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The real beginning of all this work started when we began taking peoples words as a literal description of their experience, not just a metaphor. We started communicating back as if they were literally the way they had described themselves, and we found out that was the case. When someone says, When I focus on those ideas, they feel right, but I tell myself it wouldnt work, that is a literal description of their internal experience. Now, we would like you to pick a partner, preferably somebody you have not had much contact with. Its easier to operate at the process level with strangers because their behavior is less apt to be an anchor for some behavior in you. We assume that you are all going to get changes with one another, given your usual patterns of communication. Try something new. The whole point of going through the exercise is to be exposed to new material and to do it, to discover how well it fits with your own personal style as a communicator. Until you engage all your sensory channels in playing with this material, you wont have it. Understanding fully is to be able to comprehend it in all representational systems, including behavior. Wed like you to practice the twostep visualkinesthetic dissociation process that we did with Tammy here. You dont need a fullblown phobia. You can use this process with any unpleasant response, to become familiar with the pattern. This, or the change history process, will work for nearly any presenting problem that I know of. Anchoring will get you almost everything. When youre done, use bridging or futurepacing to be sure that the new response will be triggered by the context where its needed. Go ahead. OK. How did it go What questions do you have Woman I noticed I was getting distracted because my partner was using many words that didnt match the experience I had internally. Therapist What you need is a very subtle maneuver You say, Shut up or you kick your partner One of the things that all of you can learn from this is that its very easy to learn to talk in a way that matches your clients experience. The way to do that is described in our book, Patterns I. It describes the patterns of language that sound specific, but are actually simply process instructions with zero content. For example, heres an exercise you can all do. Get comfortable and close your eyes. Take a couple of deep breaths and relax. Sometime within the last five years, each of you has had a very strong experience in which you learned something of great value for yourself as a human being. You may or may not have a conscious appreciation of exactly which episode in your life history this is. I would like you to allow that experience to come up into your consciousness. Sit there for a moment, with feelings of comfort and strength, knowing youre actually here, now. With those feelings of comfort and strength, let yourself see and hear again what it was that happened to you back there. There are additional things to be learned from that experience. I would like you to allow yourself the treat of seeing and hearing yourself go through that again so as to make new understandings and learnings which are embedded in that experience in your past history.... And when youve seen and heard something that you believe to be of value for yourself, I would like you to pick a specific situation that you know will occur within the next couple of weeks. Notice—again by watching and listening with feelings of strength and comfort—how you can apply that new learning and that new understanding to this new situation that is going to arise in the next couple of weeks. In so doing, you are making elegant use of your own personal history, and you are transferring understandings and learnings from one part of your personal history, so as to increase your choices as a creative human being in the present. Take all the time you need, and when you finish, drift back and rejoin us.... Some of you may have a clear, solid, resonant understanding of what youve succeeded in doing some of you may simply have a sense of wellbeing, a feeling of having done something without actually understanding in detail explicitly what it was that you were able to do by making use of a particularly powerful experience from your past in a new way.... Now, Id like you to begin to drift back slowly, understanding that if youve completed the process to the best of your conscious understanding, fine.... If you havent yet finished, youve set into motion a process which can be completed comfortably outside of your awareness as you return your attention slowly here to this room.... Now, what did I actually say I didnt say anything. Zero. There was no content to that verbalization. “To do something of importance for yourself... certain learnings... unconscious understanding from that specific experience in your past.” None of those have any content. Those are pure process instructions. And if you have the sensory experience, you can see the process happening as you do it. That is where your timing is very important. Let me give you a very different experience. Id like you to close your eyes and visualize a rope... which is green. How many of you already had a different colored rope If I give you instructions that have any content whatsoever, as I just did, I am very, very apt to violate your internal experience. I will no longer be pacing you adequately. A skill that all communicators need is the ability to give process instructions instructions that have no content whatsoever. Thats the sense in which I mentioned earlier that Ericksonian hypnosis is the least manipulative of all the forms of psychotherapy Ive ever been exposed to. In any communication with content, theres no way for you to not introduce your own beliefs and value systems by presupposition. However, if you restrict yourself to process work, to contentfree verbalizations with your clients, you are guaranteeing that you are respecting their integrity. If you do secret therapy, theres no way that you can interfere with their beliefs or value system because you don’t know what they are. You don’t have any idea what they are doing, and theres no need for you to, either. Woman Why do you have to integrate the negative