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

Virginia, who achieved consistently good results, didn’t claim to have the right approach to therapy. She just said that people could be helped more easily if all the family members were involved, rather than just the individual. Also, her ability to observe patterns and predict behavior was extraordinary. On one occasion, when I drove her to see a family whose epileptic daughter had been labeled a juvenile delinquent, she said, “Watch what happens. In the middle of this session, the girl is going to have a seizure. The moment I start talking to one or other of the family members, she’s going to fall down in a fit.” Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. This was the sort of thing that happened around Virginia. But one of the most important qualities she had was that she was absolutely relentless. She was warm and sweet and kind, but she didn’t give up. It didn’t matter to her if it took twelve hours. She would keep working until she got the change she was after.

Virginia was an exquisite hypnotist, something she strongly denied at first. I showed her videotapes of her and Erickson, and for the first ten minutes they said exactly the same things. Virginia had nicer tonality than Milton. He sounded a little like Boris Karloff. She sounded like the sweetest person on the earth.

It was superb hypnosis, but she said it was just a centering exercise. She’d talk about people’s uniqueness, how each was the only one in the world with those fingerprints, and so on. Then I’d turn on the Milton tape, and he’d talk about the individuality of his patients, how their fingerprints were unique—the same concepts, in the same order.

It took her time to admit it, but, finally she came around, and even asked me to use hypnosis to help her with a personal problem.

Virginia had met Milton and thought he was creepy and didn’t want anything to do with him. I have to admit, I understood why she felt that way. He was in a wheelchair, having had polio twice, and was suffering from postpolio syndrome. He wore purple pajamas, induced trance, and communicated covertly more or less all the time, even when he didn’t need to. But he did it to amuse himself. Interestingly, though, despite their differences, Virginia and Milton were, in my opinion, the best at getting results.

Fritz’s work was very hypnotic, too. Telling clients to hallucinate dead relatives in empty chairs—what is that if it isn’t deep trance hypnosis?

In reality, Fritz didn’t actually have a very good track record fixing clients. Everybody was impressed with his work, but he didn’t get good results. He couldn’t get an insomniac suddenly to be able to sleep, for example, and he was very open about the fact that he couldn’t work with psychotics or schizophrenics. He only worked with “neurotics.”

On one occasion, though, he did help a client get over his impotence by having him think about his nose and then his genitals and his nose again. He couldn’t explain how it worked; he just said it was something that fit his theory. Now, of course, we know that in the motor cortex, the wiring for the muscles of the nose and the genitals are right next to each other. If you move your nose, typically your genitals will move; typically, if you flare your nostrils or move the nose up and down, you stimulate your genitals.

When the patterns I identified were first published as the Milton Model, Milton was very pleased, even though he implied they only reflected a part of his repertoire. Milton’s approach could be very complicated. He very strongly identified with the concept of “being a hypnotist” and insisted that all his clients become exceptional hypnotic subjects before they went any further.

I was more interested in how far I could push this thing called hypnosis, so I tried everything that he ever claimed you could do. This was not because I wanted to disprove it, but because if I could produce the same effects, then I knew there would be a world of things that hadn’t even been tried.

I tried things no one had ever tried before. I wanted to find out what effects could be achieved with light trance and deep trance; I wanted to see how far we could go. I have to admit that a lot of my clients went through a lot of demanding stuff so I could find easier ways of doing things.

The people who really should get credit for my work are the clients who came to me at the end of their ropes. In fact, nobody came to me first. They only came to me because everybody had given up on them. They always said, “You’re my last hope,” and I’d always respond, “Boy, you’re in big trouble then.”

But I didn’t give up. From Virginia Satir I learned to be relentless. I learned that if something doesn’t work, you just do something else. Failure is when you stop, and I never stopped.

In practice, Erickson didn’t use all the patterns that became known as the Milton Model, nor do I. Since I paid attention to Erickson, Satir, and Perls, as well as to those “ordinary” people who accomplished things by themselves, it became possible to create a technology that was universal in its application, was fast, and that anyone could learn. Quite simply, the language we use has a direct impact on the listener’s neurology. The language we use when talking to and about ourselves also affects our own neurology.

