Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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Anchoring Exercise

We are going to ask you to begin with kinesthetic anchors. They seem to be the easiest to learn, and the most useful. You'll generalize naturally from those. You can anchor in any system. Pair up again, A and B. You are both going to operate in both positions.

A, your job is to do the following: Face B, and place your right hand lightly on B's left knee. Then ask an accessing question: "Do you remember the last time that you had a really good sexual experience?" Wait for an appropriate response. You've got to be able to detect a response before you can anchor it. As you begin to see changes, you begin to apply pressure with your hand. You observe the changes in the parameters of muscle tone, skin color, breathing, lip size, etc. As you detect them, let those actually drive the pressure in your hand. When the changes level out, then you just lift your hand off. Then you will have a perfectly timed anchor. Don't anchor initially until you can see a difference in your partner's response.

Your ability to see a difference depends on how forceful you are in amplifying what you are getting. If you do things like this: (low, slow voice) "Have you ever been really excited?" or (high, quick voice) "Have you ever been really sad?" that won't work as well as if you congruently say excitedly "Look, have you ever been really excited?" The more expressively you access, the more expressively they will respond.

Then you place your left hand on their right knee, and ask them "What in your experience is the opposite of that?" They will access whatever is the opposite, for them. As the changes occur, again you increase the pressure as you see the changes until they plateau, and then lift your hand off.

Then you have two anchors. What we want you to do is to use one, and notice the changes. Pause, and then use the other one, and notice the changes. It works even better if you distract your partner's consciousness with something neutral, like "Do you remember seeing the lights as we came into the building?" as you use that anchor. See if you can regularly get the same response when you use your anchors.

When you are satisfied that you have two anchors that work, and you can see the difference between them, then we want you to hold both at the same time, for about 30-60 seconds, and watch an amazing event, called “integration." Watch your partner's face. You will first see half of the face with one of those responses and the other half with the other, and then they will integrate. Anchors are not buttons; you have to hold them until you see the full response. Once the integration begins, you don't have to hold any more.

The purpose of this exercise is not to do therapy with your partner. The purpose is simply for you to verify with your own sensory apparatus that anchors exist, and that you are capable of anchoring. All you are doing is learning to anchor. This afternoon well teach you how to use it to do therapy. Go ahead.

* * * * *

There was one question that came up repeatedly during the exercise. Bill said «Well, I was imagining a time with my wife that was extremely sensually pleasurable there on the one knee. And on the other knee, I was remembering a time when she didn't seem to be willing to be with me, or the demands of keeping the house, etc. didn't allow us time to sit down together, and I got angry.» Bill's partner was able to get the two distinctly, and to go back and reaccess them; the anchoring worked fine. He collapsed the two anchors and the integration occurred. And their question is «What will happen now when he sees his wife?» The answer to this is really important insofar as our understanding of our work goes. What will happen now is that when he sees his wife, he will have the choice of those purely sensual, pleasant feelings in the past, or the feelings of anger from the past, or—and this is very important– any combination of the two.

Those were two antagonistic, dissociated feeling states in the past. When you anchor each one, you also anchor the antagonistic physiology, muscle patterns, breathing, etc. Then when you stimulate both at the same time, the physiological patterns which are antagonistic literally interrupt each other—you could see that in the person's face, in their breathing, and so on. In the process they become integrated so that the person can come up with any combination of those feelings which were previously dissociated, and respond appropriately in context. The presupposition behind our behavior in this area is that given a set of choices, a person will always make the best choice that they have available in the context. I think it's entirely appropriate for anyone to have the ability both to be fully sensual with another person as well as to be angry, and all the mixes in between. By integrating in this way, using anchoring as an integrative device to break down the dissociations, we make sure that you have a full range of response in that area.

One of the lies we told you was that the anchoring exercise you did is not therapy. "You are just going to anchor this here and that there and then you are going to collapse the two and integrate them." I want you to think about that. What you did with the knee anchors and the integration is formally identical to gestalt two-chair work. Gestalt people use chairs as anchors and when you switch from one chair to the other, your feelings actually change. If you were on the outside as the therapist, you would actually see facial, postural and color changes as the person moved from one chair to the other. Those chairs are anchors. The problem is that it's hard to get integration. How do you push the chairs together? So you have to make people go back and forth really fast.

Now we'd like you all to pair up again and do the "changing personal history" pattern that we did this morning with Linda. I'll review it briefly:

First, what response does your partner have now that s/he wants to change? Anchor that to stabilize the situation, and to give you access to it.

