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

This afternoon we'd like to give you two methods of self–induction, and then a very elegant method of utilizing self–hypnosis. These methods can be useful to you personally, as well as in your work with clients. If you instruct your clients in self–hypnosis, you can then have them put themselves in altered states in your office. All you will need to do is utilize those trances. You can have your clients practice entering altered states at home, and when they come back in, have them access those trance states by asking them to recount in detail what they did. You say "Now, tell me in detail, which of the ways that you tried secured the deepest trance?" They'll say "Well, this one's pretty good," and they will begin to go back into a trance as they describe what happened. You will essentially be accessing a previous trance.

The first self–induction method I want to describe is Betty Erickson's technique. Betty is Milton's wife, and she is extremely sophisticated in putting herself into various altered states. She can jump in and out of many different states very quickly. The technique that she developed presupposes representational systems, Erickson, by the way, is the only person other than us who had an explicit understanding of representational systems; he knew that there are three major ones, and that there are predicates which identify them.

Betty uses representational systems in this induction. She seats herself in a comfortable place and finds something that's easy to look at. I would probably choose some place where the light is reflecting, such as some of the cut glass that is hanging from that chandelier. I fix my gaze on that, and then I say three sentences to myself about my visual experience. "I see the light glittering on the various pieces of cut glass; I sec the movement of somebody's bare arm; I see that somebody just looked up at the chandelier."

Now I switch to auditory, and make three statements about that portion of my experience. "I hear the sound of the ventilation system; I hear the sound of paper being rustled as people are making notes; I hear the sound of somebody clearing her throat."

Then I make three statements about my kinesthetic experience. "I can feel where the soles of my feet are making solid contact with the platform I'm standing on; I can feel the weight of my jacket as it lies across my shoulders; I can feel the warmth where my fingers are interlaced as I stand here." I've made three statements about my ongoing visual experience, three about my auditory, and three about my kinesthetic.

Then, maintaining the same position and the same direction of gaze, I recycle through each sensory channel, making two statements for each. I pick out two additional visual, auditory, and kinesthetic parts of my experience. Then I recycle through the three channels again, picking out one of each. Typically, even for beginners, about the time you get half way through the cycle of two sentences for each system, your eyes start to get drowsy, and you get tunnel vision. If your eyes get drowsy, you just allow them to close and substitute internal visualization for external. You can still use external experience for auditory and kinesthetic statements.

Man: Do you say the statements out loud when you are doing it for yourself?

it doesn't matter. Use whichever is easiest for you. Many of you will find that after you've done this half a dozen or so times, all you have to do is say "Well, 1 think I'll do that induction" and you're there! All I have to do is look over there at the cut glass and I get tunnel vision, which is one of the indicators that I'm going into an appropriate trance.

Woman: Do you have to do it in that sequence: visual, auditory, then kinesthetic?

No. If you happen to know your own preferred sequence, use that to pace yourself. If you tend to go visual, kinesthetic, and then auditory, then use that sequence. That will make it more powerful for you, but it will also work the other way.

Woman: You don't use the same sentences each time you cycle through, do you?

Use different ones each time, consistent with whatever your experience is at the moment. Notice that you are setting up a biofeedback loop. That is, you are representing in words exactly the experiences you are having visually, auditorily, and kinesthetically. One of the essential characteristics of all good hypnotic or altered states work is that particular loop. This is very similar to the 5–4–3–2–1 exercise that we discussed earlier, and it is the first phase of the Betty Erickson technique.

In the next phase I first sense which hand and arm feels lighter. Then I give suggestions to myself by saying that the hand that feels lighter will continue to feel lighter, and will begin to float up with honest unconscious movements, feeling attracted toward my face, so that when it makes contact with my face, I will sink into a deep trance.

The second self–hypnosis method is similar to the first, but you use internal representation instead of external representation. You sit or lie down in a comfortable place and make an internal visual image of what you would look like if you were standing five feet in front of yourself, looking at yourself. If you have any trouble constructing such an image, you already know a pattern which will assist you in doing that—overlap. Begin with the kinesthetic sensation of your breathing, or the sound of your breathing, and overlap to seeing your chest rising and falling. Continue to develop and stabilize that image of yourself until you can see it in greater detail. Eventually you will be able to see the rise and fall of your chest, which will be correlated with the kinesthetic sensations of your chest rising and falling as you breathe.

Continuing to see that image of yourself, you then shift your awareness to the very top of your head and kinesthetically sense temperature, tension, moisture, pressure, etc. — any distinction you are able to make kinesthetically. You work your way slowly down through your body, sensing each part of your body. As you look at that visual image of yourself from the outside, you're sensing what's going on in your body kinesthetically.

