tranformasyon

Trance-formations

Neuro-Linguistic ProgrammingTM and the Structure of Hypnosis

by John Grinder and Richard Bandler

edited by Connirae Andreas

Real People Press Box F1 Moab, Utah, 84532

ISBN: 0-911226-22-2 clothbound $9.00 ISBN: 0-911226-23-0 paperbound $5.50

Cover Artwork by Rene Eisenbart

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Grinder, John.

Trance-formations•

1, Hypnotism—Therapeutic use—Problems, exercises, etc. I. Bandler, Richard. II. Andreas, Connirae. III. Title. RCA-95.G76 615.8:512 81-15342 ISBN 0-911226-22-2 AACR2 ISBN 0-911226-23-0 (pbk.)

Other useful books from Real People Press:

REFRAM1NG: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Transformation of Meaning, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. 220 pp. 198) Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50

A SOPRANO ON HER HEAD: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life—and Other Perfor- mances, by Eioise Risiad. 184 pp. 1981 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50

FROGS INTO PRINCES, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. 197 pp. 1979 Cloth $9.00 Paper$5.50

NOTES TO MYSELF, by Hugh Prather. 150 pp. 1970 Cloth $6.00 Paper $3.50 WINDOWS TO OUR CHILDREN, by Violet Oaklander. 325 pp. 1978 Cloth $9.00

GESTALT THERAPY VERBATIM, by Frederick S. Perls. 280 pp. 1969 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50

DON'T PUSH THE RIVER, by Barry Stevens. 280 pp. 1970 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50 EMBRACE TIGER, RETURN TO MOUNTAIN: the essence of T'ai Chi, by At Chung- Hang Huang. Illustrated. 185 pp. 1973 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50

PERSON TO PERSON, Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens. 276 pp. 1967 Paper $5.50 AWARENESS, by John O. Stevens. 275 pp. 1971 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50 GESTALT IS, by Frederick S- Perls. Wilson Van Dusen. and others. 274 pp. 1975 Cloth $9.00 Paper $5.50

The name Real People Press indicates our purpose; to publish ideas and ways that a person can use independently or with others to become more real—to further your own growth as a human being and to develop your relationships and communication with others,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 P r i n t i n g 85 84 83 82 81

Contents

Foreword 1-4

I Introduction 5-33 Exercise 1 8 Exercise 2 11 Exercise 3 27

Summary 33

II Simple Inductions 34-69 Verbal Pacing and Leading: 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise 35 Nonverbal Pacing and Leading 43 Overlapping Representational Systems 44 Accessing a Previous Trance State 49 Naturally Occurring Trance States 50 Exercise 4 54 Discussion 56 Anchoring Trance States 61 Analogue Marking 63 Exercise 5 66 Discussion: Negative Commands and Polarities 67

III Advanced Inductions 70-98

Leverage Inductions and Pattern Interruption 70 Overload 80 Stacking Realities 85 .

Exercise 6 88 Incorporation and Dealing with Abreactions 90 Benediction 97

IV Utilization 99-136 Process Instructions 99 Generative Change 116 Exercise 7 118 Clean-up Routines 120

V Reframing in Trance 137-177 Introduction 137 Reframing 147 Reframing Outline 159 Discussion 160

VI Specific Utilization Techniques 178-200 New Behavior Generator 178 Deep Trance Identification 185 Pain Control 189 Amnesia 192 Recovering Personal History 196

VII Calibration 201-212 Exercise 8 202 Exercise 9 204 Exercise 10 205 Crystal Ball Gazing 206

VIII Self-Hypnosis . 213-223

Discussion 219

IX Questions 224- 237

Benediction 235

Appendix I 238-239 Appendix II 240-250 Note 251-252 Bibliography 253 Index 254-255

Foreword

Hypnosis is a word that usually gets strong responses from people- some positive and some negative. Some people think it's a hoax or only good for making people act like chickens, some people think it will cure everything from dandruff to flat feet, and others think it is so danger- ous that it should be left alone completely. Trance experiences have existed in different forms for centuries, usually surrounded by a mys- tique of something "magical" and unexplainable. What is unique about this book is that it turns the "magic" of hypnosis into specific understandable procedures that can be used not only in doing "hypno- sis" but also in everyday communication.

When John Grinder and Richard Bandler do a seminar on hypnosis together, one of them usually says "All communication is hypnosis" and the other says "I disagree, nothing is hypnosis; hypnosis doesn't exist." There is a sense in which they are both right, and both are saying the same thing.

If I tell you about going snorkeling on my recent honeymoon in the Yucatan and describe to you the swift movements of the brightly- colored tropical fish, the rhythmic sound of the gentle waves against the shore, and the feeling of rising and falling with the warm waves as I scan the underwater scenery, hopefully I will alter your state of con- sciousness so that you can experience some representation of what I experienced. If you become excited about going there yourself, I will have used the same patterns of communication that are used by suc- cessful hypnotists . . . and by successful poets, salesmen, parents,

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2 politicians, religious leaders, etc. If you think of hypnosis as altering someone's state of consciousness, then any effective communication is hypnosis.

One of the simpler hypnotic patterns is the "negative command." If I say "Don't think of blue," you have to think of blue in order to understand my sentence. If a hypnotist says "I don't want you to relax too soon" the listener often finds himself beginning to relax as a way of understanding what those words mean. Beginning with a negation simply takes any pressure to respond off the listener.

The same pattern is often inadvertently used to get unwanted responses. The well-meaning parent may say to her child "Don't spill the milk," or "Don't stumble." The well-meaning husband may say "Don't get upset," or "I don't want you to worry about what happens while you are gone." The listener has to represent the unwanted behav- ior somehow in order to understand what has been said, and this makes the unwanted behavior more likely. Unknowingly, he or she in a sense "hypnotizes" the child or spouse into an unwanted response.

The same pattern can be used to get more useful responses from people, whether they are in "trance" or not. "Don't be too curious about what you'll learn from reading this book." "I wouldn't tell you to be eager to discover how you'll change comfortably in the coming weeks." Since hypnosis is fundamentally no different than any effective communication, "There is no such thing as hypnosis" as a separate and distinct process.

Most books present hypnosis as something that you sit down and do with yourself or someone else for a discrete period of time, usually to solve problems. Then you get up and do something else. If you still think of hypnosis in that way after you have read this book, you will be depriving yourself of the most important ways you can use these tools—in your living. The communication patterns described in this book are far too useful to leave on a hypnosis chair somewhere. Most of the satisfactions that we all want in life don't take place in a hypnosis chair; they happen with the people we love, the work that we do, and

the ways that we play and enjoy life. You can use the information in this book in many ways, both personally and professionally. One way is to make remedial changes by solving problems and removing limitations. This is the way hypnosis is usually used to stop smoking, lose weight, deal with unreasonable fears, and so on.

3 But you can also use this information in evolutionary ways to devel- op yourself and continually increase your abilities and choices in life— learning to do better what you already do well. You can do this in simple ways such as learning to communicate with family and asso- ciates more effectively, make love more enjoyably, learn new skills more easily, and so on. You can also learn how to make even more pervasive changes in how you live.

Much of the material in this book is derived from Bandler and Grinder's careful and systematic observation of the work of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. Until his death in 1980, Erickson was widely con- sidered to be the world's greatest medical hypnotist. He was widely known for his successful and often "miraculous" work with "impossi- ble" clients, as well as for his extensive writings on hypnosis.

Several years ago I went to visit Milton Erickson at his home in Phoenix. After he described some of his remarkable work with clients, I asked him how he knew to use one approach with one client, when he had used an opposite approach with another client who apparently had the same kind of problem. He responded "You just trust your uncon- scious mind,"

That approach to hypnosis works great if you have Milton Erickson's unconscious mind. But how is it possible to learn to automati- cally and unconsciously respond as effectively as Milton Erickson did—to have an unconscious mind like Erickson's? Grinder and Bandler's special genius is the ability to observe someone like Erickson and then describe in detail what Erickson does, what cues he responds to, and how it all fits together. This makes it possible for others to learn how to repeat the same procedures and get similar results. After a period of practice, these patterns can become as automatic as knowing which muscles to move in order to reach across a table and pick up a glass. Erickson wrote the following in the preface to Bandler and Grinder's book The Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.: "Although this book by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, to which I am contributing this Preface, is far from being a complete description of my methodologies, as they so clearly state it is a much better explanation of how I work than I, myself, can give. I know what I do, but to explain how I do it is much too difficult for me."

4 In addition to modelling the behaviour of "wizards" such as Milton Erickson, Grinder and Bandler have added their own wide array of effective communication skills to the body of knowledge that they teach others. It is unusual to find two people like Bandler and Grinder who are such powerful and effective communicators. It is even more unusual to find two people who are so capable of teaching others to do what they do so exquisitely.

The material presented in this book is detailed and specific and carefully sequenced, beginning with simple concepts and exercises, and proceeding step-by-step to more advanced procedures. This book has been created from verbatim transcripts of 10 different seminars on hypnosis, edited together so that it appears as a single workshop. No distinction is made between when Richard is speaking and when John is speaking, and the names of most participants have been changed.

As you read this book, keep in mind that Bandler and Grinder are usually doing what they're talking about. Sometimes they're explicit about this, and sometimes they're not. The astute reader will find much more in the text than is overtly commented upon.

This book has been edited so as to keep redundancy with other NLP books to a minimum. Some material from the original workshops which is already available in other books has been omitted. You will find that the books Frogs into Princes, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., Vol. I, and They Lived Happily Ever After are very useful additions to the information in this book.

If you are reading with an interest in acquiring and developing hypnotic communication skills, you will serve yourself by taking the time to enjoy practicing each small piece that is presented so that you can become systematically effective. If the pieces are too big for you to do comfortably, break them into smaller and more digestible chunks.

If you are reading this book simply for entertainment or out of curiosity—enjoy! Grinder and Bandler's teaching is more interesting and entertaining than most comedians.

Connirae Andreas

I

Introduction

Our topic here is hypnosis. We could immediately launch into an argument about whether there is such a thing, and what it might be if there were. However, since you already paid your money and came here for a seminar in hypnosis, I won't bring up that particular argument.

I hope that in the three days we spend here together, you will come to understand the sense in which that might be a fruitful argument. I hope you will discover that you already know a great deal about hypnosis under other names, or under no name at all. You can discover that certain experiences many of you have had are really excellent examples of altered states of consciousness. In the course of these three days, I will call upon both of each of you to enjoy and learn from what takes place here.

I assume that each of you is here with at least two objectives in mind. One is to discover how hypnotic patterning might be useful and effec- tive for you in whatever area you are in, whether it's psychotherapy, management, education, nursing, sales, or something else. I assume that you want to discover what new choices hypnotic patterning offers that you might add to your present repertoire to become even more effective in doing what you do. In addition, I am sure that many of you are interested in making a number of personal changes as a part of your experience here.

I invite you to participate with both those objectives fully in mind. In dealing with this material, we will be doing demonstrations, we will

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6 discuss what is going on, and we will ask you to do exercises under our supervision after we've explained what we would like you to do.

Hypnotic patterning is the same as any skill that can be learned. In order to be learned, it has to be practiced. I assume that most of you here drive automobiles. If you don't drive automobiles, you can find some comparable perceptual-motor skill that you have mastered, whether it's riding a bicycle, roller skating, or playing some athletic sport. If you remember the first occasion on which you attempted to master the complex skill of driving a car, there were many things that you had to keep track of. Your hands were doing several things. At least one of them was on the wheel, presumably, and the other one was working the gear shift, if the car you were learning to drive had one. At the same time you were taxed with the task of being able to pay attention to what your feet were doing. There were three things they might do down there, and some of those things had to happen in coordination. You may remember putting the brake on and failing to put the clutch in at the same time, and the disastrous results of that. You had to pay attention to all of this, in addition to having some consciousness of what was going on outside of the car itself.

As with any complex perceptual-motor skill, what's required is that the task be organized into small pieces or chunks, so that you can practice each small chunk individually until you've mastered it. Once you have succeeded in practicing each chunk to the point that it becomes an automatic, effective, unconscious skill, you are free to attend to new possibilities: other components of the task. You can then practice these new chunks until they also achieve that same status of an unconscious, effective, perceptual-motor pattern that you do not have to give any conscious attention to.

The easiest way to become skilled at hypnosis is to practice small chunks one at a time, in the same way that you learned many tasks such as driving a car. I assume that the ultimate test of your skill in hypnosis is whether you can walk in and begin to interact with someone in such a way as to induce the specific kind of hypnotic outcome that they request—without having to strategize at the conscious level. Three days is not long enough, in my opinion, to achieve the kind of graceful, systematic, unconscious functioning that is required of a really fine hypnotist. However, our task in these three days will be to organize the overall task of hypnosis into chunks, and ask you to practice the various pieces. Our job will be to balance the amount of time we have

7 you practice specific skills with the time we spend making sure we complete a coherent whole that will give you an overall strategy for hypnosis. I trust that you, and particularly your unconscious mind, will continue to practice such skills after this seminar. I also hope that you will continue to add alternative ways of achieving the same out- comes to the repertoire you will be acquiring here.

What we do for a living is an obscure thing called modeling. When we model, we try to build descriptions of how to do something. As modelers we are interested in two things: one is asking really good questions about what needs to be known, and the other is making descriptions of what seems to work. It's something akin to writing a cookbook.

During the next three days, we'd like to teach you a model for doing hypnosis. It is not the truth. It is not an answer, It is not real. If you think you know what's "really" going on and want to argue with me about what's really going on, I'm not going to be able to argue with you because I don't know. There are some things that I do know about; I understand how hypnosis is done. Why it works, I don't know. I do know that hypnosis works in the same way that you learn and remember and everything else. It works in the same way that you understand language.

Although hypnosis is not different from anything else, in the config- uration we're going to teach it to you, it's a very powerful tool. And I would like you to think of it as a tool that accomplishes something specific. It's an.amplifier. No matter what you do, whether you're selling cars, doing psychotherapy, or working with juries, you can do it and elicit more intense responses from people. Hypnosis will allow you to do whatever you do and have.a greater impact with it. By itself it won't do anything.

I also want to point out that hypnosis is not a panacea. I have been using hypnosis for seven years, and I still sometimes wake up tired in the morning. Since I'm not a person who ordinarily drinks coffee, if I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, my body vibrates. If I fall down, I still get bruised. If I have a toothache and I remove the pain with hypnosis, I still have to go to a dentist to do something about the tooth. I consider these to be limitations not in hypnosis as a tool, but primar- ily in myself. Right now, hypnosis and communication arts in general are in their infancy as disciplines.

The process of learning to do hypnosis is somewhat unusual,

8 because unlike most things you learn, you already know how to do it. The problem is noticing it. So rather than going through a long and detailed description this morning, I am going to ask you to do some- thing and then afterwards take a look at it.

Exercise I

I'm going to ask you to get into groups of three people. I want one of you, person A, to think of something that fits the following descrip- tion; a situation in which you become deeply involved, with a limited focus of attention. For some people that's jogging; for others it's reading a book. It might be writing, watching television, going to the movies, driving your car on a long trip—anything which fits that description.