Not everybody will use Milton patterns the same way. The people who become really familiar with them will find they have certain preferences and will naturally develop their own distinctive styles.

TEMPORAL PREDICATES

For my part, I find temporal predicates—words that refer to time and its passage—incredibly powerful. I use temporal predicates as linkage—“when you sit here breathing in and out, then you will relax, and as you think about this for the last time…” But there are many more ways temporal language can be used.

Inducing confusion increases suggestibility—for example:

[B]efore you stop yourself from preventing the idea that you don’t know what’s coming later, it’ll be here, but before we start to continue with what isn’t important about what you don’t know, you’ll find that you’ve just begun to go backwards, because the past is just a future moving by now…

This passage demonstrates how language patterns can be layered. Aside from the temporal predicates, that last sentence is stacked with ambiguities—words and phrases that could have more than one meaning, leaving the unconscious room to explore alternatives that have not been explicitly stated.

Another reason I regard temporal predicates as particularly important is to make clear the very important distinction between the past and the future. The best thing about the past is that it’s over. When people don’t deal with the past as if it’s over, then they’re not free to go into the future. That’s why I particularly love the ambiguity that “the past is just a future moving by now…” (I suggest that you reread that sentence very carefully to find out for yourself how many meanings it contains.)

SEMANTIC DENSITY

I often talk about people being angry or sad or depressed “for the last time.” I like what are known as “semantically dense” predicates, something linguistics spends a lot of time discussing. For instance, one doesn’t lurk up to somebody openly. The verb “lurk” has all kinds of connotations that don’t need to be stated, so when you say that somebody is walking around the edge of a crowd, as opposed to lurking around the edge of a crowd, the semantically denser phrase has greater impact.

Temporal predicates—words like “last,” “first,” “after,” “again”—all have semantic density. Phrases including the word “when” (“when you start to do X, you’ll find something important”) and “next” (“the next time you see him, you’ll feel Y”) really allow you to aim posthypnotic suggestions to maximum effect.

I think of temporal predicates as targeting devices that allow you to place feelings, amplify them or diminish them, with great power and precision.

Temporal predicates, of course, are directly connected to presuppositions. Presuppositions literally “presuppose” or assume that something is present, even though they are not explicitly stated. A question such as, “When you get up, could you close the door?” contains a number of presuppositions: that the listener will get up, that there is a door, that he is capable of closing the door, and so on.

Many syntactic environments for presuppositions are based on temporal predicates. The “when” in the previous example is a temporal predicate that supports the presupposition. I find these to be extremely powerful, especially when you talk about doing something “for the last time,” or about feeling something “never again and again and again.”

There are also wonderful, simple, and effective words like “stop.” Most people don’t think of “stop” as a temporal predicate, but when I see people beginning to go into a behavioral loop that’s going to run ad infinitum, where they start to get a bad feeling or a panic attack, I say to them, “Stop”—and, amazingly, they usually do.

Add to that a phrase such as “back up,” and you have even more effective tools. When someone is sitting down, there’s no way to physically back up, so when you say, “Stop. Back up and feel something else this time,” they know at a deep level what to do.

Another word that is temporal in nature is “new.” “New” implies that you’re going to do something in the future so “this old feeling that’s going past isn’t going to be as satisfying as when you find new feelings coming…now.”

“Now” is one of the most powerful temporal predicates in the hypnotist’s repertoire. People, especially in altered states, can be very passive, so you have to tell them what to do, when to do it, when to start…and now, of course, is a good time. If I tell people to “go deeper,” it doesn’t mean they will. I tell them exactly when to do anything I want them to do: “Your arm will drop…now”; “In exactly two minutes you’ll find these thoughts coming into your head, now, and then you’ll find…”

Ambiguity is a useful pattern when working with somebody who has a suspicious conscious mind and doesn’t trust himself. Then I’ll talk “through” them to their other parts, trying to come in from the back door to the front door, instead of the front door to the back. Of course, if I have the subject’s cooperation, I’ll use it. I’ll get the conscious mind and the unconscious mind doing the same thing. The more you can line up a person’s resources, the better off you are.

