Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

by Richard Wayne Bandler

  Most people in the field of therapy go to school, but they don't learn anything about people that is relevant to therapy in any way. They learn about statistics: "Three and a half percent of clients are..." But you very rarely have a hundred people walk into your office so that you can work with three and a half of them. So you go to workshops to learn how to do therapy. There are a lot of people who are very good therapists who do workshops but who don't know how they do what they do. They will tell you what they think they are doing, thereby distracting you from paying attention to the client they are working with. If you are lucky you will pick up the kinds of cues we're talking about subliminally, and be able to respond out of yourself in some systematic way. However, that doesn't work with a large number of people. There are a large number of people doing therapy unsuccessfully. What you need to begin to do is to restructure your own behavior in terms of paying attention to your clients.

  As professional communicators, it seems to me to make a lot of sense for you to spend some time consciously practicing specific kinds of communication patterns so that they become as unconscious and as systematic in your behavior as riding a bicycle or driving a car. You need to train yourselves to be systematic in your behavior, which requires some conscious intervening practice time. So that when you see visual accessing cues and hear visual predicates, you can automatically have the choice of responding by matching, or responding by mismatching, or any combination that you can think of.

  In other words, you need a good unconscious systematic repertoire of patterns for each choice point that you have that's going to come up repetitively in your work: How do I establish rapport with this other human being? How do I respond in a situation in which they don't have information consciously and verbally to respond to my question? How do I respond to incongruity? Those are all choice points. Identify what choice points are repetitive in your experience of doing your work, and for each of those choice points, have a half a dozen different responses—at least three, each one of which is unconscious and systematic in your behavior. If you don't have three choices about how to respond to things that occur in the therapeutic situation, then I don't think you are operating out of a position of choice. If you only have one way, then you are a robot. If you have two, you'll be in a dilemma.

  You need a solid foundation from which to generate choices. One way to get that solid foundation is to consider the structure of your behavior and your activity in therapy. Pick out points that are repetitive, make sure you have lots of responses to each of those points, then forget about the whole thing. And add one ingredient, a meta-rule which says "If what you are doing is not working, change it. Do anything else."

  Since consciousness is limited, respect that and don't go "Good, I'm going to do all those things that happened in this workshop." You can't. What you can do is for the first five minutes of every third interview every day begin by saying "Look, before we begin today there are a couple of things I need to know about your general cognitive functioning. Would you tell me which color is at the top of a stoplight?" Ask questions that access representational systems, and tune yourself for five minutes to that person's responses so that you will know what's happening later in the session under stress. Every Thursday you can try matching predicates with the first client that comes in, and mismatching with the second. That is a way of systematically discovering what the outcome of your behavior is. If you don't organize it that way, it will stay random. If you organize it and feel free to limit yourself to specific patterns and notice the outcome, and then change to new patterns, you will build up an incredible repertoire of responses at the unconscious level. This is the only way that we know of to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways. This just happens to be the only one we know about now.

  Man: It sounds to me as if you are telling us to experiment with our clients. I think I have a professional obligation to—

  I disagree. I think you have an obligation to experiment with every client to make yourself more skilled, because in the long run you are going to be able to help more people more expediently. If, under the guise of professionalism, you don't try to expand your skills and experiment, basically I think you are missing the point and professionalism becomes just one way to limit yourself. Think about "professionalism." If professionalism is a name for a set of things that you can't do, then you are restricting your behavior.

  In cybernetics there's a law called the Law of Requisite Variety. It says that in any system of human beings or machines, the element in that system with the widest range of variability will be the controlling element. And if you restrict your behavior, you lose on requisite variety.

  The prime examples of that are mental hospitals. I don't know about your mental hospitals here, but in California we've got some real whackos in ours, and we have a lot of patients, too. It's easy to distinguish the staff, because the staff has a professional ethic. They have a group hallucination and this group hallucination is more dangerous to them than to anyone else, because they believe that they must restrict their behavior in certain ways. Those ways make them act consistently, and the patients don't have to play by those rules. The widest range of flexibility is going to allow you to elicit responses and control the situation. Who's going to be able to elicit the most responses—the psychiatrist who is acting "normal" or the patient who is acting weird? I'd like to give you my favorite example.

  We're walking down a corridor in Napa State Mental Hospital in California with a group of resident psychiatrists. We approach a large day room and we are talking in normal tones. As we reach the door and open it and walk in, all of the psychiatrists begin to whisper. So of course we began to whisper too. Then finally we looked at each other and said "Why are we whispering?" And one of the psychiatrists turned to us and whispered "Oh, there's a catatonic in the room. We don't want to disturb him." Now when a catatonic can have requisite variety over a professional, then I join the catatonics.

