Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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Another problem is that the field of psychotherapy keeps developing the same things over and over and over again. What Fritz did and what Virginia does has been done before. The concepts that are used in Transactional Analysis (TA)—"redecision" for example—are available in Freud's work. The interesting thing is that in psychotherapy the knowledge doesn't get transferred.

When humans learned to read and write and to communicate to one another somewhat, that knowledge began to speed up the rate of development. If we teach someone electronics, we train them in all the things that have already been discovered so that they can go on and discover new things.

What happens in psychotherapy, however, is that we send people to school instead. And when they come out of school, then they have to learn to do therapy. Not only do they have to learn to do therapy, but there's no way to learn to do therapy. So what we do is we give them clients, and we call what they do "private practice" so they can practice privately.

In linguistics there's a distinction called nominalization. Nominalization is where you take a process and you describe it as if it's an event or a thing. In this way you utterly confuse those around you, and yourself—unless you remember that it is a representation rather than experience. This can have positive uses. If you happen to be a government, you can talk about nominalizations like "national security" and you can get people to worry about those words. Our president just went to Egypt and changed the word "imperative" to the word "desirable" and suddenly we're friends with Egypt again. All he did was change a word. That's word magic.

The word "resistance" is also a nominalization. It's describing a process as a thing without talking about how it works. The earnest, concerned, authentic therapist in the last dialogue would describe the client as being callous and insensitive, so totally out of touch with his feelings that he could not communicate effectively with him. That client was really resistant.

And the client would be out looking for another therapist because that therapist needed glasses. He had absolutely no perspective at all. He couldn't see eye to eye with him at all!

And they would both be right, of course.

Now, is there anyone here who hasn't yet identified the pattern that we're talking about? Because it really was the beginning point for us.

Woman: Ah, in the last dialogue the client was using visual words like "look, see, show, focus, perspective." And the therapist was using feeling words like "grasp, handle, feel, smooth, rough."

Right. And there are also some people who use mostly auditory words: "I hear what you're saying,""That rings a bell," "I can resonate with that," etc. What we noticed is that different people actually think differently, and that these differences correspond to the three principal senses: vision, hearing, and feeling—which we call kinesthetics.

When you make initial contact with a person s/he will probably be thinking in one of these three main representational systems. Internally s/he will either be generating visual images, having feelings, or talking to themselves and hearing sounds. One of the ways you can know this is by listening to the kinds of process words (the predicates: verbs, adverbs and adjectives) that the person uses to describe his/her experience. If you pay attention to that information, you can adjust your own behavior to get the response you want. If you want to get good rapport, you can speak using the same kind of predicates that the other person is using. If you want to alienate the other person, you can deliberately mismatch predicates, as we did in the earlier client-therapist dialogues.

Let me talk a little about how language works. If I look at you and say "Are you comfortable?" you can come up with a response. The presupposition of your being able to respond congruently to my question is that you understand the words that I am speaking. Do you know how you understand the word "comfortable" for example?

Woman: Physically.

You understand it physically. You sense some change in your body which is distinctive. That shift in your feeling state is distinctive from "terrified." That's a different response.

She senses a change in her body as a way of understanding the meaning of the word "comfortable. "Did anybody else notice how they understand it? Some of you will see visual images of yourself in a comfortable position: lying in a hammock, or lying on the grass in the sunshine. And a few of you may even hear the sounds which you associate with comfort: the babbling of a brook, or wind blowing through some pine trees.

In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words—which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history—and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word "comfortable. "That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.

Eskimos have some seventy words for snow. Now, does that mean that people who are raised in a tribe called Eskimos have different sensory apparatus than we do? No. My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness. It's not surprising that the Eskimos have seventy-some words for snow in terms of where they live and the kinds of tasks they have to perform. For them, survival is an issue closely connected with snow, and therefore they make very fine distinctions. Skiers also have many different words for different kinds of snow.

As Aldous Huxley says in his book The Doors of Perception, when you learn a language, you are an inheritor of the wisdom of the people who have gone before you. You are also a victim in this sense: of that infinite set of experiences you could have had, certain ones are given names, labeled with words, and thereby are emphasized and attract your attention. Equally valid—possibly even more dramatic and useful—experiences at the sensory level which are unlabeled, typically don't intrude into your consciousness.

There is always a slippage between primary and secondary representation. There's a difference between experience and the ways of representing experience to yourself. One of the least immediate ways of representing experiences is with words. If I say to you "This particular table right here has a glass of water partially filled sitting on top of it," I have offered you a string of words, arbitrary symbols. We can both agree or disagree about the statement because I'm appealing directly to your sensory experience.