Now, how would you like to behave, or what resource would you need, to behave in a way that's more congruent with your present resources? When you originally went through this experience, you didn't have all the resources you now have. Which resource would you take back to change your personal history? When have you had an experience of that resource? Anchor the response.

Then put the two together. Hold both anchors as your partner goes back and relives the past with the new resource, changing and creating new old history, until s/he is satisfied. Here your sensory experience is important. Check for congruency. Did you like the way it turned out? If not, do it again. What other resource do you need? Sometimes you have to give people a couple of resources. Or sometimes people think that all they needed is a certain resource and they take it and go back and it turns out to be a dud. The conscious mind has a limited understanding of what's needed back there. The only way you're going to find out is by having them go back to re-experience parts of their personal history.

After they are satisfied that they have a new resource that worked back there, you need to bridge, or future-pace. What experiences in your present life are sufficiently similar to that old one to trigger the unwanted response? What is the first thing you see, hear, or feel that

I lets you identify this kind of situation? Then anchor the new resource to those contextual cues. OK. Go ahead.

* * * * *

There are many, many useful ways of organizing the whole process called psychotherapy. One of the ways that is quite simple, and therefore elegant, is to treat every psychological limitation like a phobia. A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation. A person who has a phobia made a decision, unconsciously, under stress, sometime earlier in their life in the face of overwhelming stimuli. They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning. Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life, they make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement. You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes, you are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.

The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the responses are so consistent. If a person says "I can't be assertive around my boss," they are essentially saying «Somewhere in my personal history I have an experience or a set of experiences of being assertive. I cannot get to that resource in the context of my boss.» When a person responds with a phobic response to a snake, that's a similar situation. I know that at other times in their experience, in their personal history, they have been able to be quite calm and courageous. However, in the context of a snake, they can't get to that resource.

Up to this time in the development of psychology and psychiatry and counseling, people haven't tried to organize information to go directly after things. Freud set up a rule "You must go into history," so we've decided if you can understand how something developed historically, you can work with it. I think you only need to do that once or twice, though. Given that you understand, historically, how people are capable of creating phobias, you don't need a historical understanding of each and every phobia, as long as you understand that there are similar processes at work. The way in which people get phobias is fascinating. However, once you understand something about the structure you can go ahead and change it, because all phobias are going to work in the same way. People have strategies which produce phobic responses. Who here has a phobia?

Woman: I've got one about driving a car across a bridge and falling in the car into the water.

If you were observing her, everything that you need to know about changing her has already happened. Would you like to get rid of it? Is it something that restricts your behavior?

Woman: Oh, I'd love to get rid of it!

Are you sure?

Woman: Of course. Yeah, I'm sure. I just wasn't sure I wanted to share it, but I've already shared it!

But you didn't need to share it! You could have kept it a secret. We don't need any content. In fact, we prefer not to have any. Is there someone else here with a phobia who would be unwilling to talk about it? Any time we ask for volunteers, you keep the content to yourself. None of you knew what Linda was thinking about this morning. That's the format we'll always use for demonstrations, so feel free to demonstrate. One way for us to respect your integrity as human beings, whether it's in private practice or in a group demonstration like this, is for you to keep the content to yourself. We don't need it. We operate with process anyway. Content is irrelevant, and besides that, it's often depressing. We don't want to hear it. And when you tell people the content of your problem, you look like a fool. It's a good thing we interrupted you before you told them what the content was, right? OK. What's your name?

Woman: Tammy.

Tammy. Very good. (He contorts his body and several different intense expressions pass across his face.) Any weird non-verbal analogue is good, especially if you get clients who have been in therapy before. You need to do something to throw them off balance– anything to break up their patterns. Because otherwise they will come in and tell you the same thing they told everyone else. They will come in and tell you a prerecorded message. We once heard a tape recording of a client with the therapist before us, and in the whole first session with us she said exactly the same thing; the same words in the same order. We were fascinated to find out how much she could reproduce. It was almost identical until we intervened in the process. I jumped up and started roaring about God. "God said 'You will change!'" The easiest way to do therapy is to enter the client's reality. This woman was extremely religious, and the easiest way to assist her in making a change was to make myself an intermediary between God and her. That's what all priests do, isn't it? It was acceptable to her. All I did was feed back information that she had given to me from her unconscious—which were the instructions she needed.

