Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

by Richard Wayne Bandler

  I've seen a therapist take away a phobia and give it back nine times in a single session, without having the faintest idea what she was doing. At the end of the session she said "Well, we'll have to work more on this next time."

  Do yourself a favor. Hide yourself where you can see your clients make the transition from the street to your office. What happens is a miracle. They are walking down the street, smiling, feeling good. As they enter the building, they start accessing all the garbage that they are going to talk about, because the building is an anchor. You can't not anchor. It's only a question of whether you do it in a useful way or not.

  We know an old Transylvanian therapist who solved the problem by having two offices. He has one office in which you come in and you tell him all your troubles. And then he says nothing to you; he just stands up and takes you into the next room and does change work. And then pretty soon he just takes you into the other room and you change; you don't have to go through the personal history which has all the pain and suffering.

  When couples have been together for a while they usually end up not touching each other much. Do you know how they do that? Let me show you. Come up here, Char. This is a good way to alienate your loved ones. You're in a really bad mood, really depressed. And I'm your loving husband, so I come up and I go "Hey, it's going to be all right," and put my arm around your shoulders. Then all I have to do is wait until you're in a good mood and really happy, and come up and say "Hey, you want to go out?" and put my arm around you again. Boom! Instead of touching each other when they are happy and making all kinds of great anchors, couples usually anchor each other into unpleasant states.

  All of you who have done work with couples or families know you can be sitting there and everything is going along nicely and suddenly one of them explodes. If you didn't happen to notice the little sound, or the movement, or the body sway away from the other person, it's baffling. What happened? Nobody knows. The anchors that people are responding to in "maladaptive behavior" are usually outside of their awareness.

  There's a great exercise you can do. Get together with a family or a couple, wait until one of those explosions happens, and detect what you think was the cue that initiated the explosion. Then adopt it in your behavior, and find out if you can get them to explode again. If you can get them to explode, you know you've identified exactly the key point in their interaction. Let's say it's a raised eyebrow. Then all you have to do is anchor a pleasant response kinesthetically, and then fire off that anchor and raise your eyebrow at the same time. In the future when someone raises their eyebrow, it won't have that effect any more.

  You can also use anchoring in the context of an organization or a corporation. They are just like families, basically. If you know ahead of time that a group of people is going to get together and they've been meeting for years, they're going to disagree in patterned ways. One of the things you can do is to meet with each of them individually beforehand, and establish a covert non-verbal anchor to change the most salient irritating parts of their non-verbal communication.

  Some people have voice tones that when you hear them you just feel bad and disagreeable, no matter what they say. Nobody could continue to talk that way if they had auditory feedback loops. If they could hear themselves, they would talk differently. I guess it's a protective device.

  Bullfrogs do that. A bullfrog makes such a huge sound, it would deafen itself if it heard itself, because its ear is so close to the source of that loud noise. The nerve impulses for the sound, and the nerve impulses from the muscles that make the sound, arrive at the brain 180 degrees out of phase and cancel each other. So the bullfrog never hears itself. And it seems like a lot of people I meet operate the same way.

  Another thing that often happens in a corporate situation is this: Somebody becomes so excited about a point they want to make that he begins to really push and gesture. Suddenly the person on the other side sees the pointing finger and the intense look on his face and that triggers an anchored response in them. Away they go. Their response is partially to this human being in this time and place, and a whole lot to other times and places—anchored by the excited face and the pointing finger. Human beings operate in what we call a "mixed state" most of the time. If I ask you to look around and find someone in this group who reminds you of someone else, I will guarantee that your responses to that person will be a mixture of responses to them here and now, and old responses to whoever it is they remind you of—unless you are very, very careful and clean in your responses to that person. You are all sensitive to that process; it's called a "contaminated" response in TA, and it's a common way that people respond.

  Woman: Does it make any difference whether you touch the right or left side of the body when you anchor kinesthetically?

  There are fine distinctions—there's a lot of artistry. But for the purposes of doing therapy, you don't need to know about them. If you want to be a magician, it's a different game. If you want to create artificial credit cards that aren't there, and things like that, there are certain useful kinds of distinctions. But for the purpose of doing therapy, kinesthetic anchors are adequate, and either side of the body will be as good.

  Sometimes it helps to be able to anchor tonally. Virginia Satir anchors tonally. She has a certain tone of voice she uses whenever she does change work. She talks in a regular tonality for six hours, and then suddenly she changes her tonality. When she uses that tonality, boom! that's it. The people change. Erickson has a special tonality he uses when he wants people to go into trance.

  A lot of people in trance have their eyes closed. What does Erickson do for anchoring at that point, since he's in a wheel chair and he can't reach around and do kinesthetics? Close your eyes for a moment. I'm going to talk, and as I talk I'm going to move my head back and forth. I want you to notice whether you can detect the spatial dislocation of my voice, even from this distance. If you can, fine. If you can't, you detected it unconsciously I'll guarantee you, because that's one of the major anchoring systems that Erickson uses with people who have their eyes closed in trance.

