Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Now which response is this? (He touches her left shoulder.)... Now, when I say that she needs this resource X, I have given you as much information verbally as you ever get from your clients when they tell you what they want. If a client says "I want to be more assertive; I want to be more trusting; I want to be more caring, more respectful of other people," they have given you exactly the same amount of information as saying "I need X." In a way they have given you less. Because if they say "I want to be more assertive,"you're going to take your meaning of assertive and assign it to their behavior. If they say "Well, what I need is some X," you won't run the risk of misunderstanding them. Sometimes I think it would be easier to do therapy in a foreign language that you didn't speak. That way you would not have the illusion that the words you heard had the same meaning for the person who utters them as they have for you. And believe me, that's an illusion.

Now why does response Y occur when I touch her right shoulder?... Have you noticed that that occurs? Has anyone in here noticed that? What's going on here? It's really spooko time! Linda, do you believe in free will?

Linda: Yeah.

(He touches her right shoulder.) Now who tightened the muscles around your mouth? Whose free will do you believe in? Free will is a funny phrase. It's also a nominalization. When you came up here in response to my request, you made a statement about your own free will. I said "I want somebody up here who makes pictures that they don't want to make." That is a statement that someone is making those pictures and it isn't you. It's your unconscious or your "mother," one or the other.

Now, what's going on? Did anybody make sense out of that?

Woman: When you were asking her to go deep inside of her and see that image, you put your hand on her right shoulder as she was feeling the bad feelings, so she had an association with the touch.

Do you mean to tell me that now every time I touch her on the shoulder like that, shell have that response? (He touches her right shoulder again, and response Y occurs.)

Man: It sure looks that way. I agree with you.

How could something that powerful be overlooked by modern psychology? Here you are, adult human beings. Most of you have been to college, and most of you are professional communicators. You've learned about human beings and how human beings work. How do you make sense out of this? ...

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? This is straight stimulus-response conditioning. Linda had a certain experience which was her response to an accessing question that I asked her—namely about this experience that she wants to change. As she fully recovered that experience—and I knew when she had fully recovered it by observing her responses—all I had to do was touch her. That touch is now associated with the entire experience that she recalled. It's the same process as the thing that she wants to change. How is it that when she makes that picture she has a set of feelings automatically? She sees a picture, bam!—she has the unpleasant feeling. It's the same process.

When a person is in a certain state of consciousness such as the experience Y for Linda, you can introduce a new dimension in any sensory system, such as a touch. We call this an "anchor," in this case, a kinesthetic anchor. As long as I repeat that touch with the same pressure at the same point on Linda's body, and she has no stronger competing states of consciousness when I begin, it will always re-access that experience. It's straight conditioning. It constitutes, in my opinion, one of the most powerful covert tools that you can use as a therapist or as a communicator. It will get you almost everything. About ninety percent of what goes on in therapy is changing the kinesthetic responses that people have to auditory and visual stimuli. "My husband makes me feel bad." "My wife always makes me angry."

Now let's demonstrate one—and this is only one way—to use it. What I'd like you to do, Linda, is to go back to this experience. Close your eyes, and go back to that experience. This time I want you to take this resource with you (He touches her left shoulder.) and I want you to see yourself respond in a whole new way. Go all the way through it until you're satisfied.