and as the woman he had induced into a trance returned, he looked at her and said "Notice how quiet it is in the room." When a person returns and opens his eyes, if you look at him and immediately comment on anything other than the experience he just came out of, you will abruptly direct his attention elsewhere, and you will tend to get really profound amnesia. This is true whether he is coming out of a deep trance, or whether you are in the middle of an ordinary conversation with him. For example, you could be talking about hypnosis and suddenly you turn and begin to talk about the necessity for checking your brakes before you go down mountain roads, and very congruently go into extreme detail about it. If you then ask "What was I just talking about?" he probably won't remember. Since there's no continuity, the probability that what happened just before the interruption will be consciously remembered is really small. So you get amnesia.

Try this with your clients when you aren't doing official altered states work. Deliver the set of instructions you want them to carry out for homework, and then immediately change the subject. They will have amnesia for the instructions; however, they will typically carry them out. There won't be any interference from the conscious mind when you do it that way. They won't remember the assignment, so they won't be able to have any "conscious resistance" to carrying it out.

Man: I've had clients apologize for not remembering the homework assignment I had given them, and then describe exactly how they fulfilled it.

Excellent. That's really good feedback to know that you've gotten the message across.

When you are doing official trance work, as soon as the person arouses from trance, you can begin in the middle of a sentence to comment about something that is completely unrelated to what occurred before or during the trance. That's an unconscious cue to him that you would prefer not to talk about what just occurred, and that it need not be available to his consciousness, either. Amnesia is as easy to get as most other "deep trance" phenomena, and this is one way to get it.

Man: i used to have trouble eliciting amnesia with my clients. Then I started doing just one thing differently: I waited about fifteen minutes before bringing up anything that happened in the trance. That's the only thing I changed, and amnesia started to occur.

Man: I've found that if I say to somebody "Then you will make a decision on this by next Tuesday," change the subject abruptly, and—

Well, I wouldn't be that direct. I would presuppose the decision. I would say "And when we get together to continue the discussion next Tuesday, I would like you to go ahead and indicate what your decision is in some way that is particularly interesting for me" and change the subject. If you do that, the behavior will occur and there won't be any consciousness about what's going on. That's an advantage if there is any conscious resistance to what you propose.

By the way, amnesia is a way to convince a "non–believer" that he's been in a trance. When he arouses from a trance, immediately engage his attention on something else and then later demand that he describe all the events that occurred, to prove to you that he wasn't in a trance.

Milton Erickson's office was the Land of Clutter. There were four hundred thousand objects in his office, so he had lots of choices about what he talked about and what he directed your attention to. He always arranged the clocks so that he could see them and you couldn't. He loved to bring people out of a trance, change the subject, and then say "Now, before you look at your watch, I would like you to make a guess about how much time has transpired." Of course you never knew what time it was, because Erickson did time distortion really well.

That is usually a convincer for people. If they can't account for the last two hours, they become convinced they were in a trance.

Another way to get amnesia is by producing dissociation. For example, if a person is highly specialized visually, I may do an overlap induction with him and lead him into a kinesthetic state of consciousness. When he comes back to his normal state of consciousness, he will automatically be amnesic for his trance experience. He will have no way to access the information because his consciousness is visual, and the altered state experiences were kinesthetically grounded. "He" — the visual part of him—won't know about that.

Any time you radically alter someone's state of consciousness, and then bring him back to his normal state abruptly without building bridges between those states, he will tend to have amnesia for what occurred when his consciousness was altered. He has no way to get to that information in his normal state; the information is linked to another state of consciousness.

Research on learning has been done on mild forms of this phenomenon. It's been discovered that if you memorize information while listening to music, you'll be much more apt to remember the information later if you listen to music again. What you learn when you' re drinking coffee or altering your consciousness in some other way, you'll be more apt to recover if you drink coffee again or alter your consciousness in the same way.

You can use this same information to get amnesia. What you do want to insure is that you've transferred the behavioral changes to the person's normal state of consciousness. It's very important to build bridges that make such a transfer automatic. That's the purpose of having you do explicit future–pacing, It insures that the change you have made will transfer to the context in which it is needed.

Lynn, what did 1 just say? (He raises his arm directing her to a visual access. See Appendix 1 on eye accessing cues.)

Lynn: I don't know.

I don't care if you understand what I said. Just tell me what words I used.

Lynn: I don't know; I don't remember. It's erased.

Did you all notice that when I asked her that question requesting auditory information, I waved my arm directing her gaze up and to her left. She followed, so she was looking in a direction that allowed her to access visual information, but not auditory. That's another way to get dissociation. So it's no surprise that she reported being amnesic for what I said.