If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those—unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions—is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.

Your experience will overlap with mine to the degree that we share a culture, that we share certain kinds of backgrounds. Words have to be relativized to the world model of the person you are talking to. The word "rapport" for a ghetto person, "rapport" for a white middle-class person, and "rapport" for someone in the top one hundred families in this country, are very, very different phenomena. There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences– which they must—then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.

There's a slippage between the word and the experience, and there's also a slippage between my corresponding experience for a word and your corresponding experience for the same word. I think it's extremely useful for you to behave so that your clients come to have the illusion that you understand what they are saying verbally. I caution you against accepting the illusion for yourself.

Many of you probably have intuitions about your clients when you first meet them. There may be a certain type of client that comes into your office and even before they speak you look up and you know that one's going to be hard, that one's going to be really difficult. It's going to be a rather tedious and long-range project for you to assist that person in getting the choices they want, even though you don't know what those are yet. At other times, before a new client even speaks, you know it will be interesting, it will be a delight. There will be a spark there, there will be a sense of excitement and adventure as you lead this person to some new behavior patterns to get what it is that they came for. How many of you have intuitions like that? Let me have a volunteer. Do you know when you have the intuition that you are having it?

Woman: Umhm.

What is that experience?...

We'll help you. Start by listening to the question. The question I'm asking you is one that I'd like to train you all to ask. The question is "How do you know when you are having an intuition?" (She looks up and to her left.) Yes, that's how you know.

She didn't say anything; that is the interesting thing. She just went through a process non-verbally in responding to the question that I asked her. That process is a replica of the process she actually goes through when she has the intuition, and it was the answer to the question.

If you take nothing else away from this workshop, take away the following: You will always get answers to your questions insofar as you have the sensory apparatus to notice the responses. And rarely will the verbal or conscious part of the response be relevant.

Now let's go back and demonstrate again. How do you know when you are having an intuition?

Woman: Well, let me take it back to the dialogue here earlier… I was trying to put that into some form. And what it was for me was the symbol of—

What kind of a symbol? Is this something you saw, heard, or felt?

I saw it in my head as just—

Yes. You saw it in your head. It was a picture.

Now, all the information that she just offered us verbally is wholly redundant if you were in a position to be able to watch her non-verbal response to the initial question. Everything that she just presented verbally was presented in a much more refined way non-verbally. If you clean up your sensory channels and attend to sensory experience, when you make a statement or ask a human being a question they will always give you the answer non-verbally, whether or not they are able to consciously express what it is.

The information about representational systems comes through in lots and lots of different ways. The easiest way to begin to train your senses is this: people make movements with their eyes which will indicate to you which representational system they are using. When somebody walks into your office, they are planning what they are going to do. They are either visualizing, or they are telling themselves what they are going to say, or they are paying attention to the feelings that they want to describe to you. When they do that, they go inside and they access that information, and they make typical gestures that every one of you knows about unconsciously, and yet through the whole history of psychology no one has ever explicitly described.

For example, I'll name a standard one. You ask somebody a question. They say "Hm, let's see," and they look up and to their left, and tilt their head in the same direction. When people look up, they are making pictures internally.

Do you believe that? It's a lie, you know. Everything we're going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies. Since we have no claim on truth or accuracy, we will be lying to you consistently throughout this seminar. There are only two differences between us and other teachers: One is that we announce at the beginning of our seminars that everything we say will be a lie, and other teachers do not. Most of them believe their lies. They don't realize that they are made up. The other difference is that most of our lies will work out really well if you act as if they are true.

As modelers, we're not interested in whether what we offer you is true or not, whether it's accurate or whether it can be neurologically proven to be accurate, an actual representation of the world. We're only interested in what works.

Let me have three volunteers to come up here….

What I'm going to do next is to ask Fran and Harvey and Susan up here some questions. All I want you out there to do is to clear your sensory apparatus. You could sit there and make images about what something is reminding you of, or you could talk to yourself about such things, or you could have feelings about what's going on.

This is what I am proposing you adopt as a learning strategy for the next few minutes: simply clear all your internal experience. Quiet the internal dialogue, check and make sure that your body is in a comfortable position so that you can leave it there for a while, and don't make internal images. Simply notice with your sensory apparatus what relationship you can discover between the questions I'm going to ask of these three people and the responses they make non-verbally. I would like you to pay particularly close attention to the movements and changes in their eyes. There are lots of other things going on which will be useful for us to talk about at some other time. At this time we simply want you to pay attention to that part of their nonverbal response.

