Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Our presupposition is that any human being who comes and says "Help! I need help" has already tried with all their conscious resources, and failed utterly. However, we also presuppose that somewhere in their personal history they have had some set of experiences which can serve as a resource for helping them get exactly what they want in this particular situation. We believe that people have the resources that they need, but they have them unconsciously, and they are not organized in the appropriate context. It's not that a guy can't be confident and assertive at work, it's that he isn't. He may be perfectly confident and assertive on the golf course. All we need to do is to take that resource and put it where he needs it. He has the resource that he needs to be confident and assertive in his business on the golf course, but he has never made that transfer, that connection. Those are dissociated parts of himself. Anchoring, and the integration that occurs with anchoring, will give you a tool to collapse dissociations, so that the person has access to the resource in the context that they need it.

Man: Are there situations where that's not true and the therapist needs to give the person a—

No, I don't know of any.

I'd like to mention something that is relevant for your own learning. There's a phenomenon in the field of psychotherapy which does not seem to occur in some of the other fields that I have worked in. When I teach somebody how to do something and demonstrate that it works, they usually ask me where it won't work or what you do about something else. So when I demonstrate how you can work with people who are bothered by images from their past, you ask "When won't it work?"

Now, the interesting thing about that pattern of behavior is that if what I've demonstrated is something that you'd like to be able to do, you might as well spend your time learning it. There are lots and lots of things that we cannot do. If you can program yourself to look for things that will be useful for you and learn those, instead of trying to find out where what we are presenting to you falls apart, you'll find out where it falls apart, I guarantee you. If you use it congruently you will find lots of places that it won't work. And when it doesn't work, I suggest you do something else.

Now to answer your question. The limiting case is a person who has had very, very little real world experience. We had a client who had been locked up for twelve years in his parents' house and had only left the house to see a psychiatrist three times a week, and had been on tranquilizers from age twelve to twenty-two. He didn't have much personal history. However, he had twelve years of television experience, and that constituted enough of a resource that we were able to begin to generate what he needed.

Let me reinterpret the question. If you ask a client "How would you like to be?" and they congruently say "I don't know what I want. I really don't. I don't know what resource I would have needed back then," what do you do? You can ask them to guess. Or you can say "Well, if you knew, what would it be?" "Well, if you don't know, lie to me. Make it up." "Do you know anyone who knows how to do this?" "How would you feel if you did know? What would you look like? What would your voice sound like?" As soon as you get a response, you can anchor it. You can literally construct personal resources.

For most of the people who come to you, and for all of you sitting here, your personal history is a set of limitations on your experience and behavior in the present. Anchoring, and the construction of new possibilities using anchoring, can literally convert your personal history from a set of limitations to a set of resources.

Another way to answer the question is that if a person hasn't had the direct experience they need as a resource, they have some representation of what it could be, even though it may be other people's behavior. That is, there is a representation within them which they label "other people's behavior" that they don't allow themselves to have. However, it is a representation that's in them. If you can access it fully, you can anchor it. You can do it directly or covertly. "Well, I can't see the images that you are looking at right now, your representation of this friend of yours who knows how to do this, so would you pretend to be that friend to give me an idea of what we are working toward?" "Display that behavior for me so that I can get an idea about how Joe would act." "Show me how you wouldn't act. "Then anchor it as they do it. That's now a piece of behavior that is as real as any other behavior.