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

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) takes the position that no two people share precisely the same experiences. The map or model they create to make sense of and navigate around the world is partially based on these experiences and the distinctive ways in which each processes them. Therefore, each person’s model varies to some degree from the model created by every other person. We live in different realities, some richer, and some very much poorer, than others.

This fact alone doesn’t always cause problems. We have something called consensual, or shared, reality, which means we all, more or less, agree to operate according to the same hallucinations—and this is a useful thing. We need to have certain rules by which we all function. We need to agree on what is up and what is down. We need to know the difference between left and right—something I discovered for myself the first time I visited the United Kingdom and found out that they drive on the other side of the road from Americans. Stepping off the sidewalk and looking only one way is not a good idea if you’re still operating according to a map that applies to somewhere else.

Now, if a map or a model adequately represents the reality it is describing, the person who has created it is likely to be functioning adequately in her or his world. But experience shows us that most people who come to us in pain feel blocked and limited and without any sense of options or choices. In other words, it’s not the world they live in that’s limited; it’s the poverty of their maps that keeps them suffering and in pain.

It follows, then, that it’s often much more productive—and a lot easier—to change the map someone has been using rather than the territory in which the person is functioning. The therapists we modeled were showing us this approach in their behavior.

Despite the fact that some people, usually psychotherapists, believe change is only possible with a lot of time and effort—and then only if the client isn’t resistant—hypnosis, the effective therapists, and those people who “just changed” showed us that change could be a lot quicker and easier. The tools to do this were not available at the time, so I had to create them. Through NLP, I have been able to develop learnable principles, processes, and techniques that make change systematic and easy.

As I pointed out in Volume I of The Structure of Magic, perception and experience are active, rather than passive, processes. We all create our subjective experience out of the “stuff” of the external world. One of the reasons that we don’t all end up with the same model is that our experiencing is governed by certain restrictions or constraints: the constraints of our individual nervous systems (neurological constraints), the societies in which we function (social constraints), and our unique personal histories (personal constraints).

The NLP model we advanced at the time to explain this process was simplified, but it’s held up remarkably well over the years. Basically, the model suggested that we each use our five senses slightly differently from each other to process incoming information. The models we make depend on which senses we favor, what information we take in and how much we leave out, and how we interpret whatever does get through. To summarize briefly:

Neurological constraints. We receive information about the world through five sensory input channels—visual, auditory, kinesthetic (feelings), smell (olfactory), and taste (gustatory). Rather than each sense being given equal weight with every other sense, each of us favors one or two over the others. Of course, we know there’s considerable overlap in the parts of the brain responsible for processing our senses, but one or the other usually dominates in experience. This is known as your sensory preference or preferred sensory system.

Social restraints. As members of a particular society, we are subject to a number of mutually agreed-upon filters, the most significant of which is the language we are born to speak.

The more specific our language is, and the more distinctions we can make, the richer our experience will be. This concept is central to the practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis. Words are power, and the language patterns you will learn from this book will help harness this power for yourself and for others.

Individual constraints. As its name suggests, the third category of constraints develops out of our personal experience. We are each born into a particular set of circumstances, and as we grow up we encounter an increasing number of experiences, which in turn give rise to unique likes and dislikes, habits, rules, beliefs, and values. The maps we create from these can become rich and useful, or limited and destructive, and unless we understand how we create our subjective world, we will continue to live in confusion and pain.

People don’t make themselves miserable out of choice, even though it sometimes looks that way. NLP doesn’t see people as bad, crazy, or sick. Our viewpoint is that they are operating out of an impoverished map, limited in the number of choices they have. To put it another way, they mistake the model for reality. This is what we mean when we say: The map is not the territory.

The richness and poverty of our maps are created by three filtering mechanisms: deletion, distortion, and generalization. These are all processes we need to carry out to manage the information that is coming at us so we are not overwhelmed. Problems occur when the wrong information is deleted, distorted, or generalized, creating patterns that either don’t support our well-being or actively diminish it.

