Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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We're offering you classes of information which are universal for us as a species, but which are unconscious for other people. You need those as tools in your repertoire, because it's the unconscious processes and parts of the person you've got to work with effectively in order to bring about change in an efficient way. The conscious parts of the person have already done the best they can. They are sort of useful to have around to pay the bill, but what you need to work with are the other parts of the person.

Don't get caught by the words "conscious" and "unconscious."They are not real. They are just a way of describing events that is useful in the context called therapeutic change. "Conscious" is defined as whatever you are aware of at a moment in time. "Unconscious" is everything else.

You can make finer distinctions, of course. There are certain kinds of unconscious data which are immediately available. I say "How's your left ear?" Until you heard that sentence, you probably had no consciousness of your left ear. When you hear me say that, you can shift your consciousness to the kinesthetics of your left ear. That is easily accessible from unconscious to conscious. If I say "What color shoes did your kindergarten teacher wear on the first day that you went to school?" that's also represented somewhere. However, getting at it will take a lot more time and energy. So there are degrees of accessibility of unconscious material.

Typically a person arrives in your office and says "Help! I want to make a change here. I'm in pain. I'm in difficulty. I want to be different than I am presently." You can assume that they have already tried to change with all the resources they can get to consciously, and they have failed utterly. Therefore, one of the prerequisites of your being effective is to have patterns of communication which make good rapport with their unconscious resources to assist them in making those changes. To restrict yourself to the conscious resources of the person who comes to you will guarantee a long, tedious, and probably very ineffective process.

By the way, here in this seminar there is no way that you will be able to consciously keep up with the rapid pace of verbalization that will be going on. That is a systematic and deliberate attempt on our part to overload your conscious resources. We understand that learning and change take place at the unconscious level, so that's the part of you we want to talk to anyway. The part of your functioning which is responsible for about ninety-five percent of your learning and skill is called your unconscious mind. It's everything that's outside of your awareness at a point in time. I want to appeal directly to that part of you to make a complete and useful record of anything that happens here, especially the things we don't comment on explicitly, which it believes would be useful for you to understand further and perhaps employ as a skill in your work as a professional communicator– leaving you free at the conscious level to relax and enjoy your experience here.

The point we're at now is "So what?" You have all had some experience identifying accessing cues and representational systems. What do you use it for?

One way I can use this information is to communicate to you at the unconscious level without any awareness on your part. I can use unspecified words like "understand" and "believe" and indicate to you non-verbally in which sensory channel I want you to "understand." For example, I could say to you "I want to make sure you understand (gesturing down and to the audience's left) what we've done so far." My gesture indicates to you unconsciously that I want you to understand auditorily.

You can also use this information to interrupt a person's accessing. All of you make a visual image, and see what happens when I do this. (He waves both arms over his head in a wide arc.) My gesture knocks all your pictures out of the air, right?

Thousands of times in your life you said something or asked a question of someone and they said "Hm, let's see," and they went inside to create a visual image. When they go inside like that, they cant simultaneously pay attention to input from outside. Now let's say that you and I are on opposite sides about some issue at a conference or a corporate meeting. I begin to talk, and I'm forceful in presenting my material and my system in the hope that you will understand it. After I've offered you a certain amount of information, at some point you will begin to access your internal understanding of what's going on. You'll look up and begin to visualize, or look down and begin to talk to yourself or pay attention to how you feel. Whichever internal state you go into, it's important that I pause and give you time to process that information. If my tempo is too rapid and if I continue to talk at that point, I'll just confuse and irritate you.

What often happens is that when I notice you look away, I think that you aren't paying attention, or that you are avoiding me. My typical response in stress during a conference is to increase the tempo and the volume of my speech because I'm going to make you pay attention and drive that point home. You are going to respond as if you are being attacked, because I'm not allowing you an adequate amount of time to know what I'm talking about. You end up quite confused, and you'll never understand the content. If I am facilitating a meeting, I can notice whenever a listener goes inside to access, and I can interrupt or distract the speaker at those times. That gives the listener adequate processing time so that he can make sense of what is going on, and decide whether he agrees or disagrees.

Here's another example: If you can determine what a person's lead and representational systems are, you can package information in a way that is irresistible for him. "Can you see yourself making this new change, and as you see yourself in this process, do you have those feelings of accomplishment and success and say to yourself This is going to be good.?" If your typical sequence happens to be constructed images, followed by feelings, followed by auditory comment, that will be irresistible for you.

