Woman: Ah, I can hear your voice.

You can hear my voice, so you have auditory external. Is anyone talking on the inside at this moment?

Woman: I may have some internal voices.

Do you? While you're listening to me talk, is anyone else speaking? That's what I want to know. And I'm going to continue to talk so that you can find out.

Woman: I... yes.

Is it a he or a she or an it? Woman: A she.

All right. So you have some external and internal auditory experience. All TA people have that. They have a "critical parent," saying "Am I doing this right?" No one else does, though—until they go to a TA therapist, and then they have a critical parent. That's what TA does for you. OK, what else have you got? Are you visualizing while I'm speaking to you?

Woman: No, I'm seeing you on the outside.

OK, so you have some visual external experience. Are you having any kinesthetic experience?

Woman: Not until you mentioned it.

OK. What was it?

Woman: Ahhhhmmmm ... I can feel a tightness in my jaw.

Another way to get this would be to say "What are you aware of?" And you would tell me about your state of consciousness at that moment in time. So we have specified auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. You weren't perceiving any smells or taste, were you?

Woman: No.

OK, I didn't think you were. Now, my definition of altering your state of consciousness is to change it from this to any other possible combination of these things. For example, if you were to only hear my voice and not your internal dialogue, that would constitute an altered state for you because you don't usually do that. Most of the time you talk to yourself while other people are talking. If, instead of seeing externally, you were to make clear, rich, vivid, focused images of anything inside, that would be an altered state. For example, if you were to see the letters and numbers of the alphabet, an orange, yourself sitting on the couch with your hand on your ear in an auditory accessing position, the nodding of your head….

Another thing is that your kinesthetics are proprioceptive. Tightness in the jaw is a lot different than the feeling of the couch, the warmth where your hand touches your face, the feeling of your other hand... against your thigh,... the beating of your own heart,... the rise and fall of your chest... as you breathe deeply. The intonation patterns of my voice,... the changing tonality,... the need to focus your eyes... and the changing focus of your pupils, ... the repeating blinking movements, ... and the sense of weight…. Now, can you feel your state of consciousness alter?

That to me constitutes an altered state of consciousness. The way to do it is to first find out what's there, and then do something that makes something else come into consciousness. Once you are directing an altered state of consciousness, you can begin to make maneuvers that add options, add choices.

Woman: I think at that point I was aware of what was happening and I could stop it if I had wanted to, so—

But you didn't.

Woman: That's right, but I don't know about this argument of whether you can make somebody go into an altered state or not. I'm still not—

Well, it's a stupid argument to begin with, because the only people who are going to resist you are people who know that you are doing it. And then I can get somebody to resist me right into a trance, because all I have to do is to instruct them to do one thing and they'll do the opposite. They'll enter an altered state immediately. An example of that is a thing that mothers often say to children: "Don't laugh."They induce altered states in their children by playing polarity. Kids don't have a choice about that until they have requisite variety.

Who can make whom do what, is a function of requisite variety. If you have more flexibility in your behavior than your hypnotist, then you can go into a trance or you can stay out of a trance, depending upon what you want to do. Henry Hilgard made up one hypnotic induction and administered it to ten thousand people. Sure enough, he found out that only a certain percentage of them went into a trance. The percentage that went into a trance were the ones that were either pre-adapted or flexible enough to adapt to that hypnotic induction. The rest of the people who were not flexible enough to adapt to that particular hypnotic induction could not go into a trance.

Going into an altered state is nothing weird. You all do it all the time. The question is whether you use the altered state to produce change, and if so, how are you going to use it? Inducing it is not that difficult. All you have to do is talk about parameters of experience that the person isn't aware of. The question is "How will you do it with whom?" If you have a person who's very visual, you're going to do something that's very different than with someone like this woman here who talks to herself a lot and pays attention to the tightness in her jaw. For her, entering a state of consciousness where she makes rich, focused images would be altered. But for a visual person that would be the normal state. In an altered state a person has more and different choices than she does in her normal conscious waking state. Many people think that going into a trance means losing control. That's where this question "Can you make somebody go into a trance?" comes from. What you're making them do is to go into a state where they have more choices. There's a huge paradox there. In an altered state of consciousness you do not have your usual model of the world. So what you have is an infinite number of possibilities.

Since I can represent states in terms of representational systems, I can use this as a calculus to compute what else must be possible. I can compute altered states that have never existed and achieve them. I didn't find that possibility available to me when I was a gestalt therapist or when I did other forms of therapy. Those models didn't offer these alternatives. If you want to learn in detail how to induce and utilize altered states, read our book Trance-formations: NLP and the Structure of Hypnosis.

I have a student now who I think is pretty good. One of the things that I appreciate about him is that instead of "working on himself," he takes the time to enter altered states and give himself new realities. I think most of the time when therapists work on themselves, all they do is confuse themselves utterly and completely. Once a woman hired me to do a workshop. She called me up three weeks before the workshop and said that she had changed her mind. So I called my attorney and sued her. She had months and months and months to plan the workshop and do what she had said she would do. She had spent all that time "working on" whether she was ready to do this or not. Her therapist called me up to try to persuade me to not sue her. He said "Well, it's not like she hasn't spent time on it. She's been working on this for months about whether she was ready to do this workshop."

It seems to me that there was one obvious thing she could have done: she could have called me up months and months earlier and told me that she was unsure. But instead of doing that, she tried to work out external experience internally and consciously. And I think that's a paradox, as we've said over and over again. When people come for therapy, if they had the resources consciously available they would have changed already. The fact that they haven't is what brings them there. When you, as a therapist, consciously try to change yourself, you're setting yourself up for confusion, and you're likely to go into all kinds of interesting, but not very useful, loops.

One student of mine came to me first as a client. He was a junior in college at the time, and he said "I have a terrible problem. I meet a girl, things go really fine, and then she comes and sleeps with me and everything is great. But the next morning as soon as I wake up, I think 'Well, either I have to marry her or kick her out of bed and never see her again.'"