Текст книги "Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming"

Автор книги: Richard Bandler

Соавторы: John Grinder
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Experience vs. Hallucination Exercise:

Part I

We want you to sit in groups of three. One of you we'll call A, one B, and one C. A, your job is detection. B, your job is to practice experiencing different kinds of experience. C is simply an observer, and can also help A and B keep track of what to do next. B, you select, without mentioning anything verbally, three different experiences that you had which were very intense experiences. They can be from any part of your life, but make them distinctive, one from the other; don't take three similar occasions. You can just identify them by dropping inside and finding representative examples, and simply number them one, two, and three.

Then hold hands with A and announce "one." Then go internal, drop out of sensory experience, go back to that time and place, and have that experience again without any overt verbalization. Take a minute or two or three to relive that experience fully…. Then announce "two" and relive it…. Then announce "three" and relive that....

Now there is one incredibly important factor. For those of you who are very visual, it will be imperative that you do not see yourself there, but see what you saw when you were there.

For example, close your eyes and see yourself from above or the side somewhere, riding on a roller coaster, just about to go down that first big drop.... Now step into that image of yourself inside the roller coaster and see what you would see if you were actually there riding it. Those are very different experiences. The kinesthetics come in profoundly once you break the dissociation of seeing yourself over there, and put your perceptual position inside your body on the roller coaster.

As you go back and find these three experiences and re-experience them, it is important that you do not do it dissociated. You may begin by seeing yourself; then get inside the picture. When you are inside the picture and you feel the experience in your body again as you did before, you begin to squeeze A's hand, thereby cuing them tactually that you are now having that experience.

A, your job is simply to observe the changes in B, as s/he goes through the three experiences. I want you to watch skin color changes, size of lower lip, breathing, posture, muscle tonus, etc. There will be many profound changes in B that you can see visually as B goes through this experience.

Part 2

B will do exactly the same thing as in Part 1: s/he will announce «one» and re-experience it, then «two» and «three.»But this time A will not only watch the changes but describe them out loud. C's job is to make sure that all the descriptions that A offers are sensory-based descriptions: «The corners of your mouth are rising. Your skin color is deepening. Your breathing is high and shallow and increasing in rate. There's more tension in your right cheek than your left.» Those are descriptions that allow C—who is watching as well as listening to your description—to verify, or not, what in fact you are claiming. If A says «You're looking happy; now you're looking worried,» those are not sensory-based descriptions. «Happy» and «worried» are judgements. C's job is to make sure that A's descriptions are sensory-based, and to challenge any utterance that is not sensory-based.

Part 3

This time B goes into one of the three experiences without identifying it by number. You just pick one of the three and go into it. A sits there, again observing B, saying nothing until s/he finishes that experience. And then A, you tell B which experience it was: «one,» «two,» or «three.» B continues to run through those three experiences in any order other than the original order, until A is capable of correctly naming which experience you are having. If A can't do it the first time through, simply start over again. Don't tell them which one was which, or that what they thought was number one was really number three; just tell them to back up and start over again. It's a way of training your senses to be acute.

Part 4

This time B goes into any one of the three experiences again and A hallucinates and guesses, as specifically as s/he can, what the content of that experience is. And believe me, you can get very specific and very accurate.

In parts 1, 2, and 3 we ask you to stay in sensory experience. In part 4 we're asking you to hallucinate. This is to make a clean distinction between sensory-based experience and hallucination. Hallucination can be a very powerful, positive thing. Anybody who has ever done a workshop with Virginia Satir knows that she uses hallucination in very powerful and creative ways, for instance in her family sculpting. At some point after she has gathered information she'll pause and sort through all the visual images that she has, preparatory to sculpting or making a family stress ballet. She will change the images around until it she puts them on the family by sculpting them. That's a case where hallucination is an integral part of a very creative and effective process. Hallucination isn't good or bad; it's just another choice. But it's important to know what you are doing. OK. Go ahead.

* * * * *

All right. Are there any comments or questions about this last exercise we did? Some of you surprised yourselves by the guesses you made, right? And others of you scored zero.

Whether you did well or not is really irrelevant. Either way, you got important information about what you are able to perceive, and whether or not what you hallucinate has any relationship to what you perceive.

