Hypnosis is a word that usually gets strong responses from people–some positive and some negative. Some people think it's a hoax or only good for making people act like chickens, some people think it will cure everything from dandruff to flat feet, and others think it is so dangerous that it should be left alone completely. Trance experiences have existed in different forms for centuries, usually surrounded by a mystique of something "magical" and unexplainable. What is unique about this book is that it turns the "magic" of hypnosis into specific understandable procedures that can be used not only in doing "hypnosis" but also in everyday communication.
When John Grinder and Richard Bandler do a seminar on hypnosis together, one of them usually says "All communication is hypnosis" and the other says "I disagree, nothing is hypnosis; hypnosis doesn't exist." There is a sense in which they are both right, and both are saying the same thing.
If I tell you about going snorkeling on my recent honeymoon in the Yucatan and describe to you the swift movements of the brightly–colored tropical fish, the rhythmic sound of the gentle waves against the shore, and the feeling of rising and falling with the warm waves as I scan the underwater scenery, hopefully I will alter your state of consciousness so that you can experience some representation of what I experienced. If you become excited about going there yourself, I will have used the same patterns of communication that are used by successful hypnotists … and by successful poets, salesmen, parents, politicians, religious leaders, etc. If you think of hypnosis as altering someone's state of consciousness, then any effective communication is hypnosis.
One of the simpler hypnotic patterns is the "negative command." If I say "Don't think of blue," you have to think of blue in order to understand my sentence. If a hypnotist says "I don't want you to relax too soon" the listener often finds himself beginning to relax as a way of understanding what those words mean. Beginning with a negation simply takes any pressure to respond off the listener.
The same pattern is often inadvertently used to get unwanted responses. The well–meaning parent may say to her child "Don't spill the milk," or "Don't stumble." The well–meaning husband may say "Don't get upset," or "I don't want you to worry about what happens while you are gone." The listener has to represent the unwanted behavior somehow in order to understand what has been said, and this makes the unwanted behavior more likely. Unknowingly, he or she in a sense "hypnotizes" the child or spouse into an unwanted response.
The same pattern can be used to get more useful responses from people, whether they are in "trance" or not. "Don't be too curious about what you'll learn from reading this book." "I wouldn't tell you to be eager to discover how you'll change comfortably in the coming weeks." Since hypnosis is fundamentally no different than any effective communication, "There is no such thing as hypnosis" as a separate and distinct process.
Most books present hypnosis as something that you sit down and do with yourself or someone else for a discrete period of time, usually to solve problems. Then you get up and do something else. If you still think of hypnosis in that way after you have read this book, you will be depriving yourself of the most important ways you can use these tools—in your living. The communication patterns described in this book are far too useful to leave on a hypnosis chair somewhere. Most of the satisfactions that we all want in life don't take place in a hypnosis chair; they happen with the people we love, the work that we do, and the ways that we play and enjoy life.
You can use the information in this book in many ways, both personally and professionally. One way is to make remedial changes by solving problems and removing limitations. This is the way hypnosis is usually used to stop smoking, lose weight, deal with unreasonable fears, and so on.
But you can also use this information in evolutionary ways to develop yourself and continually increase your abilities and choices in life— learning to do better what you already do well. You can do this in simple ways such as learning to communicate with family and associates more effectively, make love more enjoyably, learn new skills more easily, and so on. You can also learn how to make even more pervasive changes in how you live.
Much of the material in this book is derived from Bandler and Grinder's careful and systematic observation of the work of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. Until his death in 1980, Erickson was widely considered to be the world's greatest medical hypnotist. He was widely known for his successful and often "miraculous" work with "impossible" clients, as well as for his extensive writings on hypnosis.
Several years ago I went to visit Milton Erickson at his home in Phoenix. After he described some of his remarkable work with clients, I asked him how he knew to use one approach with one client, when he had used an opposite approach with another client who apparently had the same kind of problem. He responded "You just trust your unconscious mind,"
That approach to hypnosis works great if you have Milton Erickson's unconscious mind. But how is it possible to learn to automatically and unconsciously respond as effectively as Milton Erickson did—to have an unconscious mind like Erickson's? Grinder and Bandler's special genius is the ability to observe someone like Erickson and then describe in detail what Erickson does, what cues he responds to, and how it all fits together. This makes it possible for others to learn how to repeat the same procedures and get similar results. After a period of practice, these patterns can become as automatic as knowing which muscles to move in order to reach across a table and pick up a glass.
Erickson wrote the following in the preface to Bandler and Grinder's book The Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.:
"Although this book by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, to which I am contributing this Preface, is far from being a complete description of my methodologies, as they so clearly state it is a much better explanation of how I work than I, myself, can give. I know what I do, but to explain how I do it is much too difficult for me."
In addition to modelling the behaviour of "wizards" such as Milton Erickson, Grinder and Bandler have added their own wide array of effective communication skills to the body of knowledge that they teach others. It is unusual to find two people like Bandler and Grinder who are such powerful and effective communicators. It is even more unusual to find two people who are so capable of teaching others to do what they do so exquisitely.
The material presented in this book is detailed and specific and carefully sequenced, beginning with simple concepts and exercises, and proceeding step–by–step to more advanced procedures. This book has been created from verbatim transcripts of10 different seminars on hypnosis, edited together so that it appears as a single workshop. No distinction is made between when Richard is speaking and when John is speaking, and the names of most participants have been changed.
As you read this book, keep in mind that Bandler and Grinder are usually doing what they're talking about. Sometimes they're explicit about this, and sometimes they're not. The astute reader will find much more in the text than is overtly commented upon.