If you're A, I want you to tell the other two in your group, B and C, what the experience is. Give them only the name of the experience: jogging, sailing—just a word. If you give them too much detail, it makes it too easy for them. Just give them a word, sit back and close your eyes, and pretend that you're in hypnosis—it's all pretend any- way. I want the other two people to describe what they believe would have to be there in sensory terms if you were having that experience. The magic words are "have to" because if someone is jogging and you say the bright sun is shining down on your body, that doesn't have to be there. People can jog at night, or on a cloudy day. However, they do have to have some skin temperature. So you're going to have to be artfully vague. I want B and C to take turns saying two sentences or phrases each. One will say "You can feel the temperature of the air on your body, and the place where your foot touches the ground." The other one might say "You notice the beating of your heart. You can feel the temperature of your skin." Those are experiences that have to be there.

I'm not going to give you any more description than that to begin with. I want you each to take a turn, and I want you to observe the person who has his eyes closed, and notice how he responds to what you say. When you are the person sitting there with your eyes closed, I want you to notice which things allow you to get into the experience more, and which things make it more difficult. I'm going to leave it at that and have you use your own experience as a teacher. Let's start. Take about five minutes each.

* * * * *

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I didn't want to talk to you too much in the beginning because whenever I begin to teach a hypnosis course it's a little bit difficult for me to keep from demonstrating at large. I asked you to notice what kinds of things seemed to allow you to go back to the state of con- sciousness that you were in when you actually had the experience you mentioned, and which things seemed to make it harder for you. Which things seemed to jar you, and which seemed to lead you more into being relaxed? Which things seemed to be disjointed, and which allowed you to forget where you were a little bit?

Woman: Anything that had to with my body put me in deeper, and anything that had to do with my mind, like what I thought about it or my reactions to it, took me out a little.

I want to know exactly what the other person actually did. Give me some examples.

Woman: OK. I was playing the piano. When the person said "You can feel the contact of your fingers on the keys," it made me go deeper. If he said something like "You think the music is you," then I came out.

Man: It was easier for me when the tempo of his voice was the same rate as my breathing.

What kinds of things made it harder? Man: Urn, when something he said was incongruous with what I had been thinking. I saw myself in an indoor skating rink, and it threw me when somebody suggested something outdoors.

Yeah, you're in an indoor skating rink and somebody says "You look up and notice how beautiful the sky is."

Woman: My partner said to me "You can hear and feel your breath- ing." That really jarred me, because I couldn't do them both at the same time. I thought "No, just a minute. I can't do that."

OK, what kind of things made it easier? Woman: When she just said one thing to do at a time, like "You can hear your breathing."

Man: I was swimming underwater when someone said "You can feel the splash of your hand hitting the water." I thought "No, I'm underwater. I can't."

Woman: We were talking about music, and at some point he said something about being in tune with the world, and it just really took me in deeper.

What made it harder? Woman: He didn't do anything that made it harder. OK, he can go home now.

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Woman: there was one thing. If one person had slowed down the speed of his voice, and then the other one speeded up, that brought me back up.

So one of the people would go (slowly) "and you'll feel . . . very . . . relaxed" and the other one would say (quickly) "and more and more and more relaxed."

Man: I noticed that my partners used nothing but feeling terms. At first that made it very easy, because I was just using one sensory system, but after a while I heard myself saying "I want to see something." I wasn't seeing anything.

So it was really the absence of something. After a while the instruc- tions became what is known as redundant.

Man: One thing really distracted me and pulled me out after I was in the experience: the phrase "as all other experiences fade." When he said that, suddenly—bang!—I was back.

You had to find out what the other experiences were so they could fade. What made it easier?

Man: Sensory things: feeling the guitar, feeling my fingers moving, looking at the music.

Woman: The omission of something very obvious made it more difficult for me. I was painting a picture and my partners never talked about the feel of the brush in my hand,

How did that make it more difficult for you? How did it cross your mind that they weren't talking about it?

Woman: I kept feeling that there's an incompleteness here; I've got to fill it in. They were talking about mixing paint and looking at the view and how beautifully the picture was progressing.

And that's not what you were doing? Well, I had to get from mixing the paint to having a brush in my hand and painting before I could stand back and look at the picture. OK. So it wasn't a natural transition for you. It was kind of like "You're standing on the beach, and you feel the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach and notice how far you've swum." 'Now what I hope you come to understand in the next three days is that many of the answers to questions about what leads somebody into an altered state have just been described. The difficulty that people have going into hypnosis is not a genetic one. It's not that some people just can't. In fact, everyone does it all the time. The difficulty is that no one really notices. Hypnosis is a very natural process, and hypnosis is

11 only a word that describes the tools that you use to systematically take someone into an altered state of consciousness. People go into altered states all the time. Perhaps at lunch you can get in an elevator and ride up to the top of this hotel with some people whom you don't know, and watch what happens to them. People don't get into an elevator and act the way they do normally. They kind of go "on hold" and watch the floors go by. In fact, if the door opens before they're ready to get out, very often they'll wake up and start out. How many of you have walked out of an elevator on the wrong floor? There's a universality to that experience. Finding things that are universal in people's experience is the key to both inducing hypnosis and using it for whatever you want to accomplish.

Another important thing is making a natural sequence. If somebody says to you "Well, 1 was driving down the road, and I was on my way to Texas, and I was looking out the window and seeing the other cars go by, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and I said to myself 'It's raining so hard!'" that last phrase will jar you out of listening. Usually that's the point at which somebody will ask a question or begin to argue or disagree. Natural transitions lead people into an altered state without jarring them.

There are ways to induce an altered state by jarring someone as well. Both ways of using communication can induce altered states. People often use what is called the confusion technique as an induction procedure. When you use the confusion technique, you do not build in meaningful transitions. You induce a state of mild confusion in people, and then you begin to build natural transitions from that point. We'll get to that later.

If you listen to the kinds of things that jarred people, usually they were things that weren't sensory-based, or things that weren't universal to the experience. If you're playing the piano, you are going to have contact between the keys and your fingers, but you are not necessarily going to feel that "the music is you." For example, if you were playing "Chopsticks" would you feel like a chopstick? It wouldn't necessarily work that way.

Exercise 2

Soon I'm going to ask you to do the same thing again, only this time I want you to restrict yourself to descriptions of what must be there in sensory experience and to be non-specific. If you say "You can hear the splash of the water" and the person is underwater, it won't work. But

12 you can say "You can hear the sounds that the water makes" because there will be some sounds.

This time I'd like you to add one other important piece: I'd like you to have a steady voice tempo and use the other person's breathing as the speed. . . and rate . . . and the pace ... of the speech . . . that you generate. Matching someone's breathing with anything in your behavior—whether it's your own breathing rate, the tempo of your speech, or anything else—has a very powerful impact. Try it and find out what impact it has. I want you to use the same experience and keep the same groups. Take two minutes apiece and don't talk about it. It should take eight to ten minutes at most for everybody in your group to do it. Notice if it feels different this time.

* * * * *

I'd like to ask you if you noticed any difference in your own experience, even with just that small amount of instruction. Was it different at all for you? Some of you are nodding. Is there anyone here for whom it was not different at all? . . . One person. Even with just that little bit of instruction, that little bit of change, the experience changed for everyone but one person in this room. That difference to me is a profound one, because the instructions I gave you are just a tiny bit of what's available.

Hypnosis itself, as far as I'm concerned, is simply using yourself as a biofeedback mechanism. You were doing that when you matched the other person's breathing rate with your voice tempo. Your behavior became an ongoing feedback mechanism for his behavior- Whether you're going to use altered states for inducing personal change, for some medical purpose, for the purpose of relaxing, or as a form of meditation, the things that allow you to be able to respond to another human being by going into an altered state are not genetically prede- termined. They're simply the mechanisms of communication.

If I tell you that I want you to think about this (speaking rapidly) "very-slowly-and-carefully," the incongruity between what I say and how I say it gives you two contradictory instructions. But if 1 tell you I want you to stop . . . and consider . . . very . . . slowly , . . just ex- actly . . . what the change . . . in your own experience . . . was . . . then ... the tempo ... the rate of my speech ... the movements of my body (he has been swaying to the rhythm of his speech) don't interfere with the words that I'm saying. In fact they embellish them and amplify their impact.

13 I heard somebody here say the word "up" as he lowered his voice. That's an incongruity. Those two things don't match. It's like talking about being really excited in a monotone. Hypnotists do this some- times. There's an old notion that you're supposed to talk in a monotone when you do hypnosis. It is actually much more effective to sound thrilled if you are taking someone back into a thrilling experience. Being in trance doesn't mean that you have to be dead. A lot of people tell me "Well, I don't think I was in a trance because I could still hear things and feel things." If you can't see things and hear things, that's death; that's a different state. In hypnosis, what you hear and see and feel is actually amplified for the most part.

I believe that people in a state of hypnosis have much more control over themselves than they think they do. Hypnosis is not a process of taking control of people. It's a process of giving them control of themselves by providing feedback that they wouldn't ordinarily have.

I know that each of you in here is capable of going into any trance state—even though Science has "proved" that's not true. And given how researchers have proved it, they're right. If you use the same hypnotic induction with a group of people, only some of them will go into a trance. That's the way traditional hypnotists work. However, we're not going to study traditional hypnosis. We're going to study what's called Ericksonian hypnosis, after Milton H. Erickson. Erick- sonian hypnosis means developing the skills of a hypnotist so well that you can put someone into a trance in a conversation in which the word hypnosis is never mentioned.

I learned a long time ago that it isn't so much what you say as how you say it. When you try to convince somebody consciously by over- powering him, it elicits from him the response of resisting you. There are some people who don't resist being overpowered, and who go into a trance. However, neither resistance nor cooperation is a demonstra- tion of anything except the ability of people to respond. Everybody who is living can respond. The questions are: how and to what? Your job when you do hypnosis is to notice what people respond to naturally.

People come into my office and say "People have tried to hypnotize me for years and it has never worked." They sit down and say "go ahead and try to hypnotize me." And I say "I can't hypnotize you." They say "Well, go ahead and try." I say "I can't do it. There's nothing I can do; if I decided to force you to keep your eyes open, that would

make you keep your eyes open, I'll try. Keep your eyes wide open. Stay

14 totally alert. Everything you do will make you stay right here and right now." Then they resist me right into trance. The principle I was using was simply noticing the response of the person in front of me, and providing him with a context that he could respond to appropriately in a way that was natural for him. Most people are not that radically resistant. Every once in a while you find one. If you realize what he's doing and alter your behavior, it can be really easy.

A stage hypnotist usually pulls twenty people up from the audience and gives them a series of commands. Then he throws out all the good that's not an indication of skill; that's a statistical approach to doing hypnosis. I want to teach you to see how someone is responding so that you can vary your behavior to provide a context in which he can respond appropriately. If you can do that, anyone can go into an altered state in which you can teach him whatever you want him to learn. One thing I've noticed is that people are more apt to respond easily when they're in a state that hypnotists call rapport. Rapport seems to be built on matching behaviors. Disagreeing with people won't estab- lish rapport. Talking faster than people can listen won't build rapport. Talking about feelings when people are making visual images won't build rapport. But if you gauge the tempo of your voice to the rate of their breathing, if you blink at the same rate that they blink, if you nod at the same rate that they're nodding, if you rock at the same rate that they're rocking, and if you say things which must in fact be the case, or things that you notice are the case, you will build rapport. If you say "You can be aware of the temperature of your hand, the sounds in the room, the movement of your body as you breathe" your words will match the person's experience, because all of those things are there. We call this kind of matching "pacing."

A universal experience in this country is driving down the freeway and noticing that somebody next to you is driving at the same rate. If you speed up, they speed up with you, and if you slow down, they slow down with you. When you begin to match somebody, you build an unconscious biofeedback loop, and there's a tendency for the other person to do whatever it is that you do, or whatever it is that you talk about. If you gauge the tempo, the rate, and the rhythm of your speech to someone's breathing and then very slowly begin to slow down that rate, their breathing will slow down too. If all of a sudden . . . you pause, so will they. So if you begin by matching someone's behavior,

15 either verbally or nonverbally, it puts you in the position of being able to vary what you do and to have them follow.

The next time you do this exercise, I want you to begin by matching the person's present experience. Last time you described what would have to be there in some previous experience the person had. This time you'll begin by describing what has to be there in the person's expe- rience now. So if I'm doing it with Charlie, 1 would say something like "And you are listening to the sound of my voice . . . and you can feel the warmth where your left hand is resting on your thigh. . . ."

There's an artistry to choosing these statements. "Until I say this sentence, you will be unaware of the temperature and feeling in your left ear" and suddenly you are aware of that. If I say to Ann "You can be aware of the feeling of warmth where your hand touches your chin" she was probably not aware of that before I made the statement. But when I said it, she could immediately verify that my verbalization was in fact an accurate representation of her experience. I come to gain credibility, and I also begin to amplify things that are true, but were unconscious in her before I mentioned them.

If I continue with kinesthetic statements and then say "And you can be aware of the sound of people shuffling paper in the room" she will again shift consciousness in order to determine whether my verbaliza- tion is accurate for her experience. I'm feeding back things that are a part of her experience, but are normally outside of awareness for her. So I'm building rapport, and at the same time I'm already altering her consciousness by that maneuver.

Today we're only going to explore the principles for inducing altred states. What you do to utilize an altered state after you get it is a separate topic, which we'll get to tomorrow.

For a long time hypnotists have worried about how "deep" you were. They used depth as an indication of what you could and could not do. As far as I can tell, depth is not a meaningful way to think about trance; in some altered states some hypnotic phenomena are possible, while others are not. But hypnotic phenomena per se are not that valuable. Being able to have positive or negative hallucinations is not something which is really that valuable in and of itself. Hallucinations can be used as tools to accomplish other ends, but they are not themselves that valuable. .

I have discovered that you can even teach people to do hypnotic phenomena—positive hallucinations, negative hallucinations, pain control, and so on—in the waking state. There is somebody in this

16 room right now who can do these things in the waking state. Is there anybody here who can still see an imaginary friend or animal that you had as a child? Anybody? You can raise your hand, we won't arrest you. (Someone raises his hand.) OK, you can hallucinate in the waking state. That's a hallucination. I hope you realize that. If you don't, we have a psychiatrist waiting outside with an electric shock treatment machine.

There are many of you who can do negative hallucination; that is, you can look at somebody and not see them. Many of you have looked down at a table to try to find something on it, and you looked all over the place and didn't see it. Yet all that time it was lying right out in the open. That is not different from what people do in deep trances. Children negatively hallucinate their parents speaking to them all the time! How many of you can smell a rose when there isn't one? How many of you can take a deep breath and smell a rose right now? On a hypnotic chart that means you're three quarters of the way into the deepest trance you can be in! This either means that you've never been in the waking state, or that the people who make the charts don't know what they're talking about.

It's not a question of depth; if one of you in here were to experience the conscious state of the person sitting next to you for a moment, it would make LSD look trivial. Trance is only taking your conscious experience and altering it to something else.

In California the legislature is passing a law which says only licensed hypnotists can induce altered states. The ramifications of that particu- lar law are going to be very interesting, because when people make love, they certainly induce altered states in one another. At least I hope making love is not the same as mowing the lawn! I'd like to know how they're going to enforce that law. Everybody's going to have to go out and become a licensed hypnotist so that they can get married.

