Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

I have a student now who I think is pretty good. One of the things that I appreciate about him is that instead of "working on himself," he takes the time to enter altered states and give himself new realities. I think most of the time when therapists work on themselves, all they do is confuse themselves utterly and completely. Once a woman hired me to do a workshop. She called me up three weeks before the workshop and said that she had changed her mind. So I called my attorney and sued her. She had months and months and months to plan the workshop and do what she had said she would do. She had spent all that time "working on" whether she was ready to do this or not. Her therapist called me up to try to persuade me to not sue her. He said "Well, it's not like she hasn't spent time on it. She's been working on this for months about whether she was ready to do this workshop."

It seems to me that there was one obvious thing she could have done: she could have called me up months and months earlier and told me that she was unsure. But instead of doing that, she tried to work out external experience internally and consciously. And I think that's a paradox, as we've said over and over again. When people come for therapy, if they had the resources consciously available they would have changed already. The fact that they haven't is what brings them there. When you, as a therapist, consciously try to change yourself, you're setting yourself up for confusion, and you're likely to go into all kinds of interesting, but not very useful, loops.

One student of mine came to me first as a client. He was a junior in college at the time, and he said "I have a terrible problem. I meet a girl, things go really fine, and then she comes and sleeps with me and everything is great. But the next morning as soon as I wake up, I think 'Well, either I have to marry her or kick her out of bed and never see her again.'"

At that moment in time I was sort of amazed that a human being had actually said that to me! I will never cease to be amazed about how people can limit their world of experience. In his world there were only those two choices!

I was working with John at the time, and John looked at him and said "Has it ever occurred to you to just say 'Good morning'?" and the student went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I think that stunk as a therapeutic maneuver, because now what's he going to do? He's going to say "Good morning," and then either put his foot in the center of her back and kick her out of bed, or propose marriage. There are more possibilities than that. But as he entered that state of confusion and went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I reached over and said "Close your eyes." And John said "And begin to dream a dream in which you learn just how many other possibilities there are, and your eyes will be unable to open until you find them." He sat there for 5 and a half hours. We went out in the other room. Six and a half hours he was there coming up with possibilities. He couldn't leave because his eyes wouldn't open. He tried standing and walking, but he couldn't find the door. All of the possibilities that he thought of in that six and a half hour period had been available to him all along, but he had never done anything to access his own creativity.

Reframing is a way of getting people to say "Hey, how else can I do this?" In a way it's the ultimate criticism of a human being, saying "Stop and think about your behavior, and think about it in the following way: Do something new; what you're doing doesn't work! Tell yourself a story, and then come up with three other ways of telling the story, and suddenly you have differences in your behavior.

There's an amazing thing about people: when they find something that doesn't work, they do it harder. For example, go to a junior high school and watch kids on the playground. One kid comes up to another one and pushes him. So the other kid sticks his chest out. The next time the kid pushes him he can push him even better because he has a firm chest to put his hand against.

One thing that really hasn't been understood is what's possible if instead of approaching a problem directly, you approach it indirectly. Milton Erickson did what I think was one of the shortest cures that I've ever heard about. The story that I heard was that he was at the VA hospital in Palo Alto in 1957, and psychiatrists were waiting in line with patients out in the hall. They were coming in one at a time, and Milton was doing a little magic, doing this and doing that. Then they went back out in the hall and talked about how Milton wasn't really doing these things and he was a charlatan.