You can take the training we're giving you and you can notice as you are communicating with a client or a loved one that the responses that you are getting are not the ones that you want. If you take that as an indication that what you are doing is not working and change your behavior, something else will happen. If you leave your behavior the same, you will get more of what you are already getting. Now, that sounds utterly simple. But if you can put that into practice, you will have gotten more out of this seminar than people ever get. For some reason, that seems to be the hardest thing in the world to put into practice. The meaning of your communication is the response that you get. If you can notice that you are not getting what you want, change what you're doing. But in order to notice that, you have to clearly distinguish between what you are getting from the outside, and how you are interpreting that material in a complex manner at the unconscious level, contributing to it by your own internal state.

The exercise you just did was essentially limited to one sensory channel. It was a way of assisting you in going through an exercise in which you clean up your visual input channel. You also get some kinesthetic information through holding hands. You can do it auditorily as well, and also kinesthetically. You can generalize that same exercise to the other two systems. If you are going to do it auditorily, A would close his eyes. B would then describe the experience without words, just using sounds. The tonal and tempo patterns will be distinctive and since A's eyes will be closed, all he has is the auditory input.

Or you could just think about the experience and talk about cooking lunch. That's the way couples often do it with one another. He makes a picture of his wife having an affair and then they talk about going camping, right? And he goes (angrily) "Yeah, I'd really like to go with you. I think we'd have a good time. I'm going to bring the ax so I can chop up some firewood."

Another thing couples do is fight in quotes. Do you know about quotes? Quotes is a wonderful pattern. If any of you have clients who work at jobs and have resentment for their bosses or fellow employees, but who can't really express it because it's inappropriate, or they might get fired or something, teach them the pattern of quotes in language. It's marvelous because they can walk up to their employer and say "I was just out on the street and this man walked up to me and said 'You're a stupid jerk.' And I didn't know what to say to him. What would you do if somebody walked up to you and said' You’re a jerk.? Just right out on the street, you know."

People have almost no consciousness of any meta-levels if you distract them with content. Once at a conference I talked to a large group of psychologists who were pretty stuffy and asked a lot of dumb questions. I told them about quotes as a pattern. Then I said for example—I even told them what I was, doing—Milton Erickson once told me a story about a time he stayed at a turkey farm, and the turkeys made a lot of noise and kept him awake at night. He didn't know what to do. So finally one night he walked outside—and I faced all those psychologists out there—and he realized he was surrounded by turkeys, hundreds of turkeys everywhere. Turkeys here, and turkeys there, and turkeys all over the place. And he looked at them and he said "You turkeys!"

There were a couple of people there who knew what I was doing and they absolutely cracked up. I stood on the stage in front of these people who were paying me a fortune and I went" You turkeys!" They didn't know what I was doing. They all sat there nodding seriously. If you are congruent, they will never know. If you feed people interesting content, you can experiment with any pattern. As soon as I said "I'm going to tell you a story about Milton" everybody went "content time" and that was all it took.

In the middle of telling the story, I even turned around and laughed at the top of my lungs. And then I turned back and finished it. They just thought it was a weird behavior, because I laugh a lot. Or I could have made the laughing part of the story. "Milton turned around and laughed." At the end of the day all these people came up to me and said "And I want to tell you how important this has been to me" and I said "Thank you. Did you hear the story about Milton? I don't want you to think that it's about your

You can try any new behavior in quotes and it won't seem to be you doing it. Quotes gives you a lot of freedom to experiement with gaining flexibility, because it means that you can do anything. I can go into a restaurant and walk up to a waitress and say "I just went in the bathroom and this guy walked up to me and said 'Blink,'" and find out what happens. She'll blink, and I'll go "Isn't that weird?" and walk away. It wasn't me, so I didn't have to worry about it. It's a big piece of personal freedom; you are no longer responsible for your own behavior because it's "someone else's behavior."

When I was going to psychiatric meetings and stuff, I would walk up to someone and say "I was just in a conference with Dr. X, and he did this thing I've never seen anyone do before. He walked up to this person, lifted up his hand like this, and said 'Look at that hand.'" Then I'd do a fifteen or twenty minute trance induction and put the person into a trance. Then I'd slap him in the stomach so he came out, and say "Isn't that a weird thing for him to do?" He would go "Yeah, that's a really weird thing for him to do. He shouldn't do things like that." And I'd go "I would never do anything like that. Would you?" And he'd say «No!»

Quotes also works great if you're doing therapy with a family that fights and argues and won't listen, because you can lean forward and you can say "I'm so glad you're such a responsive family, because with the last family that was here I had to look at each and every person and say 'Shut your mouth.' That's what I had to tell them. "It reminds me of a group we did in San Diego; there were about a hundred and fifty people and we told them "The next thing that we'd like to tell you is how couples often fight in quotes."

