Try this with your clients when you aren't doing official altered states work. Deliver the set of instructions you want them to carry out for homework, and then immediately change the subject. They will have amnesia for the instructions; however, they will typically carry them out. There won't be any interference from the conscious mind when you do it that way. They won't remember the assignment, so they won't be able to have any "conscious resistance" to carrying it out.
Man: I've had clients apologize for not remembering the homework assignment I had given them, and then describe exactly how they fulfilled it.
Excellent. That's really good feedback to know that you've gotten the message across.
When you are doing official trance work, as soon as the person arouses from trance, you can begin in the middle of a sentence to comment about something that is completely unrelated to what occurred before or during the trance. That's an unconscious cue to him that you would prefer not to talk about what just occurred, and that it need not be available to his consciousness, either. Amnesia is as easy to get as most other "deep trance" phenomena, and this is one way to get it.
Man: i used to have trouble eliciting amnesia with my clients. Then I started doing just one thing differently: I waited about fifteen minutes before bringing up anything that happened in the trance. That's the only thing I changed, and amnesia started to occur.
Man: I've found that if I say to somebody "Then you will make a decision on this by next Tuesday," change the subject abruptly, and—
Well, I wouldn't be that direct. I would presuppose the decision. I would say "And when we get together to continue the discussion next Tuesday, I would like you to go ahead and indicate what your decision is in some way that is particularly interesting for me" and change the subject. If you do that, the behavior will occur and there won't be any consciousness about what's going on. That's an advantage if there is any conscious resistance to what you propose.
By the way, amnesia is a way to convince a "non–believer" that he's been in a trance. When he arouses from a trance, immediately engage his attention on something else and then later demand that he describe all the events that occurred, to prove to you that he wasn't in a trance.
Milton Erickson's office was the Land of Clutter. There were four hundred thousand objects in his office, so he had lots of choices about what he talked about and what he directed your attention to. He always arranged the clocks so that he could see them and you couldn't. He loved to bring people out of a trance, change the subject, and then say "Now, before you look at your watch, I would like you to make a guess about how much time has transpired." Of course you never knew what time it was, because Erickson did time distortion really well.
That is usually a convincer for people. If they can't account for the last two hours, they become convinced they were in a trance.
Another way to get amnesia is by producing dissociation. For example, if a person is highly specialized visually, I may do an overlap induction with him and lead him into a kinesthetic state of consciousness. When he comes back to his normal state of consciousness, he will automatically be amnesic for his trance experience. He will have no way to access the information because his consciousness is visual, and the altered state experiences were kinesthetically grounded. "He" — the visual part of him—won't know about that.
Any time you radically alter someone's state of consciousness, and then bring him back to his normal state abruptly without building bridges between those states, he will tend to have amnesia for what occurred when his consciousness was altered. He has no way to get to that information in his normal state; the information is linked to another state of consciousness.
Research on learning has been done on mild forms of this phenomenon. It's been discovered that if you memorize information while listening to music, you'll be much more apt to remember the information later if you listen to music again. What you learn when you' re drinking coffee or altering your consciousness in some other way, you'll be more apt to recover if you drink coffee again or alter your consciousness in the same way.
You can use this same information to get amnesia. What you do want to insure is that you've transferred the behavioral changes to the person's normal state of consciousness. It's very important to build bridges that make such a transfer automatic. That's the purpose of having you do explicit future–pacing, It insures that the change you have made will transfer to the context in which it is needed.
Lynn, what did 1 just say? (He raises his arm directing her to a visual access. See Appendix 1 on eye accessing cues.)
Lynn: I don't know.
I don't care if you understand what I said. Just tell me what words I used.
Lynn: I don't know; I don't remember. It's erased.
Did you all notice that when I asked her that question requesting auditory information, I waved my arm directing her gaze up and to her left. She followed, so she was looking in a direction that allowed her to access visual information, but not auditory. That's another way to get dissociation. So it's no surprise that she reported being amnesic for what I said.
Do you remember what I said this time? (He waves his arm down and to her left.)
Lynn: You said I was amnesic, since you directed me to access visual
information and not auditory.
Right. She can recover what I said when I direct her to the appropriate channel. If I want amnesia, I direct her into an inappropriate channel. Since I asked her to recall what I said, it's appropriate to direct her to look down and to her left, if I want her to be able to recall it. If I want her to be able to recall the movements of my arms, I would direct her gaze up and to her left. So if I deliberately direct her into a channel other than the one where the information is stored, she will be amnesic.
Amnesia is traditionally thought of as one of the most difficult deep trance phenomena to get. If you understand accessing cues and states of consciousness in the way that we have been describing them here, all you have to do is misdirect a person and you get amnesia.
Man: What about getting the amnesia to last later on?
It doesn't matter later. A good time to go for amnesia is right after you've made some change or given some instruction. If a person doesn't consciously remember, it can be easier for the new behavior to emerge without conscious interference. If he remembers later on, that's OK.
Sometimes I verbally suggest a dissociation between the person's conscious and unconscious processes in order to get amnesia. For example, I might say: "And as you sit there … I'm going to speak to you … and the more you listen to me … the less you will understand with your conscious mind … the more you will understand with your unconscious mind … because it's your ears that I am speaking to."
What could it mean to tell someone you aren't speaking to him, but to his ears? The result is generally dissociation. Another variation is to say "I'm not speaking to you now; I'm talking to him."
Earlier I offered you another way to suggest amnesia verbally. Before you bring someone out of a trance, you can give him instructions like "And your unconscious mind can sort through everything that has occurred here so that it can let you know only those portions of what has occurred that it believes would be useful for you to know … because it can be so delightful to find yourself using new choices . . , and you don't know where they came from." Or "And you can remember to forget to remember any material best left at the unconscious level."