I once taught a mathematics course at the University of California to People who were not sophisticated mathematically. I ended up teaching it as a second language. The class was a group of linguistic students who had a good understanding of how language systems work, but did not have an understanding of mathematical systems. However, there is a level of analysis in which they are exactly the same. So rather than teach them how to talk about it and think about it as a mathematician would, I simply utilized what was already available in their world model, the notion of translation, and taught them that these symbols were nothing more than words. And just as there are certain sequences of words which are well-formed sentences, in mathematics there are certain sequences of symbols which are well-formed. I made my entire approach fit their model of the world rather than demanding that they have the flexibility to come to mine. That's one way to go about it.

When you do that, you certainly do them a favor in the sense that you package material so it's quite easy for them to learn it. You also do them a disservice in the sense that you are supporting rigid patterns of learning in them. It's important for you to understand the outcomes of the various choices you make in presenting material. If you want to do them a really profound favor, it would contribute more to their evolution for you to go to their model and then teach them to overlap into another model so that they can have more flexibility in their learning. If you have that kind of sensitivity and capability, you are a very unusual teacher. If you can offer them that experience, then they can have two learning strategies. They can now go to some other teacher who doesn't have that sensitivity of communication, and because they are flexible enough they will be able to adapt to that teaching style.

A lot of school children have problems learning simply because of a mismatch between the primary representational system of the teacher and that of the child. If neither one of them has the flexibility to adjust, no learning occurs. Knowing what you now know about representational systems, you can understand how it is possible for a child to be "educationally handicapped" one year, and to do fine the next year with a different teacher, or how it is possible for a child to do really well in spelling and mathematics, and do badly in literature and history.

You can also translate between representational systems with couples. Let's say that the husband is very kinesthetic. He comes home after working hard all day and he wants to be comfortable. He sits down in the living room, kicks his boots off here, throws a cigarette down there, gets a beer from the icebox, grabs the paper, and sprawls all over his chair, and so on. Then the wife, who's very visual, walks in. She's worked hard all day cleaning house so it will look good, as a way of showing respect for him. She sees his stuff scattered all over the living room and gets upset. So the complaint from him is "She doesn't leave me enough space to be comfortable, man. It's my home. I want to be comfortable." What she says to him at this point is "You're so sloppy. You leave stuff lying all over and it looks cluttered, and when it looks cluttered like that I know that you don't respect me."

One of the things Virginia Satir does is to find the kinesthetic counterpart of her visual complaint, and vice-versa. So you can look at the husband and say:

«You don't understand what she said, do you? You really have no idea what she experiences. Have you ever had the experience that she went to bed first, and she's been sitting there watching TV in bed, eating crackers? And you come in and get into bed and feel all those cracker crumbs all over your skin. Did you know that's what she experiences when she walks in and sees your stuff lying all over the front room?»

So there's no fault, no blame. You don't say "You're bad" or «You're stupid» or anything like that. You say «Here's a counterpart that you can understand in your system.»

He says "Well, when we're in public, and I want to express affection, she's always standing back, always pushing me away." And she says «He's always making scenes in public. He's pawing me all the time!» That is his way, of course, of simply being affectionate, but she needs to see what is going on. He complains that she moves away and he falls flat on his face. He reaches out toward her and nothing happens. So you find a counterpart and say to her:

«Have you ever had the experience of wanting and needing help, really seeing the need for companionship and assistance, and it's like you're standing in the middle of the desert and you look around in all directions and there's no one there? You don't see anybody and you are all alone. Do you know that's what he feels when he comes toward you and reaches out and you back up?»

The point is not whether those are actually accurate examples or not. The point is that you can use the principle of sorting people by representational systems, and then overlapping to find counterparts between them. That establishes something that even the major insurance companies in this country have adopted, "no-fault" policies. Family and couple therapists ought to at least have that, and have a way of demonstrating it.

As I stand back and give her space to see what I'm saying, and I get in close to him and make good solid contact with him, the teaching at the unconscious meta-level is this: I can get responses from her that he would love to get, and I can get responses from him that she would love to get. That's never mentioned; that's all at the unconscious level. So they will model and adopt my kinds of behavior to make their communications more effective. That's another way of making contact and establishing rapport with each individual member and then translating between representational systems, as a way of teaching them how to communicate more effectively.

