Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

Guilt's a little different. There are a couple of ways to feel guilty. One of the best ways to feel guilty is to make a picture of the response on someone's face when you did something that they didn't like. In this case you are making a visual eidetic picture. You can feel guilty about anything that way. However, if you step outside the picture, in other words reverse the procedure that we use with grief, what happens is that you will no longer feel guilty, because then you literally get a new perspective.

It sounds too easy, doesn't it? It is too easy. Ninety-nine out of a hundred depressed clients that I have seen have exactly the same pattern. They will be visualizing and/or talking to themselves about some experience that is depressing to them. But all they will have in awareness are the kinesthetic feelings. And they will use words which are appropriate: "weighed down, burdened, heavy, crushing." However, if you ask them any questions about their feelings, they will give you an elegant, non-verbal description of how they create their depression. "How do you know you're depressed? Have you felt this way a long time? What started this syndrome?" The exact questions are wholly irrelevant; they are just ways of accessing that process.

Depressed people usually make a series of visual images, usually constructed and outside of awareness. Usually they have no idea that they are making any images. Some of you had that experience with your partners today. You told them that they were accessing in a system, and they went "Oh, I don't know about that" and they didn't, because that wasn't in their awareness. Depressed people are running profoundly effective hypnotic inductions by seeing images and talking about them outside of awareness and responding in consciousness with only the feelings. They are going to be bewildered about where their feelings come from, since where they come from is totally outside of their awareness.

Many, many people who have weight problems are doing the same thing. They will have a hypnotic voice that goes "Don't eat that cake in the refrigerator." "Don't think about all the candy in the living room." "Don't feel hungry." Most people have no idea that commands like that are actually commands to do the behavior. In order to understand the sentence "Don't think of blue" you have to access the meaning of the words and think of blue.

If a child is in a dangerous situation and you say "Don't fall down," in order for him to understand what you have said, he has to access some representation of "falling down." That internal representation, especially if it is kinesthetic, will usually result in the behavior that the parent is trying to prevent. However, if you give positive instructions like "Be careful; pay attention to your balance and move slowly," then the child will access representations that will help him cope with the situation.

Man: Can you say more about guilt?

Guilt is like everything else. It's just a word, and the question is "What experience does the word refer to?" For years now people have walked into psychiatric offices of all kinds and said "I have guilt." Therapists have heard the word "guilt" and said "Yeah, I know what you mean." If that same person had walked in and said "I have some X," those therapists wouldn't have made the jump to thinking that they understood what the person meant.

The point we are trying to make about guilt and depression and jealousy and all those other words is that the important thing is to find out how it works—find out what the process is. How does someone know when it's time to be guilty as opposed to when it's not time to be guilty? And we said that an example—and this is ONLY ONE example—of how to feel guilty is to make eidetic images of people looking disappointed, and then feel bad about it. There are other ways you can feel guilty. You can make constructed images or you can talk yourself into feeling guilty. There are lots and lots of ways to go about it. It's important with each individual that you find out how they do it, if you want to change that process to something else. If the way they make themselves feel guilty is with eidetic images, you can have them change the eidetic image into a constructed image. If they do it with constructed images, you can have them change it into an eidetic one. If they talk to themselves, you can have them sing to themselves.

If you have the sensory refinements to be able to discover the specific steps in the process that the person goes through to create any response which they don't find useful and which they want to change, it gives you multiple points of intervention. The intervention can be as simple as substituting one system for another, because that will break up the pattern.

One woman had a phobia of heights. Our office was on the third story, which was kind of convenient. So I asked her to go over and look out the window and describe to me what happened. The first time she went over, she just choked. I told her that wasn't an adequate description. I had to know how she got to the point of choking and being very upset. By asking a lot of questions, I discovered that what happened is that she would make a constructed picture of herself falling out, have the feeling of falling, and then feel nauseous. She did that very quickly, and the picture was outside of consciousness.

So I asked her to walk over to the window while she sang the National Anthem inside her head. Now that sounds kind of silly, except that she walked over to the window and she didn't have the phobic response! None whatsoever. She'd had the phobia for years and years and years.

A man who was a Cree Indian medicine man, a shaman, came to a workshop and we were discussing different mechanisms that worked cross-culturally as far as inducing change in a rapid and effective way. If a person has a headache, an old semi-gestalt thing to do is to sit them in a chair, have them look at an empty chair, have them intensify the feeling of the pain, and have the intensified pain they are feeling develop into a cloud of smoke in the other chair. Slowly the smoke forms itself into an image of someone they have unfinished business with, and then you do whatever you do. And it works; the headache goes away,

The counterpart for this shaman was that he always carries a blank piece of paper. Whenever anybody comes to him and says "I have a headache, will you assist me?" he says "Yes, of course, but before I begin I want you to spend five minutes studying this piece of paper in absolute detail, because it contains something of great interest for you." The thing in common about those two interventions is that they both involve switching representational systems. You break up the process by which the person is having the experience they don't want to have, by having their attention riveted in some other representational system than the one in which they are presently receiving messages of pain. The result is absolutely identical in both cases. By studying the blank piece of paper intently, or by intensifying the feeling and making it change into a picture in the chair, you are doing the same thing. You are switching representational systems, and that is a really profound intervention for any presenting problem. Anything that changes the pattern or sequence of events a person goes through internally—in responding to either internal or external stimuli—will make the response that they are stuck in no longer possible.

