Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

A young PhD psychologist, who was about as straight as you could get, brought in a seventeen-year-old adolescent who had been knifing people and doing anything he could possibly conceive of that was damaging. The kid had been waiting in line for hours and people had been coming out in somnambulistic trances; the kid was going " Ahhhhhhhh ... What are they going to do to me?" He didn't know if he was going to get electric shock or what. They brought him in and there was this man with two canes standing there behind the table, and an audience in the room. They walked up in front of the table. Milton said "Why have you brought this boy here?" And the psychologist explained the situation, gave the case history as best he could. Milton looked at the psychologist and said "Go sit down." Then he looked at the young boy and said "How surprised will you be when all your behavior changes completely next week?" The boy looked at him and said "I'll be very surprised!" And Milton said "Get out. Take these people away."

The psychologist assumed that Milton had decided not to work with the boy. Like most psychologists, he missed the whole thing. Next week, the boy's behavior changed completely, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. The psychologist said that he could never figure out what it was that Milton did. As I understand it, Milton only did one thing. He gave that boy the opportunity to access his own unconscious resources. He said "You will change, and your conscious mind won't have anything to do with it. "Never underestimate the usefulness of just saying that to people. "I know that you have a vast array of resources available to you that your conscious mind doesn't even suspect. You have the ability to surprise yourself, each and every one of you. "If you really congruently act as if people have the resources and are going to change, you begin to induce impetus in the unconscious.

One of the things that I noticed about Milton when I first went to see him, was the incredible respect that he has for unconscious processes. He is always trying to get demonstrations back and forth between conscious and unconscious activity.

In linguistics there is something called "the tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Do you all know what that is? That's when you know a word and you even know that you know the word, but you can't say what it is. Your conscious mind even knows that your unconscious mind knows what the word is. I remind people of that as evidence that their conscious mind is less than the tip of the iceberg.

I once hypnotized a linguistics professor and sent his conscious mind away into a memory. I asked if his unconscious mind knew what the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon was—because he had demonstrated it in many of his classes. His unconscious mind said to me "Yes, I know what it is." I said "Why is it that if you know a word, you don't present it to his conscious mind?" And he said to me "His conscious mind is too damn cocky."

In our last workshop we were doing some things with strategies, and we programmed a woman to forget what her name was. A man there said "There's no way that I could possibly forget my name." I said "What is your name?" And he said "I don't know! I said "Congratulate your unconscious mind, even though you don't have one."

It is amazing to me that hypnosis has been so systematically ignored. I think it's been ignored mostly because the conscious minds who practice it don't trust it. But every form of therapy I've studied has trance experiences available in it. Gestalt is founded on positive hallucination. TA is founded on dissociation. They all have great verbal inductions.

At the last workshop we did there was a guy who was skeptical through most of the day. As I walked by, during an exercise, he was saying to his partner "Can you allow yourself to make this picture?" That's a hypnotic command. He had asked me downstairs if I believed in hypnosis! What I believe is that it's an unfortunate word. It's a name given to lots and lots of different experiences, lots of different states.