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A partial, structured, regression of the type Tammy and I were working with here allows you the freedom to go back and connect new kinds of resources with the auditory and visual stimuli which in the past have elicited old, uncomfortable, kinesthetic responses. Its impossible for her to go through this experience and still maintain that old response because shes done onetrial learning again. Now she doesnt have to be phobic. I havent taken that choice away. There may be some context in which being phobic in response to something may be useful. Im not playing God. I presuppose that people make the best choice in context. My job is to make sure that resources which have been dissociated from a certain context become available in that context. I leave it to the unique human being, with all the various needs they have that I dont even know anything about, to make an adequate selection somewhere along the continuum between resourcefulness and terror. And she will. Those resources have been dissociated in the past, but they are now integrated and they are now both responses to the same stimuli. Man You are making certain assumptions about integration and a lot of things that have happened. Right. Is there any particular assumption youd like to challenge Man Um, all of them. Good. Pick one. Man That she feels any different now than she did before. OK. Let me give you a way of testing. He turns to Tammy. Let me ask you a question. He touches the phobia anchor. She turns to him and smiles Umhm Thats fine you answered it. Does that make sense to you, sir Do you remember that the last time I touched her, there she had a phobic response I had anchored the phobic reaction there, and then I demonstrated that I had control of her phobia. When I reached over and touched her arm, she became phobic. Now I reach over and touch her and what does she do She looks at me as if to say What do you want That is a far more elegant demonstration than any verbal feedback I could get. Im not saying dont use verbal conscious feedback, but understand that when you ask for that, you are tapping into the least informative part of the person their conscious mind. Let me give you another way of testing. Tammy, Id like you to try something for me. This is just a scientific experiment. Are there any bridges here in town I would like you to close your eyes and fantasize driving across a bridge, and I want you to do it in a special way. I want you to do it from the point of view of being in a car—not watching yourself—so that you see what you would see if you were actually driving across the bridge. What happens when you do that ... Tammy She raises her eyebrows, looks slightly puzzled. I drove across the bridge. I drove across the bridge. What could be a more elegant response If she had told me I was so happy driving across the bridge, Id say What Wait, its just an ordinary bridge. Tammy But always before when I drove across a bridge, I immediately began to program myself What am I going to do when the car goes off the side And what did she say this time I just drove across the bridge. When you associate the strength and confidence with those auditory and visual stimuli, driving across a bridge becomes just another human activity, the same as the experience that the rest of you have had driving across bridges your whole life. This is also a way of testing our work to find out if it is adequately futurepaced. We know what she looked like when she had a phobic response. If the same phobic response comes up, we know somehow the integration didnt happen. Well find out what happened and redo it. Her response was Oh, driving across the bridge. Earlier, with Linda, we were talking about anchoring the new response to a cue from the environment. Here were testing and were bridging or futurepacing at the same time. Woman Can you do this with yourself Yes, with two qualifications. Tomorrow were going to teach a pattern called refraining which teaches you how to establish an internal communication system with some sophistication and subtlety. If you have such an internal communication system, you can always check internally to make sure that all parts of you are congruent. If you get a goahead, of course you can do it by yourself. If theres some hesitation, reframing gives you a way of getting congruence, internal agreement. Another precaution is that you get a really good anchor for a powerful, positive blastout experience, so that if you begin to collapse back into the old unpleasant feelings, you can bring yourself out. Feeling more unpleasantness will not help you in this at all. I had a powerful anchor. Make sure you have one for yourself. I would recommend that you do it with somebody else if you have a very intense phobic response. It isnt that difficult, and it obviously doesnt take that long. Find somebody else, if only to operate the bailout anchor if you begin to go back into the unpleasantness. You can go slightly into the phobic response and say to your friend Look at what I look like now, and what Im breathing like now. If you see that again, squeeze my hand. That would be adequate. You can run the rest of it yourself. Woman Can you do this with children Children dont seem to have that many phobias. For those who do, this will work fine. Whatever you do with kids, I recommend that you sneak up on it. A friend of mine had a nineyearold kid who was a lousy speller. I said Look at this list of spelling words. The kid looked at it, and I said Now close your eyes and tell me what they are—not how to spell them. He had some difficulty doing that he didnt have welldeveloped visualization. However, I said Remember the Wookie in Star Wars Do you remember when the Wookie opened his mouth and showed his teeth like this And he went Oh, yeah and then he was visualizing immediately. I had him print the words out in the Wookies mouth. Theres always some experience somewhere in a persons personal history that has the requisite qualities