We had a man in Marin, California, and every time he saw a snake— no matter how far away it was, no matter where he was in respect to it or who was around it—his pupils would immediately dilate. You had to be close enough to see it. He would make an image of a snake flying through the air. This was outside of awareness until we uncovered it. When he was six years old somebody threw a snake at him unexpectedly and it scared him badly. He then responded kinesthetically as a six-year-old to the internal image of a snake flying through the air toward him. One thing we could have done was to simply change the content of that picture. We could have had him make a picture of someone throwing kisses. What we actually did was simply switch the order in which the systems occurred. We had him have the kinesthetic response first and then make the picture internally. That made it impossible for him to be phobic.

You can treat every limitation that is presented to you as a unique accomplishment by a human being, and discover what the steps are. Once you understand what the steps are, you can reverse the order in which the steps occur, you can change the content, you can insert some new piece or delete a step. There are all kinds of interesting things you can do. If you believe that the important aspect of change is "understanding the roots of the problem and the deep hidden inner meaning" and that you really have to deal with the content as an issue, then probably it will take you years to change people.

If you change the form, you change the outcome at least as well as if you work with content. The tools that it takes to change form are easier to work with. It's a lot easier to change form, and the change is more pervasive.

Man: What are some questions that you ask to elicit the steps in the process that people go through?

Ask them to have the experience. Ask them about the last time they had the experience, or what would happen if they were to have it right here, or if they remember the last time it happened. Any of those questions will elicit the same unconscious responses we've been showing you here. Whenever I ask a question or make a statement about something to someone here in the group, if you are alert the response will already be made non-verbally much earlier and more completely than the person will consciously be able to verbalize the answer explicitly.

"How do you know when you are being phobic, as opposed to when you are not being phobic?" "How do you know?" questions usually will take you to just about everything. People have a tendency to demonstrate it, rather than bring it into consciousness.

Our book The Structure of Magic, I is devoted to what we call the "meta-model." It's a verbal model, a way of listening to the form of verbalization as opposed to content. One of the distinctions is called "unspecified verb." If I'm your client and I say to you "My father scares me," do you have an understanding of what I'm talking about? No, of course not. "My father X's me" would be as meaningful. Because for one person "Father scares me" may mean that his father put a loaded .38 to his head. And for someone else it may simply mean that his father walked through the living room and didn't say anything! So the sentence "My father scares me" has very little content. It simply describes that there is some process—at this point unspecified. The pattern, of course, is to be able to listen to language and know when a person has adequately specified some experience with a verbal description.

One of the things we teach with the meta-model is that when you get a sentence like "My father scares me" to ask for a specification of the process that the person is referring to called "scare." "How specifically does your father scare you?". "How specifically do you know you are depressed, or guilty, or phobic?" "Know" is another word like scare. It doesn't specify the process. So if I say to you "Well, I think that I have a problem" that doesn't tell you anything about the process. If you say "How do you think it?" initially people will go "What?!" But after they get over the initial shock of being asked such a peculiar question, they will begin to demonstrate the process to you, at first non-verbally. They'll go "Well, I just think it." (eyes and head moving up and to his left) Or they'll go "Ah, I don't know. I just, you know, it's just a thought I have." (eyes and head moving down and to his left) The combination of the unspecified verbs that the person is using and the quite elegant non-verbal specification by eye movements and body shifts will give you the answer to the question, whether they ever become conscious of it or not.

If you keep asking questions, usually people will become conscious of their process and explain it to you. Usually people do it with disdain, because they assume that everybody thinks the same way they do, with the same kind of processes. One well-known therapist told us seriously one day "Every intelligent, adult human being always thinks in pictures." Now, that's a statement about him. That's the way he organizes a great deal of his conscious activity. It has very little to do with about half the population we have encountered in this country.

Quite often at seminars like this, people ask questions in the following way. They go "What do you do with someone who's depressed?" (pointing at himself) The word "someone" isn't specified, verbally. We say it's a word with no referential index. It doesn't refer to something specific in the world of experience. However, the nonverbal communication was very specific in that case, and people do the same thing with other non-verbal processes. If you are able to identify things like accessing cues and other non-verbal cues, you can be pretty clear about how something works. People will come in and say "Well, I have a problem" and their non-verbal behavior has already given you the sequence that produces it.

So a "How specifically?" question or a "How do you know?" question will usually give you a complete non-verbal specification of the process that the person goes through. Magic I has a very complete specification of how to ask appropriate questions using the meta-model.

One of our students taught the meta-model to a hospital nursing staff. So if a patient said "I'm sure I'm going to get worse" or "I can't get up yet," the nurse would ask "How do you know that?" The nurse would then follow that up with other meta-model questions, to help the patient realize the limitations of his world model. The result was that the average hospital stay was reduced from 14 days to 12.2 days.

The whole idea of the meta-model is to give you systematic control over language. When we first took the time to teach it to our students, the result was the following: first there was a period where they went around and meta-modeled each other for a week. Then they began to hear what they said on the outside. They would sometimes stop in midsentence because they would begin to hear themselves. That's something else the meta-model does: it teaches you how to listen not only to other people but to yourself. The next thing that happened is that they turned inside and began to meta-model their own internal dialogue. That changed their internal language from being something that terrorized them to being something that was useful.

The meta-model is really simplistic, but it's still the foundation of everything we do. Without it, and without systematic control over it, you will do everything that we teach you sloppily. The difference between the people who do the things that we teach well and those that don't, are people who have control over the meta-model. It is literally the foundation of everything we do. You can be bright and witty and sharp and make the most complex metaphor in the world, but if you can't gather information well, both internally and externally, you won't know what to do. The meta-model questions are the ones that really give you the appropriate information immediately. It's a great tool for that, both on the outside and the inside. It will turn your internal dialogue into something useful.