  All of those will work. The choice you make about what system you anchor in will determine the kind of response you get. If you want to involve the person's consciousness, anchor in all systems. If you want to be covert and go around a resistant conscious mind, anchor in any system that is not represented in consciousness. If the person's predicates and their eye movement patterns give you the information that they are primarily kinesthetic, don't anchor in that system unless you, want their conscious resources involved. If you anchor that same person tonally, they will have no conscious representation of it.

  Anchoring Exercise

  We are going to ask you to begin with kinesthetic anchors. They seem to be the easiest to learn, and the most useful. You'll generalize naturally from those. You can anchor in any system. Pair up again, A and B. You are both going to operate in both positions.

  A, your job is to do the following: Face B, and place your right hand lightly on B's left knee. Then ask an accessing question: "Do you remember the last time that you had a really good sexual experience?" Wait for an appropriate response. You've got to be able to detect a response before you can anchor it. As you begin to see changes, you begin to apply pressure with your hand. You observe the changes in the parameters of muscle tone, skin color, breathing, lip size, etc. As you detect them, let those actually drive the pressure in your hand. When the changes level out, then you just lift your hand off. Then you will have a perfectly timed anchor. Don't anchor initially until you can see a difference in your partner's response.

  Your ability to see a difference depends on how forceful you are in amplifying what you are getting. If you do things like this: (low, slow voice) "Have you ever been really excited?" or (high, quick voice) "Have you ever been really sad?" that won't work as well as if you congruently say excitedly "Look, have you ever been really excited?" The more expressively you access, the more expressively they will respond.


  Then you place your left hand on their right knee, and ask them "What in your experience is the opposite of that?" They will access whatever is the opposite, for them. As the changes occur, again you increase the pressure as you see the changes until they plateau, and then lift your hand off.

  Then you have two anchors. What we want you to do is to use one, and notice the changes. Pause, and then use the other one, and notice the changes. It works even better if you distract your partner's consciousness with something neutral, like "Do you remember seeing the lights as we came into the building?" as you use that anchor. See if you can regularly get the same response when you use your anchors.

  When you are satisfied that you have two anchors that work, and you can see the difference between them, then we want you to hold both at the same time, for about 30-60 seconds, and watch an amazing event, called “integration." Watch your partner's face. You will first see half of the face with one of those responses and the other half with the other, and then they will integrate. Anchors are not buttons; you have to hold them until you see the full response. Once the integration begins, you don't have to hold any more.

  The purpose of this exercise is not to do therapy with your partner. The purpose is simply for you to verify with your own sensory apparatus that anchors exist, and that you are capable of anchoring. All you are doing is learning to anchor. This afternoon well teach you how to use it to do therapy. Go ahead.

  * * * * *

  There was one question that came up repeatedly during the exercise. Bill said "Well, I was imagining a time with my wife that was extremely sensually pleasurable there on the one knee. And on the other knee, I was remembering a time when she didn't seem to be willing to be with me, or the demands of keeping the house, etc. didn't allow us time to sit down together, and I got angry." Bill's partner was able to get the two distinctly, and to go back and reaccess them; the anchoring worked fine. He collapsed the two anchors and the integration occurred. And their question is "What will happen now when he sees his wife?" The answer to this is really important insofar as our understanding of our work goes. What will happen now is that when he sees his wife, he will have the choice of those purely sensual, pleasant feelings in the past, or the feelings of anger from the past, or—and this is very important— any combination of the two.

  Those were two antagonistic, dissociated feeling states in the past. When you anchor each one, you also anchor the antagonistic physiology, muscle patterns, breathing, etc. Then when you stimulate both at the same time, the physiological patterns which are antagonistic literally interrupt each other—you could see that in the person's face, in their breathing, and so on. In the process they become integrated so that the person can come up with any combination of those feelings which were previously dissociated, and respond appropriately in context. The presupposition behind our behavior in this area is that given a set of choices, a person will always make the best choice that they have available in the context. I think it's entirely appropriate for anyone to have the ability both to be fully sensual with another person as well as to be angry, and all the mixes in between. By integrating in this way, using anchoring as an integrative device to break down the dissociations, we make sure that you have a full range of response in that area.

  One of the lies we told you was that the anchoring exercise you did is not therapy. "You are just going to anchor this here and that there and then you are going to collapse the two and integrate them." I want you to think about that. What you did with the knee anchors and the integration is formally identical to gestalt two-chair work. Gestalt people use chairs as anchors and when you switch from one chair to the other, your feelings actually change. If you were on the outside as the therapist, you would actually see facial, postural and color changes as the person moved from one chair to the other. Those chairs are anchors. The problem is that it's hard to get integration. How do you push the chairs together? So you have to make people go back and forth really fast.