"Well, if you were to tell me that, you know what I would say to you?"

"Well, if you told me to do that, I'd just tell you to go to hell!"

"Well, listen, if you ever said that to me I'd reach right over and..." The trouble is they usually lose quotes, and actually get into a fight.

Most of you have heard quotes in family therapy. You ask "How did it go?" If they stumble on reporting an argument, they'll start in quotes and then they'll be into it again! All their non-verbal analogues will support it. Quotes is a dissociative pattern, and when the dissociation collapses, the quotes go.

Grief is usually a similar pattern. What's going on in the grief-stricken person is this: they make a constructed visual image of being with the lost person. They are seeing themselves with the loved one who is now dead or gone, unavailable somehow. Their response called "grief or "sense of loss" is a complex response to being dissociated from those memories. They see their loved one and themselves having a good time, and they feel empty because they are not there in the picture. If they were to step inside the very same picture that stimulates the grief response, they would recover the positive kinesthetic feelings of the good experiences they shared with that person they cared very much about. That would then serve as a resource for them going on and constructing something new for themselves in their lives, instead of a trigger for a grief response.

Guilt's a little different. There are a couple of ways to feel guilty. One of the best ways to feel guilty is to make a picture of the response on someone's face when you did something that they didn't like. In this case you are making a visual eidetic picture. You can feel guilty about anything that way. However, if you step outside the picture, in other words reverse the procedure that we use with grief, what happens is that you will no longer feel guilty, because then you literally get a new perspective.

It sounds too easy, doesn't it? It is too easy. Ninety-nine out of a hundred depressed clients that I have seen have exactly the same pattern. They will be visualizing and/or talking to themselves about some experience that is depressing to them. But all they will have in awareness are the kinesthetic feelings. And they will use words which are appropriate: "weighed down, burdened, heavy, crushing." However, if you ask them any questions about their feelings, they will give you an elegant, non-verbal description of how they create their depression. "How do you know you're depressed? Have you felt this way a long time? What started this syndrome?" The exact questions are wholly irrelevant; they are just ways of accessing that process.

Depressed people usually make a series of visual images, usually constructed and outside of awareness. Usually they have no idea that they are making any images. Some of you had that experience with your partners today. You told them that they were accessing in a system, and they went "Oh, I don't know about that" and they didn't, because that wasn't in their awareness. Depressed people are running profoundly effective hypnotic inductions by seeing images and talking about them outside of awareness and responding in consciousness with only the feelings. They are going to be bewildered about where their feelings come from, since where they come from is totally outside of their awareness.

Many, many people who have weight problems are doing the same thing. They will have a hypnotic voice that goes "Don't eat that cake in the refrigerator." "Don't think about all the candy in the living room." "Don't feel hungry." Most people have no idea that commands like that are actually commands to do the behavior. In order to understand the sentence "Don't think of blue" you have to access the meaning of the words and think of blue.

If a child is in a dangerous situation and you say "Don't fall down," in order for him to understand what you have said, he has to access some representation of "falling down." That internal representation, especially if it is kinesthetic, will usually result in the behavior that the parent is trying to prevent. However, if you give positive instructions like "Be careful; pay attention to your balance and move slowly," then the child will access representations that will help him cope with the situation.

Man: Can you say more about guilt?

Guilt is like everything else. It's just a word, and the question is "What experience does the word refer to?" For years now people have walked into psychiatric offices of all kinds and said "I have guilt." Therapists have heard the word "guilt" and said "Yeah, I know what you mean." If that same person had walked in and said "I have some X," those therapists wouldn't have made the jump to thinking that they understood what the person meant.

The point we are trying to make about guilt and depression and jealousy and all those other words is that the important thing is to find out how it works—find out what the process is. How does someone know when it's time to be guilty as opposed to when it's not time to be guilty? And we said that an example—and this is ONLY ONE example—of how to feel guilty is to make eidetic images of people looking disappointed, and then feel bad about it. There are other ways you can feel guilty. You can make constructed images or you can talk yourself into feeling guilty. There are lots and lots of ways to go about it. It's important with each individual that you find out how they do it, if you want to change that process to something else. If the way they make themselves feel guilty is with eidetic images, you can have them change the eidetic image into a constructed image. If they do it with constructed images, you can have them change it into an eidetic one. If they talk to themselves, you can have them sing to themselves.

