Now, I noticed a certain incongruity in his communication, so I told him to get his wife and come over to my office immediately. When they arrived, I seated them in the waiting room and left the room. At that time my wating room had a videotape unit set up in it so that I could watch people. I discovered that 1 could learn much more about people in the waiting room in five minutes than I could in my office in an hour. So I used to spy on people a lot. I had it set up so that no matter where a person moved in that room, 1 could hear and see them.
This couple sat in there and waited and waited, and I waited and waited. I kept watching them until I noticed something interesting. They were both engaging in such meaningful activities as reading magazines and staring out the window. There wasn't a lot to do. He was pacing around, and she kept looking at him and trying to talk to him. At one point he sat down next to her, and she opened her purse and pulled out a cigarette. She lit the cigarette and then stopped and stared at him. She took a drag off of the cigarette and looked at him again. He glanced at her smoking, got up, and moved away from her. She continually tried to engage him in conversation, but he would just give her short answers and go back to his magazine.
At that point I went out into the waiting room, lit a cigarette, handed it to the man, told him to smoke it, and left the room. He took the cigarette, and although he didn't want to smoke it, he kept it in his hand. He didn't smoke the cigarette, but he began to talk to his wife.
It had occurred to me that there was a strong possibility that over the years they had developed a signal system using cigarettes, I later used a little hypnotic investigation and verified that my hunch was correct. In their day–to–day routine they both engaged in lots of activities until one of them paused and lit a cigarette. Then the other would do the same thing, and they would pay attention to each other. They hadn't done that in the last two weeks, since I took away his smoking. They had ignored each other completely because that signal system was gone. That's a good example of something which is not meaningful in itself, but which has a purpose.
Another man came to see me because of ringing and pain in his ear. It had started with a small earache some time earlier; then he went deaf in that ear and also had chronic pain in the ear. He'd had five operations, and now there were no nerves left in that ear/Doctors had taken everything out, yet his ear still rang, and he still had the same pain he'd had before the operations. The doctors knew there was nothing left in his ear to hurt or make noise, so they decided that it must be psychological. Their timing was not something I would be proud of, but at least they didn't keep operating. They have to be complimented for that. At least they didn't say "Well, maybe it's the other ear!" Or "Let's go for the left cerebral hemisphere!"
When this man came to me, he said "I've got to get the pain to stop. All I want to do is learn self–hypnosis to control the pain, because now I have to take so many drugs to control the pain that I can't function. I can't do anything at home. I can't work. And if I don't take the drugs, the pain is so tremendous I can't do anything. I'm trapped. I'm going broke. I'm going to lose my home. It's just terrible."
He wanted me to use hypnosis, and in a way I did. I used a particular model inside of hypnosis—a model we call "refraining" which is designed to do deliberate symptom substitution. Refraining takes one symptom and turns it into another one. It sounded to me as if this ear problem gave him a ticket out of having to work and do other unpleasant things. It wasn't a very pleasant ticket, but he didn't like his work, either. He was an architect and he didn't really enjoy it, and ended up doing most of the bookkeeping and other unpleasant jobs. So I switched the symptom from being pain and ringing in his ear— although I left the ringing initially—to hysterical paralysis. I instructed his unconscious mind that both his arms would become paralyzed only when it was appropriate for this symptom to be available, because I wanted to know how accurate my guess was.
He really became quite functional. Then his wife would say things like "I want you to take out the garbage and mow the lawn, because there are so many things that we're behind on" and suddenly his arms would become paralyzed. He would go "Oh, damn! I can't do it now." His business partners would ask him to engage in the most unpleasant of activities in their business–doing bookkeeping and things like that—and the paralysis would mysteriously emerge.
Once while I was trying to learn about symptom substitution, a lady who had numb feet came to me. Her feet were numb all the time. They were so numb that she couldn't balance herself, and she even had to have people help her walk. She had been in therapy for some time. Before she first went to therapy, her feet only got numb sometimes, and after being in therapy, they kept getting worse and worse. She thought that they had been getting worse all the time, and that the therapy hadn't helped, but my guess is that the therapy had made her have numb feet constantly.
I always think of symptoms as being people's friends, not their problems, because 1 think of symptoms as communication channels. However, as with most communications between people, the purpose and the outcome is often forgotten. Symptoms, like people, don't always realize the difference between what they intend to communicate and what they do communicate.
This woman was brought into my office by a very conservative counselor from a place in California where you have to be rich to qualify to live. The counselor explained to me how she had done family therapy with this woman, and the woman now had a perfectly happy family. The counselor had thought that the woman's numb feet had something to do with family interactions. But since she had worked through all the family difficulties, and the symptom was still there, something else must be going on. So they thought, as a last straw, they would try hypnosis.
The poor client was sitting there dressed in a sweatshirt and pedal–pushers. She wasn't an unattractive person, but she appeared to have worked very diligently to make herself look unattractive. There she was, sitting next to a very well–dressed forty–year–old woman therapist,' who was saying things to me like "Her family problems are solved." Every time the counselor said that, the client didn't say anything, but her nonverbal response was dramatic. Her face would go asymmetrical and her breathing would become shallow and rapid. I thought "Hm … something is going on here."
So I looked at her, and said "You've come to me with numb feet … and your therapist says … this has nothing to do with your family problems… . Your therapist believes … your problems have been solved … and your symptom persists… . Your doctor tells you … this is not neurological… . He says the problem is not a physical one … but it is in your head… . Now 1 know … and you know … that the problem is not in your head… . It's in your feet because you can't stand on them. … If you stood on your feet… without numbness … you wouldn't need … this therapist … or that doctor . . , because that's the reason you've come here… . Now I don't want to talk to you . , . because you've failed utterly to cope with this problem… . You haven't learned to stand on those feet … by yourself … without numbness… . I want to speak to your feet directly."
If you take somebody from Middle–class America and say something like that to them, they get weird. The difference between hypnotic communication and ordinary verbal communication is that when you use hypnotic communication, you don't care about the content. You only pay attention to the responses. I keep saying "Don't pay attention to the content, pay attention to the response" If you do that, you can say anything, and communicate with people in a way that no one else can.