Crying wasn't useful for me, and it wasn't useful for her, either. I looked outside and saw a dog walking along. I pointed at it and exclaimed "LOOK! IS THAT YOUR DOG?" just as a way to get her to stop crying. Because of the urgency in my voice, she responded congruently to my question. She looked out, then looked back at me confused, and said "I don't even have a dog." But she had stopped crying entirely, which was the point of the maneuver.
Then I told her a story. "Well, you know, that dog reminds me of this little dog that I knew—a very small dog—that lived in San Francisco. This dog believed that nobody in the world understood it. That's what the dog told me, and the dog was almost right. Because it was true that almost nobody in the world really understood her. And the dog didn't realize that there is a big difference between no one understanding it and almost no one understanding her." She burst into tears again.
We continued driving, and soon she said "You're right, the question is 'Why do I drink?' "
"And even that is the wrong question" I said. "Your whole life you've been asked that question, and you've been asking yourself the question 'Why do 1 drink?' Everybody's been saying 'Why do you drink?' but you've been made a fool of. Not only did you ask me the wrong question, but you've been asking yourself the wrong question for the last 30 years. Everybody around you has been asking you the wrong question, and they've made a fool out of you by focusing your attention on that question, because it's not the right question."
I pulled into her driveway. She looked over at me, and first she said "Who are you really?" I just smiled. Then she said "Well, are you going to tell me what the right question is?"
"Well, I'll tell you under one condition. The condition is this: after I finish telling you, I'll reach over and touch you on the shoulder. When you feel my touch on your shoulder, you'll get up, walk out, go into your house, and begin to find answers to the question I give you. As soon as you know what the answer is, you'll call me." And I gave her my friend's phone number.
She said "OK. I agree." So I said "Well, the question is not 'Why do you drink?' the question is (slowly) 'What would you do if you didn't drink? "
Immediately her whole demeanor changed. Different expressions began tumbling past one another on her face. She went through breathing, skin–color, and posture changes. That was precisely what I'd wanted. She'd never considered what else she'd do if she didn't drink. She went into a fairly deep trance, and I let her sit there for two or three minutes, and then I reached over and touched her on the shoulder. She roused a little bit, got out of the car, and went into her house.
Five minutes after I got to my friend's house the telephone rang, and sure enough it was this woman. She said "Is that really you? … I just wanted to tell you that you saved a life this afternoon, 1 was going home to commit suicide. But I decided I just didn't know how to answer that question, and I want to tell you that. I don't know what it meant to you, but that is the single most beautiful question in the world."
I said "I don't care whether you like the question or whether you believe it's the most beautiful question in the world. That's not my interest. My interest is in the answer to that question. And you call me tomorrow with several answers to that question."
At one point in the conversation she used a perfect idiom. She said "Well, I just felt like I was going down the drain." And I said to her "People don't go down the drain. Other things do!" And sure enough, when she called me the next day, she'd dumped all the booze in the house down the drain. I was there for two weeks, and I know she didn't drink again during that period of time,
I consider that a really interesting example of conversational reframing. There wasn't a wasted move in the conversation on either my part or her part. And what made it work, of course, was my ability to notice the sensory–grounded responses I was eliciting, and her ability to do that as well. She was quite sensitive to minimal cues and so forth. I suppose a person who is about to commit suicide would be, since this is their last time around.
In this example I skipped most of the steps I asked you to go through in refraining. However, the essence of what I did was the same kind of symptom subsititution — "What would you do if you didn't drink?"
One of the big advantages of hypnosis is that people's responses are amplified and slowed down. There's nothing you can do with a person in trance that you can't do with a person out of trance, as far as I know. I'm able to induce every deep trance phenomenon in the waking state. However, hypnosis slows the person down enough so that you can keep track of what's happening, and stabilize states long enough to be able to do something systematically. To do it in the waking state requires sensitivity, speed, and flexibility. With hypnosis, you stabilize a person in a particular altered state, so that she will stay there long enough for you to be able to do something.
Woman: In general, when do you use hypnosis—with what kinds of problems?
When I feel like it. Seriously, that is the only distinction I can figure out that makes hypnosis more relevant than something else. I started doing hypnosis for only one reason: I got sick of listening to my clients talk. I was so tired of it that I was becoming ineffective as a therapist, because I was not paying attention and responding to them in a way that was useful. I was responding to them out of boredom.
So I began just zapping them into a trance and finding out how little information I could work from and still give them what they wanted. Then the whole process of therapy became interesting again. Now I use it intermixed with everything else as a way of coloring what I do, mostly to keep me interested. I know 1 could get the personal changes more quickly and methodically, but for me, to sit down and do formal reframing is a boring task. Even though it's fast, it's laborious, because I have done it too many times. If I do something too many times, I don't want to do it anymore.
Hypnosis is a way of doing things in a bizarre and unusual way. Now I mainly create alternative realities with hypnosis. I create realities other than the ones that a person lives in—for instance, one in which she is a unicorn, because unicorns can do what she wants to be able to do but thinks she can't. I regress people to a younger age than when they first had to wear glasses and have them keep child–like eyes and grow up, as a way of working with myopia. It depends upon what people want. I just go for it in whatever way I think would be interesting.
Man: I'm becoming more and more interested in giving up my glasses and having normal vision. Could I do that using hypnosis? Do you have any astigmatism? Man: Yes. My left eye's really bad.
Well, that makes a difference. So far I haven't been able to do much with astigmatism. That doesn't mean it can't be done; I just haven't figured out a way to do it yet.
Myopia isn't too hard to deal with, because nearsighted people are just squeezing their eyeballs too hard. When they try to see something, they squint and strain, and that results in improper focus and blurred vision. All they have to do is learn the meaning of the word "focus." That's not really very difficult. William H. Bates developed a way of doing that years ago, and wrote Better Eyesight Without Glasses. It's just that people don't use it.