If you have the sensory refinements to be able to discover the specific steps in the process that the person goes through to create any response which they don't find useful and which they want to change, it gives you multiple points of intervention. The intervention can be as simple as substituting one system for another, because that will break up the pattern.

One woman had a phobia of heights. Our office was on the third story, which was kind of convenient. So I asked her to go over and look out the window and describe to me what happened. The first time she went over, she just choked. I told her that wasn't an adequate description. I had to know how she got to the point of choking and being very upset. By asking a lot of questions, I discovered that what happened is that she would make a constructed picture of herself falling out, have the feeling of falling, and then feel nauseous. She did that very quickly, and the picture was outside of consciousness.

So I asked her to walk over to the window while she sang the National Anthem inside her head. Now that sounds kind of silly, except that she walked over to the window and she didn't have the phobic response! None whatsoever. She'd had the phobia for years and years and years.

A man who was a Cree Indian medicine man, a shaman, came to a workshop and we were discussing different mechanisms that worked cross-culturally as far as inducing change in a rapid and effective way. If a person has a headache, an old semi-gestalt thing to do is to sit them in a chair, have them look at an empty chair, have them intensify the feeling of the pain, and have the intensified pain they are feeling develop into a cloud of smoke in the other chair. Slowly the smoke forms itself into an image of someone they have unfinished business with, and then you do whatever you do. And it works; the headache goes away,

The counterpart for this shaman was that he always carries a blank piece of paper. Whenever anybody comes to him and says "I have a headache, will you assist me?" he says "Yes, of course, but before I begin I want you to spend five minutes studying this piece of paper in absolute detail, because it contains something of great interest for you." The thing in common about those two interventions is that they both involve switching representational systems. You break up the process by which the person is having the experience they don't want to have, by having their attention riveted in some other representational system than the one in which they are presently receiving messages of pain. The result is absolutely identical in both cases. By studying the blank piece of paper intently, or by intensifying the feeling and making it change into a picture in the chair, you are doing the same thing. You are switching representational systems, and that is a really profound intervention for any presenting problem. Anything that changes the pattern or sequence of events a person goes through internally—in responding to either internal or external stimuli—will make the response that they are stuck in no longer possible.

We had a man in Marin, California, and every time he saw a snake– no matter how far away it was, no matter where he was in respect to it or who was around it—his pupils would immediately dilate. You had to be close enough to see it. He would make an image of a snake flying through the air. This was outside of awareness until we uncovered it. When he was six years old somebody threw a snake at him unexpectedly and it scared him badly. He then responded kinesthetically as a six-year-old to the internal image of a snake flying through the air toward him. One thing we could have done was to simply change the content of that picture. We could have had him make a picture of someone throwing kisses. What we actually did was simply switch the order in which the systems occurred. We had him have the kinesthetic response first and then make the picture internally. That made it impossible for him to be phobic.

You can treat every limitation that is presented to you as a unique accomplishment by a human being, and discover what the steps are. Once you understand what the steps are, you can reverse the order in which the steps occur, you can change the content, you can insert some new piece or delete a step. There are all kinds of interesting things you can do. If you believe that the important aspect of change is "understanding the roots of the problem and the deep hidden inner meaning" and that you really have to deal with the content as an issue, then probably it will take you years to change people.

If you change the form, you change the outcome at least as well as if you work with content. The tools that it takes to change form are easier to work with. It's a lot easier to change form, and the change is more pervasive.

Man: What are some questions that you ask to elicit the steps in the process that people go through?

Ask them to have the experience. Ask them about the last time they had the experience, or what would happen if they were to have it right here, or if they remember the last time it happened. Any of those questions will elicit the same unconscious responses we've been showing you here. Whenever I ask a question or make a statement about something to someone here in the group, if you are alert the response will already be made non-verbally much earlier and more completely than the person will consciously be able to verbalize the answer explicitly.

"How do you know when you are being phobic, as opposed to when you are not being phobic?" "How do you know?" questions usually will take you to just about everything. People have a tendency to demonstrate it, rather than bring it into consciousness.

Our book The Structure of Magic, I is devoted to what we call the "meta-model." It's a verbal model, a way of listening to the form of verbalization as opposed to content. One of the distinctions is called «unspecified verb.» If I'm your client and I say to you «My father scares me,» do you have an understanding of what I'm talking about? No, of course not. «My father X's me» would be as meaningful. Because for one person «Father scares me» may mean that his father put a loaded .38 to his head. And for someone else it may simply mean that his father walked through the living room and didn't say anything! So the sentence «My father scares me» has very little content. It simply describes that there is some process—at this point unspecified. The pattern, of course, is to be able to listen to language and know when a person has adequately specified some experience with a verbal description.

