Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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As Dick does this and you are watching to get the answer before he gives it to us, realize that if the signal had been a picture we would have simply varied the amplitude of the signal. We could make it brighter for "yes" and darker for "no." If it had been a sound we could have asked for an increase in volume for "yes" and a decrease for "no." In this way you avoid the risk of consciously misinterpreting the meaning of various internal kinesthetic, visual, or auditory signals. It gives you a very clean channel of communication with the part of Dick that is responsible for the pattern of behavior he wants to change. And of course that's just the part that knows how to make the change.

This process gives you an excellent opportunity to practice seeing what are traditionally called hypnotic responses. One of Milton Erickson's more useful definitions of deep trance is "a limited focus of attention inward." That's exactly what we asked Dick to do here—to limit his focus of attention to a signal which is internally generated. And the corresponding changes in the texture of his skin, breathing, skin color, lip size, etc., are all characteristic of what official hypnotists call trance phenomena.

Dick, rejoin us back here. What happened?

Dick: I had the feelings.

So the feelings intensified. You got a verification. We now have communication with the part; we have a "yes-no" signal. We can now ask that particular part any question and get an unambiguous "yes-no" answer. We have an internal channel of communication that Dick is running himself. We're not doing it. We're simply consulting with him about the next step. He now has established an internal channel of communication which allows him to communicate unambiguously with the part of him responsible for the pattern he wants to change. That's all you need. You can do anything at this point.

Step three is to distinguish between pattern X and the intention of the part that is responsible for the pattern. Dick, this part of you which is responding to you at the unconscious level has a certain intention it's trying to carry out for you. The way it's going about it is not acceptable to you at the conscious level. Now we're going to work with that part, through your channel of communication, to offer it better ways to accomplish what it's trying to do. When it has better ways than the way it goes about it now, you can have what you want consciously andthis part can continue to take care of you in the way it wants to.

I want you to go inside again and ask a question. After the question, be sensitive to the signal system you have. Go inside and ask that part "Would you be willing to let me know in consciousness what you are trying to do for me by this pattern X?" Then you wait for a "yes-no" signal…. (Dick smiles broadly.)

I just said to ask "yes-no"; I didn't say "Give me the information." If you were attending, you noticed that something fairly dramatic happened. He asked for a "yes-no" answer. He got the "yes-no" signal and he also got information about the intention in consciousness.

Dick: Which pleased me.

Which pleased him and surprised him. Therapy is over at this point. There is now a conscious appreciation of what this part—that has been running pattern X—has been trying to do for him at the unconscious level. Dick, you didn't know what it was trying to do before, did you?

Dick: No, but I got a clue to it while you were talking, before l went down in. I got a feeling that it—

Part of our problem doing demonstrations is that after two days with you we have such good rapport with your unconscious there's a tendency for you to do it too fast.

So now he has a conscious understanding of the intention of this part of him that has been running X. Dick, is it true that you would like a part of you to have the responsibility of taking care of you in that way, even though the specific method it uses is not acceptable to you? You may not like the way that it goes about accomplishing pattern X, but do you agree that the intention is something you want to have a part do for you as a person?

Dick: Yes.

Now there is congruency between the intention of the unconscious part and the appreciation of the conscious.

That means it's time for step number four: to create some new alternatives to the pattern X that are more successful in accomplishing the intention, and that still allow consciousness to have exactly what it wants. What we're going to do is hold the intention—the outcome– constant, and vary the ways of achieving that outcome until we find some better ways of achieving it, ways that do not come into conflict with other parts of Dick.

Dick, do you have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part?

Dick: Humpf!

The creative part hops out! "Hi! Here I am. What do you want?" I hope you all appreciate the sense in which I said before that multiple personality is an evolutionary step. So you do have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part.

Dick: Oh, yes.

I want you to go inside and ask your creative part if it would be willing to undertake the following task. Let me explain it first before you do it. Ask it to go at the unconscious level to the part that runs pattern X, and find out what that part is trying to do for you. Then have it begin to create alternative ways by which this part of you can accomplish this intention. It will create 10,20, or 1000 ways to get that outcome, and it's to be quite irresponsible in this. It simply is to generate a lot of possible ways for you to get the outcome, without trying to evaluate which ones would really work. Now, out of that multitude of things that it will offer, the part of you that's running pattern X will evaluate which of those ways it believes are more effective than pattern X in getting what it's been trying to get for you. It is to select at least three ways that it believes will work at least as effectively as, and hopefully more effectively than, the pattern of behavior it's been using up to now to accomplish that intention. Does that make sense to you?

Dick: I think so.