Next you add on auditory representation. As you see the image and sense your body kinesthetically, you describe your experience to yourself internally. "I feel a tension in my right eyebrow, and as I sense it, it begins to go away." All three systems are representing the same information. You are seeing, feeling, and hearing what your actual experience is at that moment.

After you've gone all the way through your body in this way, then you can add the same piece on at the end that I gave you for the other method. As you sense which hand and arm feels lighter, you see that hand and arm in the image beginning to lift up, feeling attracted toward your face. Then you describe it auditorily "My left hand is beginning to lift with honest, unconscious movements." Even if you don't know what honest, unconscious movements are, your unconscious does. Leave that to her. "My hand will continue to feel lighter and be attracted to my face. When it touches my face, I'll sink into a nice deep trance." You can say these things to yourself either sub–vocally or out loud if that is more convenient. If you say this out loud, shut the door, or people will think you are very weird.

Man: I have found it easier to get my hand up if I see a long handle pulling it up.

Or you can use a helium balloon. There are lots of extra things you can add to this. Use whatever else you can incorporate into your images and feelings and words that will help you accomplish each step. I'm giving you the basics. There are lots of nice artistic ways of doing it.

Man: If I'm using the internal image of myself out there and I feel my left hand lighter than my right, do I see that as a mirror image or the other way?

Try it both ways and find out which,is more effective for you.

Man: What's the purpose of having your hand touch your face?

The exact task that you pick to do is arbitrary. Most people report that their hand and arm did lift, and when it touched their face they felt a sudden, radical change, and that they had amnesia after that point.

Before you begin either one of these exercises, and any time in the future when you decide to do self–hypnosis or meditation, give your unconscious an instruction about how long to keep you there and when to arouse you. You might say to yourself before you begin either one of these exercises "I would like you, my unconscious, to arouse me in fifteen minutes, allowing me to feel refreshed and renewed by this experience." Your body is an exquisite time clock. If you measure the time it takes a person to come back out of trance, it's usually within a quarter minute of the time they had specified. The worst that would ever happen, even if you forgot that instruction, is that you might go into a nice deep physiological sleep and wake refreshed several hours later.

Try both methods until you discover which is most effective for you. For the first half–dozen times, don't attempt any specific change work other than just relaxing and refreshing and renewing yourself. Wait until you have full confidence about your ability to get in and out; in other words wait until you know that you can get yourself into a deep trance and that your unconscious will arouse you after the appropriate length of time.

As you practice these methods, you will develop confidence about being able to get in and out. You will also notice that the procedure is beginning to streamline. Instead of deliberately going through the whole sequence, when you sit down to do it, you will begin to go into a trance immediately. At that point self–hypnosis becomes available to you as a really nice tool for your own self–evolution.

To use self–hypnosis for your own development, give your unconscious an entire set of instructions before going into a trance. First, decide what dimension of your experience you would like to alter. Ask your unconscious to review with sounds, images, and feelings, those occasions when you did something particularly creatively and effectively. Ask that when your unconscious has finished making this review in all systems, it extract from the review those elements of your performance which are distinctive, and to have them naturally and spontaneously begin to occur more frequently in your everyday behavior in appropriate contexts.

Suppose you are about to make a sales presentation to a board of directors in a corporation, and you want to make the very best presentation you can. Before you drop into the trance, at the time you state how long you want to stay down, you might say "When I get into a deep trance this time, I would like you, my unconscious mind, to review with images and sounds and feelings the five times when I have been most dynamic, effective, and creative in making sales presentations.

If you want to be effective in family therapy, you ask to review the five times you were most creative, etc. in doing family therapy. If you want more general self–evolution, you can say "Review the five times in my life when I behaved most gracefully, or most assertively, or most creatively," You ask for a review of the best representations of whatever it is that you would like to be effective at. Then you drop into trance and allow that to occur. If you do this, you will discover yourself changing; you will indeed evolve yourself.

You can also ask for a conscious output of what you went through in trance, but I recommend that you don't. I recommend that you simply get in the habit of trusting your unconscious processes. You will discover new patterns in your behavior, or old patterns which are occurring more frequently in the appropriate context. When that happens, you can use your own behavior as examples from which you can then come to a conscious understanding of what changes you have made. It's more efficient to go from unconscious change to behavior and then to a conscious digitalization of it, than it is to begin with a conscious understanding which you attempt to apply to behavior. Do yourself a favor and do it the easy way.

Bob: What if you want to do something that you have never done before?