Now back to your task. In addition to matching people's experience with your statements to get rapport, you need to be able to do some- thing with the rapport you'll have. The key to this is being able to make transitions. You need to have a graceful way of guiding someone from his present state into a trance state—going from describing his present state to describing the state you want him to go to. Using transitional words allows you to do this smoothly. Transitional words such as "as" or "when" are words which imply that there is some meaningful relationship between two utterances. "As you sit there, it's possible for you to realize that I'm about to tell you something." There's no

17 relationship between your sitting there and realizing something. How- ever, it sounds meaningful, and it's the tone of voice and the transition "as" that imply meaning.

Beginning with sensory-based information allows you to make tran- sitions and elicit responses that induce altered states. The sensory base for transitions needs to be something that the person with whom you are working can find. It doesn't need to be something he already has in awareness, but something that he can find. If I sit here and look down at Stan and say "Stan, you can feel the texture of your moustache and as you slide your finger, you can notice that you smiled and stopped. You can even feel your elbow with your other hand and sense the rise and fall of your own chest as you breathe. And you may not know it yet, but you're about to become aware of the temperature of your right foot."

Joe: I still don't understand what you mean by the term transition. If I say to you "You asked a question while you were sitting in a chair" I am making a transition. I'm using the word "while" to define that two things are related. "You asked this" question because you want to know something that's important." Now most things aren't neces- sarily related, but using the word "because" gives them a relationship. i If I say "As you sit in that chair you are breathing in and out" it relates those two things by time. They are not necessarily related, but I relate them in time by saying "as."

I'm talking about relating the sentences by using transitional words. If I say to somebody "You're sitting in this chair. You are blinking your eyes. You are waiting," that doesn't have anywhere near the flowing quality of "You are sitting in the chair and you are blinking your eyes and you are wondering what the point of all of this is." Words like "and," "as," "while," "because," and "when" all build a relationship between parts of a sentence. The particular relationship is one of time That relationship allows people to move from one idea to another without disjunction. It's the same thing as saying "You're standing on the beach feeling the warmth of the sun on your body, and you look back at the beach as you take another stroke in the water." Even though the ideas aren't related, they become more related simply by adding those connecting words. You can take ideas that don't fit together and fit them together by gracefully using those kinds of words. When people listen to language, part of what allows them to flow from one idea to the other are these particular kinds of words. And you are here because you want to learn to be able to do a certain phenomenon

18 called hypnosis. And as you go through the next three days, I'm going to teach you a lot of things that allow it to work easier. Why it works I don't know. But as you begin to try some of these things, you will find in your own experience that they have an impact. Even as I'm talking to you now, I'm using the same kinds of words and that's part of what makes it more meaningful.

Joe: Is the "even as" that you just used, another example of a transition?

Yes. Joe: OK, then I understand what you're saying. You're saying figure out words that will allow bridging between the different sentences you're making.

Yes. I could say "As you sit in that chair, you can feel the warmth of your hand on your arm and you can feel the notebook on your legs. If you listen, you can even hear your own heart beating and you don't really know . . . exactly . . . what you're going to learn in the next three days but you can realize that there are a whole lot of new ideas and experiences and understandings that could be useful."

Now those things don't necessarily connect together logically. The fact that your hand is touching your arm and your notebook is on your leg does not mean that you're going to learn things. However, it sounds meaningful and serves a purpose. The purpose is not one of deception, but one of transition.

A lot of people have the idea that hypnosis is a contest, but to think of hypnosis as a contest is really a waste of time. The question is "How can I structure my communication to make it easiest for someone to accomplish what he wants to?" If somebody comes in wanting to go into a trance to make therapeutic changes, or if I'm using hypnosis for some medical purpose, or control of pain, or to remember things, I want it to be as easy as possible for me to accomplish these things. I want the same thing for the people I communicate with. And as I communicate with people, I use words like "as" to connect ideas together so that they don't have to jump from one idea to another.

Man. Are you saying that you try to link up the suggestion with something in the person's immediate concrete experience to make the suggestion more credible?

Absolutely. You can, in fact, feel your hand on your leg and you can feel your notebook. So I can link something about learning to that. Not only does it become more credible, but it is no longer a jump. I used to think that what made transitional words powerful was only that they

19 made a statement more credible. In addition to that, the fact that people don't have to jump simply makes it much easier for them to actually engage in the process.

When I was working with people doing things like pain control, I used to build upon things that they could verify. "You can feel the pain in your arm, and it hurts you very badly, but you can also feel the beating of your heart, the movement of your toes, and you can feel the sound in your ears as your heart beats. You can feel your glasses on your nose, and it's possible for you to begin to feel that other hand, and that other hand can become very intense in its feelings. You can notice each finger, and in fact, you can take all the feelings in one hand and put them in another."

I used to think that it was the logic of that kind of statement that made it convincing. That so-called logic is part of what makes these statements effective, but more than being logical and convincing, these statements are a set of instructions about what's plausible. That plaus- ibility becomes easier for people to respond to when they stay in a constant, uninterrupted state of consciousness. You see, hypnosis makes it possible for somebody to control his heart rate. But usually when people begin to try to do something like control their heart rate, they start talking to themselves, and then they start thinking about their Aunt Susie, and then they say "I wonder if this will work." Those jumps between ideas represent changes in consciousness—not radical ones but subtle ones.

Building transitions maintains a relationship between statements so that rather than jumping from one state of consciousness to another, you move through them smoothly. And as you move more gracefully from one state of consciousness to another, it's easier to accomplish tasks, especially ones that have to do with your involuntary systems like heart rate and blood pressure. It's not a mechanism of conviction; it's a mechanism that makes it easier.

One of my main criteria for the validity of something is not only whether or not it works, but also how easily it works. I don't believe therapy should be hard on the client or the therapist. When something is hard, it's an indication of what we don't know. Hypnosis should not be difficult or unnatural. It should be the most natural thing in the world. Whenever people have to force themselves and try, that is an indication that the technology you're using is not sophisticated enough. That doesn't make it bad, but it is an indication that there's much more to know. Does that make sense?

Man: I really wasn't following the last sentence.

20 Thank you, You did that beautifully. What I am saying doesn't really make sense; however, it works. I elicit a very different response if I stop using phrases like "as" or "when" or "while" and suddenly use a disjunctive sentence like "Does that make sense?" You start to go back through what I said, and it's difficult to make the transition to the last sentence because there wasn't one. Now while I'm describing this to you, if you consider your experience of what's occurring right at the moment that I'm talking to you, you're moving from one idea to the other. The grace with which you're moving from one idea to the other is what we're talking about. And if I want to know if you consciously understand that—which is a different thing than experiencing it or being able to do it—I'm going to have to be able to make a smooth transition to your conscious understanding. As you sit here consider- ing that, does that make more sense to you?

Man: It seems that you're talking about using a number of bridges; for example the thing about making your style like the patient's, or adopting maybe the mannerisms—

No, I didn't say mannerisms. You might want to mirror body posture, but if the person scratches himself, it's not necessary for you to scratch yourself. If you adopt a person's mannerisms overtly, it has a tendency to intrude into consciousness, and the one thing you don't want to do as a hypnotist is to intrude into that person's consciousness. You want to find more subtle mechanisms: for example, breathing at the same rate. That's not something a person is apt to become con- scious of. But unconsciously he will be aware of it and he'll respond.

Man: OK. Those things are another way of making a link between the ideas that you're trying to put across. I don't know quite how to articulate what I'm thinking: that somehow you're going to be more persuasive if there's a similarity in various subtle means.

Yes, and I do something else that makes it much easier to be successful as a hypnotist. I don't think of it as persuasion. Many people who do hypnosis and write about it talk about it as "persuasion," being "one-up," being in "meta-position," or being "in control." They some- times refer to themselves as "operators," which I always thought was an interesting thing for hypnotists to call themselves. People who do that also write about "resistance," because thinking of hypnosis as control and getting resistance go hand in hand. One way of describing what I'm suggesting is that it is more persuasive. The other way of describing it is that it is more natural. It's more natural for you to

21 respond to things that fit together than to things that don't.

Try something. Close your eyes for a minute. Most of you here have been standing near a grove of trees at some time in your life. And as you stood there and looked up at those trees, you could see the leaves and the branches, and you could smell the air that surrounded the trees. You could feel the weather, the temperature of the air; you might even begin to hear a breeze, and as you hear that breeze you might notice the branches and the leaves responding with movement. You might turn to your left and see a large rhinoceros charging at you.

If that doesn't disjoint your reality, nothing will. In terms of induc- ing an altered state, disjointing can have a value and a function. But its function is not one of gently gliding someone somewhere.

Disjointed communication is a very powerful tool in family therapy. People come in and say things like "I wish my wife would just leave me alone" and I say "OK, lock her in a closet."

"Well, that's not what I want." "OK, what do you want?" "I just want her to stop telling me she wants things." "Do you want her to write you letters?" Those are not natural transitions, and they elicit different kinds of responses. They are very useful in the context of family therapy when things have got to go quickly, and you often have to work around the limitations of the conscious mind by battering it back and forth.

You can use the absence of transitions to elicit very, very powerful responses. Here we're talking about smooth inductions into altered states. You can also pump people into altered states very quickly by communicating without transitions that are logical, meaningful, and smooth. We'll get to that later on. That's a more radical method, and I don't want to teach you both at the same time. I want to teach you one and then the other. It's always easier to understand when things are sorted into pieces.

In my teaching I've noticed something I'll mention to you. It's a funny thing about learning and the way people make generalizations. If you tell people "You know, I really think that Kansas City is a nice town" they'll say "What's the matter with Dallas?" This isn't idiosyn- cratic to psychological and communication arts; it's a very pervasive thing. In my teaching around the country if I tell people "This is something that will work" somehow or other they get the idea that something else won't work. And I'm not saying not using transitions

22 won't work. I'm saying using transitions is helpful. It amplifies what you're doing and makes it better. The opposite can work just as well. but you have to use it differently.

In the context of hypnosis, you do not go fast by going quickly. You go fast by going slowly. You simply put your subject's conscious mind in abeyance. Or you can describe it as switching what is in conscious- ness by leading him into an altered state of consciousness. It's not that he loses his conscious mind and he can't see or hear or think; it's that the same paradigm that operates his conscious mind is not at work. It's still there, it hasn't disappeared, but when you shift him to an altered state, you can logically and systematically and rigorously build new learning. The first step is to learn to get a person into an altered state by using gentle transitions.

Man: I've seen the utility of transitions, especially when you're dealing with relatively unrelated concepts. Is it necessary when they're related—say in relaxation, when you're dealing with words like "feel- ings of tranquility, peaceful, feeling quiet, feeling very good"? Is it necessary to keep tying transitions onto those types of phrases?

Well, "necessary" is a funny word. Necessary always relates to the outcome. It's certainly not necessary; the question is "What is it that you want to accomplish?"

Man: What becomes the measuring device for knowing how often it's most beneficial to use those transitions?

Your eyes. As you begin to do this you're going to notice that people look different in altered states than they do when they're in their normal waking trances; and as you begin to notice that, you begin to notice when you do things which create discontinuity in their experien- ces. Very good vision is necessary in order to use hypnosis, because most of the time people are not providing you with as much feedback as they would normally. They're not talking much, and they're not behaving as obviously. In one sense this makes it easier, because there's not as much to confuse you, but it also requires that you have more visual acuity. If you don't have that, you'll end up doing what many hypnotists do—relying completely on finger signals to get yes/no answers to your questions. That isn't necessary. It's a good thing to know about in case you're not getting the feedback you want, or to use while you develop your sensitivity. However, if you have good vision, you can get any feedback you want without having to build in a feedback mechanism artificially. People respond externally, in ways that you can see, to what's going on in them internally.

23 If people have the internal experience of being disjointed when you say "quiet," "relaxed," or "comfortable" because they don't feel that way, you will see nonverbal responses which will indicate that. And if you see those kinds of things, it makes sense to mention them. "Some- one says 'Why don't you relax?' and you try to relax, but it's difficult and you can't, and you say to yourself 'If only I could.' 1 could tell you 'Be comfortable' but it's hard to be comfortable deliberately. But it's very easy to think about a raindrop resting on a leaf." Even though those two things aren't related, people will relax a lot more thinking about a raindrop than they will trying to relax.

One of the things that impressed me more than anything else about Milton Erickson was that he did not use hypnosis as a direct tool. If he wanted someone to be colorblind, he didn't say "Become colorblind." He'd say "Have you ever read a book? What does it mean to have a book read (red)? It doesn't mean anything at all. Somebody told me one time that there was a 'blue Monday.' I said to myself 'a blue Monday. That doesn't mean a thing. These things go together some- how, but they don't have any meaning.' They don't mean anything to me. They don't need to mean anything to you." The difference between Erickson and the other hypnotists that I've watched and listened to and studied with, is that Erickson didn't have any resistant clients. Either he selected his patients really well, or he did something important that other people weren't doing. Milton watched how people responded, and he gave them what was appropriate for them. Using transitions is one thing that is appropriate with anyone . who is a native speaker of English, because transitions are part of the basic structure of English; they are part of how our language is built. And as you do hypnosis, if' you use transitions, they will help you.

I saw Milton do an official trance induction once, which was a very rare phenomenon, believe me. Most of the time people went in and started talking to him about intellectual things . . . and suddenly the time had passed. But once he officially induced a trance. He had a person sit down, and he said "And as you sit there I want you to stare at a spot on the wall, and as you stare at that spot you can realize that you're doing the same thing now that you did when you very first went to school and learned the task of writing numbers and the letters of the alphabet. You're learning . . . learning about something that you really don't know about. And even though you haven't realized it, already your breathing has changed (his voice tempo slows down), and you're becoming more comfortable and more relaxed." Those transi-

24 tions helped to build continuity. Now what going to school and learn- ing about numbers and letters of the alphabet have to do with becom- ing more relaxed is tenuous at best.

However, the meaning of any communication—not just in hypnosis but in life—is not what you think it means; it's the response it elicits. If you try to compliment somebody and he's insulted, the meaning of your communication is an insult. If you say he's insulted because he didn't understand you, that's a justification for your inability to com- municate. The communication itself was still an insult. You can either justify things and explain them, or you can learn from them. My preference is to learn from them. So if I communicate and someone takes it as an insult, next time I change the way I communicate. And if in the future I want to insult that person, I know exactly how to do it!

While transitions are not the whole ball game, they are a useful tool. There's no set formula in hypnosis. The only thing that you can count on is that when you communicate with people, they will respond. If you provide them with enough different communications, you can find what they will respond to appropriately.

What I've told you so far is just the beginning. I also want you to pay attention to your tempo. Tempo is very, very powerful. A rather traditional hypnotist named Ernest Hilgard proved after forty years of research that there's no relationship between a person's ability to alter his state of consciousness and the hypnotist's voice tempo. He has statistical proof of this. But if you pay attention to your own expe- rience as I am talking to you right now and when ... I change my tempo . . . to another tempo . . . which is distinctly . . . different . . . and slower ... it has a noticeable impact. As long as it has a noticeable impact, I don't care what "science" says.

Now, I said in the beginning that I'm a modeler. A modeler only builds descriptions. The descriptions are only ways of getting you to pay attention to things. Right now these descriptions are designed to get you to pay attention to your voice tone and tempo. The first hypnotist I ever met was sitting down trying to put someone in a trance when I walked in the room. He was going to teach me how to do hypnosis, and he was talking in an unpleasant high nasal voice saying "I want you to feel very relaxed." Even recognized that I couldn't feel relaxed with a whining person talking to me. But he "knew" that all you needed to do was have one tone of voice, because it says in all the books that you're supposed to use a monotone. He "knew" that it doesn't matter what tone you use, as long as it's the same one.

