Neuro Linguistic Programming is a logical step higher than anything that has been done previously in hypnosis or therapy only in the sense that it allows you to do things formally and methodically. NLP allows you to determine exactly what alterations in subjective experience are necessary to accomplish a given outcome. Most hypnosis is a fairly random process: If I give someone a suggestion, that person has to come up with a method of carrying it out. As a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, even if I use hypnosis, I would describe exactly what I want that person to do in order to carry out the suggestion. That's the only important difference between what we're doing here and what people have been doing with hypnosis for centuries. It's a very important difference, because it allows you to predict outcomes precisely and avoid side-effects.

Using reframing and strategies and anchoring—all the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming—you can get any response you can get through hypnosis. But then that's only one way to go about it. Doing it through official hypnosis is also interesting. And combining NLP and hypnosis is even more interesting.

For instance there is the "dreaming arm" technique that works great with children—and adults, too. First you ask "Did you know you have a dreaming arm?" When you have their interest, you ask "What is your favorite TV show?" As they access visually, you notice which side their eyes go to. As they do that, you lift up their arm on the same side, and say "I'm going to lift your arm, and your arm will go down only as fast as you watch that whole TV show, and you can begin right now. So the kid watches his favorite TV show. You can even reach out and stop their arm for a moment and say "It's time for a commercial" and install messages.

I'll tell you the extremes you can take this to. I had a client who had a severe hallucination that was always with him. I could never discern quite what it was. He had a name for it which was a word I'd never heard. It was a geometric figure which was alive and that followed him everywhere. It was his own sort of personal demon, but he didn't call it a demon. He could point to it in the room, and he interacted with it. When I asked him questions, he would turn around and ask "What do you think?" Before he came to me he had been convinced by a therapist that this was a part of him. Whether it was or not, I don't know, but he was convinced that this was a part of him that he had alienated. I reached over and said "I'm going to lift up your arm, and I want you to put it down only as fast as you begin to integrate this."Then I pulled his arm down quickly, and that was it. The integration occurred— whammo, slappo—because I had tied the two together with words.

I once asked a TA therapist which part had total control over his conscious ongoing behavior. Because it didn't seem that people had a choice about being their "parent," or their "child." So he named some part; TA has names for everything. I said "Would you go inside and ask that part if it would knock your conscious mind out for a while?" And he went "Ah, well... "I said "Just go in and ask, and find out what happens." So he went inside and asked the question... and his head fell over to one side and he was gone! It is amazing how powerful it is to use language. I don't think people understand the impact of verbal and non-verbal language at all.

At the beginning of therapy sessions very often I'll say to people "If anything begins to occur to your conscious mind which is too painful in any way, I want to say to your unconscious mind that I think it has the right and the duty to keep from your conscious mind anything that is unpleasant. Your unconscious resources can do that and they should do it—protect you from thinking about things which are unnecessary in that way, and make your conscious experience more pleasant. So if anything unpleasant begins to arise in your conscious experience, your unconscious mind can slowly allow your eyes to flutter closed, one of your hands to rise up, and your conscious mind can drift away into a pleasant memory, allowing me to speak privately with your unconscious mind. Because I don't know what the worst thing that ever happened to you was...."

I'm saying when X occurs, respond this way, and then I'm providing X. I'm not saying "Think about the worst thing that ever happened." I'm saying "I don't know ..." This is the same pattern that's in Changing with Families, the pattern of embedded questions. Virginia never says "What do you want?" She says "Gee, I ask myself why a family would travel six thousand miles to see me. And I don't know, and I'm curious." When I say "I don't know exactly what the most painful and tragic experience of your whole life was," it'll be right there in consciousness.

People do not process language consciously. They process language at the unconscious level. They can only become conscious of a very small amount of it. A lot of what is called hypnosis is using language in very specific ways.

It's one thing to alter someone's state of consciousness and to give them new programs, new learnings, new choices. Getting them to know that they've been in an altered state is something else entirely. Different people have different strategies by which they convince themselves of things. What constitutes somebody's belief system about what hypnosis is, is very different from being able to use hypnosis as a tool. It's much easier to use trance as a therapeutic tool with people who don't know that they've been in a trance, because you can communicate so much more eloquently with their unconscious processes. As long as you can establish unconscious feedback loops with that person, you'll be able to alter their state of consciousness and they are more apt to have amnesia.

My favorite case of this was a guy named Hal. He came to a seminar that a student of mine had set up and at the last minute she decided that she was an inadequate human being and left the State. The people all showed up at the seminar and someone called me and said "All these people are here, what should I do?" It was nearby, so I went over and I said "Well, I'll spend the evening with you. I don't want to teach a seminar, but I would like to know what you all hoped to get." Hal said "I have been to every hypnotist I've ever found; I have gone to every seminar I could ever find on hypnosis, and I have volunteered myself every time, and I have not gone into a trance."

I thought that was dedication for somebody who had failed over and over again. And so I thought "Well, wow! This is really interesting. Maybe this guy really is an 'impossible,' and maybe there's something interesting here." So I thought I'd try it. I did a hypnotic induction and the guy went right through the floor! He went into deep trance and he demonstrated all the most difficult hypnotic phenomena. Then I aroused him and said "Did you go into a trance?" And he said "No." I said "What happened?" And he said "Well, you were talking to me and I sat here and listened to you talk, and I closed my eyes, and I opened my eyes." I said "And did you X?" and I named one of the trance phenomena he had just demonstrated. And he said "No." So I thought, "Ah! well, it's just a function of his amnesia."

I hypnotized him again and gave him implicit hypnotic commands to remember doing all the things he did. He still had no memory whatsoever. All the people in the room, of course, were going crazy because they've seen him do all these things. I tried things like saying "Tell Hal what you saw" and they all told him. And he said "That's not going to work on me. I didn't do that. I would know if I did that." The interesting thing about Hal was there was more than one of him, and they had no connection with one another, no means of communicating with one another. So I thought well, I'm going to have to mix it up a little bit. I said "While you remain in the conscious state, I'd like to ask your unconscious mind to demonstrate to you that it can do things by lifting your hand so that only your right arm is in trance." His arm began to involuntarily float up. I thought "Now this is going to convince this guy," because only his arm was in trance. And he looked me straight in the eye and said "Well, my arm is in trance, but the rest of me can't go in."