Deletion. Deletion occurs when we pay attention to certain parts of our experience at the expense of others, which we do naturally. Think about being in a crowded room, talking to a friend. You automatically screen out the buzz of other people’s conversation…until you hear your name spoken by someone on the other side of the room.

Deletion is a necessary and useful mechanism for making sure your world is manageable in size, but in certain circumstances it can create pain and suffering. For example, I’ve never met a depressed person who can remember a time when he was really happy. As far as depressives are concerned, they’ve always been unhappy. Equally, sufferers of chronic pain often don’t notice those times when their pain is reduced or nonexistent. Certain people believe the world is a hostile place and simply fail to notice how many people act in a caring or supportive way.

Distortion. Distortion is a quality that all creative people have in abundance. We need to be able to shift the meaning of—to distort—present reality to be able to create something new. (Great writers and artists are experts in distortion.) However, as pattern-making beings, we are equally inclined to distort reality in ways that cause us pain and distress.

Some years ago I was in a restaurant, listening to a couple at the next table having a fight. The man said something really nice—obviously wanting to make peace with his partner—and she snapped back: “Oh, you’re just saying that to make me feel better!”

Of course he was trying to make her feel better—nothing wrong with that, as far as I could see. But she distorted into a hostile act his attempt to make peace. So I leaned over and said: “Yeah, he’s really bad that way. Imagine wanting to make the woman he loves feel good.” For a moment, they were both stunned. Then they laughed and started to talk to each other in a much nicer way.

Generalization. The third mechanism is generalization—the process by which a person takes one or two experiences and decides that this is the way all things are meant to be, all the time.

Generalization is useful as a tool in learning. If we cut ourselves when we are careless with a sharp implement, we generalize to the extent that we believe “all” sharp instruments are capable of injuring us, so we treat them with respect. We have learned over many hundreds of thousands of years to stay alive by applying generalization.

Generalization, as has already been mentioned, is the mechanism by which people all over the planet know how to open doors, simply because they’ve generalized information out of one or two formative experiences, but generalization is also at the root of many problems. When I was still at school, teachers believed we left-handers should be forced to write with our right hands. Their method of instruction was to patrol our desks and whack us with rulers when they found us writing with the “wrong” hand.

Later, I got to do more things my way. As a person who was still left-handed, I reversed all the doors in my house to make things easier for myself. Everywhere else, the front door opened inward. Mine opened outward; it just felt better that way.

However, friends of mine would come along, try to get in, then say, “Hey, your door’s jammed.” I’d come along, open it the other way, and then next time they came along, the same thing would happen. Their motor programs just couldn’t cope with an exception to their generalization about the way doors “should” be.

Generalization can have serious consequences on people’s lives when they fail to undo generalizations that no longer work. Someone who was mistreated as a child may decide that all men (or women) or all authority figures are to be feared and disliked. A person who experiences several failed relationships may decide that love is for losers and withdraw into a lonely existence. Sexual dysfunction among some men persists because they believe a single incident will necessarily apply to all physical encounters.

Basically, generalization occurs when someone applies a single rule to all situations that resemble the one in which the original rule was formulated. The context has been altered from “one” to “all,” from “sometimes” to “always.”

Understanding this mechanism gives us insight into much behavior that otherwise seems strange or even bizarre. If we recognize that the rule makes sense in the appropriate context, we can start to help people restore the behavior to the situation or situations in which it originated, or help to create new and more appropriate behaviors. Based on this NLP approach, we can say, at some level, that all behavior has positive intent.

Freedom can only start to come when we restore information to an impoverished map. Once we begin to explore how each individual reality is constructed, we open ourselves and others to a whole range of options and opportunities. Rather than trying to take away people’s discomfort or unwanted responses—to make people “not have” depression or anxiety or an eating disorder— we create new choices for them in the belief that, when they have more and better choices than before, they will make them on a more consistent basis.

Exercise: Identifying Your Sensory Preferences

You can do this exercise with a partner or by yourself. If you are alone, it helps greatly to speak out loud, possibly into a voice recorder so you can review your experiences later.

