Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

One woman had a phobia of heights. Our office was on the third story, which was kind of convenient. So I asked her to go over and look out the window and describe to me what happened. The first time she went over, she just choked. I told her that wasn't an adequate description. I had to know how she got to the point of choking and being very upset. By asking a lot of questions, I discovered that what happened is that she would make a constructed picture of herself falling out, have the feeling of falling, and then feel nauseous. She did that very quickly, and the picture was outside of consciousness.

So I asked her to walk over to the window while she sang the National Anthem inside her head. Now that sounds kind of silly, except that she walked over to the window and she didn't have the phobic response! None whatsoever. She'd had the phobia for years and years and years.

A man who was a Cree Indian medicine man, a shaman, came to a workshop and we were discussing different mechanisms that worked cross-culturally as far as inducing change in a rapid and effective way. If a person has a headache, an old semi-gestalt thing to do is to sit them in a chair, have them look at an empty chair, have them intensify the feeling of the pain, and have the intensified pain they are feeling develop into a cloud of smoke in the other chair. Slowly the smoke forms itself into an image of someone they have unfinished business with, and then you do whatever you do. And it works; the headache goes away,

The counterpart for this shaman was that he always carries a blank piece of paper. Whenever anybody comes to him and says "I have a headache, will you assist me?" he says "Yes, of course, but before I begin I want you to spend five minutes studying this piece of paper in absolute detail, because it contains something of great interest for you." The thing in common about those two interventions is that they both involve switching representational systems. You break up the process by which the person is having the experience they don't want to have, by having their attention riveted in some other representational system than the one in which they are presently receiving messages of pain. The result is absolutely identical in both cases. By studying the blank piece of paper intently, or by intensifying the feeling and making it change into a picture in the chair, you are doing the same thing. You are switching representational systems, and that is a really profound intervention for any presenting problem. Anything that changes the pattern or sequence of events a person goes through internally—in responding to either internal or external stimuli—will make the response that they are stuck in no longer possible.

We had a man in Marin, California, and every time he saw a snake— no matter how far away it was, no matter where he was in respect to it or who was around it—his pupils would immediately dilate. You had to be close enough to see it. He would make an image of a snake flying through the air. This was outside of awareness until we uncovered it. When he was six years old somebody threw a snake at him unexpectedly and it scared him badly. He then responded kinesthetically as a six-year-old to the internal image of a snake flying through the air toward him. One thing we could have done was to simply change the content of that picture. We could have had him make a picture of someone throwing kisses. What we actually did was simply switch the order in which the systems occurred. We had him have the kinesthetic response first and then make the picture internally. That made it impossible for him to be phobic.

You can treat every limitation that is presented to you as a unique accomplishment by a human being, and discover what the steps are. Once you understand what the steps are, you can reverse the order in which the steps occur, you can change the content, you can insert some new piece or delete a step. There are all kinds of interesting things you can do. If you believe that the important aspect of change is "understanding the roots of the problem and the deep hidden inner meaning" and that you really have to deal with the content as an issue, then probably it will take you years to change people.

If you change the form, you change the outcome at least as well as if you work with content. The tools that it takes to change form are easier to work with. It's a lot easier to change form, and the change is more pervasive.

Man: What are some questions that you ask to elicit the steps in the process that people go through?