Going into an altered state is nothing weird. You all do it all the time. The question is whether you use the altered state to produce change, and if so, how are you going to use it? Inducing it is not that difficult. All you have to do is talk about parameters of experience that the person isn't aware of. The question is "How will you do it with whom?" If you have a person who's very visual, you're going to do something that's very different than with someone like this woman here who talks to herself a lot and pays attention to the tightness in her jaw. For her, entering a state of consciousness where she makes rich, focused images would be altered. But for a visual person that would be the normal state. In an altered state a person has more and different choices than she does in her normal conscious waking state. Many people think that going into a trance means losing control. That's where this question "Can you make somebody go into a trance?" comes from. What you're making them do is to go into a state where they have more choices. There's a huge paradox there. In an altered state of consciousness you do not have your usual model of the world. So what you have is an infinite number of possibilities.
Since I can represent states in terms of representational systems, I can use this as a calculus to compute what else must be possible. I can compute altered states that have never existed and achieve them. I didn't find that possibility available to me when I was a gestalt therapist or when I did other forms of therapy. Those models didn't offer these alternatives. If you want to learn in detail how to induce and utilize altered states, read our book Trance-formations: NLP and the Structure of Hypnosis.
I have a student now who I think is pretty good. One of the things that I appreciate about him is that instead of "working on himself," he takes the time to enter altered states and give himself new realities. I think most of the time when therapists work on themselves, all they do is confuse themselves utterly and completely. Once a woman hired me to do a workshop. She called me up three weeks before the workshop and said that she had changed her mind. So I called my attorney and sued her. She had months and months and months to plan the workshop and do what she had said she would do. She had spent all that time "working on" whether she was ready to do this or not. Her therapist called me up to try to persuade me to not sue her. He said "Well, it's not like she hasn't spent time on it. She's been working on this for months about whether she was ready to do this workshop."
It seems to me that there was one obvious thing she could have done: she could have called me up months and months earlier and told me that she was unsure. But instead of doing that, she tried to work out external experience internally and consciously. And I think that's a paradox, as we've said over and over again. When people come for therapy, if they had the resources consciously available they would have changed already. The fact that they haven't is what brings them there. When you, as a therapist, consciously try to change yourself, you're setting yourself up for confusion, and you're likely to go into all kinds of interesting, but not very useful, loops.
One student of mine came to me first as a client. He was a junior in college at the time, and he said "I have a terrible problem. I meet a girl, things go really fine, and then she comes and sleeps with me and everything is great. But the next morning as soon as I wake up, I think 'Well, either I have to marry her or kick her out of bed and never see her again.'"
At that moment in time I was sort of amazed that a human being had actually said that to me! I will never cease to be amazed about how people can limit their world of experience. In his world there were only those two choices!
I was working with John at the time, and John looked at him and said "Has it ever occurred to you to just say 'Good morning'?" and the student went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I think that stunk as a therapeutic maneuver, because now what's he going to do? He's going to say "Good morning," and then either put his foot in the center of her back and kick her out of bed, or propose marriage. There are more possibilities than that. But as he entered that state of confusion and went "Uhhhhhhhhh!" I reached over and said "Close your eyes." And John said "And begin to dream a dream in which you learn just how many other possibilities there are, and your eyes will be unable to open until you find them." He sat there for 5 and a half hours. We went out in the other room. Six and a half hours he was there coming up with possibilities. He couldn't leave because his eyes wouldn't open. He tried standing and walking, but he couldn't find the door. All of the possibilities that he thought of in that six and a half hour period had been available to him all along, but he had never done anything to access his own creativity.
Reframing is a way of getting people to say "Hey, how else can I do this?" In a way it's the ultimate criticism of a human being, saying "Stop and think about your behavior, and think about it in the following way: Do something new; what you're doing doesn't work! Tell yourself a story, and then come up with three other ways of telling the story, and suddenly you have differences in your behavior.
There's an amazing thing about people: when they find something that doesn't work, they do it harder. For example, go to a junior high school and watch kids on the playground. One kid comes up to another one and pushes him. So the other kid sticks his chest out. The next time the kid pushes him he can push him even better because he has a firm chest to put his hand against.
One thing that really hasn't been understood is what's possible if instead of approaching a problem directly, you approach it indirectly. Milton Erickson did what I think was one of the shortest cures that I've ever heard about. The story that I heard was that he was at the VA hospital in Palo Alto in 1957, and psychiatrists were waiting in line with patients out in the hall. They were coming in one at a time, and Milton was doing a little magic, doing this and doing that. Then they went back out in the hall and talked about how Milton wasn't really doing these things and he was a charlatan.
A young PhD psychologist, who was about as straight as you could get, brought in a seventeen-year-old adolescent who had been knifing people and doing anything he could possibly conceive of that was damaging. The kid had been waiting in line for hours and people had been coming out in somnambulistic trances; the kid was going " Ahhhhhhhh ... What are they going to do to me?" He didn't know if he was going to get electric shock or what. They brought him in and there was this man with two canes standing there behind the table, and an audience in the room. They walked up in front of the table. Milton said "Why have you brought this boy here?" And the psychologist explained the situation, gave the case history as best he could. Milton looked at the psychologist and said "Go sit down." Then he looked at the young boy and said "How surprised will you be when all your behavior changes completely next week?" The boy looked at him and said "I'll be very surprised!" And Milton said "Get out. Take these people away."
The psychologist assumed that Milton had decided not to work with the boy. Like most psychologists, he missed the whole thing. Next week, the boy's behavior changed completely, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. The psychologist said that he could never figure out what it was that Milton did. As I understand it, Milton only did one thing. He gave that boy the opportunity to access his own unconscious resources. He said "You will change, and your conscious mind won't have anything to do with it. "Never underestimate the usefulness of just saying that to people. "I know that you have a vast array of resources available to you that your conscious mind doesn't even suspect. You have the ability to surprise yourself, each and every one of you. "If you really congruently act as if people have the resources and are going to change, you begin to induce impetus in the unconscious.