you need. If you combine that experience with the task that you are trying to do—especially with children, make a game out of it—there is no problem. What do you think the Wookie would see if he were watching you go through that thing with your dad Thats another way of getting the dissociation. Children are really fast. As an adult, you are a lot slower than a child. You are less fluid in your states of consciousness. The primary tool that we offer people who work with children is to use anchoring as a way of stabilizing what you are trying to work on, to slow the kid down enough so that you can cope. Because kids are really fast. Woman Why two steps of dissociation You dont need it. Thats just a guarantee its insurance that she doesnt collapse back into the old feelings. If we had only dissociated her one step, if she collapsed she would collapse right back into the old experience, and it would be very difficult to get her back out. By doing it in two steps, if she begins to collapse, she will collapse into the first step and its easier to get back out. You can tell whether she is up above or back down here by the changes in posture and skin color and breathing, etc. Knowing that, if I see her collapse from two to one, I give a squeeze here, or I say Now let her feel the old feelings over there. You watch from up here. Those are ways of insuring that she doesnt just reexperience the bad feelings. Woman You asked Tammy to take the feeling and find a picture of herself at a younger age. What if she cant find one Thats a statement about the therapist, not the client. It should be taken as a comment about what the therapist is doing, indicating that the therapist should change his behavior and do it differently. Let me answer your question in this way. I dont believe that Tammy actually had the experience that she watched herself go through. She may or may not have I dont know. But it is irrelevant. Once a very wellknown therapist was visiting with us, and we received an emergency referral, a suicidal woman. The psychiatrist had given up, saying Here, would you please take this woman over Im out of choices. Since this famous therapist was staying with us, we thought it would be an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate some of the uses of hypnosis Erickson had taught us. Because for that therapist, at that point in his evolution, hypnosis was a dirty word. He thought it was manipulative. And we told him There are ways in which Ericksonian hypnosis is far less manipulative than any insight, consciousmind therapy we have ever run across. Let us demonstrate with this woman. So we began to work with this woman. The visiting therapist was sitting there watching and listening. About ten minutes into the session, he got a revelation. It was obvious. I said Do you have something you want us to do I had never had a chance to watch this therapist work live before. He took over and started going Blood... stairway... childhood, younger brother... mother cries... screams. He developed this incredible fantasy, which he then essentially sold to this woman. At first the woman would go Gee, I dont remember anything like that. Finally, the woman went Uuuuhhhh Thats it I must have done it very much like a family reconstruction, if youve ever been through one of those with Virginia Satir. Suddenly the woman made all these internal connections, and the visiting therapist did all this therapy about this past experience and the woman changed dramatically. Her behavior changed dramatically, and she stayed changed, too. She was a continuing client of ours. Now, when she came back in two weeks, we couldnt resist. We induced a somnambulistic trance, and established an anchor for amnesia so that we could erase anything we did during that session—because she was doing fine and we didnt want to interfere. We just wanted to check and find out what had happened. We asked her unconscious mind if in fact the experience described by the therapist during the session—or anything approximating it—had ever occurred. The answer was unequivocally No. However, that is no different than what just happened here. If the experience that Tammy generated has all the elements of whatever the original experience or set of experiences was, it will serve as a metaphor which will be as effective as an actual, factual, historical representation. And from my sensory experience, I can guarantee that it was effective. Woman What I still dont understand is what you do if the client is stuck because she has an expectation of getting a picture of a childhood incident, and now shes sitting there doing this and she cant get a picture. OK, thats the same choice point as the congruent I dont know that we talked about earlier. Ask her to guess, make it up, lie, fantasize it doesnt matter. Actually, age regression is a very easy phenomenon. We said Go back through time. She had very little conscious idea what we meant by that, but she responded quite easily to it. Man What specifically were you seeing on her face The same response that she originally demonstrated when we asked her about the feelings of the phobia. I watched her age regress until I saw a very intense example of it. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. There was whiteness around the eyes and the side of the face. There was some kind of scrunching of her chin. There was an increase in moisture on her skin, especially on the bridge of her nose. When that became intensified, I said Now look at an image, that image there. If you tell people to go back through time and they frown, thats also a cue. And you might try something tricky like saying Well, go forward in time. Go through time, jump back in time. Go around time. Anything. It doesnt matter. The specific words you use are wholly irrelevant as long as you get the response you want. Another way to think about it is that everybody with a phobia knows the feelings of the phobia. They have a fragment of the experience, so they can get the rest by overlap.