  When you go to California, most therapists have a different professional ethic. For example, in order to be a good communicator, you must dress like a farm worker. That's the first rule. The second rule is that you must hug everyone too hard. Those people are always laughing at the psychiatrists because they have to wear ties! To me, their behavior is just as restricted and one-dimensional and limited. The trouble with many professional ethical codes, whether they are humanistic, analytic or anything else, is that they limit your behavior. And whenever you accept any "I won't do it," there are people you are not going to be able to work with. We went into that same ward at Napa and I walked over and stomped on the catatonic's foot as hard as I could and got an immediate response. He came right out of "catatonia," jumped up, and said "Don't do that!"

  Frank Farrelly, who wrote Provocative Therapy, is a really exquisite example of requisite variety. He is willing to do anything to get contact and rapport. Once he was doing a demonstration with a woman who had been catatonic for three or four years. He sits down and looks at her and warns her fairly: "I'm going to get you." She just sits there catatonically, of course. It's a hospital, and she's wearing a hospital gown. He reaches over and he pulls a hair out of her leg just above the ankle. And there's no response, right? So he moves up an inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. No response. He moves up another inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. "Get your hands off me!" Most people would not consider that "professional." But the interesting thing about some things that are not professional is that they work! Frank says that he's never yet had to go above the knee.

  I gave a lecture at an analytic institute in Texas once. Before we began, for three hours, they read research to me demonstrating basically that crazy people couldn't be helped. And at the end I said "I'm beginning to get a picture here. Let me find out if I'm right. Is what you are trying to tell me that you don't believe that therapy, the way it's done presently, works?" And they said "No, what we're trying to tell you is that we don't believe that any form of
therapy could overwork for schizophrenics." And I said "Good. You guys are really in the right profession; we should all be psychiatrists and believe that you can't help people." And they said "Well, let's talk about psychotics. People who live in psychotic realities and blah blah blah," and all this stuff about relapses. I said "Well, what kinds of things do you do with these people?" So they told me about their research and the kind of therapy they had done. They never did anything that elicited a response from these people.

  Frank Farrelly had a young woman in a mental hospital who believed that she was Jesus' lover. You must admit that is a slightly unusual belief. People would come in and she would go "I'm Jesus' lover." And of course they would go "Unnhhh!" and say "Well, you're not. This is only a delusion you're having ... isn't it?" If you go into mental hospitals, most mental patients are very good at acting weird and eliciting responses from people. Frank trained a young social worker to behave consistently in a certain way and sent her in. The patient went "Well, I'm Jesus' lover," and the social worker looked back and said wryly "I know, he talks about you." Forty-five minutes later the patient is going "Look, I don't want to hear any more of this Jesus stuff!"

  There's a man named John Rosen whom some of you have heard of. Rosen has two things he does consistently, and he does them very powerfully and gets a lot of good results. One of the things Rosen does really well, as described by Schefflin,is that he joins the schizophrenic's reality so well that he ruins it. That's the same thing that Frank taught his social worker to do.

  The psychiatrists in Texas had never tried anything like that before. And when I suggested it to them, they all made faces because it was outside of their professional ethic. They had been trained in a belief system that said "Limit your behavior. Don't join your client's world; insist that they come to yours." It's much harder for somebody who's crazy to come to a professional model of the world, than it is for a professional communicator to go to theirs. At least it's less apt to happen.

  Man: You guys are stereotyping a lot of people here!

  Of course we are. Words do that; that's what words are for. Words generalize experience. But you only need to be offended if they apply to you directly.

  One of the main places that communicators get stuck is on a linguistic pattern that we call "modal operator." A client says "I can't talk about that again today. That's not possible in this particular group. And I don't think that you're able to understand that, either." When you listen to content, you get wiped out. You will probably say "What happened?"

  The pattern is that a client says "I can't X" or "I shouldn't X." If somebody comes in and goes "I shouldn't get angry" what you do if you're a gestalt therapist, is "Say 'I won't.'" Fritz Perls was German, and perhaps those words make a difference in German. But they don't make any difference in English. "Won't" and "shouldn't" and "can't" in English are all the same. It makes no difference whether you shouldn't or you couldn't or you wont, you still haven't. It makes no difference whatsoever. So the person says "I wont get angry."

  Then if you ask "Why not?" they are going to give you reasons and that's a great way to get stuck. If you ask them "What would happen if you did?" or "What stops you?" you'll go somewhere else more useful.