I'll just ask the three of you up here some questions. I'd like you to find the answers to those questions, but don't verbalize the answers. When you are satisfied that you know what the answer is, or you've decided after searching that you don't know what the answer is, stop. You don't have to give me any verbal output; you keep the answers to yourself.

In the United States there's an interesting phenomenon called "traffic lights." Is the red or the green at the top of the traffic light?... When you came here today, how many traffic lights did you pass between where you started your trip and arriving here at the hotel?...What color are your mother's eyes?... How many different colored carpets did you have in the last place you lived? (Fran stares straight ahead in response to each question; Harvey looks up and to his left; Susan looks up and to her right, or sometimes straight ahead.)

Now, have you noticed any movements in their eyes? Do you see systematic shifts there? OK. Store that information for a moment. These are complex human beings, and they are giving more than one response. However, notice what is common about the responses they gave to that set of questions.

I'm going to shift the questions a little bit and I want you to notice if there is a systematic difference in the way they respond.

Think of your favorite piece of music.... What is the letter in the alphabet just before R?... Can you hear your mother's voice? (Fran and Harvey look down and to their left as they access information after each question; Susan looks down and to her right.)

Now, there was a difference between the last set of responses and the previous set.

Now I'm going to shift my questions again.

Do you know the feeling of water swirling around your body when you swim?... What happens in winter when you are in a nice, warm, cozy house, and you walk out into the cold air outside?... (Fran and Harvey look down and to their right while accessing the answer to each question; Susan looks down and to her left.)

Can you make a connection between the classes of questions I was asking and the kind of movements that you were seeing? What did you actually see in your sensory experience when I asked the questions?

Man: I noticed especially that when it seemed like Susan was picturing something, she would look up. And then there were times when she would look straight ahead.

OK. I agree with you. How do you know when she was picturing something? That's an assumption on your part. What were the questions that I was asking that those movements were responses to?

Man: The color of eyes. How many lights—like she was picturing the intersections.

So the questions I was asking demanded visual information by presupposition. And the responses you noticed were a lot of up movements. Did you notice any preference as to side?

Woman: Susan looked to her right. She looked to her right because she is left-handed.

Because she's left-handed Susan looks to her right? She doesn't always look to her right. Watch this.

Susan, do you know what you would look like with long flaming red hair?... Do you know what you would looklike if you had a beard?... Do you know what you look like sitting right here?... (Her eyes move up and to her left.) Which way did her eyes go that time? Distinguish left and right with respect to her. You said that she typically went up to her right in answering the previous visually-oriented questions. What movement did you see with her eyes just now, in response to the last questions? This time her eyes dilated and moved up to her left and back. So she doesn't always look up and to her right. She sometimes looks up and to her left. There's a systematic difference between the kind of questions I asked just now, and the kind of visual questions I was asking before. Can you describe the difference?

Woman: The first questions had to do with experiences she was remembering, and the second group she had not experienced and was trying to visualize.

Excellent. The first set of pictures we call eidetic or remembered images, and the second set we call constructed images. She's never seen herself sitting here in this chair in this room. It's something she has had no direct visual experience of, therefore she has to construct the image in order to see what it is that she would look like.

Most "normally organized" right-handed people will show the opposite of what we've seen with Susan here. Susan is left-handed and her visual accessing cues are reversed left to right. Most people look up and to their left for visual eidetic images and up and to their right for constructed visual images.

However, lots of normally organized right-handers will look up and to their right as they respond to questions about visual memory. Barbara, here in the audience, looked up and to her right to recall something a few moments ago. Do you remember what it was you saw up there?

Barbara: No.

Do you remember one of the houses you lived in as a child?

Barbara: Yes, I do.

She just went up and to her right again. What did you see, Barbara? Name one thing you saw.

Barbara: I saw the living room.

I'm going to predict that the living room that you saw was peculiar in a specific way. I want you to check this and let me know whether my statements are accurate. The living room you saw was suspended in space. It wasn't bounded in the way it would be bounded visually if you were actually inside of that living room. It was an image which you had never seen before because it was a fragment of a set of images you'd seen lots of times in the past. It was not a visual input that you've ever had directly. It was literally extracted, a piece of a picture extracted from some part of your experience and displayed separately. Is that accurate?

Barbara: Yes.

