Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Foreword

I have been studying education, therapies, growth experiences, and other methods for personal change since I was a graduate student with Abe Maslow over twenty years ago. Ten years later I met Fritz Perls and immersed myself in gestalt therapy because it seemed to be more effective than most other methods. Actually all methods work for some people and with some problems. Most methods claim much more than they can deliver, and most theories have little relationship to the methods they describe.

When I was first introduced to Neuro Linguistic Programming I was both fascinated and very skeptical. I had been heavily conditioned to believe that change is slow, and usually difficult and painful. I still have some difficulty realizing that I can usually cure a phobia or other similar long-term problem painlessly in less than an hour—even though I have done it repeatedly and seen that the results last. Everything written in this book is explicit, and can be verified quickly in your own experience. There is no hocus-pocus, and you will not be asked to take on any new beliefs. You will only be asked to suspend your own beliefs long enough to test the concepts and procedures of NLP in your own sensory experience. That won't take long; most of the statements and patterns in this book can be tested in a few minutes or a few hours. If you are skeptical, as I was, you owe it to your skepticism to check this out, and find out if the outrageous claims made in this book are valid.

NLP is an explicit and powerful model of human experience and communication. Using the principles of NLP it is possible to describe any human activity in a detailed way that allows you to make many deep and lasting changes quickly and easily.

A few specific examples of things you can learn to accomplish are: (1) cure phobias and other unpleasant feeling responses in less than an hour, (2) help children and adults with "learning disabilities" (spelling and reading problems, etc.) overcome these limitations, often in less than an hour, (3) eliminate most unwanted habits—smoking, drinking, over-eating, insomnia, etc., in a few sessions, (4) make changes in the interactions of couples, families and organizations so that they function in ways that are more satisfying and productive, (5) cure many physical problems—not only most of those recognized as "psychosomatic" but also some that are not—in a few sessions.

These are strong claims, and experienced NLP practitioners can back them up with solid, visible results. NLP in its present state can do a great deal, but it cannot do everything.

... if what we've demonstrated is something that you'd like to be able to do, you might as well spend your time learning it. There are lots and lots of things that we cannot do. If you can program yourself to look for things that will be useful for you and learn those, instead of trying to find out where what we are presenting to you falls apart, you'll find out where it falls apart, I guarantee you. If you use it congruently you will find lots of places that it won't work. And when it doesn't work, I suggest you do something else.

NLP is only about four years old, and many of the most useful patterns were created within the last year or two.

We haven't even begun to figure out what the possibilities are of how to use this material. And we are very, very, serious about that. What we are doing now is nothing more than the investigation of how to use this information. We have been unable to exhaust the variety of ways to put this stuff together and put it to use, and we don't know of any limitations on the ways that you can use this information. During this seminar we have mentioned and demonstrated several dozen ways that it can be used. It's the structure of experience. Period. When used systematically, it constitutes a full strategy for getting any behavioral gain.

Actually, NLP can do much more than the kinds of remedial work mentioned above. The same principles can be used to study people who unusually talented in any way, in order to determine the structure of that talent. That structure can then be quickly taught to others to give them the foundation for that same ability. This kind of intervention results in generative change, in which people learn to generate and create new talents and behaviors for themselves and others. A side effect of such generative change is that many of the problem behaviors that would otherwise have been targets for remedial change simply disappear.

In one sense nothing that NLP can accomplish is new: There have always been "spontaneous remissions," "miracle cures," and other sudden and puzzling changes in people's behavior, and there have always been people who somehow learned to use their abilities in exceptional ways.

What is new in NLP is the ability to systematically analyze those exceptional people and experiences in such a way that they can become widely available to others. Milkmaids in England became immune to smallpox long before Jenner discovered cowpox and vaccination; now smallpox—which used to kill hundreds of thousands annually—is eliminated from human experience. In the same way, NLP can eliminate many of the difficulties and hazards of living that we now experience, and make learning and behavioral change much easier, more productive, and more exciting. We are on the threshold of a quantum jump in human experience and capability.