25 Now, talking in a monotone is only a way of avoiding being incon- gruent, as far as I can tell. If you use the same tone of voice all the time then you probably won't be incongruent. If you are incongruent, no one will notice it, because there's no variation in your voice. However, the variation in your voice can also be a vehicle that will add to what you're doing. Man: I noticed that when you were giving suggestions, you some- times used words that imply control; words like "you will feel" or "you are feeling" versus "this is something that may happen." Do you differentiate between when you choose controlling versus non- controlling words? Yes. The guideline I use is this: I don't want anyone that I do hypnosis with to ever fail at anything. If I'm making a suggestion about something that can be verified easily, I will probably use words such as "could" or "might"—what we call "modal operators of possibility." "Your arm may begin to rise. . . ." That way, if what I've asked for ' doesn't occur, the person won't have "failed." If I'm making a sugges- tion about something that is completely unverifiable, I'm more likely to use words that imply causation: "This makes you sink deeper into trance" or "That causes you to become more relaxed." Since the suggestion is unverifiable, he won't be able to conclude that he's failed. . If I've used five or six modal operators of possibility, and the person responds to them all, at that point I'm probably safe switching to words that imply causation. However, if my next suggestion is very critical, I may continue to use modal operators of possibility. The basic guideline is to make sure no one fails at anything.

Many hypnotists push people to the limits of what they can do by giving them what are called susceptibility tests. These hypnotists put their clients in an altered state and attempt to do a series of graded hypnotic tasks, and the clients accomplish some and fail at others. What usually happens is that somehow or other both the hypnotists and the clients get the idea that there are things they can't do.

When I was teaching at the university and was running hypnosis courses in the evening, a lot of people would come to those courses and say "Well, I've been in lots of trances, and I can only go to a certain level." I don't know where this idea about levels came from. Somehow or other the quality of your hypnotic trance is measured in height— self-esteem goes up, but in hypnosis you go down. It takes a really altered state for some people to see a positive hallucination. Other people see positive hallucinations all the time; they call it thinking. If

26 I'm a hypnotist and I push someone into a position, it sets him up for failure. If I say "You will open your eyes and see a six-foot French poodle" and he opens his eyes and there's no French poodle, he may think he can't have positive hallucinations. If he takes that instruction as a comment about himself rather than about that particular hypno- tist, he will probably believe that he can't do it.

Typically, clients will come in and say "Well, gee, I've always wanted to be able to have a positive hallucination, but I can't." I know that everybody is capable of it and has probably already done it a number of times. When they tell me they can't, it's an indication that something has convinced them that it's outside the range of their capabilities, which will only make it that much harder for me to be able to do it. I have to sneak around their beliefs in order to get them to have that experience. Alternatively, I can simply accept this belief and say "Well, you know, it's a genetic limitation, but it isn't a necessary phenomenon to be able to accomplish things, unless you're a civil engineer."

That's what civil engineers do for a living, you know. They go out and look at valleys that have nothing in them and hallucinate freeways and dams, and then they measure them. They just have to have certain hallucinations and not others. Seeing a freeway where there isn't one is "natural," it's called "work." If they see little blue men walking up and down the freeway, then they're in trouble.

Since I don't want people to fail and make generalizations which are not true, I proceed very, very slowly in producing verifiable effects like the classic hypnotic phenomena. I haven't known many people who have a great need to have arm levitation or negative hallucinations. Most people have those all the time and don't know it. Those phe- nomena don't have any value in and of themselves.

What I'm concerned about is that I lead people through experiences that convince them they can get whatever changes they want for themselves. Whether they want to be able to control pain when they go to the dentist, to change their sleeping habits, or to make very pervasive psychological changes, I want to help them get those results, because hypnosis. can be a very powerful tool to expedite psychotherapeutic change.

Many people ask "What can you use hypnosis for?" The question is not " What can you do with hypnosis specifically?" but "How can you use hypnosis to do whatever you want to do?" Hypnosis is not a cure; it's a set of tools. If you have a set of mechanic's wrenches, that doesn't mean you can fix the car. You still have to use the wrenches in a

27 particular way to fix it. This is the most misunderstood aspect of hypnosis; it's treated as a thing. Hypnosis is not a thing; it's a set of procedures that can be used to alter someone's state of consciousness. The question about which state of consciousness you use to work with a particular problem is really a different issue. It's an important issue, and it's one we're going to deal with later. But the first thing to learn is how to move somebody quickly and gracefully from one state of consciousness to another.

Exercise 3

I want you to take another ten minutes and do the same exercise that you did before in the same group of three. This time add the refine- ments that we have been talking about. Some time has passed since I described them, so I want to go back through them in detail. This time, rather than first describing the experience to the person, have him sit back and close his eyes, and begin by describing elements of his present experience. I want you to use three statements that are pacing statements—descriptions of verifiable experience. "You're sitting in a chair. . . . You can feel where your body touches the chair. . . . You can feel how your arms are crossed . . . where your foot touches the floor ... the temperature of your face ... the movement of your fingers. . . . You can hear the sounds in the room of other people moving. . . . You can feel the temperature of the air. . . . You can hear the sound of my voice. . , .

All of those statements can be verified. I want you to say three sentences that can be verified, and then I want you to attach something which is not readily verifiable. You can attach any statement that is a . description of where you want them to go: ". . . and you're becoming more relaxed." ", . . as you continue to get more comfortable." ". . . and you don't know what I'm going to say next." So you make three pacing statements, use a transitional word, and add one state- ment that leads them in the direction you want them to go. "You are breathing, . . . There are sounds in the room. . . , You can hear people moving . . . and you wonder, really wonder, exactly what you're doing." Make the transitions sound as natural as possible. One of you will be the subject, and the other two will take turns saying a set of pacing and leading statements. After each of you has done two sets, I want you to begin to include descriptions of the same experience you used the first two times you did the exercise in your pacing and leading statements. ". . . while you take time and go back and

28 think about when you were jogging." Notice how it's different this time. Again, it will help if you pace nonverbally: breathe at the same rate as the person you're talking to, or use the tempo of your voice to match his breathing. And it's essential that what you say is congruent with how you say it.

When your subject appears to be into the experience as deeply or deeper than he was before, I want you to start violating these princi- ples, one at a time. Suddenly make your voice tempo totally different. Notice whether or not that has an impact. Then go back to what you were doing before, and then change your tone. Then try not using transitions. "You're sitting there. You're comfortable. You're relaxed. You don't know what's going to happen." Notice what happens when you do that. Try adding things that are not relevant, "You can feel your fingers on the keys . . . and you know that there's a kitchen somewhere in this building." "You can feel your feet against the floor . . . and you feel the enthusiasm and interest of politicians in Washington."

Concentrate first on using all the elements that we have discussed. When you have established a good solid state, vary just one little piece and notice what happens. Then go back to using all the elements and then vary another little piece. Notice what happens to the person's face, to her breathing, to her skin color, to her lower lip size, to the move- ment of her eyelids. People don't talk much in trance, so you're going to have to get your feedback in other ways. If you check it out afterwards, it will be too late. You have to be able to check it out while it's going on at each moment, and the best tool to do that with is going to be your vision.

Take three or four minutes each to do this. Go ahead.

* * * * *

Did you notice that doing the exercise this way amplified the process even more? What I have been trying to show you this morning by grading these things—by having you just do it, then giving you a little more instruction, and then having you do it again—is that I'd like you to think of hypnosis as a process of amplification. If you think of hypnosis as a way of persuading, in the end you won't be able to do nearly as much with it. If you think of it as a way of controlling, you won't be able to do nearly as much. We picked one situation in a person's experience in which she responded in a particular way, and as

29 you used these particular techniques, you could amplify that response.

Woman: What about getting arm levitation and things like that? Is that amplification?

Hypnotists are very clever in going after responses that they know are going to happen anyway. Arm levitation is one of the things many hypnotists go for. And one of the first instructions to lead to arm lighter." Try taking a really deep breath, and notice what happens to your hands. . . . Your hands have a little light feeling, because when you breathe in and your chest goes up, that pulls your hands up. So if you give your instruction for light hands when the person breathes in, it will be true.

Good hypnotists pick things like that which they know will happen. However, they're not all conscious of how they're doing it. There's an old induction method you see in the movies where the hypnotist swings a watch back and forth. The hypnotist says "The watch is going back and forth slowly, and you're looking at the watch, and you see it as time passes before you. As you watch that watch go back and forth, your eyes are going to begin to grow tired." Of course they're going to grow tired! If you stare at anything long enough, your eyes will get tired. Around the turn of the century people used to do hypnosis by having the subject look up at something. The subject would be sitting down and the hypnotist would stand up in front of her, hold up two fingers, and say "OK, I want you to stare at these two fingers, and as you look at those fingers, I want you to watch them intensely. . . . And as your eyes begin to feel tired, your eyelids are going to grow heavy and you'll know that you're beginning to go into a hypnotic trance." If you stare at anything that's above you long enough, your eyes are going to grow tired. "And as your eyes begin to grow tired, you begin to notice changes in the focus of your vision." If you stare at anything long enough, your focus will change. "And your eyelids are going to begin to grow heavy. You're going to feel the need to close them." Of course you will. Everyone does all the time. It's called blinking.

If I then tell you "And when your eyes close, they're going to stay shut" the odds are pretty high that they will. I've taken three pieces of verifiable experience, and I've connected them with one which is not verifiable, I've done it with a natural transition and with a flow that matches everything in your experience. I've built a step-by-step process that leads to an outcome. I'm saying "You are having this experience,

30 and that leads to this experience, which leads to this experience" and these three are all verifiable. Your eyes are going to grow tired; your eyelids are going to want to close; your focus is going to change. You don't know consciously that those things are a natural part of expe- rience, but as I describe them, one naturally leads to the next. Then when I add on something which is not a natural part of your expe- rience, you are already following step by step, so you just go on to the next one. It's not that you're convinced. You never even thought about whether it was true or false. You're just following along. Using transi- tions like that allows you to follow along easily.

If you think of hypnosis as if it's a state of controlling someone or persuading someone, the loser is going to be you. You will limit the number of people you will be effective with. You'll also lose in your own personal life, because you're going to start worrying about who's in control of you. My experience is that people are much more respect- ful of themselves in hypnotic altered states than they are in the waking state. I can give someone a suggestion which is negative and harmful in the waking state, and she will be much more apt to carry it out than if she is in a trance. If you think about the things that people have told you to do which were unpleasant, but which you did anyway, you were probably in the waking state at the time you did them. In trances it's very difficult to get somebody to do something which does not lead toward something meaningful and positive. People seem to be more discerning in altered states. It's a lot easier to trick or take advantage of someone in the waking state than in any other state of consciousness I know of.

I believe that hypnosis is really biofeedback. However, a biofeed- back machine does not tell you to slow your pulse down. It only tells you where it is now. You have to aim toward the outcome of your pulse being slower, or your blood pressure being different. The machine only provides the feedback. As a hypnotist you can do both. You can provide people with communications that match what's going on, just like a biofeedback machine. You can then start adding other things step by step that lead them to somewhere else, and they will be able to go along naturally and comfortably. You can create a situation in which all they have to do is respond—the one thing people do all the time, and the thing they do best.

It is a lot easier to make personal changes in an altered state than it is in the waking state. The fact that you don't have the choices that you want is a function of the state of consciousness that you're in. Your

31 normal waking state, by definition, is a description of the capabilities and the limitations that you have. If you are in a state in which you are limited, and you try to make changes in those limitations with your normal state of consciousness, it's a "catch-22" situation. Those-limita- tions will constrain the way you try to deal with the limitations, and you're going to have a lot of difficulty. If you go into an altered state, you will not have the same limitations that you usually do. You will have limitations, but they will be different ones. If you go back and forth between altered states, you can change yourself so much that your waking state won't resemble what it was before.

How many of you in here are clinicians? How many of you at some time have changed so much that you never went back to who you were? . . . And how many of you have never done that? ... I was hoping one of you would raise your hand so I could say "How dare you be a clinician!" An agent of change unable to change—that would be the ultimate hypocrisy. To me, hypnosis is only a way of expediting change. All we're working on here is learning to make natural transi- tions from one state to another.

Man: I keep wondering how you can tell when someone goes into a trance. You asked us to notice the changes, and I saw some, but how do I know if that means she's going into a trance?

OK. What kinds of changes did you all see when you did the inductions? I asked you to pay attention to what resulted in change. What changes did you notice?

Woman: Her face muscles seemed to relax, and her face got flatter. That is characteristic. In trance there is a flattening or a flaccidity of the muscles in the face, and there is a symmetry which is uncharacteris- tic of the waking state. I've found that first there is an intensification of facial asymmetry as the person begins to enter a trance. You know you've got a fairly deep trance when you get symmetry again—a symmetry that is more balanced than the typical symmetry in the waking state. As a person comes back out of a trance, you can deter- mine where they are in the process of coming back to the normal state of consciousness. They go from extreme symmetry in their face through a relatively asymmetrical state to whatever their normal symmetry is. What else did you see?

Man: There were little twitches of the fingers or other parts of the body.

Any unconscious movements—jerky, involuntary kinds of shudder movements—are really good indicators of a developing trance state.

32 Woman: The breathing really changed.

I'm glad you said it that way. People's breathing patterns vary considerably in their normal state, and when they go into an altered state, whatever breathing pattern is characteristic for them will change. If you have a very visually-oriented client who breathes shallowly and high in the chest in a normal state of consciousness, she'll often shift to breathing deeply from lower in her stomach. If you've got a very kinesthetically-oriented person who typically, breathes slowly from her stomach, she'll shift to some other breathing pattern. Breathing patterns are linked to sensory modes, and they will change as a person alters consciousness.

Woman: If you see a person who typically has an asymmetrical face, does that mean that there is a lot of polarity, or a lot of difference between his conscious and unconscious?

1 wouldn't draw that conclusion. If you see an exaggerated amount of facial asymmetry, you know something unusual is going on. I conclude that there's some imbalance: either chemical, or behavioral, or both. I wouldn't label this a difference between conscious and unconscious.

Man: I noticed that as people went deeper, their hands got warm and flushed.

Especially as you get into the deeper stages of trance, there will be muscle relaxation and an increased flow of blood in the extremities.

Man: What's the relationship between the eyes rolling completely backwards and altered states?

None that I know of. If the eyes roll all the way up in the head, that's a good indicator of a fairly deep trance. However, lots of people go into a profound trance with their eyes open, so it's not necessarily an indication of an altered state.

Man: What does it mean when you get eye movement? There are two kinds of movement. One is an eyelid flutter, and the other one is seeing the eyeball moving behind the eyelid, but the lid itself is not fluttering. The latter is called "rapid eye movement" and is an indicator of visualization.

OK. There are these general signs of entering trance, and in addition there will be many other changes that you can observe which will be unique to the person you are working with. These changes will simply be indications that the person is shifting states of consciousness. When you ask what a trance state looks like, the question is "which state?" and "for whom?" If you observe the person's muscle tonus, skin color,

33 and breathing pattern before you do an induction, you know what their normal state looks like. As you do the induction, when you observe changes in those parameters, you know that the person's state is altering.