  We published all this in The Structure of Magic some years ago, and we ask a lot of people "Have you read Magic I"? And they go "Well, laboriously, yes." And we ask "Did you learn what was in it? Did you learn Chapter Four?" That's the only meaningful part of the book as far as I can tell. And they say "Oh, yes. I knew all that." And I say "OK, good. I'll play your client, and you respond to me with questions." I say "I cant get angry." And they say "Ah, well, what seems to be the problem?" instead of "What prevents you?" or "What would happen if you did?" By not having the meta-model responses systematically wired in, people get stuck. One of the things that we noticed about Sal Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls is that they intuitively had many of those twelve questions in the meta-model wired in.

  You need to go through some kind of program to wire in your choices so that you don't have to think about what to do. Otherwise, while you are thinking about what to do, you will be missing what's going on. We're talking right now about how you organize your own consciousness to be effective in a complex task of communication.

  As far as the conscious understanding of the client goes, it's really irrelevant. If the client wants to know what's going on, the easiest way to respond is "Do you have a car? Do you ever have it repaired? Does the mechanic describe in detail what he is going to do before he does anything?" Or "Have you ever had surgery? Did the surgeon describe in detail which muscles were going to be cut, and how he was going to clamp the arteries?" I think those are analogies which are pertinent to respond to that kind of inquiry.

  The people who can give you the most detailed and refined diagnosis of their own problems are the people I've met on the back wards of many of the mental institutions in this country and in Europe. They can tell you why they are the way they are, where it came from, and how they perpetuate the maladaptive or destructive pattern. However, that explicit conscious verbal understanding does them no good whatsoever in changing their behavior and their experience.

  Now what we would like to do is to make a suggestion. And of course we are only hypnotists, so this is only a suggestion. And what we'd like to do is to suggest to the unconscious portion of each of both of you, whose communication we have been delighted to receive the entire day today, that since it has represented for you at the unconscious level all the experiences which have occurred, both consciously and otherwise, that it make use of the natural process of dreaming and sleep, which will occur tonight as a natural course in your life, as an opportunity to sort through the experiences of today. And represent even more usefully than up to this point the material which you have learned here today without fully realizing it, so that in the days and the weeks and the months ahead you will be able to discover to your delight that you are doing new things. You had learned new things without even knowing it, and you will be delightfully surprised to find them in your behavior. So if you should happen to remember, or not, your dreams, which we hope will be bizarre this evening, allowing you to rest peacefully, so that you can arise and meet us again here alert and refreshed, ready to learn new and exciting things.

  See you tomorrow.

  II. Changing Personal History and Organization

  Yesterday we described a number of ways that you can get rapport with another person and join their model of the world, as a prelude to helping them find new choices in behavior. Those are all examples of what we call pacing or mirroring. To the extent that you can match another person's behavior, both verbally and non-verbally, you will be pacing their experience. Mirroring is the essence of what most people call rapport, and there are as many dimensions to it as your sensory experience can discriminate. You can mirror the other person's predicates and syntax, body posture, breathing, voice tone and tempo, facial expression, eye blinks, etc.

  There are two kinds of non-verbal pacing. One is direct mirroring. An example is when I breathe at the same rate and depth that you breathe. Even though you're not conscious of that, it will have a profound impact upon you.

  Another way to do non-verbal pacing is to substitute one non-verbal channel for another. We call that "cross-over mirroring." There are two kinds of cross-over mirroring. One is to cross over in the same channel. I can use my hand movement to pace your breathing movement—the rise and fall of your chest. Even though the movement of my hand is very subtle, it still has the same effect. It's not as dramatic as direct mirroring, but it's very powerful. That is using a different aspect of the same channel: kinesthetic movement.

  In the other kind of cross-over mirroring, you switch channels. For example, as I speak to you ... I watch ... your breathing ... and I gauge the ... tempo... of my voice... to the rise... and the fall... of your chest. That's a different kind of cross-over. I match the tempo of my speech to the rate of your brea
thing.

  Once you have paced well, you can lead the other person into new behavior by changing what you are doing. The overlap pattern we mentioned yesterday is an example of that. You join the client in their representation of the world and then overlap into a different representation.

  Pacing and leading is a pattern that is evident in almost everything we do. If it is done gracefully and smoothly it will work with anyone, including catatonics. Once I was in Napa State Mental Hospital in California, and a guy had been sitting there for several years on the couch in the day room. The only communication he was offering me were his body position and his breathing rate. His eyes were open, pupils dilated. So I sat facing away from him at about a forty-five degree angle in a chair nearby, and I put myself in exactly the same body position. I didn't even bother to be smooth. I put myself in the same body position, and I sat there for forty minutes breathing with him. At the end of forty minutes I had tried little variations in my breathing, and he would follow, so I knew I had rapport at that point. I could have changed my breathing slowly over a period of time and brought him out that way. Instead I interrupted it and shocked him. I shouted "Hey! Do you have a cigarette?" He jumped up off the couch and said "God! Don't do that!"