There is an old story of a boilermaker who was hired to fix a huge steamship boiler system that was not working well. After listening to the engineer's description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the boiler and the hiss of escaping steam for a few minutes, and felt some pipes with his hands. Then he hummed softly to himself, reached into his overalls and took out a small hammer, and tapped a bright red valve, once. Immediately the entire system began working perfectly, and the boilermaker went home. When the steamship owner received a bill for $1,000 he complained that the boilermaker had only been in the engine room for fifteen minutes, and requested an itemized bill. This is what the boilermaker sent him:

For tapping with hammer: .50

For knowing where to tap: $ 999.50

Total: $1,000.00

What is really new in NLP is knowing exactly what to do, and how to do it. This is an exciting book, and an exciting time.

Steve Andreas (formerly John O. Stevens)

A challenge to the reader

In mystery and spy novels, the reader can expect to be offered a series of written clues—fragmentary descriptions of earlier events. When these fragments are fitted together, they provide enough of a representation for the careful reader to reconstruct the earlier events, even to the point of understanding the specific actions and motivations of the people involved—or at least to reach the understanding that the author will offer at the conclusion of the novel. The more casual reader is simply entertained and arrives at a more personal understanding, of which s/he may or may not be conscious. The writer of such a novel has the obligation to provide enough fragments to make a reconstruction possible, but not obvious.

This book is also the written record of a mystery story of sorts. However, it differs from the traditional mystery in several important ways. This is the written record of a story that was told, and storytelling is a different skill than story-writing. The story-teller has the obligation to use feedback from the listener/watcher to determine how many clues s/he can offer. The kind of feedback s/he takes into account is of two types: (1) the verbal, deliberate conscious feedback– those signals the listener/watcher is aware that s/he is offering to the story-teller, and (2) the non-verbal, spontaneous, unconscious feedback: the glimpse, the startle, the labored recollection—those signals the listener/watcher offers the story-teller without being aware of them. An important skill in the art of story-telling is to use the unconscious feedback so as to provide just enough clues that the unconscious process of the listener/watcher arrives at the solution before the listener/watcher consciously appreciates it. From such artistry come the desirable experiences of surprise and delight—the discovery that we know much more than we think we do.

We delight in creating those kinds of experiences in our seminars. And while the record that follows may have contained enough clues for the participant in the seminar, only the more astute reader will succeed in fully reconstructing the earlier events. As we state explicitly in this book, the verbal component is the least interesting and least influential part of communication. Yet this is the only kind of clue offered the reader here.

The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop. For example, if you were given the task of describing an interaction between a cat and a dog, you might make entries like: "Cat spits, ... dog bares teeth, ... cat arches back,... dog barks,... cat—" At least as important as the particular actions described is the sequence in which they occur. And to some extent, any particular behavior by the cat becomes understandable only in the context of the dog's behavior. If for some reason your observations were restricted to just the cat, you would be challenged by the task of reconstructing what the cat was interacting with. The cat's behavior is much more difficult to appreciate and understand in isolation.

We would like to reassure the reader that the non-sequiturs, the surprising tangents, the unannounced shifts in content, mood or direction which you will discover in this book had a compelling logic of their own in the original context. If these otherwise peculiar sequences of communication were restored to their original context, that logic would quickly emerge. Therefore, the challenge: Is the reader astute enough to reconstruct that context, or shall he simply enjoy the exchange and arrive at a useful unconscious understanding of a more personal nature?

John Grinder, Richard Bandler

I. Sensory experience

There are several important ways in which what we do differs radically from others who do workshops on communication or psychotherapy. When we first started in the field, we would watch brilliant people do interesting things and then afterwards they would tell various particular metaphors that they called theorizing. They would tell stories about millions of holes, or about plumbing: that you have to understand that people are just a circle with pipes coming from every direction, and all you need is Draino or something like that. Most of those metaphors weren't very useful in helping people learn specifically what to do or how to do it.

Some people will do experiential workshops in which you will be treated to watching and listening to a person who is relatively competent in most, or at least part, of the business called "professional communications." They will demonstrate by their behavior that they are quite competent in doing certain kinds of things. If you are fortunate and you keep your sensory apparatus open, you will learn how to do some of the things they do.

There's also a group of people who are theoreticians. They will tell you what their beliefs are about the true nature of humans and what the completely "transparent, adjusted, genuine, authentic," etc. person should be, but they don't show you how to do anything.

Most knowledge in the field of psychology is organized in ways that mix together what we call "modeling"—what traditionally has been called "theorizing"—and what we consider theology. The descriptions of what people do have been mixed together with descriptions of what reality "is." When you mix experience together with theories and wrap them all up in a package, that's a psychotheology. What has developed in psychology is different religious belief systems with very powerful evangelists working from all of these differing orientations.

