Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

What she's doing now is reliving it with the new resource available— which wasn't available the first time this happened—until she is satisfied with her response in that situation. We call this process "changing personal history." You go back into your personal history with resources you did not have then, taking them with you this time. We don't know what the content of this is, and there's no need for us to. She is reliving the experience now. After this she will have two histories, the "real" one in which she didn't have the resource, and the new one in which she did have the resource. As long as these are full experiences—and we're guaranteeing that by anchoring—both will serve equally well as guides for future behavior.

Linda: (She opens her eyes and smiles broadly.) I love it!

OK, now, Linda, I would like you to go back and make the old picture again, the one that made you feel bad, and tell me what happens. Observers, what do you see, X or Y? And this is where the sensory experience really counts. You can do the therapy but knowing whether or not it worked is the most essential piece.

Man: I see a mixture of X and Y.

What happens in your experience, Linda? When you see that picture, do you feel the same way you did before? Linda: No, I do not.

Don't reveal any content; just tell us how it's different.

Linda: Uh, my fear is gone.

Now, there's another way to check your work. Anchoring can be used in a number of ways. Now, watch this. (He touches her right shoulder.) Is that the same response that touch elicited before?

Woman: Partially.

Partially. Now, if it were to be entirely reversed, I would consider that doing the client a disservice. If you are in the business of choice, you are in the business of adding choices—not subtracting them, and not substituting one rigid stimulus-response circuit for another. If you have a client who feels helpless and small each time he goes to work, and you change that so each time he goes to work he feels assertive, happy, and confident, he is no better off, in my opinion. He still has only one choice about how to respond. And if you have one choice, you're a robot. We think therapy is the business of turning robots into people. That's not an easy task. We all get robotized. Part of your job is to change that situation unconsciously, so that people actually exercise choice in their behavior, whether it's conscious or not.

What is choice? Choice, to me, is having multiple responses to the same stimulus. Do you realize that each time you read a book there are probably no new words in that book? It's the same old words in a new order? Just new sequences of the same words? No matter where you go, you're going to hear the same old words, or just new sequences of the same old words. And each time I read a fiction book, it's the same thing. Practically every word we've used today has been an old word. How can you learn anything new?

Now, we need to do one more thing that's very important. Linda has the choice sitting here in this room. You've all seen that. We want her to also have this choice in other contexts. All of you have had the following experience. You work with a client and you and the client both know that they have new choices. They leave the office and you're happy and they're happy and congruent, and two weeks later when they come back they go "Well, it didn't quite ... I don't know what happened. I knew it... and I uh..." Or worse yet they come back and present you with the exact same problem, with very little memory that you even worked on it two weeks ago!

Linda was in an altered state up here. She radically altered her consciousness to go after old experiences, to integrate them with new kinds of resources. The point is—and this was a primary insight of family therapy twenty years ago—if you simply induce changes in an altered state of consciousness known as an institution, or a therapist's office, or a group setting, it's very unlikely that most of your work will transfer the first time. You'll have to do it several times. You have to be sure that the new understandings and learnings, the new behavior, the new choices, transfer out of that altered state of consciousness into the appropriate context in the real world.

There's a very easy process that we call "bridging" or "future-pacing" that connects the new response with the appropriate context. It's another use of anchoring. You know what the new response is, and you know that the person wants it to occur in some context, so you simply ask them the following question: "What is the first thing that you would see, hear, or feel, that would allow you to know you are in the context where you want to make this new choice?"