That kind of metaphor is very different from an isomorphic metaphor. It elicits a response of avoiding something. It's an exaggerated example of what I just did when I told Linda about the mothers who had forgotten about what they'd had children for.
I used other examples of this kind of metaphor. I told a story about myself, and how my tastes changed naturally as I grew up. That story isn't parallel to anything I know about Linda; it's simply a story that elicits a response—the response of things changing spontaneously. That's a response that can be very useful when doing hypnosis.
This kind of metaphor is particularly effective if you use stories that are universal in order to elicit responses. By universal I mean stories that everyone can relate to and will respond to in the same way. Almost everyone has experienced liking some food and later disliking it, or vice–versa, so I know that if I describe such an experience, almost everyone will respond to it in the same way: by accessing an experience which indicates that spontaneous change is possible.
Milton Erickson used to use this pattern very effectively. He put people into a trance, and then talked about going to school for the first time and being faced with the alphabet. "At first it seemed like an overwhelming task. But now each letter has formed a permanent image in your brain and has become the basis for reading and writing."
That's a universal example, for people in this culture, of something difficult becoming easy. Even if it didn't happen quite that way, as an adult looking back, it seems as if it would have happened that way. That means it's an experience that you can use with anyone to elicit the response of something difficult becoming easy. When people ask for help in making a change, you can be sure that the change will seem difficult to them. So it can be really useful to elicit the response of something difficult becoming easy.
Often Milton would talk to his clients about what it was like to be a small child. He would say "And when you were a very young child, and you first learned to crawl, you saw toes and table legs, and the world looked a certain way. And when you first stood up, you had a whole new set of perceptions about the world. The whole world looked different to you. When you bent over and looked between your legs, the world looked different again. You can gain new perceptions for yourself as you change your abilities. And as you change your perceptions you have the possibility of acquiring new abilities." This kind of description is really an instruction to do something—to change your perceptions. He describes an experience we have all undeniably had of doing so, easily. "And you may be able to remember being a child, or think about what it would be like to only notice the carpet, and the little mysterious things in the fiber … to only notice the relationship of the underside of tables … and then one day you learned to stand. Perhaps you held onto someone's fingers or the side of the couch, and you looked at the world. Rather than looking up or looking down, now you could look straight ahead. And what you saw looked very different. It changed the things that you were interested in, it changed how you saw things, and it would change what you could do."
When you tell that kind of story, it doesn't matter if things actually occurred exactly that way. All that matters is that if adults look back at what it must have been like to be a child, it seems as if that would have occurred. That means that adults will universally respond to that kind of story in the same way.
If you get someone to recall that experience, and the next things you talk about are experiences that could serve as the perceptual base for changing a particular problem, that sequence is a command. It's not just a story. The command is to change your perceptions using this particular data.
We aren't going to go into detail about this kind of metaphor during this seminar. However, you can make what you do more powerful and have more punch by using this in a simple way. You can think about what kind of responses you can elicit that will make your change work easier. Then you can think of universal experiences that include those responses, and describe those experiences to your clients after you put them in a trance.
One response that's very useful to elicit when doing hypnosis is the experience that one's unconscious is wise and can be trusted. What are universal experiences in which people respond appropriately without thinking about it consciously? … You can talk about how when you run, your body knows just when to make your heart beat faster, and your breathing faster, and when to slow them down again. Consciously, you have no idea just how fast your heart should beat in order
to get the appropriate amount of oxygen to your cells, and there's no need to, because your unconscious has a wisdom about how and when such things should occur.
Reframing in Trance
Introduction
This afternoon, I want to spend some time teaching you reframing: an approach that you can use with hypnosis to deal with almost any difficulty. I also want to teach you how to arrange explicit "yes" and "no11 signals, because if you know how to do that, you can go through any procedure in a trance and get accurate feedback as you do it. But first I want to give you some background.
How many of you have ever had a client with hysterical paralysis or something like that? Many people think it's uncommon, but it's not. It's an interesting problem. When I first encountered hysterical paralysis, I was fascinated by it. I had read that Milton Erickson had taken hysterical paralysis and moved it from one part of the body to another, and I had always wanted to do that.
When I finally got a client with hysterical paralysis, I decided to try something similar to what Erickson had done. I hypnotized her and moved her paralysis from one arm to the other. She walked out being able to use her left arm, which she hadn't been able to move for three years. However, her good right arm was now completely paralyzed. I was delighted, and had her come back the next day.
She was somewhat perturbed at me, because changing her paralysis made it obvious to her that her paralysis had a hysterical quality to it. Before that—no matter what the doctors had told her—she knew that the paralysis wasn't really in her mind. The doctors kept saying "It's in your mind" and she knew it was in her arm. But when it changed to the other arm, it was hard to believe that it was only in her arm.
The next day 1 moved the paralysis from her arm to her leg. She had to limp out, but both of her arms worked perfectly. She began to get even more perturbed at me. Moving her paralysis around accomplished something very important. She had a belief, and I gave her counterexamples. She believed that her difficulty was not in her mind. But when you go into the office of somebody who is working with your mind and not your arm, and you walk out one day with your paralysis in the other arm, and the next day not in an arm but in a leg, that has a tendency to make you question whether or not you have a physiological problem. Not only did this serve as a counterexample to her old belief, but it began to teach her that the paralysis itself could be moved.