In addition to watching for general signs of changes in someone's state of consciousness, you need to watch for signs of being in or out of rapport. The person will either make responses that are congruent or that are incongruent with what you are asking for, and this will be a good indication of the degree of rapport. Of course, as you lose rapport, the person will begin to return to their waking state.

Summary A. Trance can be thought of as the amplification of responses and ex- perience. If you describe an experience, talking about what has to be there, you will help the person amplify his/her response. B. Matching builds rapport and is the basis for leading someone into an altered state. You can match any part of the person's behavioral output. It's particularly useful to match something like breathing rate which is always occurring, but is something the person isn't likely to be conscious of. If you match breathing rate with your speech tempo, you can simply slow down the rate of your speech and the other person's breathing will become slower. Another way to match is to verbalize what is present in the person's ongoing experience. "You are smiling as you look at me, you can hear my voice as I talk. . . ." C. Smooth transitions make it possible for the person to easily go into

an altered state. Connecting words like "as" "while" and "and"

make your transitions graceful. D. General signs of trance: first facial asymmetry, then more than

usual facial symmetry. General muscle relaxation, small involun- tary muscle movements, flushing, changes in breathing pattern.

II

Simple Inductions

This afternoon we're going to describe, demonstrate, and have you practice very systematically a variety of specific hypnotic induction techniques, so that you will begin to have choice in how you induce trance. What you did this morning is all you will need with some people, but you will not be successful with others if that is all you have in your repertoire.

Traditional hypnotists have done research which "proves" that only a certain percentage of people are hypnotizable. The way they proved that is by using exactly the same induction with everyone, so of course they are only successful with a certain percentage. If you have only one induction, it's going to work with some people and fail with others. Most traditional hypnotists don't even bother to add some of the basic pieces you used this morning, such as matching your voice tempo to the person's breathing. The wider the range of induction possibilities you have, the more people you will be successful with. This morning we spent some time discussing what physiological signs accompany an altered state of consciousness. You were able to detect at least some of the distinctive changes in muscle tonus, breath- ing patterns, skin color, lower lip size, etc., in the person you were putting into an altered state. Those particular signs of an altered state are precisely what you will be watching and listening for this afternoon as you continue learning about inductions.

The basic principle of doing a hypnotic induction is to watch for the physiological signs of developing altered states, and to do anything

34

35 you can to amplify those signs. There are also specific ways of proceed- ing. There are generalizations—patterns that you can use which are likely to lead in the direction of altering someone's state. I remind you that all the generalizations we offer are lies: that is, they will not work for every person or at every time. They are good generalizations because they force you to go to sensory experience and notice what's going on. Always give up a generalization or a pattern in favor of what is actually being presented to you in the way of sensory feedback. We will be presenting these patterns to give you specific ways to proceed. As you proceed, if you see signs of trance developing in the other person, continue; what you are doing is working. If you don't see those signs developing, do anything else.

The first two methods I am going to demonstrate are similar to some of the methods you already used this morning. However, they are important and useful enough that I want to describe them in a slightly different way.

Verbal Pacing and Leading: 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise

This morning you did verbal pacing and leading when you made three sensory-based, verifiable statements, used a transition, and added a non-verifiable statement. You can make this method more elegant by making your beginning statements almost entirely externally-oriented, and then gradually increasing the number of non- verifiable internally-oriented statements you make. Milton Erickson often described trance as having an inward focus of attention. By gradually increasing the number of internally-oriented statements, you use pacing and leading to shift the person's attention inward.

So when you practice this method, start by making five statements: four which are sensory-based, and then one which is internally- oriented. Connect them with some transitional word like "and" or "as." "You are listening to the sound of my voice and you can notice the colors in the room as you feel your arm on the chair and you can begin to have a sense of contentment." Then you make three verifiable statements followed by two non-verifiable, then two and three, one and four, and at that point you should have a fairly nice trance state developing.

I would like you all to think for a moment: what would constitute an example of a non-sensory-based description that you could offer in conjunction with your verifiable statements? I want to make sure you

36 understand what constitutes a non-sensory-based description of an internal experience.

Man: And you will become comfortable. Woman: And you will experience the feeling of delight. Woman: Satisfied. "And you will be satisfied with the progress you are making." Man: And you will feel some things being different. Man: And you will remember pleasant memories. "And you will remember a specific pleasant memory." Man: Are you intentionally using the future tense? Actually, I suggest that you use present progressive tense for now. "And you are becoming aware of the delightful experience, and you are beginning now to remember. . . ." "Now you are becoming aware of the sense of being able to learn about hypnosis."

Would you come up here, Barb? I'd like to demonstrate. There are two things that the rest of you can attend to as I proceed. One is to keep track of the observable physiological changes that Barb goes through as she alters her consciousness. The other is to keep track of what I am doing verbally, because 1 am going to be using the pattern I've just been talking about. That way you can correlate what I am doing with her responses.

Now, Barb, with your eyes opened or closed—it's entirely a matter of your own comfort in this—I would like you to sit there and allow me to offer you some verbal descriptions. One thing you might consider doing is questioning whether or not the verbal descriptions I am offering you are accurate for your ongoing experience. For example, at this moment you are sitting there and you can hear the tone of my voice. And you can feel the warmth of your fingers being interlaced.

What just happened? I hope you can detect that, because Barb's response just now is an important beginning.

Man: She was nodding. Yes she was, but there was something even more profound. Man: She closed her eyes and opened them. Well, her pupils dilated. The part that I think you could have seen even from the back row is the smoothing out of her facial muscles. You all know the phenomenon called the "blank stare"? You are talking to someone, and suddenly you have the feeling that you are all alone? There's a technical term for it in Northern California called "spacing out." I said two things to Barb, both of which she could immediately

37 verify. As she verified that those two statements were true, and espe- cially as she verified the second one, there was a sudden congruence between what she was hearing and what she was feeling, which allowed her to begin to change the way she was perceiving the world around her. She began to go into an altered state. Let me go on a bit so you have a chance to watch this.

As I said, Barb, you can do this with your eyes open or closed, whichever one is more comfortable. And as you sit there, you can feel the support that the chair offers you along your lower back, and you can feel the place where the rungs are supporting your feet just in front of your heels. And you can notice, as you sit there, the warmth where your hands are resting on your legs and thighs, and a sense of growing comfort. And the next time that your eyes begin to close, simply allow them to stay there and enjoy a growing sense of comfort internally. (Someone sneezes.) The sound of a sneeze washes through you, leaving you even more comfortable. And as you sit there breathing in . . . and out . . . you have a growing sense . . . of comfort. . . . Listen for those particular sounds . . . and enjoy a growing sense . . . of securi- ty . . for the purposes that we have here. . . .

At the moment, Barb, I'd like your unconscious mind to make a choice . . . about giving you a sense of refreshment . . . and renewal . . as you sit there listening to the sound of my voice . . . as well as the tinkling of the china . . . but with a sense of growing independence of your surroundings . . . and a comfort . . . internal . . . and for the purposes of what we have come here to do . . . as a demonstration . . . you have already succeeded very well. . . .

And I am going to request of your unconscious mind . . . that it cause . . . one . . . or both . . . of your hands and arms . . . to begin to lift, if indeed . . . it is appropriate . . . in small . . . honest . . . un- conscious movements. . . . And you can wonder . . . as you sit there . . . breathing in . . . and out . . . whether or not . . . that particular response will be the one selected by your unconscious mind .:. . or . . . equally useful . . . for the purposes we have here this afternoon . . . would be for your unconscious . . . to give you a sense ... of comfort . . . and if more appropriate ... to cause you " . . with a sense of refreshment . . . to slowly drift back and rejoin us . . . here . . . in this room . . . pleased with how quickly you could learn . . . these initial phases . . . of altering your state of conscious- ness. . . . In either case . . . I would like this opportunity . . . to ask your

38 unconscious to prepare some material. . . . The carpenter who approaches . . . the construction of a building. . . has . . . as his basic . . . tools to begin with . . . boards . . . nails . . . and the tools he brings. . . . The boards and the nails . . . have no meaning . . . un- til they are assembled . . . in a particular form . . . and attached to one another, . . . So, too, with little marks on paper. . . . The particu- lar marks on paper that we call the alphabet are constructed ... by small . . . boards or sticks. . . . And it's a lot easier to see . . . clearly . . . the finished product . . . that the carpenter . . . can construct . . . a house . . . a garage . . . than it is to see that same form . . . while the boards . . . and the nails are still separated . . . one from the other. . . .

There are natural . . . ways . . . of perceiving . . . which can be learned. . . . From the air . . . an entire skyline . . . for example . . . the San Francisco waterfront . . . can be taken in with a single glance . . . and its meaning discerned. . . . And indeed . . . from an airplane it's much easier to see such things , . . and to grasp ... the entire . . . meaning of the waterfront of San Francisco . . . than it is to wander down among the buildings. . . . The same is true in many other areas of our life. . . .

So whether your unconscious chooses . . . to have you return with a sense of refreshment . . . or causes you to go in deeper, so signal me by causing one or both hands and arms to lift. . . . It's a choice that Heave entirely to your unconscious. . . . I would request that whichever choice it makes, it begin to assemble those materials . . . that I have been referring to . . . so that your perceptions can be ordered . . . in a new and more efficient way. . . . (She opens her eyes and stretches,)

As usual, I spent only the first four or so utterances staying with the pattern I said I was going to use, and then just went into everything else I wanted to do. I began by making statements that could be immediately verified in Barb's experience. At any point in time, we all have available to us a potentially infinite amount of sensory-grounded experience. The artistry is in knowing what part of sensory experience to choose to mention. It's particularly useful to choose anything that you guess would be outside of her awareness until you mention it. I was fairly certain, for example, that she was aware of the tone of my voice. And indeed she was. That came as no surprise. However, she was less aware of the feeling of the rung of the chair and the support it offered to the heels of her feet. So when I mentioned that, you could see more

39 observable changes in her. She had to change her present conscious- ness in order to verify that what I said was true.

Two things happened by that maneuver. Number one, I gained cred- ibility; what I said matched her experience. The second thing is that since she wasn't attending to the sensation of her feet touching the rung of the chair until I mentioned it, it was also a covert instruction to change her present consciousness—in this case in the direction of attending to a body sensation.

I made half a dozen remarks like that. Then there was a sudden shift in the kind of verbalizations I offered Barb. What did I do?

Woman: Then you went into metaphor, I did something else before that. Man: You started leading. Yes. First I was just pacing: making statements describing her expe- rience. And then what kind of statements did I make?

Man: Suggestions to close her eyes. I made suggestions about eye closure, but she was already doing that. We call that an incorporation. She was doing something, so I incorporated it into what I said.

Right after eye closure, I started making statements about internal states that I wanted her to develop. I said things like "a growing sense of comfort and security as you sit here." For me, the nonverbal signs that she already offered—slower breathing, muscle relaxation, etc.— have the name "comfort." They may not for Barb. The word "comfort" has as many different meanings as there are people in this room. When I use words like "comfort," I'm no longer talking in sensory-grounded terms. I'm suggesting that such states develop in her—whatever those words may mean to her.

I hope that you all have some appreciation for what the rest of my statements were about. I have to explain that Barb had asked me earlier for a particular kind of change with reference to an academic skill that she wants. I told a series of metaphors directed toward preparation for that change. You may be able to find some way of making sense out of that, and you may not. She has a way of making sense out of it, and that's the important thing.

Barb: I didn't at the time. It was just so many words. I just quit trying to deal with it consciously.

Exactly. And that's one of the responses that I want. "It was so many words that I just quit trying to make sense out of it. What the hell are

40 you talking about? Carpenters and the San Francisco skyline. And from a plane, it's different than it is walking around among the buildings,"

In other words, the latter part was tailored to the request that she had made of me earlier. As I told the metaphors, her conscious mind did not understand. However, I received signals that her unconscious understood the reference and was beginning the preparations that I had requested of it. Are there any questions about what I did?

Man: You decided not to pursue the hand levitation? No, I offered her a choice. I always do. Man: Didn't you get some resistance to levitation and then give her an alternative?

There was no resistance. Her hand began to lift. The movements in her fingers and thumb were already there. Then I offered the second alternative, and her unconscious selected that one. If I had not offered the second choice, her hand would have continued to rise.

I made suggestions about hand and arm levitation and got twitches, which almost always precede the actual movement. At that point I remembered I was supposed to be demonstrating inductions, not trance phenomena. So I made the suggestion about her bringing herself out with a sense of refreshment and renewal and delight that she had achieved so much so quickly.

A good hypnotist is like a good government. The less you do to achieve the outcome effectively, the better you are at your job. My way of thinking metaphorically about what Barb and I did is that she allowed me to enter a loop with her in which I could feed back certain parts of her experience which allowed her to alter her state of con- sciousness radically. But the entire time, she was leading in the sense that I was being responsive to the changes in her, incorporating those, and then making a suggestion about where we ought to go next. She accepted all the suggestions I made to her. If she had indicated at any point that I was making a suggestion that was not appropriate for her, I would have offered alternatives.

Man: How would you know when a suggestion was inappropriate for her?

A reversal of all the growing signs of trance would indicate that. Any reversal of the muscle flaccidity, the breathing changes, the lower lip size changes, or skin color changes would have indicated to me that I had just proposed something that was not appropriate for her.

Man: I was wondering what you thought of her nervous laugh at the

41 very beginning when you said her hands were experiencing warmth. She laughed but you ignored it.

'That was when I interrupted and said "I hope you noticed that response." The response I was referring to was the muscle flaccidity, the pupil dilation and an immediate body sway. Immediately following my comments she laughed. She would not have laughed if I had gone on with the induction. Her laughter was a recognition that it was working. I had said only two sentences and it was already working and she detected a change. Is that true, Barb?

Barb: Yes. So the laugh would never have emerged if I had gone on with the induction. Her response was so immediate and distinct that I wanted to make sure all of you noticed.

Woman: What happened to me when you did the induction is kind of strange. I was trying to watch you, because that was my job, and instead I went through the whole thing myself. I was really embar- rassed because my hand was coming up and—

Well, you had lots of company. About thirty other people sitting out Where did, too, so don't be too embarrassed.

Larry: Can you give us more words that you use for internal responses—things you were guessing she was feeling inside?

Well, I wasn't guessing. I was leading at that point, I was asking her to create those experiences. I didn't use the words "security" and "comfort" based on what I was seeing, because 1 don't know if the signs that she was offering me mean security and comfort for her. I just know those are general words that are often associated with muscle relaxation.

Larry: Right. I am trying to find out other words you would use for 'that, There are lots. You can use words like ease, peace, serenity, calm- ness, or being centered. They are all just words. They don't have any

intrinsic meaning. They are interpreted individually by each person for his or her own needs. I'm insisting on making a clear distinction between sensory- grounded descriptions and non-sensory-grounded descriptions. The sensory-grounded descriptions allow me to get into synchrony with her. The non-sensory-grounded descriptions allow me to offer her very general procedures that she can use idiosyncratically. Her interpreta- tion of these will be rich and meaningful and individual to her. I have

42 no idea what they are, but that's fine. That's content, and that belongs to her. My job is to run the process.