Reference systems are also important. What if someone comes in and tells you "I don't know what I want." They are saying that they don't have a reference system. We taught a seminar just recently and a woman there said that she had a very difficult time. She could not decide what she wanted from a menu. She had no basis on which to make that decision. She said her whole life was like that; she could never decide things, and she was always dissatisfied. So we literally made up a decision strategy for her. We said OK, when you are faced with a decision, go inside and tell yourself what it is you have to decide, no matter what it is. Let's say you are in a restaurant. Tell yourself "You must choose food." Then go back to sensory experience and find out what your choices are. In other words, read the menu. As you read "hamburger" on the menu, make a picture of a hamburger in front of you, taste what it would taste like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. Then read "fried eggs," see fried eggs in front of you, taste what they would be like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. After she went through the process of trying that a few times, she had a way of making decisions, and started to make them quickly and unconsciously for all kinds of things in her life.

As she went through that process a number of times, it became streamlined in the same way that learning to drive a car does. It drops into unconsciousness. Consciousness seems to be occupied by things we don't know how to do too well. When we know how to do things really well, we do them automatically.

Man: We were wondering about accessing smells. We played with that a little bit and discovered that they went visual to see the object and then to the smell.

Not necessarily. You used the sequence you described. You said "What we discovered they do is..." and then you described yourself. That is a common pattern in modern psychotherapy, as far as I can tell. Thomas Szasz said "All psychology is either biography or autobiography." Most people are doing therapy with themselves instead of other people. To respond more specifically to your statement, people can access olfactory experience in many different ways. One of the things you can notice, however, is that when people access smells, they will flare their nostrils. That's a direct sensory signal, just as the eye movements we've been talking about are direct sensory signals, to let you know what experience the person is having. They may or may not precede that with a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory access, but you can see the nostril flare.

Turn to somebody close by; one of you decide to be A and the other to be B. I'm going to ask A to watch B respond to the question I'm going to ask. A, clear your sensory channels and watch your partner's nose. B, when was the last time you took a good whiff of ammonia?... Now is there any doubt about that? It's an involuntary response. Usually the person will breathe in at the moment the nostrils flare.

Let me ask you all to do something else which is along these lines to give you another demonstration. As a child, you had lots of experiences. Maybe you had a grandmother who lived in a separate house that had special smells. Maybe it was some special food, or a blankie, or a little stuffed toy animal, or something else special to you. Pick some object from your childhood and either feel it, talk to yourself about it, or see it in your hands. When you have it in any of those systems, breathe in strongly and let that take you whereever it takes you. Try that for a minute. That's one way of accessing smells.

There are as many ways to use this information as your ingenuity permits. If you use visual guided fantasy with your clients, there are some clients you use it with automatically and it works fine. Other people you wouldn't even try it with. What's the criterion you use to decide that, do you know? If they can visualize easily, you use visual guided fantasy, right? We're suggesting that you reverse that. Because for people who do not normally visualize in consciousness, visual guided fantasy will be a mind-blowing, profound change experience. For those who visualize all the time, it will be far less useful. The only thing you need to do in order to make it work for people who don't normally visualize is to join their system wherever they are—wherever their consciousness is—establish rapport and then slowly overlap to lead them into the system you want to engage them in fantasy with. It will be extremely powerful, much more powerful than with someone who already visualizes.

If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all. Let me ask you to do the following: Roll your shoulders forward and close your eyes and feel as though something or someone is pushing down on your shoulders. And then take those feelings, intensify them, and let them come up into a picture. Who or what do you find there? As you get the picture, I want you to notice some dimension of the picture that is connected with some sound that would be occurring if that were actually happening. And now hear the sound.

That's the principle of overlap. You can always go to the state of consciousness a person indicates by their predicates, and from there you can overlap into any other dimension of experience and train a person to do any of these things.

Richard: I know. I did it myself. Four years ago I couldn't see an image; in fact I didn't know that people did. I thought people were kidding when they did visual guided fantasies. I had no idea that they were actually seeing images. And when I figured out what was going on, I realized that there were these differences between people. Then I began trying to make images. Of course, the way I first tried to make images was by talking to myself and having feelings, which is the way people who have trouble making images usually go about it. They say to themselves "Gee, I should look at this even harder!" and then feel frustrated. Of course, the more I talked to myself and the more I had feelings, the less I could see images. I had to learn to do it by overlap: by taking a feeling or a sound and then adding the visual dimension.