OK. Go inside and ask your creative part if it would be willing to do that. When it says "yes," tell it to go ahead. And the way I would like the part of you to notify you that it has accepted each one of the new choices is by giving you that feeling, that "yes" signal. You may or may not be conscious of what the new alternatives are. That's irrelevant for our purposes here.

Dick: It sounds like a big assignment.

Yes, it is, but thousands of people have done it all over the world. It's humanly possible and you are a human. You have to go inside and explain it to your creative part and to the other part, and if they both agree, tell them to go ahead. What you're going to do now is to use your own creative resources to begin to reorganize your behavior…. (long pause)

Did you get your three signals, Dick? (No.) How many have you gotten? (None.) None, you've gotten none. Would you go inside and ask that same part—again "yes" or "no"—if it has been presented with choices by your creative part. Ask if your creative part has been presenting it choices…. (He nods.) OK. Then it has been receiving?

Dick: Apparently.

So checking at the creative level, we find creativity is generating lots of possibilities. OK, would you go inside and ask if any of those choices that were presented were acceptable choices? Were any of them more effective than pattern X to accomplish what it wants?

Some of you like to offer advice to your clients. Any time you offer advice, that's going to be less effective than if you can throw them back, with appropriate explicit instructions, on their own resources to develop their own alternative ways. You are a unique human being and so are your clients. And there may or may not be overlap, as you found the first day during that afternoon exercise when we asked you to hallucinate. Some of you could guess the content of your partner's experiences in a way that was almost unbelievable. With other people, it doesn't work at all. If you have that incredible overlap, then you can offer useful advice. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you are sensitive to the response you are getting as you offer it. But even then it will be more effective to throw a person back on their own resources. (Dick shakes his head.)

OK. You got a "no" signal. None of the new choices are acceptable. The creative part generated a lot of possible ways, none of which were as effective as the present pattern. Now, would you ask that part that runs pattern X if it would go to your creative part and become an advisor to your creative part so that it can come up with better choices about how to accomplish that intention? Ask it to explain what, specifically, about the choices the creative part has been presenting prevents them from being more effective ways of accomplishing the intention. Do you understand that instruction consciously, Dick? OK, would you go inside and explain it to that part and then ask it—"yes" or "no"—if it would be willing to do that? And if it says «yes,» tell it to go ahead.

This particular process differs significantly from normal therapeutic and hypnotic techniques. We simply serve as consultants for the person's conscious mind. He does all the work himself. He is his own therapist; he is his own hypnotist at the moment. We're not doing any of those things. We communicate directly only with his consciousness and instruct it how to proceed. It's his responsibility to establish and maintain effective communication with the unconscious portions of him that he needs to access in order to change. Of course, once he learns to do that—using this as an example—he can do it without us. That's another advantage. This process has autonomy for your client built into it.

Dick, did you get three signals?

Dick: I'm not sure.

OK, would you go inside and ask that part if it now has at least three choices—whether or not you are conscious of what they are is irrelevant—which it finds more powerful than the old pattern X in accomplishing what it's trying to do. Again, use the same signal. It's important to continually refer back to the same signal, and it's important to get three new choices. If you have at least three choices, you begin to exercise variability in your behavior.

Dick: That was "yes."

OK, so now he got a positive; it said "Yes, I have at least three ways more effective than the old pattern X," even though he consciously doesn't know what those are.

Step five is to make sure those new choices actually occur in his behavior. Using the same signal system, Dick, we would like you to ask this part "Since you have three ways more effective than the old pattern X, would you take responsibility for actually making those things occur in my behavior in the appropriate context?" And you know that the "yes" is the intensification, and the "no" is the diminishment. Is that true?

Dick: I'm not sure that it is.

OK. Ask for that part to give you a "yes" signal before you begin, so that you know which is "yes" and which is "no." If you get them backwards, it's going to mess things up a little bit.

Dick: Yeah, I … I... I lost track.

Yes. I know. That's why I'm asking you to do this. Just go inside and ask the part to give you a "yes" signal, so that you know which one is "yes."

Dick: The "yes" signal is relaxing.

OK, fine. Let's back up a bit. Go back inside and ask the part if it agrees that these choices will work more effectively than X.

Dick: That was "yes."

Fine. Now ask that part if it would be willing to accept the responsibility for generating the three new choices—instead of pattern X—for a period of, say, six weeks to try them out.

Dick: "Yes."

Step six, in my opinion, is what makes this model for change really elegant. The ecological check is our explicit recognition that Dick here, and each one of us, is a really complex and balanced organism. For us to simply make a change in pattern X and not take into account all the repercussions in other parts of his experience and behavior would be foolhardy. This is a way of building in a protection against that.