This is a very simple word induction, and you can always fall back on it. It will work. It just takes longer than some of the other fancier ones. When you use it, remember to connect the statements about sensory- grounded experience to the statements about internally-oriented states. This is called "causal modeling." The simplest and weakest way to connect statements is to use the word "and." "You hear the sound of my voice and you feel the warmth where your hands are resting on your thighs and a growing sense of comfort and, . . ."In the induction I did with Barb, I started linking with the word "and," and then I moved to a stronger form of linkage. "The feeling of warmth and support as your body fits against the chair will allow you to grow even more comfortable."

There are three kinds of linkage. The simplest is "X and Y." The next stronger form is "As X, Y" "As you listen to the sound of my voice, you will become more comfortable," or" When I reach over and touch you on the knee, you will have a sense of dropping into an even more relaxed state." " While you are sitting there listening to the sound of my voice, your unconscious mind can prepare a particularly interesting recall of a pleasant childhood experience." The strongest form "X causes Y" uses words like "cause" or "make" "The lifting of your arm will make you drift off into a pleasant memory."

So the pattern is to say four things that are immediately verifiable, and then connect them with an "and" to an internally-oriented state that you are proposing. First you have the pacing and then the leading. As you proceed, you can gradually increase the number of internally- oriented statements, and you can gradually go from a weaker form of linkage to a stronger form.

Linkage can be very powerful. It's astounding how much linkage goes right by people's conscious minds, and yet has an impact. Once I literally had somebody go totally blind in a seminar. I was demonstrat- ing something, and I said "All you need to be able to do is see in order to do this" I had linked seeing to being able to do the task. After I went through the demonstration, a woman raised her hand and said "I have a question." I asked her what the question was, and she answered "What do you do if you can't see anything?" I thought she meant she hadn't noticed the person change in my demonstration, so I said "You weren't able to sec any responses?" She said "No, it's totally dark."

She wasn't worried at all, but I was thinking "Hey, wait a minute

43 here!" I went over to her and said "You don't have to learn this" and poof! . . . her vision came back.

That woman's response was very unusual. For most people, the linkage will work the other way. Since they can see, they will be able to do the task. As long as you know what you're linking to what, you'll be able to deal with whatever impact it does have.

Nonverbal Pacing and Leading

All hypnosis can be usefully thought of as feedback. At this moment Bob is sitting in front of me. We are passing lots of information back and forth both verbally and nonverbally. Out of all the messages that we offer each other, some are conscious—that is, he and I know that we are offering them—and some are not.

One thing I can do with Bob's messages is to select those which I can identify as being outside of his awareness, and begin to feed those back by body mirroring. As 1 feed those back, one of two things will happen. His consciousness will alter and he will become aware of those things, or his unconscious responses will simply be amplified, so that more and more of his responses will be unconscious and fewer and fewer of them conscious.

After you have paced some unconscious response, you can begin to amplify or lead into some other response. I can pick out any portion of Bob's nonverbal behavior and do this. I can pace his pupil dilation by dilating my own pupils, and then, as I look at him, begin to defocus my eyes only as fast as he will follow me. Defocused eyes are a good indica- tion of trance, because they accompany internal processing as opposed to focusing on something in the external world.

1 can match his eyeblinks and then gradually blink my eyes more often and more slowly until I get him to shut his eyes. I can mirror his muscle tonus and then slowly relax my own muscles to assist him in relaxation. When you pace and lead nonverbally, there's no need for talk. You just mirror to get rapport, and then slowly put yourself into an altered state of consciousness, making sure that the other person is following you.

Pacing and leading is a meta-pattern. It's actually a part of every other induction we'll be teaching you. You can use nonverbal pacing and leading either by itself, or as a part of another induction. I recommend that at some point you practice just the nonverbal portion. Without words, just arrange yourself in a mirroring position. Then you can very slowly—noticing how fast the person follows you—put your-

44 self into a deep trance. Be sure to have some way for you to come back out.

Overlapping Representational Systems

For those of you who don't know what representational systems are, let me explain briefly. We noticed some time ago that people specialize in the kind of information they process and pay attention to. If you divide experience into information in the different sensory channels, you have a visual chunk of experience, an auditory chunk, and a kinesthetic chunk. You also have olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) chunks, but those two channels don't generally take up very large portions of your experience unless you arc cooking or eating. In our normal state, some of us are primarily aware of visual experience, some primarily auditory, and some primarily kinesthetic. We call these representational systems, because they are the systems that we use to represent our experience. The words we use when we talk about our experience are an indication of which sensory channel we are con- sciously using.

Now the interesting thing is that if you ask someone to describe her normal state of consciousness and then to describe what it's like to be in an altered state, she'll often use a different representational system. For example, someone might describe her normal state as "having a clear, focused sense of who I am" (visual words), and her altered state as being "in touch with the universe" (kinesthetic words).

This means that when you find out what state someone is in nor- mally in terms of representational systems, you have an excellent indication of what would be an altered state for that person—anything else. If someone comes in who is really in touch with her feelings and has a firm grasp on her life, you might want to take her to an altered state where she is primarily aware of visual images. So if she came in and said "Well, I just feel like I want to go into a trance, because I'm in touch with having a lot of needs, and I get irritated sometimes, and I want to feel relaxed and smooth out some of the difficulties in my life" I would have a subtle indication that her awareness is mostly kinesthetic.

Jan, would you come up here a minute? Tell me something you like about your house.

Jan: Oh, I love the view. I've got a place overlooking the ocean—it's just beautiful.

She is offering me visual information, so I know I'm safe if I begin

45 talking about visual information. That will pace her experience. Remember, the meta-pattern is pacing and leading: matching what the client is already doing and then leading to something else. That "some- thing else" is to go to systems which she doesn't ordinarily use. That will be an altered state for her.

I'd probably begin by asking for a context that is visually pleasing. I already know Jan likes the view of the ocean. Do you like the beach?

Jan: Oh, yes! I would like to invite you, with your eyes open or closed, to follow along with me as I offer you a description of the experience . . . of being at the ocean. . . . If you were actually able . . . to go to the ocean . . . on a day like today . . . one of the first things that you can become aware of. . . is that as you look up . . . you see clear- ly . . . the distinctive lighting of the sky. . . . You may be able to see some clouds floating across the sky . . . and as you look about . . . you can enjoy . . . the clarity of the air . . . and you glance down and see . . . the surface of the beach . . . and as you stand there . . . looking down at the beach you're standing on . . . you can see your feet . . . and you can feel . . . the feeling . . . of your feet . . . on the beach. . . .

And when you look out across . , . the ocean . . . you can see wave . . . after wave . . . after wave . . . rolling from the horizon . . . toward you . . . each one having a unique form . . . a particular curl . . . a particular color as it splashes. . . . And as you look out at the waves . . . moving in . . . you notice . . . the wind is blowing some of the spray off the top of each wave as the breaker hits the shore. . . . And as you watch that spray, you can feel . . . the moisture in the air, . . as the breeze blows on your face. . . . And if you were to now take . . . a couple of steps . . . into the water . . . and feel the coolness of the water swirling around your feet . . . and ankles . . . and you can really enjoy it. . . .

Now if you look up or down along the beach, you can see a familiar figure . . . someone you had not expected to find there . . . and you wave . . . and that person calls across to you . . . reminding you of another time and place . . . and something rather pleasant and surprising . . . that came from that experience . . . and enjoy the experience . . . and learn . . . from it . . . whatever might be useful for you. . . . And when you are prepared . . . and have enjoyed them . . . at your own rate . . . taking all the time you desire . . . come back.. . .

46 Now, what form of communication was I using?

Woman: You seemed to be using primarily visuals and a lot of going back and forth between those and kinesthetics. Did you reach a point where you decided to stay in kinesthetics?

I would have if I had continued the induction. When I go back and forth, I'm testing to find out if she can follow. Think of this as a verbal counterpart of breathing together. I breathe with her for a while and then I alter my breathing. If she follows, I now. have rapport; I have the lead and can continue to develop whatever kind of experience is appropriate.

How did I know that she was able to follow me, by the way? After I said the first few things, I knew immediately that she was able to go along with me. How did I know that? ' Man: Her head moved congruently with your instructions.

Yes. When I talked about looking up, her head moved up. When I talked about looking down, her head moved down. When I talked1 about looking out at the waves, she looked out at the waves. Her body responses indicated that she was having the experience I was suggest- ing. That is enough information to know that I have rapport. Now, the question is: do I still have rapport if I switch systems? Answer: try it and find out. So I had her look down at the beach. Then I said "And feel your feet against the sand,"

Jan: I did. Woman: So then when you get her into another system, do you tend to stay there?

Yes. Then I would talk mainly about the sensations in her body. As she steps into the water, she can feel the swirling of the water . . . and the moisture in the air . . . as the wind blows against her face.

I first develop a visual image about where she is and then find a point of overlap between the visual image and any other system. So, in this case, if she looks down at the beach and sees her feet against the sand, then she can feel the firmness of her feet upon the beach. If she looks cut and sees the wind blowing spray off the top of the breaking waves, then she can feel the breeze against her face.

There is always a visual, an auditory, and a kinesthetic dimension to every experience. So you begin with whatever representational system the person offers you. That's pacing: joining the client's model. Then you can use a simple verbal formula which is "You see the clouds moving across the sky . . . and as you watch the clouds move, you feel the breeze against your face." Seeing the clouds moving suggests wind.

47 The point of overlap between the visual image of clouds moving, driven by the wind, and the kinesthctic system I want to lead her to is the feeling of the breeze upon her face. The verbal formula is "as X," which is the pace, "Y," the lead.

Woman: You only used auditory once that I was aware of. You said she could hear the friend calling to her. Is there a reason why you did not emphasize auditory? I didn't need it. In this culture the auditory system is seldom well- developed except in musicians. There were lots of other places where I '-could have included auditory elements: the sound of the wind, the sound of the waves breaking against the shore.

I want to distinguish between induction and utilization. An induc- tion of going visual-visual-visual, then overlapping to kinesthetic, and .when she follows, continuing with kinesthetic, will radically alter her state of consciousness. Once that has happened, and I've got all those physiological signs that we were talking about earlier, then all I have to do is build a full experience again. Then I would include all three 'systems. I would have her walk up to the person, reach out, touch the person, look carefully at his or her face and notice what expression is there, and then listen to what the person has to tell her. Then I would use that fantasy with all three representational systems as the matrix

for whatever changes she wants to achieve.

Woman: There was an auditory interruption. Somebody's tape recorder clicked loudly, and I was wondering why you didn't utilize that. It certainly interrupted you.

It interrupted me, but it didn't interrupt her. She didn't hear it. I knew that because she didn't respond. There was no change in her breathing, her skin color, or her muscle tonus. Since there was no response, it would have been absurd for me to mention it. Woman: If she did hear the tape, how would you have included that in the induction?

"And there are disturbing noises, even at the beach." Man: What about incorporating the swinging of her leg? I could have. I could put her on a swing at the beach. That would have worked nicely. Utilizing the leg swing and some other pieces of her behavior would have been good choices to make. You don't have to use all the good choices every time that you do an induction, only enough of them to get the response that you want.

Jan: I can remember my leg going around, and at the time I knew why, but I don't now.

48 How could she recover that information, using the same principles of representational system overlap? . . . Jan, swing your leg again. Close your eyes and swing your leg again and notice what comes in visually. . . . A little bit faster.

Jan: Just people's faces. My interpretation, when I think back about it now, was that she age-regressed as she was doing it—she became a little girl again at the beach. There is a difference between the way an adult swings her leg and the way a child swings her leg. The way she swings her leg now is relatively adult. The way she was doing it when she was in the altered state was more childlike. She was a little girl back at the beach. Do you have any idea how old you were at the beach?

Jan: The same age I am now. She said she was the same age that she is now, but she also offered me nonverbal facial and tonal changes which are characteristic of age-regression. That's also how I would describe the way she was swinging her leg previously.

OK, any questions about this kind of induction? Man: I don't remember how you first started. Did you ask her something?

Yes. I did something that I think is extremely useful. I said "Do you like to go to the beach?" and noticed her response. If I had just automatically assumed she liked to go to the beach, I couldn't have known if her entire family had drowned when she was three years old as she stood on the shore watching. In that case, a beach would not have been a good choice for a relaxing induction.

The principle is to discover what representational system a person typically uses in her normal state. Some people utilize all systems, and with them you could actually begin anywhere. In the context of stress—and therapy is one such context—people typically have become specialized. That's part of the way they got stuck and came to you for help. With respect to the presenting problem, they will be specialized in one representational system or another. Simply intro- ducing the other two representational systems will often be adequate for them to come up with some new behavior for themselves. You can do that by using overlap.

Overlap will always be evident in what we do. Not only overlap from one representational system to another, but overlap from the outside to the inside. I know a man who said "I do inductions a hundred different ways." I was interested, so I had him demonstrate as many as

49 he could think of. They were all identical from a formal point of view. On every induction he used the following sequence: outside visual, inside visual, outside kinesthetic, inside kinesthetic, outside auditory, inside auditory. Each of his inductions had different content, but that's the only pattern he used to do inductions. Even though he has only one sequence, he's a very effective hypnotist in terms of achieving the usual outcomes of a traditional hypnotist.

In the context of working here in the group, you could begin with any system unless you have a partner who is already severely special- ized. However, I'd like you to take that initial step in order to go through exactly what you would actually do in practice: ask the person something about her previous experience, notice which predicates she uses, and use that system as a place to begin. Offer four or five descriptions in that system, and then find a point of overlap to lead her into another system.

Accessing a Previous Trance State

The easiest of all inductions is to ask your client if she has ever been in a trance before. If she has, you ask her to recount in great detail the sequence of events that occurred the last time she went into a trance. Ask her for the exact configuration of the room, the sound of the hypnotist's voice, and exactly what the hypnotist did to lead her into that profound trance. You will notice that she will relive the experience for you as she describes it. It's an example of automatic regression. In order for her to go back and get all the information in response to the specific questions you are asking, she will re-experience the trance state.

If she rushes over the experience too quickly, and you arc not getting a full response, you can either indicate nonverbally for her to slow down, or ask her questions which require that she give you more detail. You can ask "Were you seated just as you are now?" "No, very differently." "Well, would you show me how?" The body position which she last associated with the altered state of consciousness will help her overlap back to that trance experience.

"Were you in a room like this?" "No, no. The walls were green." "Allow your eyes to close and form a mental image of the room you were in the last time you went. . . ." You divorce her from her present state, the present space-time coordinates, to give her more freedom to access all the information, and therefore to re-enter the trance state which was most effective for her in the past.

50 You can add other delivery techniques like embedded commands (sec Appendix II) to your questions to reinforce their power. "Well, was he leaning to his right or to his left when your eyes first began to close?"

That really is the easiest of all inductions. Usually all you need to do is ask her to recount in detail the sequence of events that occurred when she last went into a deep trance. When she has accessed that trance state, you simply utilize it.

How many people here have ever had the experience of visiting Milton Erickson?

If you look around now, you can tell which of the people here have visited Milton, because as I ask that question, they access the trance experience of being with him.

Naturally Occurring Trance States

There's another really easy way to go after a trance state. Everybody has been in a somnambulistic trance; it's just a question of whether they have recognized it as such.