Now, Tammy, let's pretend that we don't know that this is about bridges. Would you give me a code word for the phobic response that you have had for some years?

Tammy: Pink.

Pink. She's phobic of pink. Now you have as much information as when she says "I'm afraid of driving across bridges." You still have no idea what the response is, where it came from, or what the dimensions are internally and externally. Secret therapy and code words vividly point out the illusion of understanding another person when they use words that do not refer to sensory-based descriptions.

Now, before we begin, let me ask you something, Tammy. Would you think of a situation in which you expressed yourself with what you regard as a fine representation of your full capabilities as an adult human being, as a mature woman. Sometime in the past few years—it may have been a stressful situation or maybe just a happy occasion– you behaved in a way that you found particularly satisfying. I want you to take your time and find such a situation, and let me know when you have it. Do you understand the request? (She nods.)...

OK. First of all, I hope you all noticed a distinct change in her face, in her breathing, etc. Those of you who were watching her could see that Tammy constructed a visual image. She searched visually and she went up and to her right. She is a normally organized right-hander, cerebrally. She didn't see the situation from inside of it. She saw herself in the situation. As such, her kinesthetic response was not as strong as it would be if she did the following.

Would you make that image of yourself again, and when you see it clearly, I want you to step inside the image so that you are actually back in that situation that represents for you an example of your full capacity as a woman. When you can actually feel in your body again the feelings of competence and strength that you associate with that situation, just reach over with your left hand and hold my hand….

OK. I have no idea what her specific experience is. I do know, however, from the remarkable, dramatic change that Tammy just offered me non-verbally, that she succeeded in carrying out my instructions. And I agree with her. That looks really good. That fits my hallucinations about what competence, etc. is. Tammy, do you happen to know what the original experience was that this phobia is connected to?

Tammy: No, I don't.

OK, that's typical. It's typical that the person only knows that in certain kinds of situations they have a very powerful kinesthetic response—in fact in your case I would describe it as an overwhelming response. That response is so overwhelming that in the past when you have been in these situations you literally exercise no choice. You have found it to restrict your behavior in the past, right?

Tammy: Oh, yes—in my dream world, too.

Most phobic people do not know what their original trauma was, and, indeed, it is not even necessary to know that. I'm going to do it as if it were necessary, but it's just part of the mythology.

Tammy has succeeded for years in making the same response over and over and over again. She has demonstrated adequately that she knows how to do that. A phobia can be thought of as nothing more than a one-trial learning that was never updated. And it worked, by the way. I will often turn right to the person and say this: I want to reassure the part of you that has been making you phobic all these years that I respect what it has done, and I regard that as a valid response. You're here. You survived. If there hadn't been a part to make that effective response to keep you out of certain situations, you might not be here. My desire is not to take away the choice of being phobic but to update it so that you can also make other responses which are more congruent with your full resources as a fully grown woman. We're going to use that same capacity to do one-trial learning to help you learn to do something else.

In a moment I'm going to ask you to do some time-traveling. As you go back I want you to increase pressure here on my hand at any point that you need to be reminded of your competence as a fully grown, mature woman. This is your connection with the present time and all the powerful adult resources that you have as a fully grown person. Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm.)

That's all you need to do to anchor the phobic response. Or you can ask a different question: What is the last time that you had an intense response like that?

Tammy: Umhm. (He touches her arm again.)

I got the same response that she gave a moment ago when I said "Do you know what the feelings of the phobia are?"—the same facial expression, the same breathing. That's now anchored on her arm. This anchor constitutes a stabilizing factor to help us go back and sort through her personal experience to find the original experience. It's not necessary to do it this way; this is one way to do phobias.

Your holding hands with me constitutes your connection to all the strength and resources you have as an adult woman. There were experiences in your past, namely those connected with this phobia, which we're going to go back and relive, but in a way that involves no discomfort at all, a way that involves total comfort. And I call to your mind the notion of dissociation that we talked about yesterday. We told you during the exercise you did yesterday afternoon to be sure you step inside the picture so that you recover the full kinesthetics. The opposite holds true here. For years Tammy has been exposed to certain kinds of real life situations and responded with a lot of emotion, a lot of kinesthetic feelings over and over again. To have her go back and relive that experience again and have those feelings again will simply reinforce it. That's ridiculous. And most people's unconscious minds say «Bullshit! We aren't going back there; that hurts!» and they are called «resistant clients,» right? Respect that resistance as a statement that says «Look, make some new arrangements so we don't have to go through the pain again.»