This book has been edited so as to keep redundancy with other NLP books to a minimum. Some material from the original workshops which is already available in other books has been omitted. You will find that the books Frogs into Princes, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H.Erickson, M.D., Vol. I, and They Lived Happily Ever After are very useful additions to the information in this book.
If you are reading with an interest in acquiring and developing hypnotic communication skills, you will serve yourself by taking the time to enjoy practicing each small piece that is presented so that you can become systematically effective. If the pieces are too big for you to do comfortably, break them into smaller and more digestible chunks.
If you are reading this book simply for entertainment or out of curiosity—enjoy! Grinder and Bandler's teaching is more interesting and entertaining than most comedians.
Connirae Andreas
Our topic here is hypnosis. We could immediately launch into an argument about whether there is such a thing, and what it might be if there were. However, since you already paid your money and came here for a seminar in hypnosis, I won't bring up that particular argument.
I hope that in the three days we spend here together, you will come to understand the sense in which that might be a fruitful argument. I hope you will discover that you already know a great deal about hypnosis under other names, or under no name at all. You can discover that certain experiences many of you have had are really excellent examples of altered states of consciousness. In the course of these three days, I will call upon both of each of you to enjoy and learn from what takes place here.
I assume that each of you is here with at least two objectives in mind. One is to discover how hypnotic patterning might be useful and effective for you in whatever area you are in, whether it's psychotherapy, management, education, nursing, sales, or something else. I assume that you want to discover what new choices hypnotic patterning offers that you might add to your present repertoire to become even more effective in doing what you do. In addition, I am sure that many of you are interested in making a number of personal changes as a part of your experience here.
I invite you to participate with both those objectives fully in mind. In dealing with this material, we will be doing demonstrations, we will discuss what is going on, and we will ask you to do exercises under our supervision after we've explained what we would like you to do.
Hypnotic patterning is the same as any skill that can be learned. In order to be learned, it has to be practiced. I assume that most of you here drive automobiles. If you don't drive automobiles, you can find some comparable perceptual–motor skill that you have mastered, whether it's riding a bicycle, roller skating, or playing some athletic sport. If you remember the first occasion on which you attempted to master the complex skill of driving a car, there were many things that you had to keep track of. Your hands were doing several things. At least one of them was on the wheel, presumably, and the other one was working the gear shift, if the car you were learning to drive had one. At the same time you were taxed with the task of being able to pay attention to what your feet were doing. There were three things they might do down there, and some of those things had to happen in coordination. You may remember putting the brake on and failing to put the clutch in at the same time, and the disastrous results of that. You had to pay attention to all of this, in addition to having some consciousness of what was going on outside of the car itself.
As with any complex perceptual–motor skill, what's required is that the task be organized into small pieces or chunks, so that you can practice each small chunk individually until you've mastered it. Once you have succeeded in practicing each chunk to the point that it becomes an automatic, effective, unconscious skill, you are free to attend to new possibilities: other components of the task. You can then practice these new chunks until they also achieve that same status of an unconscious, effective, perceptual–motor pattern that you do not have to give any conscious attention to.
The easiest way to become skilled at hypnosis is to practice small chunks one at a time, in the same way that you learned many tasks such as driving a car. I assume that the ultimate test of your skill in hypnosis is whether you can walk in and begin to interact with someone in such a way as to induce the specific kind of hypnotic outcome that they request—without having to strategize at the conscious level. Three days is not long enough, in my opinion, to achieve the kind of graceful, systematic, unconscious functioning that is required of a really fine hypnotist. However, our task in these three days will be to organize the overall task of hypnosis into chunks, and ask you to practice the various pieces. Our job will be to balance the amount of time we have you practice specific skills with the time we spend making sure we complete a coherent whole that will give you an overall strategy for hypnosis. I trust that you, and particularly your unconscious mind, will continue to practice such skills after this seminar. I also hope that you will continue to add alternative ways of achieving the same outcomes to the repertoire you will be acquiring here.
What we do for a living is an obscure thing called modeling. When we model, we try to build descriptions of how to do something. As modelers we are interested in two things: one is asking really good questions about what needs to be known, and the other is making descriptions of what seems to work. It's something akin to writing a cookbook.
During the next three days, we'd like to teach you a model for doing hypnosis. It is not the truth. It is not an answer, It is not real. If you think you know what's "really" going on and want to argue with me about what's really going on, I'm not going to be able to argue with you because I don't know. There are some things that I do know about; I understand how hypnosis is done. Why it works, I don't know. I do know that hypnosis works in the same way that you learn and remember and everything else. It works in the same way that you understand language.
Although hypnosis is not different from anything else, in the configuration we're going to teach it to you, it's a very powerful tool. And I would like you to think of it as a tool that accomplishes something specific. It's an.amplifier. No matter what you do, whether you're selling cars, doing psychotherapy, or working with juries, you can do it and elicit more intense responses from people. Hypnosis will allow you to do whatever you do and have.a greater impact with it. By itself it won't do anything.
I also want to point out that hypnosis is not a panacea. I have been using hypnosis for seven years, and I still sometimes wake up tired in the morning. Since I'm not a person who ordinarily drinks coffee, if I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, my body vibrates. If I fall down, I still get bruised. If I have a toothache and I remove the pain with hypnosis, I still have to go to a dentist to do something about the tooth. I consider these to be limitations not in hypnosis as a tool, but primarily in myself. Right now, hypnosis and communication arts in general are in their infancy as disciplines.