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.