Do you remember what I said this time? (He waves his arm down and to her left.)

Lynn: You said I was amnesic, since you directed me to access visual

information and not auditory.

Right. She can recover what I said when I direct her to the appropriate channel. If I want amnesia, I direct her into an inappropriate channel. Since I asked her to recall what I said, it's appropriate to direct her to look down and to her left, if I want her to be able to recall it. If I want her to be able to recall the movements of my arms, I would direct her gaze up and to her left. So if I deliberately direct her into a channel other than the one where the information is stored, she will be amnesic.

Amnesia is traditionally thought of as one of the most difficult deep trance phenomena to get. If you understand accessing cues and states of consciousness in the way that we have been describing them here, all you have to do is misdirect a person and you get amnesia.

Man: What about getting the amnesia to last later on?

It doesn't matter later. A good time to go for amnesia is right after you've made some change or given some instruction. If a person doesn't consciously remember, it can be easier for the new behavior to emerge without conscious interference. If he remembers later on, that's OK.

Sometimes I verbally suggest a dissociation between the person's conscious and unconscious processes in order to get amnesia. For example, I might say: "And as you sit there … I'm going to speak to you … and the more you listen to me … the less you will understand with your conscious mind … the more you will understand with your unconscious mind … because it's your ears that I am speaking to."

What could it mean to tell someone you aren't speaking to him, but to his ears? The result is generally dissociation. Another variation is to say "I'm not speaking to you now; I'm talking to him."

Earlier I offered you another way to suggest amnesia verbally. Before you bring someone out of a trance, you can give him instructions like "And your unconscious mind can sort through everything that has occurred here so that it can let you know only those portions of what has occurred that it believes would be useful for you to know … because it can be so delightful to find yourself using new choices . . , and you don't know where they came from." Or "And you can remember to forget to remember any material best left at the unconscious level."

Recovering Personal History

Organizations known roughly as ^uthe law," and also organizations that exist to protect people from too much justice, frequently hire experts in hypnosis to aid them in recovering information about past events. One of the things that people do exquisitely in altered states is relive experiences. In fact, most of the psychotherapies that have people relive past experiences use hypnotic technology to get them to do so. Some psychotherapists use these hypnotic techniques much more effectively than many professional hypnotists.

The easiest way to get someone to relive an experience is to do the same thing you did when you practiced the induction method of accessing a previous trance. All you do is begin with the first thing that you know led up to the event, have the person recall that in detail, and then proceeded from there. If you do this, the person will have the same responses he had the first time.

Once I worked with a businessman who told me that he went into a meditative state when he got on airplanes. He said 'The way I experience it, one moment we're taking off and the next thing I know, the plane is landing." I was curious about what happened, so I had him reaccess that experience. First I had him walk up the ramp onto the airplane, sit down and put on his seat belt, and then have the usual conversation with the stewardess about his coat and whether he wanted a drink. Then as the plane was taking off, I had him listen to the captain announcing how high they would be flying. As soon as I went through all that, his head dropped forward, and he ceased to respond to me. 1 hen he started snoring. He didn't go into a meditative state on airplanes; he went to sleep. Each time 1 led him through the same progression, he fell asleep, and I had to shout "Hey, you! Wake up!" Later on I discovered that if I just made the sound "Urp Urp" and jiggled his chair a little bit, he'd arouse and ask "Are we there yet?" If you want to know what happened in the past, you'll find out if you have the person relive the experience fully enough.

A man who is fairly skilled at using these techniques came up to me in a workshop and told me about two young female clients of his. They had been abducted and raped when they were out somewhere together. One of them remembered the event vividly, and had given the police all the necessary information. The other one had complete amnesia for the event and didn't quite believe the story that the first one had told. The one who remembered the rape vividly was a psychological mess as a result of it, while the other one had no response to it. She was fine.

In a situation like this, you need to consider carefully whether there is any point to her knowing what happened. If there isn't, recovering the memory may only give her pain.

This well–intentioned therapist was working diligently to get the woman who didn't remember anything to remember the event in detail, so that she could feel all of the pain. He decided that she had repressed all that unpleasantness, and he was right! However, repressing unpleasantness is an excellent choice in some situations. He placed a value judgement upon "truth" and assumed that since it was repressed, it would come out and be harmful to her later on, so she might as well have the pain now and get it over with.

If you use hypnosis to lead people into awareness of unpleasant experiences, I think you should first make a choice about whether that is worthwhile. Many of us were taught that reliving unpleasant experiences makes them less harmful, and that absolutely, categorically, is not so. If there is one thing that academic psychology has learned, it's that that assumption is false. Academic psychology has learned that if a certain set of experiences teaches you to have a generalization, going through the same experiences again will only reinforce whatever you learned from them. If what you learned from an event causes you limitations, reliving that event over and over again in the same way will only reinforce your generalization and the limitations that result from that generalization.

