Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation: Make Your Life Great

I reached out my hand and said: “Step up on just one step,” but he stepped backward and his knees gave way. To me, that’s a real, flaming phobia. I went down in the front of the audience, turned him around, ran him through the Phobia Cure (see Chapter 16), then asked him what he did for a living.

He said, “I’m an airline pilot.” Something about my reaction or expression prompted him to say, “I know what you’re thinking, but once you’re in the plane it’s not the same.”

He explained that walking up a flight of stairs was impossible for him. He could only fly planes, such as 747s, that were accessible by a ramp. He told how, when he was in the air force, he had to close his eyes, then be lifted backward into the cockpit. Once he was inside an F-16, he was fine. He couldn’t climb a ladder to the plane, but he could fly it at twice the speed of sound and drop napalm across Vietnam without a second thought.

His problem had to do with the distinctions he made in his mind of how high “high” was. It had nothing to do with going up; it was all to do with looking down. Once he was high enough up, he was okay. He even told me: “If I get in an elevator and I go up to the eighth or ninth floor I can look out the window, or off the balcony, and I’m fine. But if I get off on the first floor, I’ve got a problem.”

If he was in one of those glass elevators, he wouldn’t be able to look out. He couldn’t cope with walking around and looking out of the first floor, but felt quite safe if his room was on the sixteenth floor. The only thing was, he had to go up to his room with his back to the glass, staring at the wall or the door.

How he developed his phobia to such an elegant degree is probably all very complicated, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s significant is that he made the distinction that being at a certain height meant he could fall—but if it was much higher, he was safe. As soon as he got high enough, the phobia simply stopped functioning.

Somewhere in his brain were a starting point and a cutoff point—both very specific, and both functioning entirely outside his conscious awareness. His starting point for a height phobia was the lowest I’ve ever seen.

When he left the air force and became a commercial pilot, he had no problem flying people around in 747s, but he couldn’t take a single step up. Of course, I did everything I could to get him fixed as quickly as possible. I don’t want crazy people in the cockpit of my plane. I want people who are completely unflappable, with great sensory acuity, so they know exactly where real danger begins and ends.

Interestingly, phobias often make a kind of sense. People usually become phobic about something that could actually harm them under certain circumstances. When people come to me and say, “I want to be completely fearless around spiders,” or “I don’t want to be bothered by heights, no matter how high up I go,” I always make them step back and take a realistic look at what they are requesting. In some countries, such as Australia or Africa, having no fear of spiders would be extremely stupid. Some spiders are very poisonous. Likewise, a man with a phobia of heights who told me he wanted to be able to dance fearlessly along the rail of a balcony four floors up needs a reality check.

The outcome in curing phobias should always respect the fact that part of the person’s brain has actually been working very efficiently to help them avoid danger. The real problem is overreaction. The brain needs a new perspective to be able to change.

At the time I began investigating phobias, everyone was arguing over the right approach to psychotherapy. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of different schools of psychology, all fighting over who was right. The interesting part was that none of them was successful. Nobody was actually managing to cure anyone of their problems. To me, it seemed particularly foolish for a group of people who couldn’t do something to be arguing about the best way to not do it.

These therapists were limited by their own unconscious patterning, which predisposed them to failure. They were all looking at the content of the client’s experience—the “why”—to discover what was wrong and find ways to put it right. They were paying too much attention to trying to interpret what their clients were saying, and not noticing what they were doing.

I approached it differently. I advertised in the newspaper for people who’d had phobias they’d recovered from and offered to pay them money just to sit down and talk about their experiences. I didn’t really expect to get more than a few, but it turned out there were many, many former phobics who were happy to talk about themselves.

They all told me more or less the same story. They said things like: “One day, I’d just had enough. I said: ‘That’s it! No more!’” Then they all said: “I looked at myself and for once I saw how stupid it was to be acting the way I was and I started to laugh…,” and then they changed.

I noticed that when they made the change, they switched to watching themselves doing the behavior. Those people who lost the phobia were no longer thinking of the experience as if seeing it through their own eyes but were literally recalling it from a different point of view—that of an observer. No matter how scary the phobia had been, it no longer affected them the same way when they took up this detached or “objective” point of view. Inadvertently, they’d discovered how to dissociate from the problem experience.