We would like you to thank this part for all the work it has done. It's got what it needs; it's already satisfied with that. Now we want to find out if any other parts have input to this process. Ask "Is there any other part of me that has any objection to the new choices that are going to occur?" Then be sensitive to any response in any system: feelings, pictures, or sounds….

OK, you've got a response. And?

Dick: They have no objections,

How do you know that? This is important. I asked you to attend to all systems. You came back and said "No. There's no objection." How do you know there's no objection?

Dick: I felt no tension anywhere.

You felt no tension. Were there any changes you could detect either in your kinesthetics or visually or auditorily?

Dick: Well, the relaxation.

A relaxation. OK, that was an overall body relaxation. Just to be sure, just to check for congruency, thank whatever part made your body relax. And then ask "If this means no objection, relax me even further. If there is any objection, make some tension occur." Again, all we are doing is varying the signal for "yes" or "no." It's arbitrary whether you go "Yes for positive increase, No for diminish," or the reverse. It doesn't matter.

Dick: I'm getting some objection.

OK. What exactly was your experience? Were there changes in muscle tension?

Dick: Yes, around my eyes.

OK. Whenever you get a response to a general inquiry, it's important to check and be absolutely sure what that response means. Thank that part for the response of tension in the muscles around your eyes. Ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no" to the question: "Do you object to the new alternatives?"...

Dick: There was a decrease.

It's slightly unusual to have the tension here. Typically at the ecological check almost everybody's heart speeds up. Most people associate a speeded-up heart rate with fear or anxiety. When I ask them to stop hallucinating and simply ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no," the heart rate usually slows down. My understanding of this is that it's simply a signal that some part of them is quite excited about what's going on.

Dick: I was also aware of a pulsating in my hands, but the eye tension seemed more dramatically different than the hand sensations, so that's why I mentioned the eye tension.

OK, let's check this, too. This time go in and thank the part that gave you the hand signals. Then ask the same question "Do you have any objections?" and ask for an increase for "yes" and a decrease for "no."

Dick: Decrease in sensation.

Decrease, so that part also doesn't have an objection. If there had been an objection at this point, you would simply recycle back to step three. You have a new "yes-no" signal—the pulsating in the hands. Now you make a distinction between this part's objection and its intention. You continue cycling through this process until you have integrated all objections.

We usually hold the first set of three choices constant and ask any part that objects to find alternative ways of doing what it needs to do without interfering with the first set of choices. But you could also ask both parts to form a committee and go to the creative part and select new alternatives that are acceptable to both.

The ecological check is very important. Many of you have done elegant work, and the client is congruent in your office. When he leaves, another part of him emerges which has concerns that are contextually bound. When he gets home, suddenly he doesn't have access to what he had in your office or in the group. There are other parts of him that know that if he goes home and simply changes in the way that he was going to change, he would lose the friendship of this person, or blow that relationship, or something like that. This is a way of checking to make sure that there are no parts whose positive contribution to him will be interfered with by the new pattern of behavior. Of course the only real check is in experience, but this is a way of doing the best you can to make sure that the new choices will work.

OK, now, Dick, what happens if six or seven weeks from now, you discover yourself doing the old pattern of behavior X? What are you supposed to do, then? ... You can accept that as a signal that the new choices that you came up with were not adequate to satisfy the intention. And you can go back to your creative part and give it instructions to come up with three more choices. The pattern of behavior is a barometer of how effective the new choices are. If the old behavior emerges after a test period, it's a statement that the new choices were not more effective than the old pattern. It's a signal for you to return to this process and create better choices.

Regression to previous behavior isn't a signal of failure, it's a signal of incompetency, and you need to go back and fix it. Reframing will work. I guarantee his behavior will change. If his behavior changes back, that's a signal that the new kinds of behavior were not as effective at getting something for him as the old pattern. Then he goes back through the process, finds out what other secondary gain is involved, and creates new ways to take care of that as well.

If you don't explicitly make the symptom a signal to negotiate, the person's conscious mind will call it a «failure» if the symptom comes back. When the symptom is identified as a signal, the client begins to pay attention to it as a message. It probably always was a message anyway, but they never thought about it that way. By doing this, they begin to have a feedback mechanism. They discover that they only get the signal at certain times.

For example, somebody comes in with migraine headaches and I reframe, and all parts are happy, and the client goes along for two weeks and everything's fine. Then they are in a particular context and suddenly they get a headache. That headache triggers off the instruction that the negotiations weren't adequate. The person can drop inside and ask "Who's unhappy? What does this mean?" If a part says "You're not standing up for yourself like you promised to," then they are faced with a simple choice of having a migraine headache or standing up for themselves.