PUNCTUATION AND SCOPE AMBIGUITIES

The categories known as punctuation and scope ambiguities need special attention. Not only are they effective in themselves, but they are also modified by temporal predicates. “Time and again and again you’ll start to have old feelings disappear”; “Those same old feelings will come up for the last time just before you feel them now disappearing…”

These patterns are very hard for the conscious mind to follow, but very easy for the language-processing centers of the brain to compute. I don’t know how many times I’ve given people suggestions, and they looked at me and said, “What?”…and then carried them out to the letter, at precisely the right time, because they were given specific temporal markers.

Now, take a minute or two to find a new idea…

Milton used the phrase “Your unconscious now” (“you’re unconscious now”) many, many times. It’s a great ambiguity, but as soon as you slam that temporal predicate after the word “unconscious,” it also becomes a command. “Your unconscious now…wants new ideas,” “Your unconscious now wants to know even more unconscious now…You’ll see that you’re not doing what you can see the future coming now…”

All of those kinds of temporal phrases give you great room to put content on either side. It’s about deciding a direction and aiming where you want things to go. What you’re doing in hypnosis is leading someone’s consciousness down a certain path, and you have to decide whether that path leads into their past or their future. Some things you want behind them and some you want in front. Some you want gone forever.

LANGUAGE IN ACTION

Forewarned is forewarned…and the more warned you are about where you’re not going…you need to have signs in your mind that say, Stop, go back, you’re going the wrong way. In the United States, they put those on freeway on-ramps so you don’t go on the wrong one and end up going against traffic. I install them in people’s minds. I say: You need a sign in your head that says, Go back, you’re going the wrong way!

Now, stop, go back, and remember that idea you just thought about, only just get to the sign at the entrance. Bad idea. Go back. You’re going the wrong way…now. And then see the signs of where you should go. Pleasure ahead. Happiness coming. Choices ahead. Past behind. Leave it behind, now, so when you go ahead of time—because it’s not enough to be in the now—you need to be ahead of the now, because the future is coming, the past is behind, so never, yeah, never do never again. Never forget what you shouldn’t remember. And always remember what you shouldn’t forget…now. And then you’ll do it correctly. Because, once again (I love that “once again”), you’ll find tomorrow is much better.

Yes to day (I love that one, too. That’s full of logical ambiguity, “yes to day”). And when it comes to hope, yes to day has no bearing. Now…

Notice how densely the language patterns are stacked. When you have temporal predicates and presuppositions, and when you stack presuppositions—at least three at a time—it becomes extremely difficult for the listener to track consciously, so it produces a very strong effect on the listener’s unconscious.

Another pattern I’m particularly fond of is “the more, the more” pattern. I use that one all the time, especially with negations stacked one on top of the other. “The more you try to stop yourself from preventing what you know that you don’t understand, the more you will, because, as you try to continue to not do something you won’t be able to not see what’s going on.”

The purpose is to overload the unconscious, and once that happens, the doors open up and you can flood in the suggestions.

I often say that I’m not a hypnotist so much as a “hypno-ranter.” Where most people are providing gentle, nondirective suggestions, I’m slamming things in from every side, and every way that I can.

Speaking to the unconscious processes inside somebody with semantic density is an art form. It’s almost like being able to write good poetry, but it doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s not an innate talent. It’s something you develop, and the way you develop it is through practice.

I recommend that you spend two days on one kind of syntactic environment and the next two days on another. You can refer to Resource Files 4 and 5 (pages 311 and 316) for further explanation and inspiration, but to be able to generate language patterns without needing to think about them, you should write down pages and pages of each pattern. Reconfigure your brain so that it all becomes familiar and easy.

If you don’t have a lot of examples of what makes things different, it’s very hard to make yourself familiar with it. Hypnotic language patterns, hypnotic states—these are the building blocks. If you didn’t know all the letters of the alphabet it would be very hard for you to write anything.

People often consider me to be a very complicated person. It’s true that I know a lot of really complicated things, but when I work with human beings, there’s nothing complicated about it at all. I have broken things down for years and learned how they work, and then I’ve practiced putting them into effect. I studied language patterns so that I can automatically and unconsciously generate them in many sophisticated forms. I don’t need to think about them anymore. I just do it, while keeping my eye on where I want to be.