This morning we asked each of you to pick some state in your personal experience in which you have a limited focus of attention. The other two people in your group talked to you about that experience in order to amplify it. You can get the same kind of response without knowing anything about the person by choosing and describing som- nambulistic trance states that naturally occur in our culture. What you do is very easy. You sit across from a person and say "Well, before we begin, let's talk about common kinds of experiences, because it is of use to me as a communicator to know what kind of personal history you have, as a way of drawing upon your resources to instruct you in this new matter of hypnosis." Then you describe five very powerful, commonly-occurring trance states. You will notice that as she attempts to understand your words and find examples of what you are talking about in her personal experience, she will go into an altered state.

What happens in your experience when I talk to you about the feelings you have on a long car trip? That's an example of not giving a direct suggestion to go into trance, but simply mentioning a situation where trance states occur naturally in our culture.

For example, I drove yesterday from . . . Santa Cruz, California, where I live ... up and over the Santa Cruz mountains . . . and back down the other side ... to the airport in San Jose. And as has hap- pened so many times when I am driving . . . especially along a route

51 which I know . . . a great deal about . . . I have driven it a number of times . . . the last thing I remember . . . before arriving at the airport I , . was turning onto Highway 17, the freeway that I took all the way across the Santa Cruz mountains to San Jose to catch the airplane. And I evidently drove quite safely . . . and during the drive . . . the monotony of the road . . . I assume . . . induced in me a sort of auto- matic . . . and unconscious response . . . which I could trust . . . to get me safely from where I began ... to where I wanted to go. . . .

And that was a great deal . . . like another experience which I'm sure you and many people listening to me have shared . . . which is the experience of sitting in a lecture . . . where attendance is mandatory . . . but the person who is talking . . . is not a very exciting speaker .. . someone who is simply . . . talking in a way that induces a sense of . . . boredom . . . and offering you words without a great deal of attention to stimulating you. . . . And in such experiences I've noticed my mind tends to wander . . . to other places and times . . . which are less boring and somehow more stimulating than my present

environment. . . .

Or the experience I've had in my life . . . of walking through the woods . . . on a quiet day. . . . Some of the prettiest areas in the part of the country that I live in ... are the marvelous redwood forests. . . . I've heard people liken . . . the visual impact . . . of those redwood forests . . . to being in a cathedral . . . a large church of some kind . . . and the sense of majesty . . . and calm . . . serenity that they bring. . . . And as I walk through the redwood forests . . . one thing about redwood forests . . . is the fact that they are so homogeneous . . . that they do not support . . . much in the way of wildlife, especially birds . . . so often there is a majestic sort of silence associated . . . with . . . walks through the redwood forest . . . and although there is not a lot of variation . . . in the experience I have . . . as I do walk through them . . . I certainly have a sense of calm . . . and relaxation . . . which I deeply . . . appreciate,

What one thing do those three experiences have in common? Woman: Relaxation, solitude.

Man: Serenity. Woman: Repetition. They are repetitious. They are monotonous. And if any of you were looking around as I was talking, you could see the physiological signs that you're learning to associate with trance developing in most of you. So a very natural and covert way of leading a person from the

52 state of consciousness she is in toward an altered state, is to tell a series of stories or little episodes as I did, which have in common only the kind of response that you want to elicit from that person. At that point it is entirely a question of how acute your own sensory apparatus is, so that you can notice whether you have achieved the kinds of responses you want. You tell as many stories as necessary to achieve the response. You can talk about riding in an elevator. Almost everybody goes into a trance in an elevator. They look up at the numbers and then their pupils dilate and they become immobilized. In elevators the only place it is culturally acceptable to look is at the numbers or at the walls or the floor. Another example: What happens when you are driving along a street and you drive up to a red stop light? You stop. When the car stops moving, you stop moving.

What are other naturally occurring examples of trance states? Woman: Watching a movie. Man: Sitting in church. Yes, although sitting in church is getting less universal. A lot of people haven't had that experience and won't be able to identify with it, but it's a good one for those who have.

Woman: Watching television.

Yes. If you want to pass information to your kids—if you'd like them to clean their rooms or something—get them while they're watch- ing TV. They're going to be gone: living what's going on in the TV show. So you sit next to them and say—softly so you don't disrupt them—u. . . and you have this overwhelming compulsion to. . . ,"

Man: Chronic mental hospital patients watch television all day. I never thought of reaching them there.

You might try it that way. When we were first learning hypnosis, Richard Bandler and I used to play a game with each other. We'd get a group of "naive subjects"— people who had never been officially induced into a trance. Then we would challenge ourselves to get them from the present state to a somnambulistic trance state in a minimum number of steps. One of the first things I always asked for was a meditative state. Meditation is a very altered state relative to normal consciousness. I would ask if I could be allowed the privilege of watching them go into the meditative state without interfering in any way. They would go into the meditative state—a dramatically altered state.

When they were there, 1 would say "With your permission, I will now

53 offer a suggestion for you to move from this meditative state, leaving its integrity fully protected, to a state called a general somnambulistic trance, from which we can then begin to make the changes you have asked for." I make a clear distinction between trance and meditation, because if there is not a separation between what is called meditation and somnambulistic trance, every time they meditate they will go back into the trance state. I don't want to connect the two, unless I have a specific reason to.

If and when you do official ritualistic kinds of hypnosis, I suggest that you wait until you have already covertly succeeded in getting a couple of trance states with the client. Let me give you the most common example. Somebody comes in and demands that you do hypnosis with her for a presenting problem and you say "Of course. However, before we begin there are a couple of things I need to know."

•Then you induce a series of trances. You say something like "Well, the first thing to do is to check your ability to recall in detail information that I'm going to need for your case history." So you induce a trance by taking a case history. You ask "Now, where were you born?" and you have her describe in detail the house in which she lived, and the sounds it made, the feelings she had there, etc. And, of course, she is gone; she age-regresses in order to get the detailed information about her past. One description of trance is getting the person independent of her present time/space coordinates. This fits that definition. The only link between her and the present time/space coordinates is your voice. [Along all other dimensions, she is somewhere else. Regression is considered one of the "deep trance" phenomena by traditional hypnotists. It's actually something you get all the time. Gestalt therapists typically get deep trance phenomena automatically, much more easily than a hypnotist, and yet most of them would resist the label "hypnosis." All over the world people are looking at empty chairs and seeing their mothers or their fathers and talking to them and hearing responses. Those are positive auditory and visual hallucina- Egns. They constitute deep trance phenomena. But it's not labeled that way, so there's no resistance involved.

By the way, just as a teaching device, let me make a point here. If you ever lecture on hypnosis, of course the group is going to be going in and out of a trance. The only way that the group can make sense of your descriptions of hypnosis and trance is to access their own experiences that fit those descriptions. Depending on how confident you are in your own personal power, you will get perhaps a hundred people in

54 deep trance rather rapidly- -or not, depending upon what outcome you want. There isn't an easier subject in the world to lecture about, because as you talk about it, it is happening.

You can also use your observation of people's responses to know whom to choose as a subject when you arc doing groups. You choose one of the twenty percent of the group who have already been in and out of at least five somnambulistic trances during your fifty-minute presentation. By the end of this workshop you ought to have the sensory experience to know who's responding by going into a deep trance and taking in all the material at that level of consciousness; who's in a mixed state, responding consciously and unconsciously; and who's staying entirely conscious. To demonstrate teaching points, you should always be able to pick out exquisite demonstration subjects. If there's a particular response you want to demonstrate, you can talk about what you are going to do, instruct people in what responses are appropriate, and notice who develops those responses most rapidly. That person will be the subject to select.

Some of you here may be drifting off a little more rapidly than might be useful to you for the purpose of learning this material. You might consider stopping for a moment to silently drop inside and ask some part of you to maintain a state of consciousness which is most useful to you for learning purposes. It would be nice to have some blend of having the experience and also being able to keep conscious track of the patterns being used. Let's have a moment of silence while you make those arrangements. You can use the reframing format if you already know it. . . .

Exercise 4

I've just given you five specific induction techniques: (1) verbal pacing and leading, (2) nonverbal pacing and leading, (3) representa- tional system overlap, (4) accessing a previous trance, and (5) describ- ing commonly occurring trance situations. Get into groups of three, and each of you pick a technique that interests you, and which you haven't done systematically before. Person A will pick an induction and do it with B. B can just enjoy it.

Person C will use all of his conscious attention to notice what changes occur as B goes into trance. Pay attention to which statements and behaviors produce the most response, and whether there are any statements or behaviors that bring B back out of trance. C is going to be a "meta-person" to keep track of what's going on. As person C, if

55 you notice that the hypnotist is talking too quickly, give her a hand gesture that indicates "Slow down." If the hypnotist's voice is too high and it seems irritating to B, give her some signal to lower her voice.

When you are A, after you have induced the trance, I want you to give B some general instructions for learning, and then for returning. When you've gotten good trance responses of the nature that Barb offered us here earlier, then simply sit there, take a couple of deep breaths, smile and mentally pat yourself on the back. Look at your observer, and give some minimal cue that you are satisfied that you have achieved a trance. Then match breathing with your subject and when you speak make your voice tempo match her breathing cycle. "And enjoy . . . those particular experiences . . . which your uncon- scious mind . . . can offer you at this point . . . a sense of wonder . . . and adventure . . . as you enter . . . new states of consciousness . . , gleaning from this experience . . . a sense of assurance . , . about your own capabilities . . . and flexibility . . . as a human being, . . , And after doing that fully . . . and deeply . . . your unconscious, slowly . . . with full respect . . . can bring you back to this state . . . giving you a sense of refreshment and renewal. . . . I will be atten- tive. . . . If at any point . . . you would be interested . . . in my assist- ing you . . . in getting back . . . indicate that with a hand movement."

Then sit there and watch. This will be an excellent opportunity for you to train your perceptions to notice the changes that a person demonstrates as she goes in and out of altered states. If you get a hand wave, then you can match her breathing as you say "I am going . . . to count backwards . . . from ten . . . to one . . . slowly. . . . When I reach 'one' . . . your eyes will open . . , and you will have a sense . . . of refreshment . . . and you will be . . . totally present here." Then count backwards with her breathing until you reach one."

Take a few minutes for feedback when you're done. B can tell A about anything in the induction that was particularly helpful, or about anything that B found disruptive or got in the way of developing the altered state. C can add anything that she observed from the outside, especially relationships between A's suggestions and B's responses. This will be really useful feedback for A. After the feedback, switch positions and give both B and C a chance to try an induction.

So A is going to first induce a trance, then give general learning instructions, and finally give instructions to come back out of trance. Go ahead.

56 Man: I have a question. When I was putting Lynn under, she began to demonstrate a lot of shaky movement in her left hand. Later, she said that that was connected to a nerve center in her cheek which had been operated on a long time ago for a cyst, and that supposedly there's still nerve damage. But at the time I didn't have the faintest idea what— if anything—to do with that.

The minimum response to anything that happens which you don't directly suggest as you are inducing an altered state of consciousness is to verbally incorporate it immediately: "Yes, and you continue to have those specific experiences and the body sensations connected with them." That validates the response and reassures the person that you are alert to the signals she is offering you, even though you may not understand what the signals represent.

"Organ language" is another really powerful pattern which I find useful in dealing with any phenomenon that is significant. By "signifi- cant" I mean there's no doubt that something unusual is going on -but I have no idea what it might represent.

"Now, the first time that a person . . . goes into an altered state of consciousness ... it often shakes them up a little bit. . . . But they often find it handy ... to come to grips with the part . . . of the problem . . . that may be attached to this particular syndrome in a way that . . . allows them to put their finger on changes . . . which they can really grasp the reality of." I included four or five allusions to the part of the body and to the activity that is being performed by that part of the body. If there are still any remnants of the person's conscious mind left around at that point in the trance, it typically won't under- stand those allusions. However, the unconscious mind typically will understand and take that as a validating message.

The two maneuvers I just offered you are ways of incorporating an obvious response that I didn't ask for, and validating it. It's my way of saying "OK, I recognize what you are doing, and it is perfectly all right with me for you to continue to do that." That kind of response is usually adequate.

Another slightly more powerful method you can use is to say "... and with each such movement you'll go deeper into trance," Then you typically get one of two things: either they go really deeply into trance, or they stop shaking.

You could also use the shaking as an access point to do some therapeutic work. "Those particular experiences . . , connected with

57 those dramatic movements of your hand ... at this point in time . . . will become available to you . . . only when you reach an ade- quately deep state of trance ... for you to appreciate them . . . as experiences from your past . . . which may or may not have had negative repercussions then . . . but which you can now recognize with comfort . . . as something that you survived . . . and to draw from a review and a rehearing . . . of those particular experiences . . . ways in which you might protect yourself ... in the present and in the future . . . learning from your own experience . . . which is the foun- dation of your present resources."

All that is "fluff" in the sense that it includes no content. Hut it is an appropriate and meaningful communication in the sense that you are telling her to do something with the experiences she is having in order to learn from them.

Woman: What do you do if the person doesn't come back out? If you tell her to come back and she doesn't, that indicates that you've lost rapport, So you have to go back and get rapport. You might just pace her breathing for a while. Then ask her to gather up all the 'enjoyable, positive aspects of this experience, so that she can bring these back with her when she returns in a few moments. Count back- wards slowly from ten to one, saying one number for every other breath that she takes. This will help insure rapport. Give instructions that when you reach "one" her eyes will flutter open as control is returned to her conscious mind, and she will be puzzled and delighted by the experience she has just had.

Woman: I've had clients who apparently go into physiological sleep. I have assumed that somehow the unconscious is still listening, but I'm not at all sure of that. There's no response to me at all. OK. First of all, I don't believe the last statement: that they don't respond to you at all. I would suggest for your own learning purposes, that you use several simple nonverbal devices to find out if they are still responsive to you. The easiest way to do it would be to get in close enough that they can hear your breathing, and then breathe with them for several minutes. I assume that you have the internal flexibility not to simply fall asleep yourself. You can give yourself instructions that you are going to copy their breathing and even though that breathing is typically associated with physiological sleep, you are going to maintain a certain level of alertness. After a minute or two of breathing with them, change your breathing pattern very slightly, and they should follow at that point.

58 You can get rapport without running the risk of going to sleep by putting your hand on their shoulders and varying the pressure of your touch with the rhythm of their breathing. You can increase the pressure when they exhale, and decrease the pressure when they inhale. We call this "cross-over" pacing, because you pace with a different sensory channel- Do this for two or three minutes, and then change your pressure pattern slightly, noticing whether their breathing follows you.

Woman: What if they don't follow? If they don't, then they are in a physiological sleep state, and you need to spend more time building rapport. You can still do it, but it takes more time.

We made up something called "sleep therapy" once when we were working at a mental hospital where people had access to their clients twenty-four hours a day. We had been there several times; this was our third visit. The staff members were delighted with the responses they were getting using our patterns, and dealing very effectively with all their patients except the anorexics. They were having trouble with the anorexics.

Anorexics are people who consider themselves grossly overweight. The perception of the rest of the world is that they are about to starve to death. They are extremely skinny, to the point that their health is threatened.

One of the things that we instructed the staff to do with the anorexics—which wiped out this last stronghold of unresponsive patients- was what we called "sleep therapy." If you live with someone for whom this is acceptable, you can try it out yourself.

