Then I shifted my eyes and looked down at her feet and said "Numb feet, I know you have something important to tell us." That therapist looked down at the woman's feet, and the woman bent over and stared at her feet, too.
I said "Now, I know … that biologically … the right foot is the 'yes' foot … and the left foot is the 'no' foot. … Is there something that you want to say to me?" The "yes" foot moved, and the woman and the therapist both gasped. I said "All right. Is there something that you've been trying to tell this woman for years, and she hasn't understood?" The "yes" foot moved again. I said "Would you be willing to tell her is a new way?" The "no" foot moved. I said "Have you noticed that this way doesn't work as well as you would like it to, and that the price is too high?" The "no" foot moved again. Her feet thought that what they were doing worked just fine.
Then I said "Would you be willing to try another approach anyway, if it worked better?" and the "yes" foot moved. So I said "All right, feet. If you like this idea, what I want you to do is to remove every ounce of numbness. Restore complete and solid and firm balance. And only at the moments that you need to communicate, I want you to become numb. But I want you to do a more thorough job. I want you to become numb from the tip of the toes to at least a foot above the knees. And then when you no longer need to communicate, go back to full balance. Because the way you communicate now, she doesn't know when you are communicating and when you are not, so she can't understand what you are saying. Even though she obeys, she obeys when she doesn't need to. And she could obey more fully, could she not?" And the "yes" foot moved. Then I said "Begin now."
The woman said "My feet aren't numb!" She picked her foot up and she looked at it, and she moved her toes. She stood up and she could balance. The therapist said "Now, I don't want you to get too optimistic, because sometimes these things don't last" and the woman got numb all the way up to her knees, and she fell over. She lifted herself up into the chair and said to her therapist "Don't tell me that!" and the numbness went away.
Now, her symptom became a teacher for her. When she left my office and went home, she was delighted. She cleaned the house and did things she hadn't done in a long time. When her husband came home, she told him the good news, and said "Why don't you take me out to dinner to celebrate?" He said "I'm too tired. Why don't you just cook me something." She responded "Well, OK" and the numbness began to creep up her legs. She said "No, I think we'd better go out" and the numbness went down.
Her numbness became her best friend for quite some time. It became a teacher. When a symptom becomes a teacher for you, it becomes an ally, because there is nothing in the world that can't be made useful in some way.
If you think of psychotherapy, hypnosis, and medical science in general as making war on symptoms, you will be very limited in what you will be able to do. Fighting with her own unconscious mind is something the client doesn't do very well, and your conscious mind won't be able to do it much better.
A long time ago, before I became an official hypnotist, I had a relative who had a tremendous problem with her weight. She was a member of Weight Watchers Anonymous and she did all kinds of things like putting signs on her refrigerator. What impressed me about her was that she always bought food so she could resist eating it. There was always food in the house to not eat.
I remember that one time when I was just a kid and didn't know much about things, I went to the supermarket with her. As we were walking through the supermarket, I was kind of bouncing along behind her. She was putting lots of things in the cart that she wouldn't eat. One of the things she was getting was a half–gallon of ice cream. I asked her why she was getting the ice cream, when the day before she'd gone to so much trouble to not eat it. She said she was getting it for me.
I told her 1 didn't like ice cream, and that she didn't need to get it for me. She took the ice cream out of the cart and tried to put it back in the bin, but she couldn't do it. She said "Well, maybe your mother would like some." I said "No, my mother doesn't like ice cream, either." So she started to put it back again, and then she said "Well, you're going to have some friends over tomorrow." I said "No, I've changed my mind." She almost set the ice cream down, and then stopped again. She searched her mind, trying to put the ice cream back. I reached over, took the half–gallon of ice cream, and put it back down in the bin. Then I looked at her and asked "What's the matter?" She said "I don't know. I think I'm leaving somebody out."
I remember being struck by how confusing that comment was. It didn't make any sense to me until years later. She had left out somebody in her life—herself. She was a professional housewife who had a house that never got dirty, because nobody ever dirtied it. Her husband worked seventeen hours a day, seldom came home, and refused to talk business with her because he thought that was impolite. However, there was nothing left to talk about. They had no children. She didn't have a car, because her husband didn't think that she should learn to drive; it wasn't safe in California. So she had an empty house with nothing in it, and no one to talk to. One might say she was empty.
I wish I had known then what I know now—that there is an unconscious purpose behind behavior. The purpose docs not need to be meaningful in the sense that Freud thought it did. When I was first interested in psychology, fool that I was, I took a couple of courses at the University. One of those courses was called "Interpretation of Interpersonal Documents." We were going to learn to interpret things the "real" way. In that course, I discovered that people attach much more meaning to behavior than there actually is. Behavior doesn't have that much meaning, but it has a tremendous amount of purpose, and I want to demonstrate this to you.
Reframing
How many of you in here know how to do refraining already? What I would like to do, both for those of you who do not know what reframing means and for those of you who think you know how to do it, is to give you a way of doing reframing with the unconscious mind. The way we usually teach reframing in seminars, it is a way for your conscious mind to communicate with the rest of you about something you want to change, and to generate new and more satisfactory behaviors to choose from. Today I want to teach you how to use reframing as a way of communicating directly with someone's unconscious without using her conscious mind as an intermediary.
The way we're going to do reframing today will be a little bit unusual, because you are never going to know what you are working on. The person that you work with is not going to tell you what she wants to change. She is not even going to allude to it, and in fact she herself may not know what it is. We are going to do this by setting up an unconscious signal system. Rather than talking to people's feet, you arc going to talk to something else.
I) Selling up Unconscious yes/no Signals with the Unconscious. Before you can do the reframing part, you need to be able to set up a yes/ no signal system, so that you have a way of getting feedback. There are many ways of going about this. One way is to use what are called "ideomotor responses." Whenever a person moves some part of her body without consciously doing it, that's an ideomotor response. Traditional hypnotists use what are called finger signals. They have one finger lift for "yes" and another one lift for "no." F.rickson had a tendency to use arms —to have a whole arm move up relatively involuntarily. But you can use head nods, skin color changes—any signal that is nonverbal in nature and is something that you can observe.