If you're doing trance work as a part of an exercise in this workshop, and you want to end things quickly because we've called you back, first spend a few moments pacing your partner's breathing. Then you can say "Now I would like the opportunity to join you once again… . Allow yourself to finish … those important and meaningful things … that have been made available to you . , . during this process… . Draw from your experience any … sense of refreshment … and renewal available … and return here … at your own rate … rejoining me here in the room … to begin the next phase of this seminar."
That's a cleanup that is particularly appropriate for what you are doing in this workshop. The principles I used to construct it are the same ones I used to make up the other examples I just gave you.
Building Generalizations: A Hypnotic Utilization
The next question we want to pose to you is "How do you take a series of experiences and build a learning from them?" If I gave you a magic wand that would allow you to tap someone on the head five times and give him five experiences, what five experiences could you use to change somebody? Pick one client that you have and decide how you would like him to be different. Think about it more specifically than "having higher self–esteem." What would be really different about him in sensory experience? How would he act differently? … Now, what experience would he need in order for him to act that way?
You see, having experiences in a sequence is what served as the basis for you and everyone else to build old generalizations. No matter what content your generalizations have, the processes people use to create generalizations are similar. People who have phobias have generalizations about elevators, closets, water, or something else being dangerous. You all have generalizations about learning that are having an impact on how you are learning hypnosis right now. Some of you might have a generalization that you can do anything that you try. That generalization may be based on several examples of having succeeded in the past. Some people form generalizations based on only one experience; most phobias are created that way. Other people require more examples of the same thing before they form a generalization.
When you want to change someone, you can give him experiences to get him to make a new and more useful generalization—one that would make his life more positive. Of course, the first thing you need to decide is what generalization you would like to build. How could you determine that?
Man: Ask him what he admires in somebody else.
Yes, you could do that, and then you'll find out what he thinks he could benefit from. I don't do it that way. I figure that if what he wants would be a good choice, he would have learned it already.
I don't buy into the "you shouldn't impose upon people" philosophy, because I think you end up doing it anyway without knowing it. I keep meeting people who are the result of that kind of imposition. When I ran a private practice, over half of the people who came to me were there primarily because they had been screwed up by therapists — often "non–directive" therapists. The therapists didn't know they were doing it. They were intending to help their clients in some way, and instead they screwed them up.
For example, some therapists teach their clients about self–esteem, and then they can feel bad about not having it. That happens over and over. Most people never felt bad about feeling bad when they first went to a therapist. They just felt bad. But when they were taught about self–esteem, then they felt bad about feeling bad, and they were worse off! When you give people concepts, you have to be careful to do it in a way that takes them somewhere useful.
Some therapists teach their clients to accept all their limitations so they can be happy. Sometimes that works really well. However, if they come in with hysterical paralysis, that probably won't be a very good way of working with them.
Man: What do you mean by "happy?"
I'm not talking about philosophy here; I'm talking about the subjective experience of enjoying something, it's a subjective, kinesthetic experience in which people have the absence of pain, and they have stimulation of the nervous system in such a way that they describe themselves as liking what they're getting rather than being in a state of desire. You see, if people come in to therapy whining and moaning and complaining, it seems to me that they're not happy.
If you as a clinician don't have your own life together, it's going to be really hard to figure out a basis on which to do something to help somebody else. When I did an ongoing training program, one of the most rigorous parts of the program was that my students had to get their own personal lives together — right away! Because if I found out they were having long, meaningful conversations all night with their wives and things weren't working out, and they felt like they had to have affairs, I canned them right out of the program. They knew I would do it, so they made sure they got their lives together.
It is of paramount importance to me for people to be able to take care of themselves. I'm not talking about being able to survive, but taking themselves to places that are enjoyable. I make jokes about my next book being titled "OK is Not Good Enough." I don't consider the paradigm of repair a good paradigm. The paradigm of repair in psychotherapy, where people come in unhappy and broken and you fix them, is only part of the picture. It makes more sense to me that we build models based on notions of generativity.
People are just beginning to do this in the area of physical health. For a long time, medicine used a model based totally on repair. However, the only really amazing thing that medicine has done is to invent innoculations. The fact that people can be injected with vaccines against polio which prevent them from getting it is a miracle. It's the finest thing medicine has ever done, and it's certainly not based on repairing what's gone wrong.
If you're generative, you modify things so they're better than they were when you started. You utilize the natural propensities of the system to make the system even more effective. That's the way I think about everything. I want to work with what's there in such a way that it's better than it needs to be — not just adequate. My personal criterion for doing successful work is whether people are happier. Those are just my own ethics. You can work towards unhappiness if you want. You see, whatever you do, you set up target states. If you're a lawyer, you don't work toward happiness, you work toward conviction: toward getting people convinced of things. If you're a clinician, hopefully you set up happiness and competence as target states.
A lot of therapists set up understanding as a target state. Clinicians have been very successful at building paradigms that give people understanding, so that people understand exactly what's wrong with them. They end up with clients who really understand, but they still can't cope with the world, and they can't make themselves happy. Other therapists have referred me dozens of clients who would sit down and give me a long, detailed explanation about where their problems came from, why they have them, and how they affect their lives. I'd say to them "Well, that's really interesting, but what do you want?" They'd say "I want to change it!" So I'd say 'Then why did you tell me all of that stuff?" They'd respond "Well, don't you need to know that?" I'd say "No, I don't have to know about that." They'd be flabbergasted, because they had just spent five years and $50,000 finding out why they were screwed up!