It's always easier to see these things from outside the field than from inside it. That's true in almost everything. A friend of mine who is a prominent technology physicist told me about a time when he'd been working on a very complicated problem. He'd probably been awake for a month, diligently working on this problem.
His mother had been staying at his house and taking care of his kids while he was locked away in his laboratory. She came into the lab and brought him a cup of coffee and asked "How's it going?" He said uOh, it's going fine." She asked "What exactly are you doing?" and he explained the complicated problem to her. She listened and said "I don't understand it, I would have just done this" and she gave him the answer that he needed. She had never even gone to high school, but her answer is now the basis for one of the most sophisticated digital computers that has come on the market.
When you're inside a field, you're programmed to see certain things at the expense of others. Of course that gives you capabilities, but it also gives you limitations. When I entered the field of therapy, people said "All you need to do to be a good therapist is to be fully in touch with the needs of people. You help them to raise their self–esteem and their image of themselves so that they can have better and richer lives." I said "How do you do that? How do you raise self–esteem?" And they said "By making people see things the way they really are." I disagree with that; I think it's by creating more useful self–deceptions than the ones they already have. I don't know how things "really are."
The point is that there are many words that sound meaningful but aren't. Nominalizations always sound meaningful, but that doesn't mean that they are. If you want to get someone's unconscious to do something, nominalizations are exactly the kind of words that you can use effectively to do that.
Let me give you a general way to think about making up process instructions, because in addition to copying the kind of instructions we've been demonstrating here, you can make up your own. To make up process instructions, first think of any sequence that will lead to learning. One such sequence is to 1) pick some important experience from your past, 2) review and rehear what occurred then thoroughly enough to learn something new/additional from that experience, and 3) ask your unconscious to use the new learning in appropriate situations in the future.
If you're going to learn something, you need to have a way to learn it, and you need to have a way to determine when and where to use the new learning. So make up a sequence that includes those components. Once you have a general idea of what steps you want to include, you can deliver the instructions using hypnotic language patterns, allowing the client enough time to respond.
Generative Change; Hypnotic Dreaming
Next I want to give you a strategy for inducing generative change, both for those of you who want to make personal changes and those of you who do therapy. Generative change doesn't mean you want to quit smoking, lose weight, or get over your problems. I call those "remedial changes." Generative change means you'd like to be able to do something more exquisitely, or you'd like to learn something new. It's not that you want to change something you do badly, but that you want to improve something that you already do well.
When I started doing therapy and my sixth or seventh client walked in, I had an amazing experience. He started out in the usual way, He said "There are certain changes I'd like to make." I asked "What are they?" He said "I would like to be able to meet people and get them to like me." Since I was programmed to respond in a certain way, I asked "Do you have trouble doing that now?" He said "No, I'm really great at it."
I stopped. All of my presuppositions were being violated. I asked him "Then what's the problem?" "There's no problem" he said "I just do it so well, and 1 enjoy it so much, I'd like to be able to do it twice as well." I looked down into my therapy bag of tricks, and nothing was there! Most therapies aren't designed for that kind of situation.
Don't restrict yourself to fixing things that are broken. If you do something well, wonderful! You might enjoy doing it twice as well. There's no restriction on making that kind of change. Usually if you make enough generative changes, you will inadvertently wipe out lots of remedial problems. If you concentrate on making yourself better in an area where you are already good, very often other "problems" will be taken care of spontaneously.
I'd like to have you try out an interesting strategy for generative change that makes use of hypnotic dreaming. As far as I can tell, hypnotic dreaming doesn't differ very much from regular dreaming, except that during hypnotic dreaming you are not snoring.
There are lots of formats to use dreams to alter your reality. The first thing you'll always do is figure out what outcome you're after. You might want to be able to do X better, or for your client to be able to do X better. Let's say your client already can do X, but you want her to be able to do it better.
Then you ask yourself "What kinds of things would allow somebody to do anything better?" Be really general in responding to this. Remember, this is hypnosis, and you are in the Land of Nominalizations.
Woman: Improved perceptions. Man: Energy.
Be careful about using the word "energy." You have to be very careful about using certain idioms that are widely used in other contexts. The energy crisis has produced a tremendous number of hypnotic messages about energy conservation. If you use energy as a metaphor for having more personal oomph, sometimes you can get into trouble, because you will have to counter massive publicity. There are advertisements now on radio and television for the entire nation to conserve energy and become lethargic.
A well–known therapist uses a metaphor for personal growth called "yeasting." I discovered in one of her seminars that some of the women in the group developed yeast infections! This, by the way, is one of the primary things that old–school hypnotists discovered. They discovered that there's a sense in which all language is computed literally, particularly in a trance state. Any phrase that has an idiomatic meaning gets computed two ways. The phrase "kick the bucket" has an idiomatic meaning that someone has died, and also a literal meaning. Both meanings are computed whenever you use an idiom.
If you frequently say "My children are a real headache" I can guarantee that you will begin to get headaches. People who have a lot of back trouble talk about everything as being a pain in the back, or about carrying the world on their shoulders. We've already talked about this class of language. It's called "organ language" and it's very powerful.
What else will lead to doing something better? Woman: Knowledge. Practice.
OK. Some kind of new idea will, and practicing something will. If they already do something well, they may have already practiced it enough. If they haven't, practice is something that could lead to improvement.
What we are doing is beginning to build an equation. I know most of you don't like the word equation, but you will begin to. The more you try to not like it, — the more appealing and mysterious it might become… .
What I just did is always a good equation. Remember, this is one of the ways you can deal with abreactions. It's the same equation. "It's so pleasant to learn from unpleasantness. And the more unpleasant it becomes, the more pleasant learnings you will have." This means the more they go into the negative state, the more they will come out of it. "The more X, the more Y" is a very useful equation for you to keep in mind.