The specific arrangements might go like this: I'd like you to close your eyes, Tammy. You can vary the pressure in your hand any time you need more strength. You can draw it directly from here, and that's also a way for me to know where you are. In a moment I'm going to reach over and touch you here on your arm. That's going to help you remember a little bit of the feelings of pinking. I don't want you to go through the feelings again. I want you to take these feelings—onlyas much of them as you need—and drift back until there comes before your eyes a scene in which you see yourself over there at a younger age in a situation which has some connection with how you first learned to respond that way.

At some point while you see those images which are connected intimately with these feelings of pinking, I'm going to say "What do you see now?" I would like you to stabilize the image at that point. Likely it will be an image of yourself at a younger age, dressed in some particular way, in some colors, in some context. I don't know what any of that will be and at the moment you don't either, because you don't know where this came from. As soon as I ask you to stop the image, I want you to form a snapshot and just hold it stable. I don't want you to run any movies yet, because we need to make one more arrangement to make you even more comfortable before you run the movie.

Remember that you can modulate how much of these feelings (He touches the phobia anchor on her arm.) you are going to use to drift back until you see a clear focused visual image connected with these feelings, that represents where this original learning took place. That's right, you draw on all the strength you need here, as you drift back through time, even further, take your time ... even more. There's no rush. Be perfectly comfortable. Now look at that image. And simply nod your head when you clearly see an image of yourself at a younger age....

Tammy: I see myself at a younger age but I'm not in any situation. I'm just—

That's fine. Can you see what color shoes you are wearing?

Tammy: Black.

OK. Now I want you slowly to look at the surface that's right under the shoes. From there let your eyes slowly notice what is around you as you stand there in those little black shoes. Remembering to breathe, remembering to use these feelings of strength and competence. You've demonstrated adequately that you know about those old feelings. Now I want you to demonstrate that you can have these feelings of strength as you watch that image. Remembering to breathe; oxygen is essential for this whole process. That's right. When you have the still image, just nod….

OK. Now, I would like you to hold that image constant, just a snapshot. Relax your right hand—not your left. Your left can be as tight as you need it to be in order to get access to these feelings of strength that you need. And you are breathing nicely now. Continue your breathing.

Now, I would like you slowly to float up and out of your body so that you can actually see yourself sitting here holding hands with me, ridiculous as that may sound. Take all the time you need. And when you have succeeded in floating out of your body so that you can see yourself from above or the side or the front or the back, just nod that you have succeeded. Excellent.

Now, staying in that third position, I want you to look past yourself sitting here holding my hand and feeling the feelings of strength and adult resourcefulness. This time, with feelings of strength and comfort, I want you to watch and listen carefully to everything that happened to young Tammy way back there, so that you can make new understandings and learnings about what occurred, and therefore have new choices. You are to do this, watching from the third position, having the feelings of resourcefullness and strength connected with my hand here. Knowing that you did live through that and you won’t have to again, let that younger part of you feel the old feelings over there as she goes through that old experience for the last time. When you’ve seen and heard it all, adequate for your making new understandings, simply nod your head and stay there. You can begin the movie now…. (She nods.)

All right, now very, very slowly I want you to float down from the third position and step back in and reunite with your body, sitting here with feelings of resourcefulness and strength….

And now I want you to do something very powerful and important for yourself. Younger Tammy did something very powerful for you; she went through those feelings again for you, and she let you watch and listen with comfort and strength to stimuli which in the past have triggered overwhelming responses. This time you were able to see and hear those without pinking. I want you to walk over to young Tammy in your mind's eye. I want you to reach out and use all of the adult female resources you have, to comfort her and reassure her that she will never have to go through that again. Thank her for living through the old feelings for the last time for you. Explain to her that you can guarantee that she lived through it because you are from her future.

And when you see on her face and in her posture and in her breathing that she is reassured that you will be there to take care of her from now on, I want you to really reach out, take her by the shoulders and pull her close and actually feel her enter your body. Pull her inside. She is a part of you, and she's a very energetic part. That energy is freed now from that phobic response. I would like your unconscious mind to select some particular pleasurable activity that some of that energy can now be used for, for yourself here in the present and in the future. Because energy is energy and you deserve it. Just sit there and relax and enjoy those feelings. Let them spread through your whole body. Take your time. You've got plenty going on inside. I'm going to talk to the group.