When you ask visual memory questions and a person looks up to their right, you cannot conclude that they are left-handed or that their accessing cues are reversed. All you can conclude is that they looked up and to their right. If you want to explore it further, there are a couple of possibilities. One is what's true of Susan—namely, that she has reversed cerebral organization. The other possibility is that they could be constructing images of the past, as is true of Barbara. If that is so, the images will not have the color, the detail, the contextual markers, or the visual background that an actual eidetic remembered image has. That is an important difference.

When Barbara recalls images, she recalls them outside of context, which is characteristic of constructed images. By the way, she will argue about the past with people a lot—especially with someone who remembers eidetically.

Sally: I didn't see Fran's eyes going up or down, just straight.

OK. Was there any marked difference between the way she was looking straight at me before I asked a question and the way she continued to look straight at me after I'd asked the question? Did you notice any change?

Sally: Yes. She looked more pensive then.

"Pensive." What looks like "pensive" to you and what looks like "pensive" to me may be totally different kinds of experiences. "Pensive" is a complex judgement about experience; it's not in your sensory experience. I'm sure that "pensive" has appropriate meaning for you, and that you can connect; it with your sensory experience easily. So could you describe, so that we could agree or disagree, what you actually saw, as opposed to the judgement that she was being "pensive"?

As we said before, all these questions are being answered before the verbalization. So if you have the opportunity to watch anyone we're communicating with directly, you will always get the answer before they offer it to you verbally. I just asked Sally to describe something, and she demonstrated non-verbally what she saw. She mirrored in her own movements what Fran was doing.

Sally, do you remember the feeling of what you just did?

Sally: My eyes kind of closed a little.

So your eyelids dropped a little bit. Is there anything else that you could detect either from what you felt your eyes doing or from remembering what Fran was doing?...

Have you ever had the experience in a conversation that the other person's eyes are still resting on your face but somehow suddenly you are all by yourself? You are all alone? That's what was going on here. In both of these cases the pupils dilated and the facial muscles relaxed.

If you have trouble seeing pupil dilation, I believe that's not a statement about pupil dilation; it's a statement about your own perceptual programs. And I'm not talking about whether you have 20/20 vision or 20/2000 vision with corrective lenses. Your ability to perceive is something that is learned and you can learn to do it better. Most people act as if their senses are simply passive receptacles into which the world dumps vast amounts of information. There is a vast amount of information, so vast that you can only represent a tiny fraction of it. You learn to actively select in useful ways.

So what we’ll ask you to do in a few minutes is to change your perceptual programs to determine (1) whether the patterns we're talking about exist, and (2) whether they can be useful. We're going to proceed in that step-wise fashion. We're going to rely on whatever rapport we have with you to get you to do an exercise in which you discover for yourself, using your own sensory apparatus, whether in fact these things we're talking about are there. Then we'll talk about how to use them because that's the really important thing. The ultimate question is whether this is worth knowing about.

Let me reassure you that if you have patterns of communication that work for you now in therapy or education or business, those skills will still be available to you when we finish this seminar. I guarantee you that much. We're not going to do anything to take choices away. We would like you to consider a new approach. My guess is that some of you are quite effective and competent communicators therapeutically. You get results and you're pleased with them, and it's a challenge, and you like your job, at least some of the time. But even in the cases where you do very, very well indeed, you get bored from time to time. There's a tendency for you to repeat some set of interventions that you've made in the past which were successful, hoping for success again in the present. I think one of the most dangerous experiences human beings can have is success—especially if you have success early in your career—because you tend to become quite superstitious and repetitious. It's the old five-dollar bill at the end of the maze.

For example, say you once had somebody talk to an empty chair and visualize their mother in that chair and they dramatically changed. You might decide that every therapist in the country ought to do that, when in fact that's only one of a myriad ways of going about accomplishing the same result.

For those of you who are doubtful, and those who have skeptical parts, we would like to ask you—and this is true for all of the lies we are going to tell you—to do the following: accept our lie for a limited period of time, namely during the exercise that follows our description of the pattern we claim exists. In this way you can use your own sensory experience—not the crazy verbalizations we offer you—to decide whether in fact the things we describe can be observed in the behavior of the person you're communicating with.

We're making the claim right now that you've missed something that was totally obvious. We're claiming that you have been speaking to people your whole life and they've been going "Well, the way it looks to me..." (looks up and to his left), "I tell myself..." (looks down and to his left), "I just feel..."(looks down and to his right)—and you haven't consciously noticed that. People have been doing this systematically through a hundred years of modern psychology and communication theory and you've all been the victims of a set of cultural patterns which didn't allow you to notice and respond directly and effectively to those cues.