Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

People have almost no consciousness of any meta-levels if you distract them with content. Once at a conference I talked to a large group of psychologists who were pretty stuffy and asked a lot of dumb questions. I told them about quotes as a pattern. Then I said for example—I even told them what I was, doing—Milton Erickson once told me a story about a time he stayed at a turkey farm, and the turkeys made a lot of noise and kept him awake at night. He didn't know what to do. So finally one night he walked outside—and I faced all those psychologists out there—and he realized he was surrounded by turkeys, hundreds of turkeys everywhere. Turkeys here, and turkeys there, and turkeys all over the place. And he looked at them and he said "You turkeys!"

There were a couple of people there who knew what I was doing and they absolutely cracked up. I stood on the stage in front of these people who were paying me a fortune and I went" You turkeys!" They didn't know what I was doing. They all sat there nodding seriously. If you are congruent, they will never know. If you feed people interesting content, you can experiment with any pattern. As soon as I said "I'm going to tell you a story about Milton" everybody went "content time" and that was all it took.

In the middle of telling the story, I even turned around and laughed at the top of my lungs. And then I turned back and finished it. They just thought it was a weird behavior, because I laugh a lot. Or I could have made the laughing part of the story. "Milton turned around and laughed." At the end of the day all these people came up to me and said "And I want to tell you how important this has been to me" and I said "Thank you. Did you hear the story about Milton? I don't want you to think that it's about your

You can try any new behavior in quotes and it won't seem to be you doing it. Quotes gives you a lot of freedom to experiement with gaining flexibility, because it means that you can do anything. I can go into a restaurant and walk up to a waitress and say "I just went in the bathroom and this guy walked up to me and said 'Blink,'" and find out what happens. She'll blink, and I'll go "Isn't that weird?" and walk away. It wasn't me, so I didn't have to worry about it. It's a big piece of personal freedom; you are no longer responsible for your own behavior because it's "someone else's behavior."

When I was going to psychiatric meetings and stuff, I would walk up to someone and say "I was just in a conference with Dr. X, and he did this thing I've never seen anyone do before. He walked up to this person, lifted up his hand like this, and said 'Look at that hand.'" Then I'd do a fifteen or twenty minute trance induction and put the person into a trance. Then I'd slap him in the stomach so he came out, and say "Isn't that a weird thing for him to do?" He would go "Yeah, that's a really weird thing for him to do. He shouldn't do things like that." And I'd go "I would never do anything like that. Would you?" And he'd say "No!"

Quotes also works great if you're doing therapy with a family that fights and argues and won't listen, because you can lean forward and you can say "I'm so glad you're such a responsive family, because with the last family that was here I had to look at each and every person and say 'Shut your mouth.' That's what I had to tell them. "It reminds me of a group we did in San Diego; there were about a hundred and fifty people and we told them "The next thing that we'd like to tell you is how couples often fight in quotes."

"Well, if you were to tell me that, you know what I would say to you?"

"Well, if you told me to do that, I'd just tell you to go to hell!"

"Well, listen, if you ever said that to me I'd reach right over and..." The trouble is they usually lose quotes, and actually get into a fight.

Most of you have heard quotes in family therapy. You ask "How did it go?" If they stumble on reporting an argument, they'll start in quotes and then they'll be into it again! All their non-verbal analogues will support it. Quotes is a dissociative pattern, and when the dissociation collapses, the quotes go.

Grief is usually a similar pattern. What's going on in the grief-stricken person is this: they make a constructed visual image of being with the lost person. They are seeing themselves with the loved one who is now dead or gone, unavailable somehow. Their response called "grief or "sense of loss" is a complex response to being dissociated from those memories. They see their loved one and themselves having a good time, and they feel empty because they are not there in the picture. If they were to step inside the very same picture that stimulates the grief response, they would recover the positive kinesthetic feelings of the good experiences they shared with that person they cared very much about. That would then serve as a resource for them going on and constructing something new for themselves in their lives, instead of a trigger for a grief response.