One of the things we teach with the meta-model is that when you get a sentence like "My father scares me" to ask for a specification of the process that the person is referring to called "scare." "How specifically does your father scare you?". "How specifically do you know you are depressed, or guilty, or phobic?" "Know" is another word like scare. It doesn't specify the process. So if I say to you "Well, I think that I have a problem" that doesn't tell you anything about the process. If you say "How do you think it?" initially people will go «What?!»But after they get over the initial shock of being asked such a peculiar question, they will begin to demonstrate the process to you, at first non-verbally. They'll go «Well, I just think it.» (eyes and head moving up and to his left) Or they'll go «Ah, I don't know. I just, you know, it's just a thought I have.» (eyes and head moving down and to his left) The combination of the unspecified verbs that the person is using and the quite elegant non-verbal specification by eye movements and body shifts will give you the answer to the question, whether they ever become conscious of it or not.

If you keep asking questions, usually people will become conscious of their process and explain it to you. Usually people do it with disdain, because they assume that everybody thinks the same way they do, with the same kind of processes. One well-known therapist told us seriously one day "Every intelligent, adult human being always thinks in pictures." Now, that's a statement about him. That's the way he organizes a great deal of his conscious activity. It has very little to do with about half the population we have encountered in this country.

Quite often at seminars like this, people ask questions in the following way. They go "What do you do with someone who's depressed?" (pointing at himself) The word "someone" isn't specified, verbally. We say it's a word with no referential index. It doesn't refer to something specific in the world of experience. However, the nonverbal communication was very specific in that case, and people do the same thing with other non-verbal processes. If you are able to identify things like accessing cues and other non-verbal cues, you can be pretty clear about how something works. People will come in and say "Well, I have a problem" and their non-verbal behavior has already given you the sequence that produces it.

So a "How specifically?" question or a "How do you know?" question will usually give you a complete non-verbal specification of the process that the person goes through. Magic I has a very complete specification of how to ask appropriate questions using the meta-model.

One of our students taught the meta-model to a hospital nursing staff. So if a patient said "I'm sure I'm going to get worse" or "I can't get up yet," the nurse would ask "How do you know that?" The nurse would then follow that up with other meta-model questions, to help the patient realize the limitations of his world model. The result was that the average hospital stay was reduced from 14 days to 12.2 days.

The whole idea of the meta-model is to give you systematic control over language. When we first took the time to teach it to our students, the result was the following: first there was a period where they went around and meta-modeled each other for a week. Then they began to hear what they said on the outside. They would sometimes stop in midsentence because they would begin to hear themselves. That's something else the meta-model does: it teaches you how to listen not only to other people but to yourself. The next thing that happened is that they turned inside and began to meta-model their own internal dialogue. That changed their internal language from being something that terrorized them to being something that was useful.

The meta-model is really simplistic, but it's still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those that don't, are people who have control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do. You can be bright and witty and sharp and make the most complex metaphor in the world, but if you can't gather information well, both internally and externally, you won't know what to do. The meta-model questions are the ones that really give you the appropriate information immediately. It's a great tool for that, both on the outside and the inside. It will turn your internal dialogue into something useful.

When you use language with people, they assume that all the stuff they are accessing on the inside is the same as what you said. There's so much going on inside that they have no consciousness of the external form of your communication. You can utter sentences of syntax which have no meaning and people will respond to you as if what you said is completely meaningful. I'm surprised that anyone ever noticed that some schizophrenics speak "word salad." I have gone into places and spoken word salad and people have responded to me as if I had uttered perfect English. And of course you can embed crazy commands in word salad.

Once we were having a party at our house and we wanted to buy some champagne. We live in an area where there are no stores, so we went into a restaurant and said "Look, we want to buy a couple of bottles of champagne to take home." And the guy said "Oh, we can't do that. It's against the law." We said "Well, we're having a party and we come here and eat a lot and isn't there anything you can do something" He stopped for a moment, and he said "Wait a second. I think I can do something." So he took the bottles and gave them to himself, and then he went outside behind the restaurant and gave them to us and we tipped him. Our behavior was totally bizarre, but he had to respond, because the only thing that was evident in his consciousness was this odd sequence. It's really important to understand that most people are very chaotically organized on the inside.