Husbands and wives often make each other unhappy because they set "being right" as a target state. So they end up being right, but everybody ends up being unhappy as a result.
We want to teach you to build learnings in the context of hypnosis. You can use these techniques to get any outcome you want. If you want to you can make people unhappy, you can make them ill, or you can give people hysterical paralysis or phobias. Those things don't seem eminently fruitful to me. However, if that's what you want to do, it's an ethical choice that you'll have to make.
The question I'm asking you is "What experiences could you give somebody that would result in building a useful generalization?" It's a practical question.
Man: If he already has a troublesome generalization, you could give him a counterexample.
Yes, that would work. I believe that learning can happen in a number of ways. One of the best ways to teach the conscious mind something is to provide it with a counterexample to what it believes. There's a nice example of this in our book Magic I. In one of our groups a woman who couldn't say "no" lay down on the floor and began to cry hysterically. She exclaimed that she was helpless and people walked all over her. I asked her "What do you mean 'people walk all over you'?" Then I started to walk across the room towards her to stomp all over her. Having been in enough of my groups, she was smart enough to get out ofthe way.
She said that she lived with two other women, and they constantly made her do everything and ran her life. I said "Well, why don't you do something primitive like turn around and say 'Don't do that'?"
Saying that got one of the most intense nonverbal responses I have ever seen in a person. She turned paler than she already was and said "I can't do that." I said "What do you mean you can't do that?" She said "Well, I can't tell them 'no.'" I asked "What would happen if you told them you wouldn't do the dishes or you wouldn't do something else?" She said "Oh, it's just impossible."
She ended up telling us a traditional story that would please a psychiatrist. She had learned not to say "no" when she was a little girl. One day she was about to go to the store with her mother, when her father said "Why don't you stay home with me?" She said "No, I'm going to go with mommy." She went with mommy, and when they came back to the apartment, her father was lying on the floor covered with blood. His hand was about two inches from the telephone. He had been an alcoholic, and had just died.
After that, she just never said "no." That meant she probably didn't keep her virginity too long. She was a homosexual, which I thought was interesting. That one experience with her father was enough for her to build the generalization that if she said "no," somebody was going to die.
I put her in a "double–bind" by telling her that I wanted her to go say "no" to someone on the other side of the room. She said "No, I won't do that." And I said "Did I die?" She said "What?" And I said "You just said 'no' to me. Am I dead?" She went through another set of visible changes and then said "Well, you're special."
1 had given her an experience of a counterexample to her generalization that if she said "no" people would die. At that point she could say "no" to me and know I would live, but she still couldn't say "no" to anybody else. So I had other people come up and tell her to say "no." 1 had to build a broader base of experience on which she could do something else.
This took a long time. You see, there's something terrible about knowing you're wrong, but not knowing what you're supposed to do differently. I didn't know how to do hypnosis then. Had I known how to do hypnosis, I could have changed her generalization much more easily, gracefully, and without all the struggle and pain.
Let me pose another possibility for building generalizations. Any time you define something as being new, you can just build new generalizations for it. If you define something as new, you can build a generalization without destroying or changing one that's already there. Give me an example of when that would be useful.
Man: Don't you do that with children?
I hope so. But I want you to give me a specific example.
Man: If you're teaching someone to multiply and he doesn't know anything about it, then you can give him a generalization about learning multiplication without breaking an old one. Right.
Judy: I disagree with that. I think that when you teach addition, you don't have any generalizations to break. In teaching my children multiplication, 1 teach them that it's based on addition. It's sort of like addition, but it's just a little bit different. So in that example I think you do have generalizations to break.
Sometimes hypnotic communication flies right by, doesn't it? Judy just said in essence "When I teach my children multiplication, I do in fact have to break generalizations, because I teach them that it's like addition." Now, I agree with her reasoning. The reason that she has to break generalizations is that she thinks multiplication and addition are related to one another and she teaches her children that they are. They are related to one another, but no more or less than addition is related to subtraction or division or exponents or anything else. If she taught multiplication as a totally new thing, she wouldn't have to break an old generalization.
Man: This workshop on hypnosis is an example. I wasn't aware that I knew anything about hypnosis until I came in here. For me it's totally new learning, so I'm not breaking any generalizations about living— being–growing. Since I assumed there were no old ones to begin with, I'm just making new ones.
I'm suggesting to you that there are at least two ways of building new generalizations. One way is to break an old one, and the other way is to simply build a new one. You see, one nice thing about people is that they can have incompatible generalizations within themselves. There's nothing that prevents them from being able to do that. There's a whole form of therapy based on trying to get rid of all your incompatible generalizations so you can be one–dimensional. According to that system, to be authentic is to be totally consistent.
There's no need to break old generalizations or get a person to be completely consistent, it can be simpler to define something as being new, so that the person has no generalizations and therefore no limitations. That doesn't mean the person will know what to do, but it does mean he won't have any interference once he finds out.
The nice thing is that you can define anything that exists as something new. You see, if you have a generalization that you can't get along with your mate, you can go for something besides "getting along." You can build a totally new kind of relationship that's different than any thing that you ever had before, because now you're going to understand something that you didn't really know about before. Before you were trying to survive. You were trying to get your way or be right. You never stopped and thought about what it would be like if both you and your mate did everything you could do to make your partner make you feel good.
If I can build a new outcome for you, and then teach you specifics about how to get there, either consciously or unconsciously, your other limitations can make it easier for you to get there. They won't get in the way of your new generalization; instead they'll get in the way of your doing all the other things that you used to do and which didn't work. So the limitations that somebody has can become assets.