1 Imagine as clearly as you can a walk along a beach. It can be a beach you know or an entirely imaginary one. Your goal is to describe in as much detail as you can the experience, cycling through each of your five senses. First, describe everything you see—the color of the sky and the ocean, the seagulls in the air, the white foam flying into the air as waves crash against the black rocks, the colorful clothes of children playing in the sand, and so on. Then move to another sense—hearing, for example—and describe everything you can hear, from the sound of your feet on the beach to a ship’s horn in the distance. Continue until you have completed your description in all five senses.

2 Now, review your description and notice whether it was easier to make pictures, hear sounds, or feel sensations, such as the temperature of the air against the skin. Was it easy to imagine the smell of salt in the air, or the taste of a hot dog bought from an oceanfront stand? One of these senses will dominate. This is your sensory preference.

Note: Having a preference for one sensory modality does not mean you do not use the other senses, or that you use your preferred modality in all situations. We all tend to use all senses in processing information, but some are used to a greater or lesser degree.

Four LANGUAGE AND CHANGE (#ulink_8ac88169-88a3-5e33-8b06-824b587358d1)

The Gentle Art of Casting Spells

I USED THE TERM “INCANTATIONS” in The Structure of Magic I to describe the use of language in change-work for a very good reason. Words—as occultists, philosophers, psychologists, and writers know all too well—have magical effects. When I invite clients to “sit for a spell,” the ambiguity is deliberate. I want them to begin to be open to the possibility of change—and to the fact that the change may seem magical; often, it is.

One important aspect to helping people change is making sure they feel you understand their problem, then to move them as quickly as possible from their problem state to the solution you have prepared for them. Words are the primary means by which you can help create this kind of change.

Watching Virginia Satir work, I noticed that she tended to reflect her clients’ sensory predicates—those words and phrases that signify which of the five senses is dominant at the time of speaking.

Someone might say: “I just feel everything’s getting on top of me and I can’t move forward or back. I just don’t see a way through this.” She would reply: “I feel the weight of your problems is stopping you from finding your direction, and the best route you can take isn’t clear yet…”

She did this intuitively and achieved really close connections with her clients.

On the other hand, I often observed therapists who had no concept of the sensory preferences of their clients and just spoke the same way to everybody they met. In response to “I’m weighed down by all my problems,” a less enlightened therapist might respond, “Well, you need to listen to what I’m saying so you can see some light at the end of the tunnel.” These therapists were talking a different language from their clients, and their clients felt as if they were somehow not being listened to or understood.

Couples sometimes end up in trouble by not recognizing these differences. One person—the visual partner—might express love in the form of gifts and flowers, but the other—the auditory partner—still feels neglected because the words “I love you” are never actually spoken out loud.

Once you have successfully matched the other person’s preferred sensory system, you can begin to lead them in new directions, to increase their ability to process effectively and make enduring change. We do not want the subject to stay stuck in one processing mode; this lack of flexibility landed the person in trouble in the first place.

One of my objections to the Montessori method was just this. Originally, when a kinesthetic child was identified, he was taught only by kinesthetic methods. Likewise, visual children were taught only visually, and auditory children were taught strictly by auditory methods, thereby stunting their growth and possibilities. They were stuck on one channel, whereas real learning involves crossing into other sensory channels to optimize an individual’s potential.

Expanding a client’s experience by expanding the limits of his or her subjective model is central to the methods adopted by all the truly effective therapists and teachers I have studied. Other characteristics of effective therapists and teachers include:

They tend to be proactive and directed toward outcomes rather than formalized in their approach.

Their sensory acuity is well developed and they respond to the patient in the moment, rather than invoking a concept of what should be done.

They demonstrate behavioral flexibility, trying different approaches, and work toward developing the same quality in their clients.

They share a belief—not necessarily made explicit—that the structure of the client’s problem is more significant for making change than its content.

They see problem clients as a challenge and an opportunity to learn.

They regard the client’s condition as an attempt to deal with a problem, rather than a sign that the client is broken or stuck.