I had a woman who got such severe migraine headaches that she was flat on her back. There was a part of her that wanted to be able to play every so often, and if it wasn't going to get to play, then the other parts weren't going to get to do anything! Whacko! It would give her a headache. So she made an arrangement that she would spend a defined amount of time in playing activities. After the session, when the weekend came and it was time to play, she decided to do her taxes instead! That part just laid her out. She called on the phone and said "Well, I didn't keep up my end of the bargain, and I got another migraine headache. What should I do?" I said "Don't ask me; ask the part. It's not my problem. My head doesn't hurt."

So she went in and found out what she was supposed to do. That part said "Go out, get in the car, and go somewhere and have fun or else!" As soon as she got in the car, the headache was gone. So her headache no longer became something that was a burden; it became an indicator that she had better respond. She learned that getting a headache was a signal to go out and have some fun.

OK. Any questions about the process we went through with Dick?

Woman: Am I understanding that Dick doesn't need to be aware of what those choices are?

We prefer that he not be. That could just get in his way.

Woman: Dick, you're not aware of your three alternatives specifically?

Dick: I'm not. In some ways I feel a failure because of it, you know, because I can't think it.

Woman: Well, how does he know he has them?

He got a signal from his unconscious, namely the kinesthetic feeling of relaxation. He doesn't consciously know what the new alternatives are.

Dick: But it feels OK down here.

His unconscious mind knows what they are, and that's all that counts. That's the one that runs the show in this area of behavior, anyway. Let's make a demonstration for your purposes here. Would you go inside, Dick, and ask this same part down here, using the same "yes-no" signal, if it would be willing to allow your conscious mind to know what one of those new choices is, just as a demonstration to you that it knows things that you don't.

This is called a convincer. It's wholly irrelevant for the process of change, but it can settle people's conscious minds a little bit.

Dick: He won't do it

And rightfully so. If I were Dick's unconscious mind, I wouldn't tell him either. He'd try to interfere. What did he do earlier? His unconscious part wouldn't release specific information, and he immediately had a feeling of failure! I wouldn't communicate with his conscious mind if it were going to behave like that either. It's just as convincing to have your unconscious say «No, I won't tell you what any of the new choices are,» if it's an involuntary signal. Right?

Dick: Right.

Now let me mention in passing the paradoxical nature of the request that we made in step two. The question is "Would you be willing to communicate with me in consciousness?" Any signal that he detects has to be a response in consciousness. Even if the part says "No, I would not," that's still a communication in consciousness.

If he had gotten a "no" response, I would understand that in the following way: the intent of that part is not to not communicate with him in consciousness. It's a statement that it doesn't trust him. That is, it's not willing to release content information to his conscious mind. And I respect that. I really believe that unconscious minds should have the freedom, and in fact have the duty, to keep out of awareness material which would not be useful for the conscious mind to deal with.

We had a period when we did nothing but deep, deep trance hypnosis. A man came in once and said that there were all kinds of things standing in the way of his being happy. I said "Would you like to tell me what those things are?" And he said "No, I want to go into a trance and change it all, and that's why I came for hypnosis." So accepting all behavior, I did an induction, put him into a deep trance, sent his conscious mind away, and said "I want to speak privately with your unconscious mind." I have no idea what that means. However, when you tell them to, people do it. They talk to you and it's not the one you were talking to before, because it knows things the other one doesn't know. Whether I created that division or whether it was there already, I have no idea. I asked for it, and I got it.

In this particular case, his conscious mind was, to put it as nicely as I can, inane. His unconscious resources, however, were incredibly intelligent. So I said "What I want to know from you, since you know much more about him than I do, is what change is it that he needs to make in his behavior?"

The response I got was "He's a homosexual."

"What change does he need to make?"

"He needs to change it, because it's all based on a mistake."

"What mistake?"

The explanation that I got from his unconscious mind was the following: The first time he had ever asserted himself physically, in terms of trying to defend himself against violence, was when he was five years old in a hospital to have his tonsils out. Someone put the ether mask on his face, and he tried to push it away and fight back as he went under the anesthetic. Anesthesia became anchored to the feeling of being angry. After that, every time he began to feel angry or frightened and started to strike out, his body went limp. As a result of this, his conscious mind decided that he was a homosexual. He had lived as a homosexual for about twenty-five years.