Therapists like Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson all have people go back and relive events, but they have people do it differently than the event occurred the first time. Satir describes this as "going back and seeing with new eyes," whatever that means. Erickson had people go back into the past, and then he changed things totally. He reorganized history so that it had no alternative but to be different.

Once Milton did a fascinating thing with somebody. A client came in who had made a mistake as a very young child; he had committed a crime. Something about the course of events convinced him that from that point on he would engage in criminal activities. He became convinced that he would always make the same mistake, and so he did.

Erickson took him back into his personal history and gave him an experience in which he became convinced that he would no longer engage in crime, because he wasn't good at it. That event never actually occurred. However, if you ask that man today about that event, he will recall it for you with a great deal of detail, and it will be as real to him as anything that actually occurred.

Sometimes there is some meaningful purpose in taking a person back through unpleasant memories. It might provide you with information so that you can catch a criminal and prevent him from committing a crime against someone else. Possibly information from that event may be needed for some other purpose.

A friend of mine worked with a couple who had been assaulted, and they both had complete amnesia for having been assaulted. In fact, the only way they knew they had been assaulted was that they were both covered with bruises and lacerations. They were told that the lacerations were inflicted by some weapon, and that their money and their property were gone. The police kept insisting that they had been beaten and robbed. The man and the woman both said "We don't know. We don't remember anything."

I did some hypnotic investigation and discovered chat this couple had not been attacked; they had gotten into a car accident. After the crash, somebody pulled them out of their car and stole the car and their belongings. When I went through the experience with them to find out what had occurred. I chose to do it with only one of them, and took the other one out of the room; there was no need for both of them to suffer. Being the sexist I am, I decided it was best that the man suffer. However, I had him go through the experience in a different way to minimize any unpleasantness for him. Instead of going through the experience in the way he had before, I had him watch himself go through it.

I took this precaution both because I wanted him to be able to do it comfortably, and because he had been knocked unconscious. If someone got knocked out the first time through an experience, if I have them relive it in the same way, they will get knocked out again.

A student of mine had been in an accident and wanted to relive the experience. A lot of people had tried to work with him to get him to do this. They would have him start out with the feeling of the steering wheel and the sound of the engine, and then the visual experience of the trees, and then a horn honking, and then he would pass out. They would have to do all kinds of things to wake him up, and then they'd try again.

They could have anticipated that he'd pass out, because in the accident he hit a tree and got knocked out. If you relive something and do it in exactly the same way, you will go through the same experience in the way that you did the first time. If you got knocked out the first time, you'll get knocked out when reliving it.

If somebody has been attacked or raped or been in a car wreck, reexperiencing–the feelings they had then is not going to be useful, If someone is telling you about his heart attack, you don't want him to relive it in exactly the same way. "Oh, you had a heart attack last week. What happened?" That is the craziest thing you can ask somebody. If you do it well enough, you are going to give him another heart attack.

Many women who have been raped or attacked, subsequently have trouble with men. I'm not talking about having trouble with the man who attacked them, but with their husbands and their loved ones. Sometimes they can't even live in the house that they lived in, or walk down a street without absolute terror. Those women are reliving their unpleasant experiences over and over again. No one should have to suffer that way. If somebody was unfairly attacked, that is enough unfair pain. Having any more than that seems very unjust to me.

There is a procedure that allows you to separate out part of an experience, so that it's possible to relive it in a new way. You have them begin the experience, and then step outside of it so that they see themselves going through it. They hear what was going on at the time, but they watch themselves go through the event as if they were watching a movie. When they do it in this way, they don't have to have the feelings that they had when they were there. They can have feelings about the experience. This procedure is described in detail in Chapter II of Frogs into Princes, so I won't explain it here. We call it the phobia technique or the visual–kinesthetic dissociation.

When you have people relive unpleasant experiences, keep these ideas in mind. As a precaution against them re–experiencing the feelings, have them see themselves going through the experience. If you want to be really safe, have them watch themselves watching themselves go through the experience, as if they were in the projection box at a movie theatre, watching themselves watch the movie. If you have them go through an event this way, when they remember it later on, they won't experience the terror. That is a real gift to give someone who has been beaten or brutalized somehow. If they go back through that event from the position of watching themselves watching themselves, it will diffuse the intensity of the feelings and prevent them from building any generalization that would make them have to feel those unpleasant feelings again.