Now why does response Y occur when I touch her right shoulder?... Have you noticed that that occurs? Has anyone in here noticed that? What's going on here? It's really spooko time! Linda, do you believe in free will?

Linda: Yeah.

(He touches her right shoulder.) Now who tightened the muscles around your mouth? Whose free will do you believe in? Free will is a funny phrase. It's also a nominalization. When you came up here in response to my request, you made a statement about your own free will. I said "I want somebody up here who makes pictures that they don't want to make." That is a statement that someone is making those pictures and it isn't you. It's your unconscious or your "mother," one or the other.

Now, what's going on? Did anybody make sense out of that?

Woman: When you were asking her to go deep inside of her and see that image, you put your hand on her right shoulder as she was feeling the bad feelings, so she had an association with the touch.

Do you mean to tell me that now every time I touch her on the shoulder like that, shell have that response? (He touches her right shoulder again, and response Y occurs.)

Man: It sure looks that way. I agree with you.

How could something that powerful be overlooked by modern psychology? Here you are, adult human beings. Most of you have been to college, and most of you are professional communicators. You've learned about human beings and how human beings work. How do you make sense out of this? ...

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell? This is straight stimulus-response conditioning. Linda had a certain experience which was her response to an accessing question that I asked her—namely about this experience that she wants to change. As she fully recovered that experience—and I knew when she had fully recovered it by observing her responses—all I had to do was touch her. That touch is now associated with the entire experience that she recalled. It's the same process as the thing that she wants to change. How is it that when she makes that picture she has a set of feelings automatically? She sees a picture, bam!—she has the unpleasant feeling. It's the same process.

When a person is in a certain state of consciousness such as the experience Y for Linda, you can introduce a new dimension in any sensory system, such as a touch. We call this an "anchor," in this case, a kinesthetic anchor. As long as I repeat that touch with the same pressure at the same point on Linda's body, and she has no stronger competing states of consciousness when I begin, it will always re-access that experience. It's straight conditioning. It constitutes, in my opinion, one of the most powerful covert tools that you can use as a therapist or as a communicator. It will get you almost everything. About ninety percent of what goes on in therapy is changing the kinesthetic responses that people have to auditory and visual stimuli. "My husband makes me feel bad." "My wife always makes me angry."

Now let's demonstrate one—and this is only one way—to use it. What I'd like you to do, Linda, is to go back to this experience. Close your eyes, and go back to that experience. This time I want you to take this resource with you (He touches her left shoulder.) and I want you to see yourself respond in a whole new way. Go all the way through it until you're satisfied.

What she's doing now is reliving it with the new resource available— which wasn't available the first time this happened—until she is satisfied with her response in that situation. We call this process "changing personal history." You go back into your personal history with resources you did not have then, taking them with you this time. We don't know what the content of this is, and there's no need for us to. She is reliving the experience now. After this she will have two histories, the "real" one in which she didn't have the resource, and the new one in which she did have the resource. As long as these are full experiences—and we're guaranteeing that by anchoring—both will serve equally well as guides for future behavior.

Linda: (She opens her eyes and smiles broadly.) I love it!

OK, now, Linda, I would like you to go back and make the old picture again, the one that made you feel bad, and tell me what happens. Observers, what do you see, X or Y? And this is where the sensory experience really counts. You can do the therapy but knowing whether or not it worked is the most essential piece.

Man: I see a mixture of X and Y.

What happens in your experience, Linda? When you see that picture, do you feel the same way you did before? Linda: No, I do not.

Don't reveal any content; just tell us how it's different.

Linda: Uh, my fear is gone.

Now, there's another way to check your work. Anchoring can be used in a number of ways. Now, watch this. (He touches her right shoulder.) Is that the same response that touch elicited before?

Woman: Partially.

Partially. Now, if it were to be entirely reversed, I would consider that doing the client a disservice. If you are in the business of choice, you are in the business of adding choices—not subtracting them, and not substituting one rigid stimulus-response circuit for another. If you have a client who feels helpless and small each time he goes to work, and you change that so each time he goes to work he feels assertive, happy, and confident, he is no better off, in my opinion. He still has only one choice about how to respond. And if you have one choice, you're a robot. We think therapy is the business of turning robots into people. That's not an easy task. We all get robotized. Part of your job is to change that situation unconsciously, so that people actually exercise choice in their behavior, whether it's conscious or not.

What is choice? Choice, to me, is having multiple responses to the same stimulus. Do you realize that each time you read a book there are probably no new words in that book? It's the same old words in a new order? Just new sequences of the same words? No matter where you go, you're going to hear the same old words, or just new sequences of the same old words. And each time I read a fiction book, it's the same thing. Practically every word we've used today has been an old word. How can you learn anything new?

Now, we need to do one more thing that's very important. Linda has the choice sitting here in this room. You've all seen that. We want her to also have this choice in other contexts. All of you have had the following experience. You work with a client and you and the client both know that they have new choices. They leave the office and you're happy and they're happy and congruent, and two weeks later when they come back they go "Well, it didn't quite ... I don't know what happened. I knew it... and I uh..." Or worse yet they come back and present you with the exact same problem, with very little memory that you even worked on it two weeks ago!

Linda was in an altered state up here. She radically altered her consciousness to go after old experiences, to integrate them with new kinds of resources. The point is—and this was a primary insight of family therapy twenty years ago—if you simply induce changes in an altered state of consciousness known as an institution, or a therapist's office, or a group setting, it's very unlikely that most of your work will transfer the first time. You'll have to do it several times. You have to be sure that the new understandings and learnings, the new behavior, the new choices, transfer out of that altered state of consciousness into the appropriate context in the real world.

There's a very easy process that we call "bridging" or "future-pacing" that connects the new response with the appropriate context. It's another use of anchoring. You know what the new response is, and you know that the person wants it to occur in some context, so you simply ask them the following question: "What is the first thing that you would see, hear, or feel, that would allow you to know you are in the context where you want to make this new choice?"