We did it once with a woman who had grown up being asthmatic. At this time, she had three or four children who wanted to have pets. She had gone to a very fine allergist who insisted that she wasn't allergic to animals as far as he could tell. If he tested her without telling her what the skin patches were, she didn't come out being allergic to animals. However, if you put an animal in her presence, or told her that one had been in the room recently, she had a very strong allergic reaction. So we simply gave her a childhood of growing up without being asthmatic. And an amazing thing happened: not only did she lose her allergic response to animals, but also to the things she had been found to be allergic to by the skin-patch testing.
Woman: How long does that take, ordinarily, and do you use hypnosis for that?
Richard: Everything is hypnosis.
John: There's a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn't use such terms, since they don't refer to anything.
We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That's the function of every conversation. Let's say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they're trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called "words."
Do we have any official hypnotists here? How many of the rest of you know that you are unofficial hypnotists? We've got one. And the rest of you don't know it yet. I think that it is important to study official hypnosis if you are going to be a professional communicator. It has some of the most interesting phenomena about people available in it. One of the most fascinating things you will discover once you are fully competent in using the ritualistic notions of traditional hypnosis, is that you'll never have to do it again. A training program in hypnosis is not for your clients. It's for you, because you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people's everyday "waking activity." You will also discover that most of the techniques in different types of psychotherapy are nothing more than hypnotic phenomena. When you look at an empty chair and start talking to your mother, that's a "deep trance phenomenon" called "positive auditory and visual hallucination." It's one of the deep trance phenomena that defines somnambulism. Amnesia is another pattern you see everywhere…. What were we talking about?
I remember one time about two months after I entered the field and started studying it, I was sitting in a room full of adults in suits and ties. And a man there was having them talk to empty chairs. One of them said "I feel foolish"and I burst into laughter. They all looked at me as if I was crazy. They were talking to people who weren't there, and telling me that hypnosis is bad!
One of the things that will help people to learn about being good therapists is to be able to look at what they do and listen to it and realize how absurd most of what is going on in therapy is. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it still is definitely the major theater of the absurd at this time. And when I say absurd, I want you to separate the notion of absurdity from the notion of usefulness, because they are two entirely different issues. Given the particular cultural/economic situation in the United States, therapy happens to be an activity which I think is quite useful.
To answer the other half of your question, we don't ordinarily create new personal histories for people anymore. We have spent three hours doing it. And we have done it fifteen minutes a week for six weeks, and we trained somebody to do time distortion once, and did it in about four minutes. We programmed another person to do it each night as they dreamed. We literally installed, in a somnambulistic trance, a dream generator, that would generate the requisite personal history, and have her recall this in the waking state the next day, each day. As far as I know, she still has the ability to create daily a personal history for anything she wants. When we used to do change work with individuals, a session for us could last anywhere from thirty seconds to seven or eight hours.
We have a different situation than you do. We are modelers. Our job is to test all the patterns we have, so that when we do a workshop, we can offer you patterns that we have already verified are effective with all the presenting problems that we guess you are going to have to cope with.
We trained a group of people who work at a mental health clinic. The director took lots and lots of training with us and they do this kind of work in the clinic. They are supported by the state; they don't make their living from client money. They now average six visits per client and they have almost no returns. Their work lasts.
One of the interesting things is that the guy who directs the clinic also has a part-time private practice. In his private practice he is apt to see a client twelve or fifteen times instead of six times. And it never dawned on him what caused that. The same patterns that you can use to change somebody quickly and unconsciously can be used to hook them and keep them as patients. That's a strange thing about therapy: The more effective you are, the less money you make. Because your clients get what they want and leave and don't pay you anymore.
Woman: I have a patient who can't stand to be touched, because of a rape experience. How should I anchor her?
You can anchor in any system. But I would recommend that you do touch her, because that's a statement about her limitations. You can begin by accessing some really pleasant experience in her and anchoring that, and then expanding your anchor a little bit at a time until she can enjoy being touched. Otherwise she's going to respond like that for the rest of her life. If you respect her limitations, I think you are doing her a huge disservice. That's the very person that you want to be able to be touched without having to recall being raped. And of course your sequencing is important. You start with a positive frame. For example, you can start by talking with her, before therapy begins, about a vacation or something else pleasant, and when you get the response, anchor it. Or you can check to make sure that at least some time in her life she had a pleasant sexual experience, and anchor that.
Man: Do you have to anchor as obviously as you have been demonstrating?
We are being very obvious and exaggerated in our movements as we are anchoring here because we want you to observe the process and learn as the changes occur. If we had brought Linda up here and anchored her auditorily, with voice tonalities, you'd have no idea what we did. The more covert you are, the better off you will be in your private practice. You can be very covert in the way you touch. You can use tones of voice. You can use words like "parent," "child," and "adult," or postures, gestures, expressions. You can't not anchor, but most people aren't systematic.
Anchors are everywhere. Have you ever been in a classroom where there's a blackboard and somebody went up to the blackboard and went—(He pantomimes scraping his fingernails down the blackboard. Most people wince or groan.) What are you doing? You're crazy! There's no blackboard. How's that for an anchor?
We first noticed anchoring as we watched other people do therapy. The client comes in and says "Yeah, man, I've been just down in the dumps for seven years, and ..." The therapist leans over and puts his hand on the client's shoulder and says "I'm going to put the full force of my skills behind the changes that we will work toward together in this session." And then the therapist does some really good work. The client changes, and feels really good. Then the therapist says "That really pleases me" and as he does he leans forward and puts his hand on the client's shoulder again. Whammo, that anchor accesses the depression again.
