Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

"You don't understand what she said, do you? You really have no idea what she experiences. Have you ever had the experience that she went to bed first, and she's been sitting there watching TV in bed, eating crackers? And you come in and get into bed and feel all those cracker crumbs all over your skin. Did you know that's what she experiences when she walks in and sees your stuff lying all over the front room?"

So there's no fault, no blame. You don't say "You're bad" or "You're stupid" or anything like that. You say "Here's a counterpart that you can understand in your system."

He says "Well, when we're in public, and I want to express affection, she's always standing back, always pushing me away." And she says "He's always making scenes in public. He's pawing me all the time!" That is his way, of course, of simply being affectionate, but she needs to see what is going on. He complains that she moves away and he falls flat on his face. He reaches out toward her and nothing happens. So you find a counterpart and say to her:

"Have you ever had the experience of wanting and needing help, really seeing the need for companionship and assistance, and it's like you're standing in the middle of the desert and you look around in all directions and there's no one there? You don't see anybody and you are all alone. Do you know that's what he feels when he comes toward you and reaches out and you back up?"

The point is not whether those are actually accurate examples or not. The point is that you can use the principle of sorting people by representational systems, and then overlapping to find counterparts between them. That establishes something that even the major insurance companies in this country have adopted, "no-fault" policies. Family and couple therapists ought to at least have that, and have a way of demonstrating it.

As I stand back and give her space to see what I'm saying, and I get in close to him and make good solid contact with him, the teaching at the unconscious meta-level is this: I can get responses from her that he would love to get, and I can get responses from him that she would love to get. That's never mentioned; that's all at the unconscious level. So they will model and adopt my kinds of behavior to make their communications more effective. That's another way of making contact and establishing rapport with each individual member and then translating between representational systems, as a way of teaching them how to communicate more effectively.

Reference systems are also important. What if someone comes in and tells you "I don't know what I want." They are saying that they don't have a reference system. We taught a seminar just recently and a woman there said that she had a very difficult time. She could not decide what she wanted from a menu. She had no basis on which to make that decision. She said her whole life was like that; she could never decide things, and she was always dissatisfied. So we literally made up a decision strategy for her. We said OK, when you are faced with a decision, go inside and tell yourself what it is you have to decide, no matter what it is. Let's say you are in a restaurant. Tell yourself "You must choose food." Then go back to sensory experience and find out what your choices are. In other words, read the menu. As you read "hamburger" on the menu, make a picture of a hamburger in front of you, taste what it would taste like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. Then read "fried eggs," see fried eggs in front of you, taste what they would be like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. After she went through the process of trying that a few times, she had a way of making decisions, and started to make them quickly and unconsciously for all kinds of things in her life.

As she went through that process a number of times, it became streamlined in the same way that learning to drive a car does. It drops into unconsciousness. Consciousness seems to be occupied by things we don't know how to do too well. When we know how to do things really well, we do them automatically.

Man: We were wondering about accessing smells. We played with that a little bit and discovered that they went visual to see the object and then to the smell.