Go into the place where she is sleeping and use one of the two techniques I just mentioned to you to get rapport. Breathe with her for three or four minutes to get rapport. Since she is in a severely altered state, it takes some time to get rapport. Or instead of breathing with her, you can touch her and use pressure differences. You could get rapport auditorily by singing or humming little soft notes with her breathing movements. You can use any repetitive pattern that you can control in your own output to match her breathing cycle. Then very carefully and very slowly change what you are doing, to find out if you can lead her. Don't change your breathing radically, because part of a person's ability to be asleep and to stay asleep without interruption depends on her maintaining that breathing pattern. Unless you want to wake her up, it would be inappropriate for you to change her breathing radically.

59 You then proceed to set up finger signals—something that we'll teach you tomorrow. "As you continue to sleep deeply and rest your- self completely, you can respond to certain questions that I ask you by lifting one finger for 'yes' and another for 'no.'" The person is in a severely altered state in which her normal conscious resources are not available, and therefore not in your way. You can now begin to access information directly by getting yes/ no signals, or propose changes and new behaviors. You can do all the work in that state without interrupt- ing her sleep.

Woman: And what if her breathing doesn't change when I change mine? Does it mean she is indeed in a physiological sleep state?

No. You can gain rapport with people who are in a physiological state of sleep. The difference is that you have to spend more time following them before you attempt to lead. If you attempt to lead and you do not get the response, take that as a statement that you didn't pace long enough; go back and pace longer.

People who arc asleep do respond, but more slowly and less overtly. The same is true of people in an anesthetic sleep state during opera- : lions. Many doctors think that their patients are completely out when they are on the operating table. It's just not true. People accept post- I hypnotic suggestions under anesthesia faster than they will just about any other way. Just because their eyes are closed and their conscious minds are zonked, doesn't mean their ears don't work.

Once I worked with a woman who was living a very wild and rowdy life. Some of the things she was doing were destructive to her, so I was trying to get her to change. I worked with her for a while and couldn't make sense out of what she was doing. Finally I turned to her and said .. emphatically "Look, you absolutely have got to stop living wildly like this. It's not doing you any good, and it's just a waste of time. And what makes you do it?" Immediately her nostrils flared dramatically, and she I said "Oh, I'm really dizzy!" I asked "What do you smell?" She sniffed again and said "It smells like a hospital." I asked "What about a hospital?" She replied "You know that ether smell?" It turned out that some time earlier she'd had an operation. She'd been anesthetized, and since the doctor "knew" that she wasn't there, he talked freely. He looked at her insides and said "It looks terrible. I don't think she's going to make it for very long."

She did make it. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong! However, some- how or other she got the idea that the doctor's statement meant that she wasn't going to make it after the operation, not that she wasn't going to

60 make it through the operation. The statement was ambiguous; the doctor hadn't specified "If you make it through the operation, every- thing will be fine." His statement didn't get sorted out in any meaning- ful way; she just responded to it. She came out of the operation thinking that she wasn't going to live very long, so it didn't concern her that some of the things she was doing were self-destructive.

Martha: When we did the exercise, and I was going into a trance, some part of me wondered "Am I really in?"

Right. And now we are talking about the whole interesting area called "convincers." The thing that convinces Martha a bout the exper- ience of hypnosis will be different than what convinces Bill or some- one else.

Martha's Partner: I'm really curious about that. Her eyes dilated and closed, but later she said that she had an internal dialogue going on the whole time. So that's not a somnambulistic trance state, right?

Different people have different understandings of somnambulistic trance. There isn't any way I know of defining it for all people. Generally people are convinced that they are in a trance when they experience something very different from their normal state. One person's normal state may be another person's trance. For a person whose consciousness has been specialized into kinesthetics, the con- vincer will probably be a set of visual images that are vivid, colorful, and stabilized. A person who hasn't had a body sensation in thirty years will probably be convinced by an experience of detailed and strong kinesthetic sensations,

Man; I heard you say earlier that if someone has been in a som- nambulistic trance, she will not have any conscious memory of it.

Right. Typically when you alter a person's consciousness that radi- cally, when she comes back somebody in the audience will ask "Were you in a trance?" and she'll say "Oh, no! I knew what was going on the whole time." If you then mention some specific activities she carried out, she will say "I didn't do that! You're kidding!" That is, she has complete amnesia for a large segment of that trance experience. To assist that person in being subjectively satisfied that she was in a trance, I often set up a post-hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by kines- thetic cueing. I'll have it be something obvious and inexplicable like taking one shoe off. That way she will notice that something has happened for which she has no explanation.

You can also find out in advance what a person's "complex equival- ence" for trance is: what specific sensory experiences would constitute

61 proof to her that she was in a trance. Then you can develop that kind of experience for the person.

Actually, for the purpose of personal change, it's irrelevant whether the person believes that she has been in trance or not. If you can achieve an altered state and use it to help the person make appropriate changes, that's all that matters.

When you have thoroughly learned about hypnosis, you will find that you will never again have to do any "official" trance inductions that your clients will recognize as such. You will be able to induce altered states naturally, and you will be able to utilize them to achieve changes without the person consciously realizing that anything like "hypnosis" has ever occurred.

Anchoring Trance Stales

For those of you who are not familiar with the term "anchoring," we want to give you an idea of what it is and how you can use it. Anchoring is already written up in detail in our book, Frogs into Princes (Chapter II), so we won't repeat that information to you now. However, we do want to talk about anchoring as it relates to hypnosis.

Every experience includes multiple components: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. Anchoring refers to the tendency for any one element of an experience to bring back the entire exper- ience. You have all had the experience of walking down the street and smelling something, and then suddenly you are back in another time and place. The smell serves as a "reminder" of some other experience. That's an anchor. Couples often have a song that they call "our song." That's an anchor too. Every time they hear that song, they re-experience the feelings they had for each other when they first called it "our song."

Many of the inductions you just did made use of anchoring. When you helped your partner access a previous trance experience, you were making use of anchors that were already set up in that person's exper- ience. If you asked your partner to assume the same body posture she had during a trance experience, to hear the sound of the hypnotist's voice, or do anything else paired with trance, you were using naturally occurring anchors.

If a person can tell you what her experience of trance is in sensory- based terms, you can use anchoring to construct that state for her. All you need to do is to break down her experience of trance into its component visual, auditory, and kinesthetic parts.

If you start with visual, you can ask "How would you look to other

62 people if you were in deep trance? Show me with your body here. I'll mirror you so that you have feedback about what you're doing, and you can adjust your body until what you see looks right." When she tells you it's right, you anchor her with a touch or a sound.

Next you find out if she would be making internal images, and if so, what kind. If her eyes are open in deep trance, ask her what she would be seeing on the outside. As she accesses the answer, you anchor her state. Then you go on to feelings. "How would you feel if you were in a deep trance? How would you be breathing? Show me exactly how relaxed you would be." When she demonstrates how she would feel, you anchor that state.

That leaves the auditory component of "deep trance" to be anchored. You could ask her if she would be aware of the voice of a hypnotist, and what that would sound like. Then find out if she would have any internal dialogue or sounds in deep trance.

As you systematically go through her visual, kinesthctic, and audi- tory experience of trance, both internal and external, you can anchor each component of "trance" with either the same anchor or with different anchors. If you use different anchors for the different compo- nents, you can then trigger all the anchors simultaneously to "remind" her of what trance is like. That's another way to use anchoring to induce a trance. By using anchoring in this way, you can even build an experience that the person has never had previously. You simply anchor the component parts of the experience together.

Once you've induced a trance state, you can set up anchors so that you can quickly reinduce a trance whenever you want to. Whenever I do hypnotic inductions, I always change my voice tone, movement style, posture, and facial expression so that one set of my behaviors is associated with trance, and another set is associated with a normal state of consciousness. Once I have induced an altered state, this gives me the ability to reinduce one quickly simply by beginning my "trance" behaviours. Those behaviors will serve as unconscious signals to go into a trance. The "reinduction signals" that hypnotists use are a special case of this kind of anchoring.

Effective communicators in many fields are already using this kind of anchoring without knowing it. On Sunday morning I turned on the television and watched one of the preachers. This preacher talked very loudly for a while, and then all of a sudden he said "Now I want you to stop, and (softly) close your eyes." His voice tone and volume changed

63 entirely, and people in his congregation closed their eyes and demon- strated the same behavior that I see in people who meditate, people in deep trance, people who sit on trains and airplanes and buses, pas- sengers in cars, jury members, patients in group psychotherapy, or psychiatrists who are taking notes about what a client is saying. That preacher had paired one tone of voice with his usual talking, and another tone of voice with the altered state he called "prayer." He could use that tone of voice to quickly induce an altered state in his entire congregation.

If you change your tone of voice slowly when you notice somebody going into an altered state, the change in your tone of voice will become paired with going into an altered state. If you maintain that changed tone of voice when she reaches a state that you want to keep her in, she will tend to stay there. Your voice tone anchors that altered state. If a client walks in the door of your office, and you seat him and immediately do a trance induction using your normal tone of voice, normal posture, and normal movement style, you will be in trouble the next time you want to talk to his concious mind. The experience he has of you and your office will be a "reminder" to go into a trance. The next time he walks into your office, when you seat him and begin to talk, he will automatically begin to go into a trance.

Early in my career as a hypnotist I had a lot of problems with clients dropping into a trance when I just wanted to talk to them. I wasn't yet making a systematic distinction in my own behavior. If you don't make distinctions, your normal behavior will be a reinduction signal, whether you want it to be or not.

If you make a distinction in your behavior between when you talk to a client at the unconscious level, and when you communicate at the conscious level, that gives you systematic choices about whether or not to keep his conscious resources around. If you have a private prac- tice, you can use two chairs: one for trance states, and the other when you want to communicate with his conscious mind. Soon just indi- cating which chair to sit in will serve as an entire induction.

Analogue Marking

A special kind of anchoring is particularly useful when you want to elicit hypnotic responses. It's called analogue marking, and involves marking out certain words nonverbally as you're talking to someone. I can mark out these words as separate messages with my voice tone, a gesture, a certain expression, or perhaps a touch.

64 I might talk to you about people who are really able to relax -people who can allow themselves to be comforted by the situation they find themselves in. Or I could tell you a story about a friend of mine who is able to learn easily to go into a deep trance. As I said that last sentence, I was marking out "learn easily" and "go into a deep trance" with a slightly different tone of voice and with a wave of my right hand. They constitute separate messages within the obvious message, that your unconscious will identify and will respond to appropriately.

At this point I have connected a certain tone of voice and a certain gesture with the words relaxation and trance for many of you. Now, all I need to do is use that tone of voice more and more often, and your unconscious knows what to do. That voice tone conveys the message much more effectively than telling you to go into a trance, because it bypasses your conscious mind.

All of this is anchoring. A word like "relax" is itself an anchor—a label for something in your experience. In order to understand what I mean when I say the word "relax," you have to go inside and access your personal experiences related to that word. You have a fragment of the experience as a way of understanding the word itself. And as you are feeling comfortable, I connect that experience with a certain voice tone. Now my voice tone also becomes an anchor for that response.

You can use any discriminable aspect of your behavior to do this. Milton Erickson would sometimes move his head to the right or the left when he wanted to mark something out for special attention. The same voice will sound slightly different when coming from a different loca- tion in space. The difference may not be enough for you to notice consciously, but it will be enough for you to respond to unconsciously, even if you have your eyes closed.

By the way, analogue marking isn't something new. Your clients already do it, and if you listen to what they mark out for you, you can learn a lot. When I was running a private practice, I got really bored after a while, so I sent a letter to all the psychiatrists I knew, asking them to refer me their most outrageous and difficult clients. They sent me fascinating people.

One psychiatrist sent me a woman who would wake up in the middle of the night sweating profusely and vibrating, and no one could figure out what was wrong with her. She was terrified because this occurred quite frequently, and she had been in therapy for several years without any reduction in her symptoms. The psychiatrist was giving her pills to try to control her symptoms. He even hooked her up to an EEG

65 machine for hours at a time, waiting for one of these fits to occur so he could measure it. Of course the fits would never happen until he took her off the machine. He'd hook her back up again, and then she'd sit there for hours longer, and again nothing would happen.

This woman was quite conservative and from a wealthy area of town. When she came to see me she was terrified, because her psychia- trist had told her I was a weirdo who did strange things. But she wanted to change desperately, so she came to me anyway.

She was sitting in my office looking very timid when 1 walked in. I sat down, looked straight at her and said "You've been in therapy too long. So your conscious mind obviously has failed utterly to deal with this problem and the conscious minds of your therapists have failed utterly to deal with this problem. I want only your unconscious mind to tell me exactly what I need to know to change you—nothing more and nothing less—and I don't want your conscious mind to intrude unhelp- fully. Begin speaking now!" ' That's a strange set of instructions, isn't it? I had no idea if she would be able to deal with those instructions on any level, but she answered in a really interesting way. She looked back at me and said "Well, I don't know. I'll be sitting in my room at night and I'll switch off the electric light, I'll lie down in my bed . . . and, you know, it's really very shocking because I've been in treatment for years now, but I still wake up scared and covered with sweat."

• If you listen to that communication, it's pretty straightforward. The words that she marked out were "electric shock treatment." That gave me the information I needed. Her present psychiatrist didn't know it, but in the past another psychiatrist had given her electric shock treatment.

Some time ago her husband had become wealthy and moved her from a neighborhood where she lived around people whom she loved and enjoyed, to a very fancy house on a hill where there were no other human beings. Then he went off to work and left her there alone. She was bored and lonely, so she began to daydream to entertain herself. She was seeing a psychiatrist, and her psychiatrist "knew" that day- dreaming was "escaping reality" and that escaping reality was bad. So he gave her electric shock treatment to cure her. Every time she began to daydream, her husband put her in the car and took her down to the hospital where the doctors hooked her up to the electric shock machine and zapped her. They did this 25 times, and after 25 times she stopped daydreaming.

66 However, she still dreamed at night. She tried not to dream, but as soon as she began to dream, she began to experience electric shock. It had become an anchored response. She had all the physiological indications of it. When I went to school, this was called classical conditioning. However, her psychiatrist didn't believe in classical con- ditioning, so this never occurred to him.

This is an example of well-intentioned psychotherapy that created a problem. The people who gave her the shock treatments really believed they were doing her a favor. They believed daydreaming was escaping reality, and therefore bad. So rather than channeling her fantasies in a useful direction, they gave her electric shock treatment.

Exercise 5

I'd like to have you all practice using analogue marking to get a response from someone else. I want you all to pair up and first pick some observable response to get from your partner. Pick something simple, like scratching her nose, uncrossing her legs, standing up, getting you some coffee—whatever you want. Then start talking to her about anything, and weave instructions to do the response you selected into your conversation. You can include the instructions one word or phrase at a time, marking them out tonally or visually, so that your partner can respond to them as one message.

You see, with what we've discovered so far about hypnosis, we've only begun to scratch the surface, and no one really knows what we'll learn next, I hope it can be an uplifting experience. But you've got to hand it to those who are facing the possibilities. . . . Now already there are lots of people in this room lifting their hands to their faces and scratching their noses. It can be that simple.

Often when you do hypnosis, the responses you'll go for in another person won't be quite as obvious as the ones I'm suggesting that you choose for this exercise. For now I want you to choose something that's so obvious you will know whether or not it's occurred.

If your partner is aware of what response you are trying to elicit, she may incorporate the movement you are asking for into another movement that she consciously makes. That's fine. Just notice whether you get the response you are after. If you don't, embed another set of instructions for the same response into your conversation and mark it out.

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