  Now we'd like you all to pair up again and do the "changing personal history" pattern that we did this morning with Linda. I'll review it briefly:

  First, what response does your partner have now that s/he wants to change? Anchor that to stabilize the situation, and to give you access to it.

  Now, how would you like to behave, or what resource would you need, to behave in a way that's more congruent with your present resources? When you originally went through this experience, you didn't have all the resources you now have. Which resource would you take back to change your personal history? When have you had an experience of that resource? Anchor the response.

  Then put the two together. Hold both anchors as your partner goes back and relives the past with the new resource, changing and creating new old history, until s/he is satisfied. Here your sensory experience is important. Check for congruency. Did you like the way it turned out? If not, do it again. What other resource do you need? Sometimes you have to give people a couple of resources. Or sometimes people think that all they needed is a certain resource and they take it and go back and it turns out to be a dud. The conscious mind has a limited understanding of what's needed back there. The only way you're going to find out is by having them go back to re-experience parts of their personal history.

  After they are satisfied that they have a new resource that worked back there, you need to bridge, or future-pace. What experiences in your present life are sufficiently similar to that old one to trigger the unwanted response? What is the first thing you see, hear, or feel that

  I lets you identify this kind of situation? Then anchor the new resource to those contextual cues. OK. Go ahead.

  * * * * *

  There are many, many useful ways of organizing the whole process called psychotherapy. One of the ways that is quite simple, and therefore elegant, is to treat every psychological limitation like a phobia. A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation. A person who has a phobia made a decision, unconsciously, under stress, sometime earlier in their life in the face of overwhelming stimuli. They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning. Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life, they make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement. You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes, you are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.

  The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the responses are so consistent. If a person says "I can't be assertive around my boss," they are essentially saying "Somewhere in my personal history I have an experience or a set of experiences of being assertive. I cannot get to that resource in the context of my boss." When a person responds with a phobic response to a snake, that's a similar situation. I know that at other times in their experience, in their personal history, they have been able to be quite calm and courageous. However, in the context of a snake, they can't get to that resource.

  Up to this time in the development of psychology and psychiatry and counseling, people haven't tried to organize information to go directly after things. Freud set up a rule "You must go into history," so we've decided if you can understand how something developed historically, you can work with it. I think you only need to do that once or twice, though. Given that you understand, historically, how people are capable of creating phobias, you don't need a historical understanding of each and every phobia, as long as you understand that there are similar processes at work. The way in which people get phobias is fascinating. However, once you understand something about the structure you can go ahead and change it, because all phobias are going to work in the same way. People have strategies which produce phobic responses. Who here has a phobia?

  Woman: I've got one about driving a car across a bridge and falling in the car into the water.

  If you were observing her, everything that you need to know about changing her has already happened. Would you like to get rid of it? Is it something tha
t restricts your behavior?

  Woman: Oh, I'd love to get rid of it!

  Are you sure?

  Woman: Of course. Yeah, I'm sure. I just wasn't sure I wanted to share it, but I've already shared it!

  But you didn't need to share it! You could have kept it a secret. We don't need any content. In fact, we prefer not to have any. Is there someone else here with a phobia who would be unwilling to talk about it? Any time we ask for volunteers, you keep the content to yourself. None of you knew what Linda was thinking about this morning. That's the format we'll always use for demonstrations, so feel free to demonstrate. One way for us to respect your integrity as human beings, whether it's in private practice or in a group demonstration like this, is for you to keep the content to yourself. We don't need it. We operate with process anyway. Content is irrelevant, and besides that, it's often depressing. We don't want to hear it. And when you tell people the content of your problem, you look like a fool. It's a good thing we interrupted you before you told them what the content was, right? OK. What's your name?

  Woman: Tammy.

  Tammy. Very good. (He contorts his body and several different intense expressions pass across his face.) Any weird non-verbal analogue is good, especially if you get clients who have been in therapy before. You need to do something to throw them off balance— anything to break up their patterns. Because otherwise they will come in and tell you the same thing they told everyone else. They will come in and tell you a prerecorded message. We once heard a tape recording of a client with the therapist before us, and in the whole first session with us she said exactly the same thing; the same words in the same order. We were fascinated to find out how much she could reproduce. It was almost identical until we intervened in the process. I jumped up and started roaring about God. "God said 'You will change!'" The easiest way to do therapy is to enter the client's reality. This woman was extremely religious, and the easiest way to assist her in making a change was to make myself an intermediary between God and her. That's what all priests do, isn't it? It was acceptable to her. All I did was feed back information that she had given to me from her unconscious—which were the instructions she needed.