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I once cured a multiple personality with only that. I went through all the levels one by one and squashed all the personalities together. I once had a therapist call me on the telephone from the Midwest. He said hed read my book and there was nothing in it about multiple personalities, and he didnt even believe in them, but one had just come into his office and what should he do I went through the instructions on the phone with him for forty minutes and cured his patient over the telephone. OK, now tell her to hold out both hands. Tell her to visualize Jane in her right hand and visualize Mary in her left hand. Just take two of them and collapse them together into one image. And then tell her to pull it into her body and integrate it. Then tell her to get the integrated image that she just had, and put it together with another one. So you do them one at a time. Most people dont really ask multiple personalities any questions. But I really questioned the ones that Ive been around, to find out how they functioned. The experience of being multiple for one may be very different than it is for another. One of the women that I worked with described every single one of her parts as part of the same process. She was really, really visual she had a picture of them all. There was a couch backstage, in the back of her mind, and all these women sat back there on the couch doing their nails and chatting. Every once in a while, one of them would hop up and walk through the curtains. When it walked through, it would step into her body. Some of them knew about what the other ones did, because they would go and peek out through the curtains. I hypnotized her and went backstage with her and did the visual squash technique and put them all together. That visual squash method is a very powerful way of integrating sequential incongruities by making them simultaneous in a dissociated state. If you have a sequential incongruity, you can never represent both parts simultaneously in any system other than the visual, as far as I can tell. It takes a very complex auditory representation to have two voices going on at the same time—as opposed to alternating—and people cant pull it off kinesthetically. But you can take sequential incongruities and make them simultaneous by visualkinesthetic dissociation, and then integrate them by pulling the hands together, and then get the integration in the other two systems. I dont understand the significance of moving the arms when you do the visual squash, but if you do it without the arms it doesnt work. And I have no idea why. Ive tried it both ways if people dont actually hold out their hands in front of them like this and pull the images together, it doesnt work. People dont have to hold out their hands to get cured of phobias, but apparently with multiple personalities they have to. That doesnt make any sense to me logically, but it happens to be the case. If I were to make a generalization, I would make the reverse one. But I have found out thats the case in experience. We are a lot more willing to experiment against our intuitions than most people. When most people have a strong intuition, theyll follow it. A lot of times when we have a strong intuition, well violate it to find out what will happen—especially when we have clients that we have ongoing contact with, and can be sure of being able to deal with the consequences. That kind of experimentation has resulted in many useful patterns and discoveries. One woman had been a homosexual for years, and had fallen in love with a man. She was really stuck in this dilemma. A very strong part of her now wanted to become heterosexual. There was another part of her that was afraid it was going to have to die. She was going through the visual squash with these two parts. She was trying to pull her hands together, and she was wailing, I cant do it I cant do it I cant do it like that Richard and I were standing on either side of her. We looked at each other, and then we each grabbed one hand and pushed them together suddenly. The changes that occurred in that woman were fantastic You can create change without being elegant I think people do it all the time. However, the ramifications of doing something like that are not predictable, and predictability is something that we have always tried to develop. We just went blammo, pow and rammed it in. She did change she got what she wanted, and its lasted a long time Im sure of that because I still know that woman. However, I dont know what the side effects were. She isnt totally wonderful in many areas of her life, and I dont know how much of that is a consequence of what we did. Shes certainly better off than she was. And at the time we really wanted to know what would happen. When you start including more sophisticated ingredients in your work and tinkering with them carefully, then you get better, more elegant changes. You can also predict what will happen much more precisely. Sometimes you get much more pervasive change, too, which I think is very important. If you can do just one little tiny thing and get the outcome that you want, it will also generalize and get all the other outcomes that are really needed but havent been mentioned. The less you do in the more appropriate place, the more generalization to other contents and contexts will occur naturally. Thats one reason why we stress elegance so much Be precise, if youre doing therapy. If youre just doing utilization skills its a very different game. Business people are usually only interested in utilizing strategies. If you are doing sales training, then all you need to know is what strategies you want your salespeople to have, and how to install them. If the trainer for an organization is a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, then he says, OK, were going to have this person be a salesperson and theyre going to do this, and in order to do that, you have to have these three strategies. Then he can stick them in and block them off so that nothing else gets in their way. Those strategies dont have to generalize anywhere else in the persons life. Its not necessary for that business outcome. It might be desirable, but its not necessary. If somebodys personal life is really interrupting their business functioning, you can put a barrier around it to keep those strategies separate. There are a lot of different kinds of outcomes youre going to have as a business person, but theyre fairly limited. As a lawyer, for example, youre mostly just utilizing strategies youre not concerned with installing anything. Youre only concerned with using a strategy to get a specific outcome to make a witness look like a jerk, or to get your client to trust you, or something like that. I once did some work with a lawyer who is a trustworthy person, but nobody trusts him. His nonverbal analogues are terrible they make everyone suspicious. His problem was that he couldnt get clients to confide in him so that he could represent them well. And half the time he was courtappointed, which made it even worse. What he really needed was a complete overhaul in his analogue system. Rather than do that, I taught him a little ritual. He sits down with his client and says, Look, if Im going to be your lawyer, its essential that you trust me. And so the question thats really important is how do you decide if you trust somebody He asks, Have you ever really trusted anybody in your life and he sets up an anchor when the client accesses that feeling of trust. Then he asks, How did you make that decision Then all he has to do is to listen to a general description of their strategy Well, I saw this, and I heard him say this, and I felt this. Then he presents information back in that format Well, as I sit here, I want you to see blah blah blah, and then I say to yourself blahdeblah blah, and I dont know if you can feel this, and fires off the anchor that he made when the person had the trusting feelings. I taught him that ritual and it was good enough. But there is a real difference between that outcome and the outcome that youre working toward as a therapist. Therapy is a much more technical business in the sense of changing things. As a therapist, you dont need to be nearly as flexible in terms of utilization as somebody whos a lawyer. A lawyer must be a master of the art of utilization. You need to be able to do many different things in terms of eliciting responses. You have to get twelve people to respond the same way. Think about that. Imagine that you had twelve clients, and you had to get them all to agree when you werent in the room Thats going to take skill. One thing you can do is to identify the one or two individuals, or several, on the jury who might, by virtue of their own strategies, persuade the others to go along. And of course, that is what family therapy is all about. Everything is going to interact in a system. I dont care who you put together for what length of time, the systems are going to start clicking. I try to figure out who in the family elicits responses the most often. Because if I can get that one person to do my work for me, it will be really easy. Very often its someone who doesnt speak much. Son here says something. He has external behavior. And when he does, you get an intense internal response from the mother. Although her external behavior is subtle, some little cue, everybody responds to it. When the father does something with external behavior, this kid responds, but not much else happens. And if the daughter does something, maybe we get a response here and maybe there. I want to know who everybody else in the family responds to a lot. I also want to know if any one single person in that family can always get that person to respond. Lets say every single time the son does anything with external behavior, the mother responds. If I can predict something about how that happens, I can make one little change in the son, and then the mother will respond and get everybody else in the family to respond for me. I always spend fifty percent or more of whatever time is allotted to me gathering information, and testing it to make sure that Im right. Ill feed in an innocuous thing here, and predict what will happen over there. I keep running the system over and over again until Im absolutely sure that if I make a change with this kid, its going to change the mothers behavior in a way that will change all the other people in the family. That will set up a new stable system. Otherwise, you usually get an unbalanced system, or they change in the office but they go home and go back to normal. I want something thats really going to carry over and be very, very permanent.