People who still had their phobias, on the other hand, were looking at spiders or planes or elevators as if they were actually there. Because they were representing the thought from a point inside the experience, part of their brains responded as if the experience was actually happening and plunged them even deeper into a state of panic.

Even though each of them had differing stories to tell about their particular phobias, the only difference I could see was in the way they were representing the experience of their phobias to themselves. So I had some people with phobias apply what I had learned. I had them “step out” of their bodies and watch their responses as if from across the room. And it worked. They got rid of their phobias really quickly. Their brains simply shifted the way they perceived their situation, and their problems went away.

The psychiatrists responded by sending me more and more people with phobias. Some of them were extremely creative and entertaining in the way they had set up their problems. For example, one man had developed a phobia about leaving Huntington, Ohio. He’d be driving along quite happily, then come to the city limits, skid to a halt, and freak out. He hadn’t been able to leave town in four and a half years.

Since I was always trying to find easier and faster ways of doing things, I had him imagine he was Superman. I got him to float out of his body and fly alongside, watching himself driving his pickup truck. He flew for a couple of miles, then saw himself begin to get nervous, jam on the brakes, and start to panic…but he flew on!

What made the difference was a trick. Inside his mind, not only was he calmly flying along, but he also left town for the first time in years. Now, since part of his brain could perceive that experience as real, I could start to put together the stimulus he had with the response he desired. We sent him out to go for a drive, and he was away for hours. When he came back he was astonished. He said he’d driven to the city limits, come to a bridge leading out of Huntington, all the time waiting for his phobia to kick in—but he just drove on.

Needless to say, some psychiatrists were deeply skeptical. They kept telling me that change had to be painful and slow, and I said, “Well, that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve changed rapidly, many times, without any trouble.”

Actually, we all have. Maybe you read something in a book that changed your life in a second. Someone might have said something that instantly changed not only the way you did certain things but the entire quality of the experience you were having. Suddenly, without actually realizing it, something happened that switched off the problem and turned on the solution.

It fascinated me that among all the warring factions, a few therapists scattered around the country seemed capable of acting as genuine change agents, and I was driven by curiosity to know how they did it. That was my rule then and remains my rule now: if you want to find out how to do something you can’t yet do, find someone who can and ask them. Now we call that process “modeling,” and some people have turned it into an unnecessarily long and complicated process.

When I first began investigating modeling, I was astonished to find that highly successful people were flattered to be asked how they got that way and were usually happy to talk. The only problem was that they didn’t always know how they came to be the way they were.

Exercise: Changing Feelings by Dissociation

1 Recall an experience that still causes you sadness or distress. As you remember it, make sure you are reexperiencing it as if it were happening right now. See every thing through your own eyes, feel all the feelings—including the associated emotions—through your own body. Pay particular attention to any sounds; these might include anything that was said by you or any other significant participants in the original scenario. It may also include your own self-talk. Make a mental note of the degree to which this memory still causes you pain.

2 Now pretend or imagine you can step back out of the experience so you can see yourself there, as if on a screen. Push the entire scene away from you, further and further, noticing, as it moves into the distance, how the colors begin to leach away and the detail diminishes. Push it as far away as you need to push it to notice a distinct difference in the way you feel about the events.

Note: Unless you particularly wish to have the discomfort back, you can leave the experience where it is—or even spin it away into space and have it explode into the sun.

Three REPRESENTING “REALITY” (#ulink_01bc420f-1d60-5e9d-a8c2-abe404f6e093)

The Birth of Personal Freedom

NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING WAS born many years ago, partly out of the events one night in a hypnosis seminar. The people there were achieving deep hypnotic states and demonstrating dramatic hypnotic phenomena.

Some of them were doing things like limited vision and positive hallucinations; others were controlling their blood pressure. One young girl even speeded up the way her eyes worked, but not the rest of her, so she could see the world in slow motion. Without any training at all, she was able to run rings around a martial artist friend of mine. From her point of view, everything was slowed all the way down. To the observer, she was moving twice as fast as the other guy.

Of course, different people were able to achieve different levels of competence, and that set me thinking.

