At that moment in time I was sort of amazed that a human being had actually said that to me! I will never cease to be amazed about how people can limit their world of experience. In his world there were only those two choices!
I was working with John at the time, and John looked at him and said "Has it ever occurred to you to just say 'Good morning'?" and the student went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I think that stunk as a therapeutic maneuver, because now what's he going to do? He's going to say "Good morning," and then either put his foot in the center of her back and kick her out of bed, or propose marriage. There are more possibilities than that. But as he entered that state of confusion and went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I reached over and said "Close your eyes." And John said "And begin to dream a dream in which you learn just how many other possibilities there are, and your eyes will be unable to open until you find them." He sat there for 5 and a half hours. We went out in the other room. Six and a half hours he was there coming up with possibilities. He couldn't leave because his eyes wouldn't open. He tried standing and walking, but he couldn't find the door. All of the possibilities that he thought of in that six and a half hour period had been available to him all along, but he had never done anything to access his own creativity.
Reframing is a way of getting people to say "Hey, how else can I do this?" In a way it's the ultimate criticism of a human being, saying "Stop and think about your behavior, and think about it in the following way: Do something new; what you're doing doesn't work! Tell yourself a story, and then come up with three other ways of telling the story, and suddenly you have differences in your behavior.
There's an amazing thing about people: when they find something that doesn't work, they do it harder. For example, go to a junior high school and watch kids on the playground. One kid comes up to another one and pushes him. So the other kid sticks his chest out. The next time the kid pushes him he can push him even better because he has a firm chest to put his hand against.
One thing that really hasn't been understood is what's possible if instead of approaching a problem directly, you approach it indirectly. Milton Erickson did what I think was one of the shortest cures that I've ever heard about. The story that I heard was that he was at the VA hospital in Palo Alto in 1957, and psychiatrists were waiting in line with patients out in the hall. They were coming in one at a time, and Milton was doing a little magic, doing this and doing that. Then they went back out in the hall and talked about how Milton wasn't really doing these things and he was a charlatan.
A young PhD psychologist, who was about as straight as you could get, brought in a seventeen-year-old adolescent who had been knifing people and doing anything he could possibly conceive of that was damaging. The kid had been waiting in line for hours and people had been coming out in somnambulistic trances; the kid was going " Ahhhhhhhh ... What are they going to do to me?" He didn't know if he was going to get electric shock or what. They brought him in and there was this man with two canes standing there behind the table, and an audience in the room. They walked up in front of the table. Milton said "Why have you brought this boy here?" And the psychologist explained the situation, gave the case history as best he could. Milton looked at the psychologist and said "Go sit down." Then he looked at the young boy and said "How surprised will you be when all your behavior changes completely next week?" The boy looked at him and said "I'll be very surprised!" And Milton said "Get out. Take these people away."
The psychologist assumed that Milton had decided not to work with the boy. Like most psychologists, he missed the whole thing. Next week, the boy's behavior changed completely, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. The psychologist said that he could never figure out what it was that Milton did. As I understand it, Milton only did one thing. He gave that boy the opportunity to access his own unconscious resources. He said "You will change, and your conscious mind won't have anything to do with it. "Never underestimate the usefulness of just saying that to people. "I know that you have a vast array of resources available to you that your conscious mind doesn't even suspect. You have the ability to surprise yourself, each and every one of you. "If you really congruently act as if people have the resources and are going to change, you begin to induce impetus in the unconscious.
One of the things that I noticed about Milton when I first went to see him, was the incredible respect that he has for unconscious processes. He is always trying to get demonstrations back and forth between conscious and unconscious activity.
In linguistics there is something called "the tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Do you all know what that is? That's when you know a word and you even know that you know the word, but you can't say what it is. Your conscious mind even knows that your unconscious mind knows what the word is. I remind people of that as evidence that their conscious mind is less than the tip of the iceberg.
I once hypnotized a linguistics professor and sent his conscious mind away into a memory. I asked if his unconscious mind knew what the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon was—because he had demonstrated it in many of his classes. His unconscious mind said to me "Yes, I know what it is." I said "Why is it that if you know a word, you don't present it to his conscious mind?" And he said to me "His conscious mind is too damn cocky."
In our last workshop we were doing some things with strategies, and we programmed a woman to forget what her name was. A man there said "There's no way that I could possibly forget my name." I said "What is your name?" And he said "I don't know! I said "Congratulate your unconscious mind, even though you don't have one."
It is amazing to me that hypnosis has been so systematically ignored. I think it's been ignored mostly because the conscious minds who practice it don't trust it. But every form of therapy I've studied has trance experiences available in it. Gestalt is founded on positive hallucination. TA is founded on dissociation. They all have great verbal inductions.
At the last workshop we did there was a guy who was skeptical through most of the day. As I walked by, during an exercise, he was saying to his partner "Can you allow yourself to make this picture?" That's a hypnotic command. He had asked me downstairs if I believed in hypnosis! What I believe is that it's an unfortunate word. It's a name given to lots and lots of different experiences, lots of different states.
We used to do hypnotic inductions before we did reframing. Then we discovered that we could do reframing without having to put people into trance. That's how we got into Neuro Linguistic Programming. We thought "Well, if that's true, then we should be able to reframe people into doing every deep trance phenomenon that we know about." So we took a group of twenty people and in one evening we programmed all the people in that group to do every deep trance phenomenon we could remember having read about anywhere. We found that we could get any "deep trance phenomenon" without doing any ritualized induction. We got amnesia, positive hallucination, tone-deafness, color blindness—everything. One woman negatively hallucinated Leslie for the entire evening. Leslie would walk over and pick up the woman's hand; her hand would float up and she had no idea why. It was like those cartoons about ghosts and stuff. That's as good as any negative hallucination we ever got doing hypnosis.
In the phobia technique where you see yourself standing there, and then float out of your body and see yourself there watching the younger you—that's a deep trance phenomenon. It requires positive hallucination, and getting out of your own body. That's fairly amazing. Yet all you have to do is give somebody the explicit instructions, and out of a hundred people, ninety-five can do it quickly and easily as long as you don't act as if it's hard. You always act as if you're leading up to something else that's going to be difficult, so they go ahead and do all the deep-trance phenomena and alter their state.
