One of the things that I noticed about Milton when I first went to see him, was the incredible respect that he has for unconscious processes. He is always trying to get demonstrations back and forth between conscious and unconscious activity.
In linguistics there is something called "the tip of the tongue" phenomenon. Do you all know what that is? That's when you know a word and you even know that you know the word, but you can't say what it is. Your conscious mind even knows that your unconscious mind knows what the word is. I remind people of that as evidence that their conscious mind is less than the tip of the iceberg.
I once hypnotized a linguistics professor and sent his conscious mind away into a memory. I asked if his unconscious mind knew what the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon was—because he had demonstrated it in many of his classes. His unconscious mind said to me "Yes, I know what it is." I said "Why is it that if you know a word, you don't present it to his conscious mind?" And he said to me "His conscious mind is too damn cocky."
In our last workshop we were doing some things with strategies, and we programmed a woman to forget what her name was. A man there said "There's no way that I could possibly forget my name." I said "What is your name?" And he said "I don't know! I said "Congratulate your unconscious mind, even though you don't have one."
It is amazing to me that hypnosis has been so systematically ignored. I think it's been ignored mostly because the conscious minds who practice it don't trust it. But every form of therapy I've studied has trance experiences available in it. Gestalt is founded on positive hallucination. TA is founded on dissociation. They all have great verbal inductions.
At the last workshop we did there was a guy who was skeptical through most of the day. As I walked by, during an exercise, he was saying to his partner "Can you allow yourself to make this picture?" That's a hypnotic command. He had asked me downstairs if I believed in hypnosis! What I believe is that it's an unfortunate word. It's a name given to lots and lots of different experiences, lots of different states.
We used to do hypnotic inductions before we did reframing. Then we discovered that we could do reframing without having to put people into trance. That's how we got into Neuro Linguistic Programming. We thought "Well, if that's true, then we should be able to reframe people into doing every deep trance phenomenon that we know about." So we took a group of twenty people and in one evening we programmed all the people in that group to do every deep trance phenomenon we could remember having read about anywhere. We found that we could get any "deep trance phenomenon" without doing any ritualized induction. We got amnesia, positive hallucination, tone-deafness, color blindness—everything. One woman negatively hallucinated Leslie for the entire evening. Leslie would walk over and pick up the woman's hand; her hand would float up and she had no idea why. It was like those cartoons about ghosts and stuff. That's as good as any negative hallucination we ever got doing hypnosis.
In the phobia technique where you see yourself standing there, and then float out of your body and see yourself there watching the younger you—that's a deep trance phenomenon. It requires positive hallucination, and getting out of your own body. That's fairly amazing. Yet all you have to do is give somebody the explicit instructions, and out of a hundred people, ninety-five can do it quickly and easily as long as you don't act as if it's hard. You always act as if you're leading up to something else that's going to be difficult, so they go ahead and do all the deep-trance phenomena and alter their state.
Neuro Linguistic Programming is a logical step higher than anything that has been done previously in hypnosis or therapy only in the sense that it allows you to do things formally and methodically. NLP allows you to determine exactly what alterations in subjective experience are necessary to accomplish a given outcome. Most hypnosis is a fairly random process: If I give someone a suggestion, that person has to come up with a method of carrying it out. As a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, even if I use hypnosis, I would describe exactly what I want that person to do in order to carry out the suggestion. That's the only important difference between what we're doing here and what people have been doing with hypnosis for centuries. It's a very important difference, because it allows you to predict outcomes precisely and avoid side-effects.
Using reframing and strategies and anchoring—all the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming—you can get any response you can get through hypnosis. But then that's only one way to go about it. Doing it through official hypnosis is also interesting. And combining NLP and hypnosis is even more interesting.
For instance there is the "dreaming arm" technique that works great with children—and adults, too. First you ask "Did you know you have a dreaming arm?" When you have their interest, you ask "What is your favorite TV show?" As they access visually, you notice which side their eyes go to. As they do that, you lift up their arm on the same side, and say "I'm going to lift your arm, and your arm will go down only as fast as you watch that whole TV show, and you can begin right now. So the kid watches his favorite TV show. You can even reach out and stop their arm for a moment and say "It's time for a commercial" and install messages.
I'll tell you the extremes you can take this to. I had a client who had a severe hallucination that was always with him. I could never discern quite what it was. He had a name for it which was a word I'd never heard. It was a geometric figure which was alive and that followed him everywhere. It was his own sort of personal demon, but he didn't call it a demon. He could point to it in the room, and he interacted with it. When I asked him questions, he would turn around and ask "What do you think?" Before he came to me he had been convinced by a therapist that this was a part of him. Whether it was or not, I don't know, but he was convinced that this was a part of him that he had alienated. I reached over and said "I'm going to lift up your arm, and I want you to put it down only as fast as you begin to integrate this."Then I pulled his arm down quickly, and that was it. The integration occurred— whammo, slappo—because I had tied the two together with words.
I once asked a TA therapist which part had total control over his conscious ongoing behavior. Because it didn't seem that people had a choice about being their "parent," or their "child." So he named some part; TA has names for everything. I said "Would you go inside and ask that part if it would knock your conscious mind out for a while?" And he went "Ah, well... "I said "Just go in and ask, and find out what happens." So he went inside and asked the question... and his head fell over to one side and he was gone! It is amazing how powerful it is to use language. I don't think people understand the impact of verbal and non-verbal language at all.
At the beginning of therapy sessions very often I'll say to people "If anything begins to occur to your conscious mind which is too painful in any way, I want to say to your unconscious mind that I think it has the right and the duty to keep from your conscious mind anything that is unpleasant. Your unconscious resources can do that and they should do it—protect you from thinking about things which are unnecessary in that way, and make your conscious experience more pleasant. So if anything unpleasant begins to arise in your conscious experience, your unconscious mind can slowly allow your eyes to flutter closed, one of your hands to rise up, and your conscious mind can drift away into a pleasant memory, allowing me to speak privately with your unconscious mind. Because I don't know what the worst thing that ever happened to you was...."