Another strange thing about psychology is that there's a whole body of people called "researchers" who will not associate with the people who are practicing! Somehow the field of psychology got divided so that the researchers no longer provide information for, and respond to, the clinical practitioners in the field. That's not true in the field of medicine. In medicine, the people doing research are trying to find things to help the practitioners in the field. And the practitioners respond to the researchers, telling them what they need to know more about.

Another thing about therapists is that they come to therapy with a set of unconscious patternings that makes it highly probable that they will fail. When therapists begin to do therapy they look for what's wrong in a content-oriented way. They want to know what the problem is so that they can help people find solutions. This is true whether they have been trained overtly or covertly, in academic institutions or in rooms with pillows on the floor.

This is even true of those who consider themselves to be "process-oriented." There's a little voice somewhere in their mind that keeps saying "The process. Look for the process." They will say "Well, I'm a process-oriented therapist. I work with the process." Somehow the process has become an event—a thing in and of itself.

There is another paradox in the field. The hugest majority of therapists believe that the way to be a good therapist is to do everything you do intuitively, which means to have an unconscious mind that does it for you. They wouldn't describe it that way because they don't like the word «unconscious» but basically they do what they do without knowing how they do it. They do it by the «seat of their pants»—that's another way to say «unconscious mind.» I think being able to do things unconsciously is useful; that's a good way to do things. The same group of people, however, say that the ultimate goal of therapy is for people to have conscious understanding—insight into their own problems. So therapists are a group of people who do what they do without knowing how it works, and at the same time believe that the way to really get somewhere in life is to consciously know how things work!

When I first got involved with modeling people in the field of psychotherapy, I would ask them what outcome they were working toward when they made a maneuver, when they reached over and touched a person this way, or when they shifted their voice tone here. And their answer was "Oh, I have no idea." I'd say "Well, good. Are you interested in exploring and finding out with me what the outcome was?" And they would say "Definitely not!" They claimed that if they did specific things to get specific outcomes that would be something bad, called "manipulating."

We call ourselves modelers. What we essentially do is to pay very little attention to what people say they do and a great deal of attention to what they do. And then we build ourselves a model of what they do. We are not psychologists, and we're also not theologians or theoreticians. We have no idea about the "real" nature of things, and we're not particularly interested in what's "true." The function of modeling is to arrive at descriptions which are useful. So, if we happen to mention something that you know from a scientific study, or from statistics, is inaccurate, realize that a different level of experience is being offered you here. We're not offering you something that's true, just things that are useful.

We know that our modeling has been successful when we can systematically get the same behavioral outcome as the person we have modeled. And when we can teach somebody else to be able to get the same outcomes in a systematic way, that's an even stronger test.

When I entered the field of communication, I went to a large conference where there were six hundred and fifty people in an auditorium. And a man who was very famous got up and made the following statement: "What all of you need to understand about doing therapy and about communication is that the first essential step is to make contact with the human you are communicating with as a person." Well, that struck me as being kind of obvious. And everybody in the audience went "Yeahhhh! Make contact. We all know about that one." Now, he went on to talk for another six hours and never mentioned how. He never mentioned one single specific thing that anybody in that room could do that would help them in any way to either have the experience of understanding that person better, or at least give the other person the illusion that they were understood.

I then went to something called "Active Listening." In active listening you rephrase what everyone says, which means that you distort everything they say.

Then we began to pay attention to what really divergent people who were "wizards" actually do. When you watch and listen to Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson do therapy, they apparently could not be more different. At least I couldn't figure out a way that they could appear more different.

People also report that the experiences of being with them are profoundly different. However, if you examine their behavior and the essential key patterns and sequences of what they do, they are similar. The patterns that they use to accomplish the rather dramatic things that they are able to accomplish are very similar in our way of understanding. What they accomplish is the same. But the way it's packaged—the way they come across—is profoundly different.

The same was true of Fritz Perls. He was not quite as sophisticated as Satir and Erickson in the number of patterns he used. But when he was operating in what I consider a powerful and effective way, he was using the same sequences of patterns that you will find in their work. Fritz typically did not go after specific outcomes. If somebody came in and said "I have hysterical paralysis of the left leg," he wouldn't go after it directly. Sometimes he would get it and sometimes he wouldn't. Both Milton and Virginia have a tendency to go straight for producing specific outcomes, something I really respect.