You can use overlap to train a client to be able to do all systems, which I think is a benefit for any human to be able to do. You yourself can notice which of the representational systems you use with refinement and sophistication, and which you have difficulty with. Then you can use overlap as a way of training yourself to be as sophisticated in any system as you are in your most advanced.

Let's say you have good kinesthetics but you can't visualize. You can feel yourself reach out with your hand and feel the bark of some tree. You explore tactually until you have a really good kinesthetic hallucination. You can visualize your hand, and then you look past your hand inside your mind's eye and see what the tree looks like, based on the feelings—as you feel the roughness, the texture, the temperature of the bark. If you visualize easily and you want to develop auditory, you can see the visual image of a car whirling around a corner and then hear the squeal of the tires.

Man: Would a congenitally blind therapist be at a disadvantage?

Visual accessing cues are only one way to get this information. There are other things going on equally as interesting, that would give you the same information and other information as well. For instance, voice tone is higher for visual access and lower for kinesthetic. Tempo speeds up for visual and slows down for kinesthetic. Breathing is higher in the chest for visual and lower in the belly for kinesthetic. There are lots and lots of cues. What we are doing is giving one little piece at a time. Your consciousness is limited to seven—plus or minus two—chunks of information. What we are doing is saying "Look, you normally pay attention to other dimensions of experience. Here's another class of experience we'd like you to attend to, and notice how you can use it in a very powerful way."

I can get the same information by voice tone, or tempo changes, or by watching a person's breathing, or the change in skin color on the back of their hand. Someone who is blind can get the same classes of information in other ways. Eye movement is the easiest way that we've discovered that people can learn to get access to this class of information called "representational system." After they have that, we can easily teach them other dimensions.

You might think that a blind therapist would be at a disadvantage. However, blindness is a matter of degree in all of us. The non-sighted Person who has no chance of seeing has an advantage over most other communicators: he knows he is blind, and has to develop his other senses to compensate. For example, a few weeks ago in a seminar there was a man who is totally blind. A year ago, I had taught him how to be able to detect representational systems through other means. Not only was he able to do it, but he was able to do it every bit as well as every sighted person in that room. Most of the people I meet are handicapped in terms of their sensory ability. There is a tremendous amount of experience that goes right by them because they are operating out of something which to me is much more intense than just «preconceived notions.» They are operating out of their own internal world, and trying to find out what matches it.

That's a good formula for being disappointed, by the way. One of the best ways to have lots of disappointment in your life is to construct an image of how you would like things to be, and then try to make everything that way. You will feel disappointed as long as the world doesn't match your picture. That is one of the best ways I know of to keep yourself in a constant state of disappointment, because you are never going to get the world to match your picture.

There is another vast source of process information in observing the motor programs that are accessed when a person thinks about an activity. For example, Ann, would you sit in a "normal" position with your legs uncrossed? Thank you. Now let me ask you a preparatory question. Do you drive a car? (Yes.) Is there a single one you drive typically? (Yes.) OK, now, this is a question I don't want you to answer out loud, but just go ahead and access the answer internally. Is it a stick shift or is it an automatic shift? ... Did anyone else get the answer? Would you like to guess about the answer and check it out?

Man: Stick shift.

OK. How do you know that?

Man: She shifted. I saw her move her right hand.

Can you tell by the shift whether it was a manual or automatic?

Man: It's manual.

Now, is that true, Ann? (No.) No, it's an automatic. Now, did anybody else have that answer?

Woman: Yeah, because I figured she was little and she wouldn't want to drive a stick shift.

OK. Did anybody use sensory experience to get the answer?... Well, let me answer the question directly. If you had been watching Ann's feet, you would have gotten the answer to that question. One of the differences in the motor program between an automatic and a stick shift is whether you have a clutch to work. If you had been watching, you could have seen muscle tension in her right leg and not in her left, which would have given you the answer.

If you ask a person a question that involves a motor program, you can observe the parts of their body they will have to use in order to access the information. Information doesn't come out of a vacuum in human beings. In order for a human being to get information to answer a question, they have got to access some representation of it. And although they may only bring one of those systems into consciousness, they are going to access all systems unconsciously to gather the information.

Ann: We have both kinds of car and I drive both. You said "Which one do you drive usually?" If you had asked me "Do you have a different car?" and then asked me about that specific car, would my motor programs have been different? If I was thinking of driving the other car, would my legs have moved differently?