If you don't know that you've ever succeeded with a particular behavior, then use the New Behavior Generator that we taught you this morning. Think of someone else who does this behavior very well. Pick yourself a really elegant model—somebody whom you really respect and admire—who does this behavior particularly elegantly and effectively. Then use a variation of the same instructions. Ask your unconscious mind to review all the internal stored images, sounds, and feelings of this person doing that particular behavior. Do this in three phases. In the first review, you just see and hear what is going on. Watch and listen to that person do what you want to learn to do. In the second phase you ask your unconscious mind to substitute your image and your voice for the other person's. So the second time you run the movie, you will see yourself doing the things that you just observed and listened to the other person doing. In the third phase you step into the movie and experience it from the inside, feeling yourself do the behavior, as well as seeing and hearing from that new point of view.

For instance, I might use Milton Erickson. I have spent a lot of hours watching and listening to his behavior. I give myself the instruction before I go into trance "Pick out the times when he has responded to incongruency with clients when I have been present. What specifically does he do?" The first time around I would see and hear him do whatever he does. The second time around, I would put myself in his position and see and hear myself doing the same thing he did. In order to actually get that into my behavior—which is where I want it—I have to step into the movie myself and feel the muscle movements and feelings that I would have if I were actually doing it.

This third step is designed to get those feelings and muscle patterns into your body so that when the situation comes up, you will automatically begin to respond in that way. After you have finished this third step you ask your unconscious to have this behavior naturally and spontaneously begin to occur more frequently in your behavior in the appropriate contexts. This works very, very well as a self–programming device.

Woman: Are you doing that as instruction to your unconscious before you go into a trance?

Yes. It's too complicated to do for yourself inside the trance. And I suggest that you start with small behaviors. For example, "I want to learn to smile when I want to get a certain response." Then later take bigger and bigger chunks of behavior.

I've given you a step–by–step process for inducing and using altered states for yourself. If you find these instructions tedious, let me reassure you that after you've practiced them, they will streamline very quickly so it will take only a matter of sixty seconds or so to alter your consciousness. You will be able to do it between sessions or during short breaks.

Discussion

Harry: Would you talk about how to distort your perceptions of time? How would you use hypnosis to speed up or slow down your perceptions of events?

How I would do that would depend upon whether I was going to do it to myself or to someone else. With myself, I would instruct my unconscious to find lots of experiences that have one factor in common: changing the speed of my perceptions. For example, you know what happens when you are zooming down the freeway and then exit from an off ramp into regular city traffic and seem to be going zero miles an hour. Or when you're really enjoying something, time seems to fly by, and hours seem like moments.

Those are examples of changes in your perception of time, which are indications that such changes are possible. I would ask my unconscious to find every example that it can think of, and to put me in those experiences. The only common thread that goes through all of the experiences is having control over time and the speed of reality.

While my unconscious was doing this, I would ask it to create some sort of control knob for me, so that I could speed things up or slow them down. I would set it up so that after I went through twenty experiences my eyes would open, I would still be in a trance, and I would be able to turn the knob one way to speed things up and turn it the other way to slow them down.

That is how I would go about it. I know that time distortion exists in my normal experience already, so that is where I would find it. Then I could make tennis an opportunity to use time distortion. I could make the time slow enough so that I could respond easily, and then adjust the speed in between serves. After each serve I'd go back and evaluate "Was it fast or slow that time?" and adjust the knob accordingly.

Harry: Is there a way that I could speed up learning things, like hypnosis?

My guess is that you should be able to tell me the answer to that question. 1 can give you an example of how to do it, but I'm more interested in your knowing how to do it yourself. You know what it is that you want. So what are the parameters you are working with? If you want to speed up your perceptions, find some examples of having done it, and then give yourself some control over the process. You know that you've learned things. You know that you can integrate them. You know you have a standard speed. So how can you speed that up?

Harry: By going to the contexts in which I would do that normally. Sure. But the factor that is really going to allow you to learn more quickly is the presence of more time. All you have to do is create two months. Is that enough? In other words, do what's called "pseudo–orientation in time." Put yourself into a trance and project yourself into the future. Tell yourself that instead of being tomorrow, it's two months from now, Then, in trance, relive fully all the time between now and then; create all the necessary history for if to be two months from now. You can make up all the clients you worked with and all the things you did; you can make up everything that happened between then and now. Create in detail all the history that you need in order to have already learned lots about NLP and hypnosis.

Whenever you want anything, all you have to do is think of where it would happen anyway, and then make that up. Hypnosis is a way of making a reality. If you know that something you want will happen in a specific reality, then use that reality to create what you want. If it doesn't happen in any reality that you know of, then create a reality in which it would happen.

Woman: Is it possible to create an overload of other realities?

