However, she still dreamed at night. She tried not to dream, but as soon as she began to dream, she began to experience electric shock. It had become an anchored response. She had all the physiological indications of it. When I went to school, this was called classical conditioning. However, her psychiatrist didn't believe in classical conditioning, so this never occurred to him.
This is an example of well–intentioned psychotherapy that created a problem. The people who gave her the shock treatments really believed they were doing her a favor. They believed daydreaming was escaping reality, and therefore bad. So rather than channeling her fantasies in a useful direction, they gave her electric shock treatment.
Exercise 5
I'd like to have you all practice using analogue marking to get a response from someone else. I want you all to pair up and first pick some observable response to get from your partner. Pick something simple, like scratching her nose, uncrossing her legs, standing up, getting you some coffee—whatever you want. Then start talking to her about anything, and weave instructions to do the response you selected into your conversation. You can include the instructions one word or phrase at a time, marking them out tonally or visually, so that your partner can respond to them as one message.
You see, with what we've discovered so far about hypnosis, we've only begun to scratch the surface, and no one really knows what we'll learn next, I hope it can be an uplifting experience. But you've got to hand it to those who are facing the possibilities… . Now already there are lots of people in this room lifting their hands to their faces and scratching their noses. It can be that simple.
Often when you do hypnosis, the responses you'll go for in another person won't be quite as obvious as the ones I'm suggesting that you choose for this exercise. For now I want you to choose something that's so obvious you will know whether or not it's occurred.
If your partner is aware of what response you are trying to elicit, she may incorporate the movement you are asking for into another movement that she consciously makes. That's fine. Just notice whether you get the response you are after. If you don't, embed another set of instructions for the same response into your conversation and mark it out.
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Discussion: Negative Commands and Polarities
Michaeclass="underline" How can I gracefully set up a verification of a suggestion I make to someone to stop doing something? Let's say someone bumps into me a lot, and I deliver the message "Don't do that again."
If you say "Do not do that again," he'll do it again and again because you told him to. If you phrase any suggestion with a negative in front of it, that will happen. If you say "Don't think of blue," he'll think of blue.
Michaeclass="underline" All right. "You will not interrupt me again."
Then he will interrupt you again. You are giving him a hypnotic command to interrupt you again. If you say "Go away!" he is likely to go away, and you will have an immediate test: either he will leave or he won't.
Michaeclass="underline" Assuming you are able to phrase it so that there's no problem—I mean phrase the suggestion properly—
Yes. Assuming that you have phrased it properly, he will either carry it out or he won't. If it is something that you can't detect, then you won't have a way of knowing in that context. If you say "feel good" you won't know if he is carrying it out except by the subtle responses that he makes.
If I were you, I would very explicitly teach myself to phrase things positively, because you just went through three negative suggestions in a row. No single pattern that I know of gets in the way of communicators more often than using negation. Negation only exists in language and does not exist in experience. For instance, how do you experience the following sentence: 'The dog is not chasing the cat."
Man: I saw a dog chasing a cat and then I saw a big black "X" across the picture.
Woman: I saw a dog chasing a cat, and then they stopped and stood still.
. Right. You have to first represent whatever is negated. If I were you, Michael, I would spend a week learning to phrase everything you say positively, without negation. Learn to specify what you do want instead of what you don't want.
Typically clients come in with a long list of what they don't want, and usually they have been telling everyone around them what they don't want. That effectively programs their friends to respond in ways that bring unpleasantness and dissatisfaction. "Now I don't want you to get upset by what I'm going to tell you." "Don't get angry at what Billy did."
Of course you can use the same pattern to get a useful outcome.
'Don't get too comfortable." "I wouldn't ask you to relax."
Negation is particularly effective to use with anyone who has what we call a "polarity response." A polarity response simply means an opposite response. If I say to David "You are becoming more relaxed" and he tightens up, that's a polarity response.
Sometimes people call this "resistance" and assume you can't work with such clients. People with lots of polarity responses are very responsive; they're just responsive in the reverse direction from what you instruct them. All I have to do to utilize this is tell them not to do all the things I want them to do. They will be caught in a polarity response and do them all. "You are listening to the sound of my voice, and I don't want you to close your eyes." "I don't want you to have a growing sense of comfort and relaxation." So that's a context in which negative commands are very useful.
Another way to handle polarities is to use tag questions. "You are beginning to relax, are you not?" A tag question is simply a negation in the form of a question added on at the end of a sentence. "That makes sense, doesn't it? "You do want to learn about tag questions, don't you?"
Charles: How do we pick up on whether someone has a polarity response or not?
Think about it this way, Charles. If somebody is processing information and has a polarity response, you will be able to notice radical shifts in the sequence of expressions on his face. If somebody's process is to visualize himself doing something and then tell himself it's not a good idea, you will see radical shifts as he switches from one content to another internally. These radical shifts are different than the natural transitions in the usual sequences of expression. That's my main way of knowing.
Another way of knowing is that you will get lots of reversals behav–iorally. The classic example is the person who goes "Yes, but…" First he agrees, and then he disagrees. There are lots of other ways of finding out. One way is to just give someone a direct suggestion. You look at somebody and say "blink" and find out whether he blinks immediately, stops blinking, or just sits there. Those are all very different responses to a direct command.
You can also make a statement and observe the response, and then repackage the same statement with a negation and see if his response reverses. "You can understand that." "No, I suppose you can't understand that." If you get disagreement to both sentences, you know his response is independent of the content of the sentences.