Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

"Now, Susie, when you do this, look at him and he will nod or shake his head depending upon whether or not he feels this is an appropriate time to spend some time with you. This way he gets a message from you which is unambiguous, because if you come up to him and say (harsh voice, punching his arm) 'Want to watch football?' he might misinterpret that." I can send this couple off and let them try it. I'll tell her "Now, you're only to use this twice a day." Of course she'll be curious and she will try it. And what's underneath the "non-verbal signal?" An anchor. So what will happen? Will he nod "yes" or shake his head "no"?

Now, the first few times when she does this, shell complete the whole pattern. But pretty soon it will streamline. She'll walk in and just start to reach for him and that will be enough. Pretty soon she'll be able to walk in and just look at him and that will elicit the same response.

Couples get into trouble because they don't know how to elicit responses from one another. The response they intend to get is completely different from the one they actually get. For instance, say I have a guy here who really wants her to come and comfort him sometimes. So he sits on the end of the bed and stares at the floor. She, of course, assumes that this means that he wants space for himself, so what does she do? She leaves the room. They end up in therapy seventeen years later and he says to me "She doesn't support me when I need support." And she says "I do, too!" He says "You've never done it in seventeen years when I really needed it." I say "How do you let her know you need it?" He says "Well, when I sit on the end of the bed, I show her." And she says "Huh! Oh, I though you wanted to be alone." That's why we say "The response that you get is the meaning of your communication." This is a way that you can get the responses that people want connected with their own behavior. Now when Susie here wants affection, she has a direct way of eliciting that part of him. After you give a couple a few anchors, they begin to do it on their own without ever knowing what happened. They suddenly start getting what they want "mysteriously." That's one way of using anchoring with couples.

Most couples have simply habituated to each other's behavior, and they cease to do anything new with each other. It's not that they are not capable of it, it's that they are so anchored into rigid patterns of interacting that they don't do anything new. Very rarely do I find any serious dysfunction between couples other than having habituated into rigid patterns.

Whenever there are rigid and repetitive patterns or responses that you want to interrupt, you can begin by anchoring something unpleasant or attention-getting, and fire that anchor whenever the pattern or response occurs.

With a couple I saw once, his whole experience in life was making constructed images of possibilities, and her function in life was responding to anything he said by making an eidetic image of something that was similar and talking about how it didn't work. So he would go "I want to make a skylight in the bedroom" and she would say "We were over at so and so's house and their skylight leaked." They never had any other kind of communication. There was nothing else!

I did therapy with these two in my living room. When I came in, I sat down and said "You know, I'm kind of a city kid and living out here in the country I've had some real surprises. Did you know that a rattlesnake came right through my living room, right here, yesterday? Right across the floor. It was the damndest thing." As I said that, I looked down at the floor just behind their chairs and slowly followed an imaginary snake with my eyes as it went across the floor.

Then the couple began to speak. Whenever they would start to argue, I would look down at the floor again and they would stop. I began to anchor their terror of snakes to having that conversation. After about an hour of doing that, they didn't have that conversation any more. It was too unpleasant, because after a while their feelings about snakes became associated with arguing. If you're going to talk to somebody and you know that there's even a possibility that you might need to interrupt them, you can set them up like that before you begin the session,

You can interrupt behaviorally like that, or you can interrupt with words "Oh wait a second! What—" Or you can look at their ankle and say "Are you allergic to bee stings?" That'll get their attention. "Stop! I just thought of something I have to remember to write down."