Yes. It's called psychosis. When you use alternative realities, you must do so as a lawyer would. You must make sure that when you build realities, you build ones that are thorough and complete. You must make sure that they will accomplish what you want, and you must make sure that there's a doorway out of them. If you create sloppy realities and live in them, then you will respond in a sloppy way, and that will make you a junky person.

There's a book written by a well–known hypnotist that gives people inductions to read aloud to each other. There are programs in those inductions that make people really junky. People who read them will install strategies in each other which will not be beneficial for their overall functioning. To me that's foolish, and it's a kind of foolishness that I call indulgence. It's important not to be indulgent about using hypnosis. When you build a reality, build one that will work, and build it completely and thoroughly so that you gel exactly what you need. You don't want to just build a crazy reality and go live in it, because you have no idea how you will respond to it. You may respond to it with emphysema! You want to make sure that you build one that is going to work well for you.

Most of the hypnotic realities that people have built for themselves and live in most of the time—what they call the waking state —are not profoundly useful. I mean that literally. The majority of the people I meet in the world have built a hypnotic reality which, on the whole, weighing the good against the bad and the pleasure against the pain, isn't really beneficial for them. To me that's indulgent. You don't want to make matters worse, only more useful.

Erickson's criteria of usefulness were for all his clients to get married, get a job, have children, and send him presents. Those are not my criteria. People sent me presents but I never got anything 1 wanted, except once. I'm not going to change everybody so that they get married and so on. Erickson did, because he believed that you must do those things,

I do think that you've got to be thorough when you build alternative realities, or when you build your own reality. For instance, I think the reality that humanistic psychologists have built is incredibly indulgent and not useful. That kind of indulgence is dangerous. Sometimes I get invited to do a keynote address at some humanistic psychology conference, and I find being there more terrifying than being in a criminal institution. The ethic that criminals have is at least conducive to survival. Many of the programs and kinds of realities that people are installing in each other at humanistic conferences are not even conducive to their own survival. If anything, they are detrimental. Those realities have a tendency to put people in situations of danger where they might actually get hurt. It may never happen, but it could. People don't usually consider the premises of what they do, and it's not just humanistic psychologists who operate that way. Everybody does.

Woman: What kind of realities do psychologists create that are destructive?

For example "To be a good person is to meta–comment." So you come in and say "I'm really mad about your walking out on me last night" and 1 say "Well, I really feel good that you can express your anger towards me." That kind of response is built into the fabric of most humanistic psychologies. That is not a useful response in any way. It does not help either of the two human beings. If anything, someone who uses that particular kind of response will end up becoming more and more alienated, and having unpleasant feelings more and more often, That's a logical outcome of using that particular kind of response. Just look at the people who use that response a lot, and you can find out for yourself.

There was a guy at the college I taught at who was a humanistic organizational development consultant. He used to be a hero, but now he's only a counterculture hero. His whole world is built upon those kinds of responses. He meta–comments about everything. He is also lonely, depressed, miserable, and alienated. It's no surprise to me, because his responses are never responses to people; they are always responses about people. He doesn't respond to people, so he can't have any intimacy or any feeling of connection. That limitation is built right into the fabric of his reality: he believes that a meta–comment is a "genuine" response.

People often create realities or pick outcomes that aren't worth having. That is a limitation in self–hypnosis. One of our students had a client who had decided that it was crazy for one person to carry on a conversation with himself. He read in a book "It takes two people to have a conversation. Since conversations are for two people to talk to one another, he decided that talking to yourself is stupid. So he just stopped having internal dialogue. When he stopped, he lost the ability to do certain things that he had used internal dialogue for—little things like the ability to plan! All he could do was see pictures and have feelings. He couldn't ask himself questions like "What would i like to do today?" He hadn't considered the overall impact of that change before he made it.

Clients often come in asking for things that wouldn't make them happy. Sometimes 1 give it to them and let them suffer for a while. Then it's easier for me to go back and give them something more meaningful.

One client of mine came in saying he didn't want to be able to feel anything. He told me that everything he had felt for years had been terrible, that people had hurt him over and over again, and he didn't want to have to feel things anymore. So I hypnotized him and hypnotically removed his kinesthetic experience. Of course he lost his sense of balance and could no longer stand up. Then I brought him back out of trance, still without any feelings, and asked if he would like to come back next week. He said "Please! Do something!" I said "All right, now we'll do it my way."

When you do self–hypnosis, consider the outcomes you go for very carefully. Play the counter–example game and ask yourself if there is any way in which your outcome could be harmful, and then use that information to improve your outcome. In both the examples 1 just gave you the person was trying to improve his life by limiting himself. Giving yourself more limitations is rarely a way to solve limitations. A guiding principle is to always add to your abilities and add to your choices.