Yes. You use your left foot only if there is a clutch. Consider how you answer the following question. You all have front doors to the homes or apartments that you live in, whether they are long-term homes or apartments. As you walk into your apartment or home, does the first door open to the right or the left? Now, how do you decide that question? ... All the hands are moving.

Let me ask you another question. When you come home in the evening and your house is locked, which hand do you use to actually open the door? ... Watch the hands.

People have always tried to turn body language into a content vocabulary, as if holding your head back meant that you were reserved and crossing your legs meant that you were closed. But body language doesn't work like words work; it works differently. Eye movements and body movements will give you information about process.

The proper domain, in our opinion, of professional communicators is process. If you indulge in content, you are going to unavoidably impose part of your belief and value system on the people you communicate with.

The kinds of problems that people have, usually have nothing to do with content; they have to do with the structure, the form of how they organize their experience. Once you begin to understand that, therapy becomes a lot easier. You don't have to listen to the content; you only have to find out how the process works, which is really much simpler.

There's an important pattern that we'd like to talk about next. If I'm your client and you ask me "Well, how did it go this week?" and I respond to you by going (sighs heavily, head down, low tonality) "Ah, everything worked just great this week. (sighing, shaking head "no," slight sneer) No problems." Now, the laughter indicates that there are a number of people here who recognize that there is some unusual communication being offered. The name that we have adopted for that is incongruity. What I offer you in my voice tone, my body movements, and my head movements does not match my words. Now, what responses do you have to that as professional communicators? What choices do you have to respond to that situation?

Woman: If I knew you really well, I'd say "I don't believe you. "Or I might say "Well, you don't look very happy because things are going well."

So you would meta-comment on the discrepancy that you've been able to perceive, and confront the person with it. Does anybody else have other ways of responding?

Man: I would try to help you express both messages, maybe exaggerate the non-verbal components....

OK, the gestalt technique: amplify the non-verbal message until it accesses the appropriate experience, right? OK, that's another choice. Does everybody understand the choices we're talking about so far? Our job is choice. The notion of incongruity is a choice point which is going to be repetitive in your experience if you are in the business of communication. It makes sense for you to have a varied repertoire, a range of possible responses, and to understand—I hope at the unconscious level rather than consciously—what the outcome will be when you select one of these maneuvers or techniques.

Meta-commenting is one choice, and I think it's a good choice. However, it is only one choice. When I watch and listen to therapists communicate, I often notice that that's the only choice that a lot of them have when presented with incongruity—that the people who are in the business of choice don't have any. You want to have a lot of choices in responding to incongruity. You want to have the choice of exaggerating the non-verbal, or of calling them a liar and attacking them, or of ignoring it, or of simply mirroring back and saying incongruently "I'm so glad!" (shaking head and sneering)

Or you can "short-circuit" them by reversing the verbal and nonverbal messages: "That's too bad" (smiling and nodding head). The response you get to that is fascinating, because most people have no idea what they verbalized." Either they will enter a confusion state, or they will begin to explicitly verbalize the message that was previously non-verbal. It's almost as if they take all the conscious material and make it unconscious and vice-versa.

Or you might choose to respond with an appropriate metaphor: "That reminds me of a story my grandfather O'Mara told me once. He was Irish himself, but he told about this Baltic country that he had spent some time in as a youth when he was traveling in Europe—poor, destitute, but nevertheless out having experience. And the duke that ruled this little principality—this was before the Second World War, when there were a lot of small countries—had a problem. The Minister of the Interior did not have good communication with the Minister of the Exterior. And so some of the things that the Minister of the Exterior could see needed to be attended to in order for a judicious trade arrangement to be made with other entities—other neighboring, surrounding people—came into conflict somehow with some of the needs that the Minister of the Interior felt..."

Now how do people learn to be incongruent? Think of a young child who comes home and hands a piece of homework to his parents. The parents look at the homework and the father says (scowling face and shaking head "no," with harsh tonality) "Oh, I'm so glad you brought that home, son!" What does the kid do? Does he lean forward and meta-comment? "Gee, Dad! I hear you say you're glad, but I notice..." Not if you're a kid. One thing that children do is to become hyperactive. One hemisphere is registering the visual input and the tonal input, and the other hemisphere is registering the words and their digital meaning, and they don't fit. They don't fit maximally where the two hemispheres overlap maximally in kinesthetic representation. If you ever watch a hyperactive kid, the trigger for hyperactivity will be incongruity, and it will begin here at the midline of the torso, and then diffuse out to all kinds of other behavior.