anchor, instead of just ignoring it altogether Lots of people go to hypnotists to stop smoking. The hypnotist hypnotizes them and says From this point on, cigarettes will taste terrible. And he wakes them up and sends them away, right They dont smoke any more because it tastes terrible. However, that leaves them with a whole set of dissociated motor patterns. Its the same with alcoholics. Alcoholics Anonymous says, Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Thats a statement to me that their program fails to integrate motor programs which can still be triggered at a later date by the presence of alcohol. So all it takes is one drink and they have to continue—binge drinking—or one cigarette later on and boom That person is a smoker again. Dissociated motor patterns can always be triggered unless you integrate them. If you dissociate and sort someone, make sure you put them back together. Dont leave those dissociated motor patterns lying around. Thats one of your professional responsibilities. People have enough dissociations on their own already. They don’t need more. Man Have you ever worked with multiple personalities Multiple personality is a little bit complicated, because it depends upon who messed the person up in the first place. You really need to know the model of the therapist that wrecked the person to begin with. I have never personally met a multiple personality that wasnt made by a therapist. That doesnt mean they dont exist, its just that Ive never met one. My guess is that there might be a few out there somewhere, but Ill tell you there arent as many as therapists keep creating and bringing to me. We became interested in multiple personalities years ago, and wrote to a man who had written a big paper about it. He invited us to come and meet one named Helen. She had about twenty personalities, but the cover name for everyone was Helen. And the fascinating thing was that all of her multiple personalities were more interesting than she was. Her therapist had a very elaborate model of her personalities. She had an organization part a part that was very organized and did secretarial work and all kinds of stuff like that. So I said, Well, get that one for me. The therapist had this great nonverbal analogue he stood up and shouted JOYCE COME OUT, JOYCE and he hit her on the forehead, Bwamm and she went through all these changes. Brrnnnggnhhh It was right out of the movies it was really spooky. This guy does exorcisms on the helicopter pad at a Catholic college, and hes considered to be a respectable psychiatrist by people who think we are weird In some ways hes very effective because he is so expressive, but I dont think he understands the full ramifications of what he is doing. He has anywhere from sixteen to twentytwo multiple personalities in his practice at any time, and he cant understand why the rest of the therapeutic community doesnt recognize the epidemic of multiple personalities that he has discovered So the organization part of this woman came out, and I introduced myself. Then I said, Most of these parts have amnesia for what goes on in this persons life. Being the organization part, I figure you would have kept pretty good track of it all. Organization Part Oh, yes, of course I kept good track of it. I said, Well, how did you end up with so many personalities And she said to me, Its as if there were a whole bunch of different parts and there was a round peg that went through the middle. And when I met Dr. Soandso, he took the peg and pulled it out. That is almost verbatim what she said to me, and this is a woman who does not have a high school education. She didnt think that this was bad, by the way. Her description was that he pulled the peg out so that they all became more apparent as separate personalities, and now they were going to go back through and make them all into one again. The tragic thing is that when he succeeded in integrating her, she had total amnesia for her entire life, and was a drip as far as I could tell. She had these great parts. She had a sexy part that was just rrrnnnhhhl. Another part told jokes and was really corny. Another part was very shy and coy. But when he cured her, she had amnesia for her entire life and she had none of the resources of any of those parts. She was just dull. Now, I dont think that you can wipe out parts. So I kept mentioning the names of the parts that I liked, and I got really great unconscious responses from her. They were still there, but they werent fully available to her. To do a good job with a multiple personality, I think you need to know the model of the therapist that created it. Some therapists model of multiple personality is that you have all these parts and an unconscious that runs the program. Thats one model, a very common one. The way youd integrate that one is totally different than you would some other model. This guys model was that there were three parts here and they had their own unconscious, and then there were two parts over here and they had an unconscious, and then there was an unconscious for these two unconsciouses, and so on. It was really stacked in levels. When you integrated, you would always have to integrate at the same logical level. My guess is that he didnt do that, and that is how he got so much amnesia. You can use what we call the visual squash with multiple personalities. The visual squash is a visual method of integration using visual anchors. You hold out your hands and see yourself as one part here on your left, and as another part here on your right, and you watch them and listen to them. Then you slowly pull the two images together, and visually watch them merge together and then notice how that image is different. If you like it, then you do the same thing again kinesthetically, and squash the two images together with your hands. Then you pull the integrated image into your body. We just stumbled across this. At first it sounded kind of weird, until we studied a little bit about neurology. Its a good metaphor for what goes on in the metaphor called neurology. And if you dont think neurology is a metaphor, you are naive, I want to tell you But anyway, their metaphor and our metaphor were very similar. And if you try it, its very dramatic. Its a very powerful method.