Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

If you work with people who are diseased or dying, you don't want to mirror that directly, unless you want a very short career. People in therapy are always talking about pain, sadness, emptiness, suffering, and enduring the tribulations of human existence. If you have to understand their experience by experiencing it, then my guess is you're going to have a really unpleasant time. The important thing is to have a choice between direct mirroring or cross-over mirroring. With someone who breathes normally, pace with your own breathing. With someone who is asthmatic, pace with your hand movement or something else.

Now let's do something with this, and all the things we talked about yesterday. Is there someone here who has a past experience that they think about from time to time, and it makes them have a feeling that they don't want? ...

OK. Linda, this is secret therapy. Your task is always to keep the content of what goes on from the people here. Because if you tell them the content, they will become involved. And if they become involved, it will be harder for them to learn.

Whenever we ask a person to come and make a change here as a demonstration, we will insist that they keep the content to themselves. Usually we'll say "I want you to pick a code word, a color, a number, a letter for what you want to change." So the person will say "I want to be able to M" or "I don't want to have to three." That has a couple of positive dimensions. If the outcome we're after is to teach people how to do what we do, then we will demand that it be content-free pure process therapy. Then the only things you have available to pay attention to are the pieces of the process. You cannot hallucinate effectively on "number three"—at least not as effectively as you can on "assertiveness" or "love" or "trust" or any of those other nominal-izations.

In addition it has an extra advantage. If you are in any context in which people know each other, many people are reluctant to work on material which they think might change their relationship with the people who are there. By doing secret therapy you avoid that difficulty because nobody knows what they are working on.

Linda, what do you recall that gives you the unpleasant feeling? Is it a set of images or a voice? OK. She already answered the question nonverbally. If you were watching her eyes, you saw them move up to her left and then down to her right. So she makes an eidetic visual image and then has a feeling about it.

Linda, when you see this image you have certain feelings which are unpleasant to you. Now I'd like you to look at the image and find out if you still get the unpleasant feeling when you look at it now. And I'd like you to do a good job of that. You can close your eyes and really take a good look at it. (Pause. As she experiences the feelings, he touches her right shoulder.) And as you can all see by her responses, Linda is telling the truth: when she sees that picture she feels bad. So there is some past experience that occurred, and things didn't turn out quite the way you would have liked them to. That's an understatement if I've heard right.

Linda: Right. That's exactly right.

So from time to time an image comes into your mind, and when you think about it, you get the same kind of feelings that you had as a result of that experience. Now, I would like you to think what resource you would have needed back then to have made a different response to that situation, a response which would have given you a much more acceptable outcome if you had made it. Wait a minute, because I want to tell you what I mean by "resource." By resource I don't mean some outside help or anything like that. What I mean by a resource is more confidence, more assertiveness, more trust, more caring—any internal resource. At this point in time, some time has elapsed; I don't know how much, but during that interval you have gained resources as a human being that you didn't have access to then. I want you to select a resource that would have enabled you to have had a wholly different experience back then. I don't want you to tell me what it is. I just want you to think of what it would be. (Pause. As she thinks of the resource, he touches her left shoulder.)

Did those of you watching notice some changes? Let's call the response she gets from the picture Y, and the new resource that she needed back there we'll call X. Now, let's demonstrate. Which of those two responses is this? (He touches her right shoulder.)... Now, you should be able to see the color changes, lip size changes, breathing changes, actual trembling in her body, that we have called Y.