It is much easier to do this with people who aren't alerted to the fact that you are working on hypnotic patterning than it is in a group like this. If some of you are skeptical about that, please entertain yourself by practicing it here effectively, and then go out and test for yourself whether or not it is easier or more difficult with clients and strangers.
Man: What would you say once you got somebody's hand up who wasn't expecting it at all? If you were just on the street and walked up to somebody and interrupted a handshake, how would you proceed?
Well, what are you trying to do? What is your outcome? The answer is that you supply verbalizations for the outcome you want to develop, as a way for that person to escape from the impossible situation you put him in.
Man: Well, say you were just experimenting with a person.
Well, assuming that we set aside the issue of whether it is appropriate to go out and experiment on the unwitting public, as opposed to someone who comes to you and requests assistance, then what I would do is say "And allow your hand to go down until it contacts mine, at which point you will grasp it and shake hands as if nothing unusual had happened." So his hand goes down and you wait until it gets near yours. Then you grab it and say "Yeah, it's a pleasure." That way he will tend to be amnesic for the experience, and you won't encounter any negative response after you've completed the handshake.
Woman: Why will he be amnesic?
Well, because it's a single unit of behavior. What could happen inside of a handshake? If you offer these kinds of suggestions, and then complete the handshake as if nothing had happened, his consciousness will probably be simply that he met somebody.
Man: I've seen Groucho Marx on old reruns of his program, and often he did something similar. He would reach out to shake hands, and when the other person's hand came up, he'd pull his back. As soon as the other person would pull his hand back, he'd put his out again.
Woman: I would presume that people would come out of it almost instantly after you get their hands, and they would wonder what in the world was happening.
They will, if you do nothing but interrupt the handshake. That's the point of supplying verbal instructions about what you want to occur next. People can find a way out of an impossible situation, like an interrupted handshake, given enough time. I believe everybody's capable of that. I've tested that, and the length of time has ranged from about ten seconds, when the person recovers and says "That was weird," to five or ten minutes, where people have stood there until they found a way out of that impossible situation.
David: Was it important in your mind for me to not remember what happened while I was in that state?
No. It wasn't important to me.
David: Because I did remember it, but I also felt that in no way did that take away from what was happening.
Ron: Is it interruption when you expect to hear somebody and you don't, either like Milton Erickson's mumbling or when someone's voice drops and becomes inaudible?
The answer is in feedback. That would be an interruption for some people and not for others. Everybody is interrupted by a handshake interruption, but some people have a lot of ways to recover from unanticipated auditory experiences. You will discover that with people who are sophisticated auditorily, it won't have the interruptive effect. For people who are attending to you auditorily at that moment and don't have a lot of sophistication, it will.
For example, have you noticed how this TV monitor? . . ,
Now, the different times at which people laughed is a pretty good indication of how long each of you takes to recover from impossible auditory situations. That was a sentence fragment; it wasn't a sentence. So if you felt that waiting for a completion… . That is the interruption phenomenon.
Man: Is this the same pattern Milton Erickson used when he actually did shake hands with a woman, and then led her into a trance?
No. That was kinesthetic ambiguity. That's a different kind of interruption. If I reach out and I shake your hand normally, at the end of a certain period of time we're supposed to release. If I fail to release, or if, as Erickson did, I begin to release but release ambiguously, in such a way that you don't know exactly when I make the last touch, you'll be suspended without a next program. If you read Erickson's account of that, what he did was release his hand with varying touches so that the woman wasn't sure when he actually broke the contact. The last thing Erickson did before releasing completely was to make a slight push upward at the wrist, which got catalepsy. It's the same principle as holding up someone's arm and jiggling it until his muscles take over and hold the arm up.
Norma: What about incongruence as a pattern interruption?
That's an excellent way to do it. Funny that Norma would be the one to mention that. I know from other contacts with Norma that she has a really exquisitely refined strategy for congruency checks. That's a very important strategy for anybody who is a professional communicator to have. It does, however, leave her open to certain manipulations. If you present some material congruently and suddenly … (He continues gesturing and mouthing words, but without sound.) If you continue to present it as if nothing had happened but you simply cut out one channel, in this case auditory, she almost falls forward off the chair. The congruency check strategy she is using as she listens and watches somebody communicate demands that movement of the lips be associated with some sound so that she can make a congruency check. If there is no sound, it really interrupts her program.
If you know about the class of information we call "strategies" (See the book Neuro–Linguistic Programming Volume I) you have access to a really elegant way of doing pattern interruption. If you interrupt someone's key strategy, you get a more profound interruption. Those interruptions really hold.
Man: You could also feed people numbers that they're used to getting in certain chunks, like the social security number, in chunks they're not used to. The social security number is usually given in chunks of three, two, and four numbers.
Yes, or you can use telephone numbers. Seven eight two four … three six seven. You can tell what strategy the person uses by their response. If they use a tonal pattern for storing telephone numbers, presenting the numbers chunked differently will totally interrupt them. If they do it purely visually, typically it won't have nearly as much effect.
Pattern interruption can be used in any competitive sport. You can notice that every time you make a certain move, you get a certain response. Then you can interrupt that pattern to gain an advantage.
My wife, Judy, is really good with saber. She will set up a movement pattern and run the pattern half a dozen times to discover what regular response her opponent makes. When she knows what response she's going to get to this pattern, she figures out what response to that response will succeed in her making a hit. Or she'll begin the gesture and then interrupt it. Her opponent will have already committed himself to some response to Judy's gesture, and she can then utilize that. Boxers do this too. They set up a pattern and then interrupt it.
If you've watched Bjorn Borg play tennis, you know that he wastes no energy. He organizes his consciousness in a very narrow band. It doesn't matter whether the crowd is going crazy cheering or booing; he doesn't hear any of that. There is no difference in his response whether he misses or makes an easy shot. He simply turns around and re–anchors himself—he twirls the handle of his racket as he walks back to begin the next play. He wastes no energy at all; he's entirely concentrated on essentials. That concentration protects him from psychological maneuvers by opponents. If you can interrupt somebody else's altered state—the one that they need to perform well–then they will play poorly, and you may be able to beat them.