When I wanted to learn to do therapy, I went to a month-long workshop, a situation where you are locked up on an island and exposed every day to the same kinds of experiences and hope that somehow or other you will pick them up. The leader had lots and lots of experience, and he could do things that none of us could do. But when he talked about the things he did, people there wouldn't be able to learn to do them. Intuitively, or what we describe as unconsciously, his behavior was systematic, but he didn't have a conscious understanding of how it was systematic. That is a compliment to his flexibility and ability to discern what works.

For example, you all know very, very little about how you are able to generate language. Somehow or other as you speak you are able to create complex pieces of syntax, and I know that you don't make any conscious decisions. You don't go "Well, I'm going to speak, and first I'll put a noun in the sentence, then I'll throw an adjective in, then a verb, and maybe a little adverb at the end, you know, just to color it up a little bit." Yet you speak a language that has grammar and syntax– rules that are as mathematical and as explicit as any calculus. There's a group of people called transformational linguists who have managed to take large amounts of tax dollars and academic space and figure out what those rules are. They haven't figured out anything to do with that yet, but transformational grammarians are unconcerned with that. They are not interested in the real world, and having lived in it I can sometimes understand why.

When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages. If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same. There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not. Our job as modelers is to do a similar task for other things that are more practical. Our job is to figure out what it is that effective therapists do intuitively or unconsciously, and to make up some rules that can be taught to someone else.

Now, what typically happens when you go to a seminar is that the leader will say "All you really need to do, in order to do what I do as a great communicator, is to pay attention to your guts." And that's true, if you happen to have the things in your guts that that leader does. My guess is you probably don't. You can have them there at the unconscious level, but I think that if you want to have the same intuitions as somebody like Erickson or Satir or Perls, you need to go through a training period to learn to have similar intuitions. Once you go through a conscious training period, you can have therapeutic intuitions that are as unconscious and systematic as your intuitions about language.

If you watch and listen to Virginia Satir work you are confronted with an overwhelming mass of information—the way she moves, her voice tone, the way she touches, who she turns to next, what sensory cues she is using to orient herself to which member of the family, etc. It's a really overwhelming task to attempt to keep track of all the things that she is using as cues, the responses that she is making to those cues, and the responses she elicits from others.

Now, we don't know what Virginia Satir really does with families. However, we can describe her behavior in such a way that we can come to any one of you and say "Here. Take this. Do these things in this sequence. Practice until it becomes a systematic part of your unconscious behavior, and you will end up being able to elicit the same responses that Virginia elicits." We do not test the description we arrive at for accuracy, or how it fits with neurological data, or statistics about what should be going on. All we do in order to understand whether our description is an adequate model for what we are doing is to find out whether it works or not: are you able to exhibit effectively in your behavior the same patterns that Virginia exhibits in hers, and get the same results? We will be making statements up here which may have no relationship to the "truth," to what's "really going on." We do know, however, that the model that we have made up of her behavior has been effective. After being exposed to it and practicing the patterns and the descriptions that we have offered, people's behavior changes in ways that make them effective in the same way that Satir is, yet each person's style is unique. If you learn to speak French, you will still express yourself in your own way.

You can use your consciousness to decide to gain a certain skill which you think would be useful in the context of your professional and personal work. Using our models you can practice that skill. Having practiced that consciously for some period of time you can allow that skill to function unconsciously. You all had to consciously practice all the skills involved in driving a car. Now you can drive a long distance and not be conscious of any of it, unless there's some unique situation that requires your attention.

One of the systematic things that Erickson and Satir and a lot of other effective therapists do is to notice unconsciously how the person they are talking to thinks, and make use of that information in lots and lots of different ways. For example, if I'm a client of Virginia's I might

«Well, man, Virginia, you know I just ah ... boy! Things have been, they've been heavy, you know. Just, you know, my wife was... my wife was run over by a snail and... you know, I've got four kids and two of them are gangsters and I think maybe I did something wrong but I just can't get a grasp on what it was.»

I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to watch Virginia operate, but she operates very, very nicely. What she does is very magical, even though I believe that magic has a structure and is available to all of you. One of the things that she would do in her response would be to join this client in his model of the world by responding in somewhat the following way:

«I understand that you feel certain weight upon you, and these kinds of feelings that you have in your body aren't what you want for yourself as a human being. You have different kinds of hopes for this.»