His unconscious resources said "You must not let his conscious mind know about this mistake, because knowing that would destroy him." And I agreed with that. There was no need for him to know that he had goofed in all of his relationships for twenty-five years. The only important thing was that he make a change, because he wanted to get married. But he couldn't marry a woman because he knew that he was a homosexual. His unconscious mind would not allow him in any way to become conscious of the fact that he had made this mistake, because it would have made his whole life a mistake and that knowledge would have utterly destroyed him. It wanted him to have the illusion that he grew out of it and grew into new behavior.

So I arranged with his unconscious mind to have him blossom as a heterosexual person and to make the changes as a result of a spiritual experience. His unconscious mind agreed that that was the best way to go about it. He changed without any conscious representation of either the hypnotic session or where the changes came from. He believes it came as a result of a drug experience. He smoked marijuana and had a cosmic experience. He assumed that it was the quality of the grass, and not a post-hypnotic suggestion. That was adequate for him to make the changes that he wanted.

There are many parts of people that do that same kind of thing. A part doesn't want the conscious mind to know what's going on, because it believes the conscious mind can't handle it, and it may or may not be right. Sometimes I've worked with people and I've made a deal with a part to allow the conscious mind to slowly become aware of something a little at a time, to discover if in fact the conscious mind can handle it or not. And usually the part discovered that the conscious mind could accept the information. At other times I've gotten an emphatic "No, there's no way I will do that. I don't want the conscious mind to know. I will change all behaviors, but I will not inform the conscious mind of anything." And people do change. Most change takes place at the unconscious level anyway. It's only in recent Western European history that we've made the idea of change explicit.

If Dick's part had said that it was unwilling to inform his conscious mind what the intention was, we would have just gone ahead anyway because it isn't relevant. We would have just told that part to go directly to his creative part and get the new choices. In fact, informing his conscious mind is probably what made it take so long. I'm serious. Being conscious, as far as I can tell, is never important, unless you want to write books to model your behavior. In terms of face-to-face communication, either internally or with other people, you don't need consciousness. We essentially limit his conscious participation to receiving and reporting fluctuations in his signal system, and asking the questions which stimulate those responses.

It's quite possible—not only possible but quite positive—for him not to know what the intention of his unconscious part is, as well as for him not to know what the new choices are. The changes will still be as profound and as effective as if he knew all that. In fact, in some ways the changes will be more effective.

Man: What if you get no response at all at the beginning?

Well, if you get no response at all, your client is probably dead. But if he doesn't get a response that convinces him, I'd ally myself with his unconscious mind and say "Look, this part is unwilling to communicate with you and I agree with it, because I wouldn't want to communicate with you either. What you haven't realized yet is that this part has been doing something vitally important for you. It's been doing you a service and you've spent all this time fighting your own internal processes when they've been trying to do something positive for you. I want to salute them and compliment them. And I think you owe them an apology." I'll literally tell people to go inside and apologize for having fought with the part and having made it that much harder for that part to do what it's trying to do for them.

If that doesn't work, you can threaten them. "And if you don't start being better to your parts, I'm going to help them destroy you. I'm going to help them give you a terrible headache and make you gain twenty-five pounds." Then typically I begin to get really good unconscious communication. The person will be saying "Well, I don't think this is really accurate" at the same time that their head is nodding up and down in response to what I've said.

Woman: In step three you ask the part what it is trying to do– what its intention is by that pattern of behavior. Do you need to do that if it doesn't matter whether you know about it or not?

No. It's just that most people are interested. If the unconscious doesn't want to reveal the intention, we'd just say something like «Even though X is a pattern you consciously want to change, are you willing to believe that this is a well-intentioned unconscious part, and that what it's trying to get for you by making you do X is something in your behalf as a total person? If you're willing to accept that, let's keep all the content unconscious, saying 'OK, I trust that you're well-intentioned. I don't need to review and evaluate your intentions because I will make the assumption that you're operating in my best interests.'» Then we'd just go ahead with step four.

A few years ago we were doing a workshop and there was a woman there who had a phobia of driving on freeways. Rather than treating it as a phobia, which would have been much more elegant, I did a standard reframing to demonstrate that you can work with phobias with reframing, even though it's much faster to use the two-step visual/kinesthetic dissociation pattern. I said "Look, there's a part that's scaring the pants off you when you go near freeways. Go inside and tell this part that we know it's doing something of importance, and ask if it is willing to communicate with you." She got a very strong positive response. So I said "Now go inside and ask the part if it would be willing to tell you what it's trying to do for you by scaring the pants off you when you go near freeways." She went inside, and then said "Well, the part said 'No, I'm not willing to tell you.'"