Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

We used to do hypnotic inductions before we did reframing. Then we discovered that we could do reframing without having to put people into trance. That's how we got into Neuro Linguistic Programming. We thought "Well, if that's true, then we should be able to reframe people into doing every deep trance phenomenon that we know about." So we took a group of twenty people and in one evening we programmed all the people in that group to do every deep trance phenomenon we could remember having read about anywhere. We found that we could get any "deep trance phenomenon" without doing any ritualized induction. We got amnesia, positive hallucination, tone-deafness, color blindness—everything. One woman negatively hallucinated Leslie for the entire evening. Leslie would walk over and pick up the woman's hand; her hand would float up and she had no idea why. It was like those cartoons about ghosts and stuff. That's as good as any negative hallucination we ever got doing hypnosis.

In the phobia technique where you see yourself standing there, and then float out of your body and see yourself there watching the younger you—that's a deep trance phenomenon. It requires positive hallucination, and getting out of your own body. That's fairly amazing. Yet all you have to do is give somebody the explicit instructions, and out of a hundred people, ninety-five can do it quickly and easily as long as you don't act as if it's hard. You always act as if you're leading up to something else that's going to be difficult, so they go ahead and do all the deep-trance phenomena and alter their state.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is a logical step higher than anything that has been done previously in hypnosis or therapy only in the sense that it allows you to do things formally and methodically. NLP allows you to determine exactly what alterations in subjective experience are necessary to accomplish a given outcome. Most hypnosis is a fairly random process: If I give someone a suggestion, that person has to come up with a method of carrying it out. As a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, even if I use hypnosis, I would describe exactly what I want that person to do in order to carry out the suggestion. That's the only important difference between what we're doing here and what people have been doing with hypnosis for centuries. It's a very important difference, because it allows you to predict outcomes precisely and avoid side-effects.

Using reframing and strategies and anchoring—all the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming—you can get any response you can get through hypnosis. But then that's only one way to go about it. Doing it through official hypnosis is also interesting. And combining NLP and hypnosis is even more interesting.

For instance there is the "dreaming arm" technique that works great with children—and adults, too. First you ask "Did you know you have a dreaming arm?" When you have their interest, you ask "What is your favorite TV show?" As they access visually, you notice which side their eyes go to. As they do that, you lift up their arm on the same side, and say "I'm going to lift your arm, and your arm will go down only as fast as you watch that whole TV show, and you can begin right now. So the kid watches his favorite TV show. You can even reach out and stop their arm for a moment and say "It's time for a commercial" and install messages.

I'll tell you the extremes you can take this to. I had a client who had a severe hallucination that was always with him. I could never discern quite what it was. He had a name for it which was a word I'd never heard. It was a geometric figure which was alive and that followed him everywhere. It was his own sort of personal demon, but he didn't call it a demon. He could point to it in the room, and he interacted with it. When I asked him questions, he would turn around and ask "What do you think?" Before he came to me he had been convinced by a therapist that this was a part of him. Whether it was or not, I don't know, but he was convinced that this was a part of him that he had alienated. I reached over and said "I'm going to lift up your arm, and I want you to put it down only as fast as you begin to integrate this."Then I pulled his arm down quickly, and that was it. The integration occurred— whammo, slappo—because I had tied the two together with words.