The procedures we are teaching you do not have to be used in isolation. As you practice them ana become more effective in using them, you can begin to combine them and vary them in ways that make your learning more interesting for you.
Man: Have you ever gotten a congruent "yes" signal, and then not gotten the new behavior?
No. If I get a congruent response that says it will happen, it will. Sometimes the person has the new behavior for three or four months, and is just delighted, and then he goes back to the old behavior. To me that's a statement that I'm an elegant master of the art of change, that the person who was my client is quite responsive and easily able to make profound changes, and that some context in his life—his job, his family relationships, or something else—has changed so that the old behavior has become more appropriate than the new behavior we found. It's now my job to create new alternatives more appropriate for the new context.
Larry: I've heard that you could just take a person into the future and ask him what he would like to be like.
You're talking about pseudo–orientation in time. When you do that you put the person in trance, orient him into the future, and presuppose that he has already solved the problem he had when he first came to see you. Then you ask him to recount in detail just how he solved that problem, and what you did with him that was particularly useful. We've actually used this method as a way to develop new techniques that we then use with other clients.
There are lots of ways to do pseudo–orientation in time. It's one of my favorite approaches, but it's a little more advanced. If you can do the steps I just gave you, you've got the essential steps for making useful changes. This is the bare skeleton of how to proceed effectively. Variations such as pseudo–orientation in time require some artistry. I'm giving you what I consider the essential ingredients. The particular flavoring of the cuisine that you cook up in your office is going to be your artistry. I recommend that you feel free to restrict yourself to this bare outline until it is an automated part of your repertoire, and then get artistic. The bottom line is to be effective. After you can do that, you can get artistic.
1 like the work that you all did very much. Are there any other questions or comments about your experience that I might respond to now?
Beth: Kitty did this exercise with me, and I was dealing with something I've worked on for six or seven years in all different kinds of psychotherapy, from Reichian to gestalt to everything else around. This was something that happened way back in childhood which I alienated myself from, and couldn't get closure on. Anyway, using this new behaviour generator with the help of Kitty, who was doing it for the
very first time, the whole thing just fell into place. I don't know just what words to use. It just happened. There was unification, acceptance, and forgiveness, that I had never been able to experience before. And I have spent a long time trying to get at this with many different approaches. Thank you.
That was a testimonial, not a question. But I also asked for comments, so it was perfectly appropriate. Thank you.
Deep Trance Identification
Using exquisite models for the new behavior generator is based on what we call a "referential index shift" — "becoming" another person. If you do a really complete referential index shift, it's called "deep trance identification," one of the hardest hypnotic phenomena of all. Deep trance identification is a state of consciousness in which you assume the identity of someone else. You do it so completely that for that period of time you don't know you are doing it. Of course, there are varying degrees of this. It's possible to adopt the nonverbal and verbal behavior of another person so completely that you automatically acquire many skills that he has, even though you have no conscious representation of those skills. It's essentially what we did with people like Milton Erickson in order to learn quickly to be able to get the results they got.
There are certain necessary elements to assisting someone in doing deep trance identification. First, you have to remove the identity of the person with whom you are working. That presupposes a lot of amnesia: he is going to have amnesia for who he is. Secondly, it presupposes that he is going to have the ability to generate his behavior based on what he has observed about somebody else. In other words, if he is going to do deep trance identification with Melvin Schwartz, it means that all of his behavior has to be generated from Melvin Schwartz' verbal and nonverbal behavior. You need to give instructions to his unconscious to sort through his experience of the model's behavior: This includes voice tonality, facial expressions, posture, movement style, and typical ways of responding.
There are many ways to go after deep trance identification. Let me give you one way. The first thing I would do is work for a total age–regression to get rid of the identity of the person that I am working with. By the way, doing this will tell you how much work you are going to have to do to get deep trance identification.
Now, how could you get age–regression? What kinds of experiences would lead to age–regression? Think of universals for a moment. What universal experiences do people use to age–regress themselves?
Woman: The first time you learned to walk.
Man: Childhood memories.
No. Let me rephrase the question. You are mentioning things that are out of people's childhood, but not things that you've used to age–regress yourself. Let me give you an example. One of the things that people use to regress themselves is their college yearbook. People pull out their yearbooks specifically to regress themselves. College reunions arc another classic example of an age–regression technique. What else?
Woman: Photograph albums.
Man: Boxes of memorabilia.
Yes. Exactly.
Man: Odors.
Odors is one way it happens spontaneously, but not a way that people deliberately use. Woman: Old music. Now there's a zinger. Man: Souvenirs.
What else do people do? People return to their home town and go back to the old neighborhood. The things we're talking about now are things that people characteristically do. If I'm going to go for a hypnotic phenomenon, I want to design an experience in which the spontaneous reaction is the response I want—in this case regression—so I'm going to use these kinds of universal experiences.
One of the ways of doing age–regression is to induce a trance and have somebody see before himself the book of time. "And in that book there will be photographs from your entire life, and the page you are open to now is your present age totally and completely. But as you turn the page back one year, suddenly and completely, you are back there again … feeling what you felt then … and knowing only what you knew then and nothing more … honestly and completely … such that you can turn back one page … of time … at a time … going back fully and completely in each year … until you go all the way back to age six … such that when you are back there fully and completely… at age six … honestly knowing what you knew then and only then , . . will you be ready to continue … spontaneously … one of your hands will begin to float up, only as an indication to me … that you are honestly six years old."