Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Whenever someone is compulsed to do something he doesn't want to do, something inside has to amplify to a certain point. Something has to get bigger or brighter or louder, or the tone changes, or the tempo speeds up or slows down. I want you to find out how this person achieves this particular limitation. First ask him when to do it, and then find out how he does it: what does he do on the inside that drives his response? When you think you have identified the crucial submodalities, test by asking your partner to vary them one at a time, and observe how it changes his response. Then ask him to take a different picture and again vary the same submodalities, to see if it changes his response to this other picture in the same way. Find out enough about how it works so that you could do this person's limitation if you wanted to. When you have this information, it will tell you precisely how to swish this particular individual. Don't actually swish them; just gather the information. Take about a half hour.

Man: My partner has two pictures representing two different states: desirable and undesirable. In one of them he sees jerky movement, and in the other one the movements are smooth and graceful,

OK. Do these two pictures create and maintain whatever he considered to be the difficulty? That was my question. I didn't ask about where the person wants to go yet: I only asked how he creates the difficulty. With the woman with panic attacks, she has to get from the state of "Ho, hum" to the state of "freaking out." She starts with a voice and pictures. Then she has to make the voice get faster and higher–pitched, and the picture gets closer and closer as time runs out.

Man: My partner has a feeling of urgency—

Of course. That's the feeling of compulsion. But how does he make that feeling? What is the critical submodality? In essence, what you want to know is, "How does this person already swish himself from one state of consciousness to another?"

Man: What makes it different for him is wrapping the picture around him. He pulls it in and around himself and steps into the picture and looks at the picture from his own eyes.

OK. Good. That's how he gets into the state he doesn't want to be in.

Man: Yes. He first gets into that state, and then dissociates by stepping out of it, putting it back over here to his left, away from him, and stands at a distance of several feet away from it,

OK. So association/dissociation is the critical submodality There aren't that many choices, so we are going to find some repetition. What other critical submodalities did the rest of you find?

Woman: The width of the picture, along with brightness, were critical. When the picture narrowed and dimmed, she felt constrained.

That makes sense. If you get skinny pictures, you feel constrained.

Woman: What she did was like a synesthesia.

These all work by synesthesia. That's what we're experimenting with. Think about it. When you change the brightness of an image, it changes the intensity of your feelings. These are all synesthesias. What we want to know is how they are related, so we can use that relationship to build a swish.

What you need to know in order to build a swish for her is whether or not narrowing any picture makes her response stronger, and whether dimming any picture makes her response stronger. You see, it may be that she uses the word "constrained" because she doesn't like the particular choice that she's left with in that picture. If she sees a choice she likes and the picture narrows, she may describe the feeling as "purposeful," or "committed." If narrowing and dimming make her response stronger, you can build a swish for her by starting with a narrow, dim "problem state" picture which gets wider and brighter as the desired state picture gets narrower and dimmer. That will sound strange to most of you, but keep in mind that everyone's brain is coded somewhat differently. What makes the swish really elegant is designing it so that a particular brain will respond to it strongly.

The other alternative is that making this particular picture of few choices narrow increases the intensity her feeling constrained, but that making an image of her with choices gets a stronger response if she broadens it. In that case, you could have the problem picture narrow down to a line, and the solution picture open up out of that same line. So you'll have to go back and find out more about how it works before you'll know the best way to design a swish for her.

I'm telling you about these possibilities so you begin to understand how important it is to tailor your change method to each person. You want to create a direction where the old problem image leads to the solution, and the solution image creates a response of increasing intensity.

Man: My partner had a picture with a double frame — one black and one white — and the image is slanted instead of being straight up and down. The top of the image tilts away from her when she panics.