If you do this, you will get the very positive rapport that you need with the other person's unconscious, because you are validating one of its most important functions—protection and you are requesting that it continue to carry out that function as you work with it. You will also have made a special request: that the material that comes up be material that creates a very positive desire on the part of the conscious mind to continue to explore this new dimension of experience.
By the way, there's nothing wrong with abreactions. I'm just saying that it makes sense to find some very powerful pleasant experiences when you begin trance work. A lot of people believe that pain has to be associated with change. If the two become anchored together, people will resist change, because they don't like pain. It's not that they don't like change; it's that they don't like pain. If you make a clear distinction between change and pain, then people can change much more easily. You make your life much easier as an agent of change, because there's no necessary connection between pain and change.
Stan: In other words you are saying that this is mental judo, except that in judo you are always using what the person is doing against them. In this case you would use it for them.
Yes. Stan, would you put your hands together above your head?
Now, would you push with your right hand? Shirley, would you do that for me too? Put your hands together above your head and push with your right hand.
Now, in both cases, when 1 asked them to press with their right hand, they also pressed with their left! This is a kinesthetic metaphor for what's often called "resistance.11 You can push against people, and if you do, you will get resistance which you will then have to work with directly. Or, you can recognize that every response is the best choice that a person has available to them in that context. Rather than push back against it, which will cause an expenditure of energy and time and effort on both people's part and doesn't guarantee any useful response, you can accept it and turn it around.
The same difference appears if you compare American boxing and Oriental martial arts. In the Oriental martial arts you never oppose the force from another person; you take the force and utilize it to move in the trajectory that you want to move anyway. What I just had you do is a very precise kinesthetic metaphor for the difference between some traditional direct–command forms of hypnosis and the kind of patterning that we're teaching you here.
Man: When you notice an abreaction, do you ever ask the client to supply the content?
I don't. Asking for content is a traditional psychotherapeutic choice. I don't need content, so 1 don't ask for it. It slows me down. But each person has needs for feedback, and a belief system about what is appropriate and important. Your clients may have been trained by you or other psychotherapists to believe that they have to talk about the content of their experience. If either one of those conditions is true about the interaction, then you ought to involve content in it to satisfy those needs.
Man: Did Milton Erickson ever ask for content?
I think Erickson's done everything. I'm sure that at some point with some clients, he has gotten lots of content. I've also seen him do pure process, content–free therapy, so I know he had the full range. If you can do pure process work without any content, you already know how to work with content. That gives you the full range of choices about how to proceed.
This afternoon you've done two exercises out of the ten methods we've talked about. You did them very well, and were able to induce relatively nice trances. You won't know any of these other eight induction techniques until you do them. Make yourself a little promise for your own evolution as a human being. I'm only a hypnotist, so this is only a suggestion. As a communicator you owe it to yourself to have lots of choices about securing various outcomes. Make arrangements with friends and / or colleagues, or use your private practice to practice privately, and systematically go through the other ways of getting the same outcome. If you have ten ways to induce a trance, you'll always get it. Using a meta–strategy called "finesse," you can begin one type of induction, and if the response is not emerging quickly enough to suit your needs or the client's needs, you very smoothly go on to the next class of inductions and do one of those. If the response still isn't developing rapidly enough, you go on to the next one. The client's experience will be that you are smoothly going through a number of communications with him. He wilt never know that you tried one method, decided it wasn't working quickly enough, and went on to another.
Benediction
We have attempted to engage your attention today, and to indicate that there arc worlds upon worlds of possibilities that each one of you brought here with you, that we would like to help you find the resources to get access to. Today we have covered a significant number of the patterns that we consider important in successful hypnotic communication and successful communication in general. We have gone through a series of induction techniques, and we ask that you add those techniques to your present unconscious repertoire as alternative ways of accomplishing things that you already know how to accomplish by other methods.
If you felt that we were moving too fast today, covering more material than you could assimilate at the conscious level, let me reassure you that you are absolutely right. That's a deliberate part of the technique that we have evolved in doing this kind of instruction, understanding that your unconscious mind will represent for you anything that you missed consciously. We thank your unconscious mind for its attention, and ask that your unconscious mind make use of a naturally occurring set of states that is going to happen later on for you tonight.
Sometime this evening you are going togoto sleep. During sleep and dreaming, natural integrative processes go on all the time in very dramatic and interesting ways. Sometimes you remember the content of such dreams; sometimes you do not. That's irrelevant with respect to the integrative function that dreaming has. I call upon your unconscious minds, during the natural integrative processes of dreaming and sleep tonight, to make use of that opportunity to sort through the experiences of today. Your unconscious can select and represent those portions of what we or someone else did that were effective in eliciting certain responses that you would like to add to your repertoire.
So your unconscious can sort through the experiences of today, both the ones you are aware of and the ones that were going on outside of your awareness, and store in some useful form whatever it believes would be useful additions to your repertoire, so that in the days and weeks and months to come, you can discover yourself evolving your own behavior, coming up with new choices appropriate for your needs in context, and doing things that you learned here without even knowing about it.
At the same time that you are having these bizarre and unusual dreams, we call upon your unconscious to ensure that you sleep soundly and that you will awaken rested and refreshed, and join us here to being the seminar tomorrow morning in this room.
Thank you for your attention today.
Utilization
Process Instructions
The topic this morning is utilization. Once you have achieved an altered state, how do you utilize it in a useful way? Today I'm assuming that you already have attention and rapport, and I'm assuming that you've already done an induction1 and your client is sitting there in an altered state.
The major positive attribute of an altered state of consciousness is that you don't have to fight with a person's belief system. The unconscious mind is willing to try anything, as far as I can tell, if it is organized and instructed in an appropriate way. The conscious mind is continually making judgments about what is possible and what is not possible, rather than simply trying some behavior to find out whether it is possible or not. The conscious mind with its limited belief system is typically extremely limited in terms of what it is willing to try, relative to what the unconscious is willing to try. The unconscious typically doesn't have those kinds of restrictions.