It doesn't really matter what she says, as long as she uses the same kinds of words and tonal patterns. If the same client were to go to another therapist, the dialogue might go like this:

«Well, you know, things feel real heavy in my life, Dr. Bandler. You know, it's just like I cant handle it, you know ...»

"I can see that, Mr. Grinder."

"I feel like I did something wrong with my children and I don't know what it is. And I thought maybe you could help me grasp it, you know?"

"Sure. I see what it is you're talking about. Let's focus in on one particular dimension. Try to give me your particular perspective. Tell me how it is that you see your situation right now."

"Well, you know, I just... I'm ... I just feel like I cant get a grasp on reality."

"I can see that. What's important to me—colorful as your description is—what's important to me is that we see eye to eye about where it is down the road that we shall travel together."

"I'm trying to tell you that my life has got a lot of rough edges, you know. And I'm trying to find a way...."

"It looks all broken up from ... from your description, at any rate. The colors aren't all that nice."

While you sit here and laugh, we can't even get as exaggerated as what we've heard in «real life.» We spent a lot of time going around to mental health clinics and sitting in on professional communicators. It's very depressing. And what we noticed is that many therapists mismatch in the same way that we just demonstrated.

We come from California and the whole world out there is run by electronics firms. We have a lot of people who are called "engineers," and engineers typically at a certain point have to go to therapy. It's a rule, I don't know why, but they come in and they usually all say the same thing, they go:

«Well, I could see for a long time how, you know, I was really climbing up and becoming successful and then suddenly, you know, when I began to get towards the top, I just looked around and my life looked empty. Can you see that? I mean, could you see what that would be like for a man of my age?»

"Well, I'm beginning to get a sense of grasping the essence of the kinds of feelings that you have that you want to change."

"Just a minute, because what I want to do is I'm trying to show you my perspective on the whole thing. And, you know—"

"I feel that this is very important."

"And I know that a lot of people have a lot of troubles, but what I want to do is to give you a really clear idea of what I see the problem is, so that, you know, you can show me, sort of frame by frame, what I need to know in order to find my way out of this difficulty because quite frankly I could get very depressed about this. I mean, can you see how that would be?"

"I feel that this is very important. You have raised certain issues here which I feel that we have to come to grips with. And it's only a question of selecting where we'll grab a handle and begin to work in a comfortable but powerful way upon this."

"What I'd really like is your point of view."

"Well, I don't want you to avoid any of those feelings. Just go ahead and let them flow up and knock the hell out of the picture that you've got there."

"I... I don't see that this is getting us anywhere."

"I feel that we have hit a rough spot in the relationship. Are you willing to talk about your resistance?"

Do you happen to notice any pattern in these dialogues? We watched therapists do this for two or three days, and we noticed that Satir did it the other way around: She matched the client. But most therapists don't.

We have noticed this peculiar trait about human beings. If they find something they can do that doesn't work, they do it again. B. F. Skinner had a group of students who had done a lot of research with rats and mazes. And somebody asked them one day "What is the real difference between a rat and a human being?" Now, behaviorists not being terribly observant, decided that they needed to experiment to find out. They built a huge maze that was scaled up for a human. They took a control group of rats and taught them to run a small maze for cheese. And they took the humans and taught them to run the large maze for five-dollar bills. They didn't notice any really significant difference. There were small variations in the data and at the 95% probability level they discovered some significant difference in the number of trials to criterion or something. The humans were able to learn to run the maze somewhat better, a little bit quicker, than the rats.

The really interesting statistics came up when they did the extinguishing part. They removed the five-dollar bills and the cheese and after a certain number of trials the rats stopped running the maze…. However, the humans never stopped!... They are still there! ... They break into the labs at night.

One of the operating procedures of most disciplines that allows a field to grow and to continue to develop at a rapid rate is a rule that if what you do doesn't work, do something else. If you are an engineer and you get the rocket all set up, and you push the button and it doesn't lift up, you alter your behavior to find out what you need to do to make certain changes to overcome gravity.

However, in the field of psychotherapy, if you encounter a situation where the rocket doesn't go off, it has a special name; it's called having a "resistant client." You take the fact that what you do doesn't work and you blame it on the client. That relieves you of the responsibility of having to change your behavior. Or if you are slightly more humanistic about it, you "share in the guilt of the failure" or say he "wasn't ready."