Do you understand the anchors? First, she holds hands with me. This is a "bail-out" anchor, a resource anchor that will always get her out of trouble and says "Here, you're grounded right here." It's also a really exquisite biofeedback mechanism. By temperature and pressure and moisture changes in her hand, I get an incredible amount of information about her complex internal experience. An anchor here on her arm stabilizes the phobic feelings to use as a lead to go back and find some visual experience that will serve as a metaphor for her entire set of experiences called «the phobic response.»

Once she sees herself at an earlier age over there, using the feelings to lead her back to something she had never known about consciously before, then I dissociate her a second step—I ask her to float up out of her body. You could see the changes in posture and color and breathing and so forth which indicated which position she was operating from.

Once the two-step dissociation has been established, I have her watch and listen with comfort to the old experience. She saw and heard things today which have never been available to her before.

Tammy: That's true.

She was so overwhelmed in the past by the kinesthetic phobic response that she couldn't see and hear what was going on. Consciousness is limited. As she watches and listens to herself at a younger age, the competent feelings of comfort and resourcefulness are being associated with the auditory and visual stimuli from the past.

And when she's gone through the whole thing, then we reintegrate. Every model of therapy, every psychotheology, is built on dissociation and sorting to help people reorganize. Whether you call it "parent-child-adult," "topdog-underdog," using chairs or words doesn't matter as long as you label and sort a person's behavior, dissociating parts of them, one from the other. You have the responsibility as a professional communicator to put your clients back together before the session is over. One easy way to make sure the dissociations that you create are re-integrated before the end of the session is to simply reverse the process by which you create the dissociation.

In this particular case, the dissociation is (1) see yourself over there at a younger age, (2) float up and out of your body. For the integration, (1) float back down and rejoin yourself here—and you could see the tremendous change in her that indicated that she had succeeded in doing that, (2) then walk over in your mind's eye, reach out, comfort and reassure the younger Tammy, thank her for going through this so that you could learn, pull her into you, re-integrate her and feel the feelings of energy.

What we're doing here is structured regression. Primal Therapy claims to get complete regression back to infancy. If that were true, then Primal Therapy would achieve change only insofar as it doesn't work! If Primal Therapy really got complete regression, it would be doing exactly what Tammy has been doing with the phobic response up until today. Complete regression simply means that you relive the experience in all systems. If you do that, you reinforce it.

A partial, structured, regression of the type Tammy and I were working with here allows you the freedom to go back and connect new kinds of resources with the auditory and visual stimuli which in the past have elicited old, uncomfortable, kinesthetic responses. It's impossible for her to go through this experience and still maintain that old response because she's done one-trial learning again. Now she doesn't have to be phobic. I haven't taken that choice away. There may be some context in which being phobic in response to something may be useful. I'm not playing God. I presuppose that people make the best choice in context. My job is to make sure that resources which have been dissociated from a certain context become available in that context. I leave it to the unique human being, with all the various needs they have that I don't even know anything about, to make an adequate selection somewhere along the continuum between resourcefulness and terror. And she will. Those resources have been dissociated in the past, but they are now integrated and they are now both responses to the same stimuli.

Man: You are making certain assumptions about integration and a lot of things that have happened.

Right. Is there any particular assumption you'd like to challenge?

Man: Um, all of them.

Good. Pick one.

Man: That she feels any different now than she did before.

OK. Let me give you a way of testing. (He turns to Tammy.) Let me ask you a question. (He touches the phobia anchor. She turns to him and smiles: «Umhm?») That's fine; you answered it. Does that make sense to you, sir? Do you remember that the last time I touched her there she had a phobic response? I had anchored the phobic reaction there, and then I demonstrated that I had control of her phobia. When I reached over and touched her arm she became phobic. Now I reach over and touch her and what does she do? She looks at me as if to say "What do you want?" That is a far more elegant demonstration than any verbal feedback I could get. I'm not saying don't use verbal conscious feedback, but understand that when you ask for that, you are tapping into the least informative part of the person: their conscious mind.

Let me give you another way of testing. Tammy, I'd like you to try something for me. This is just a scientific experiment. Are there any bridges here in town? I would like you to close your eyes and fantasize driving across a bridge, and I want you to do it in a special way. I want you to do it from the point of view of being in a car—not watching yourself—so that you see what you would see if you were actually driving across the bridge. What happens when you do that? ...