Already, those psychologists studying hypnosis had decided there was such a thing as “hypnotizability” that could be measured—meaning that one person could be more or less hypnotizable than another.

I didn’t really believe that. I wasn’t impressed with the idea of a hypnotizability scale. I kept asking, “Has anybody got one? Has anyone even seen one?”

What the research really told me, though, was that if you use the same input with some people, they will respond differently than others. In the case of hypnosis, some people go deeper, others not. To me, the analogy was simply that if you keep punching a group of research subjects at the same height, you’ll hit some in the head and hit the really tall ones in the knee. The whole thing begged the question: What was one person doing with his brain that the other wasn’t? It seemed to me that these psychologists were really measuring not hypnotizability, but their own incompetence.

Some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the world we perceive ourselves in is only a representation of reality, whatever that is. Hans Vaihinger, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bate-son all made the same observation. They all discussed variations on the theme of “our experience of reality is not the same as reality itself.” Some very old cultures came to the same conclusion. They realized thousands of years ago that what was outside the mind was not the same as what was inside the mind. Part of their way of dealing with it was to meditate for years to become enlightened and dissolve the “illusion.”

But the problem remained for the rest of us. Even if we accepted that our experience was constructed in our minds, what then? What could we do with that knowledge? What difference would it make?

In volume one of The Structure of Magic, I wrote: “We as human beings do not act directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live—that is we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.”

My point was that those people in that workshop who could create positive or negative hallucinations, or become selectively amnesiac, or anesthetize their arms, were representing their world differently from those who could not do those things. They changed their way of looking at things; they changed their beliefs. The intriguing thing is that, in some cases, not only did their subjective experience change with the suggestion, but their physiology did, too.

Hypnosis, therefore, was central to the development of NLP because it allowed us to explore altered states. We could push boundaries with it, because it was a tool that allowed us to begin to learn what was possible. Once we saw some of the things that were possible, we could begin to look at how they happened and what we needed to do to replicate the outcomes. In this sense, NLP may be thought of as the underlying “structure” of hypnosis.

It wasn’t possible to turn to psychology for help, because not only were most of the “experts” fighting with each other to decide whose theory was correct, they were also focused only on why people became ill or stuck, or how they came to fail.

I once spent a whole winter house-sitting for a psychiatrist friend, and out of sheer boredom I read every book he had. It was a fascinating experience. The hundreds of texts by all these important doctors and professors could tell you everything you needed to know about how people got sick or stuck—but not one of them had even the glimmer of an idea of how to help them get better. It didn’t even seem to occur to them that it might be a useful direction to follow.

That was a question I found myself asking again and again. How do people get better? Some of them do get better, sometimes with the help of doctors or psychologists. Others just get better all by themselves.

But my interest went beyond that. I wanted to know how people achieved their goals and what made some of them exceptional in their field. I wanted to know how some people achieved excellence.

A few therapists at the time were getting far better results than those of their colleagues. They lived and practiced in different parts of the country; their methods were different; and they didn’t know anything about each other or the way they worked. But those who knew them and saw their work described their results as magical—and they were, compared with the results of most of their peers.

Their followers praised their talent or genius or intuition, as if that explained their abilities, but nobody at the time really understood how they came to be this way, least of all the therapists themselves.

As a scientist and a mathematician, I knew there had to be a structure, and I wanted to know what that structure was. I knew that, if it could be identified, it should be possible to replicate it and even teach it to other people. Everybody could become magicians in their own right.

I spent some time with John Grinder studying these therapeutic wizards very closely. Initially, we focused on family therapist Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, the grandfather of modern hypnotherapy. We watched them at work, and instead of getting caught up in the content of what they were doing, we looked at the syntax of what they were saying and doing. As soon as we looked at it that way, the patterns popped out everywhere—in the questions they asked, the words they used, the gestures they made, in the tonality and rate with which they spoke. We started to notice that, even though they were all very different personalities, they shared many characteristics.

The interesting thing was that they all acted intuitively. They all had their own maps or models of therapy; there were similarities and there were differences. Often they had no idea at all why something they had done had been successful, but all shared a belief that the client’s model of the world could be changed. Regardless of what they did or thought they were doing, each believed in helping to expand and enrich the clients’ subjective experience.