The fascinating thing is that when I worked with her, no matter which part of her I worked with, or what I changed, or what she learned to do—even tasks like learning to type on a typewriter that had the keys in a different configuration—when the parts flipped over, none of it transferred. She was almost like two people, although she wasn't a complete multiple personality. In each of her states she had some memory of the other state: she remembered where she lived, and most of what had happened in the other state. But learnings and personal changes never transferred back and forth. So, of course, the one that was «up» would go out and make changes and accomplish things, and the one that was «down» would go hide. One of them kept becoming more and more confident and capable, and the other one more and more depressed and incompetent.
When you have people like this, one of the things that you have to do somehow—no matter what else you do—is to integrate those two parts. But in order to integrate them, you've got to get them together in the same time–place coordinates. That's not very easy, because the one that's not in your office can be very hard to get to. You could anchor one, and wait six months and then anchor the other. And if you had really good anchors, you might be able to pull them together.
One approach that has worked really well for me is «pseudo–orientation in time.» That is a hypnotic phenomenon in which you hypnotize the client and you project her into the future in increments. Then you have her arouse from the trance believing, for instance, that this is not her second visit but her sixteenth. It's now three months later, so you can ask her about the past. Pseudo–orientation in time is a neat way to get a client to teach you about therapy. You hypnotize her and tell her you have cured her, and in a moment you are going to arouse her from the trance. It is now August, and she is returning for her last visit, and she has agreed to document some of how all these changes took place.
Then you bring her out of the trance and say «Hi! How have you been?» «Oh, I've been wonderful.» Then you say «I have such a bad memory. Will you recall for me exactly what you consider the most essential thing that I did which changed you?» Your client will then tell you really great things to do! A lot of the techniques that we teach people in workshops have come from doing pseudo–orientation in time.
It takes either a fairly good hypnotic subject or rigorous hypnotic training to be able to do this. It's a complicated trance phenomenon. Of course, once you've become used to doing it, it's not complicated anymore.
Another thing I do is to set up a signal for the different states. I try to detect where the polarities lie. If they are temporal, then I set up signals for the different time zones. Some of them are contextuaclass="underline" some people have sequential polarities depending upon whether they are at work or at home, for example. Some people switch between vacation and everyday life. If it has to do with a drug substance, then of course I set up an anchor that induces the substance state.
When I have good anchors for both parts, I can literally carry on conversations with each one sequentially. With the manic–depressive woman I talked about earlier, I had anchors for a July visit, and for a December visit. I set up anchors not only covertly, but also directly hypnotically: «When I touch you on the knee, it will be July» so that I could literally go back and forth between the two parts and work with both of them. So when I did reframing, I'd induce one state and I'd say «Now, you go and ask the part …» and then I'd induce the other state and do the same thing. It was like doing reframing with two people at the same time.
I used to run groups where I would bring in ten or fifteen people and just start going around the room, using the six–step reframing model. The first week I would always do it with content, and then the next week when they came back, I could do it purely formally. I would have them pick something that they could talk about the first few times to make sure they could tell the difference between an intention and a behavior and that sort of thing, and I would go around the room and troubleshoot as they all went through the steps at the same time.
Man: But the two parts of the manic–depressive woman are in the same person. How do you reframe them to the same conclusion?
If you have sequential incongruity—somebody diets like crazy and then gains weight like crazy—that's actually only an incongruity at the level of content. At the formal level, the two parts are the same. Both are obsessions, and both of them show a loss of control. One is saying «I'll starve myself; the other is saying «I'm going to eat everything in sight.» At the content level, they are opposite, but at the formal level, they are exactly the same. Those people don't diet intelligently. They don't build up to a maintenance program slowly. It's always either crash diets or «pigging out.» If you offered them anorexia, they'd take it! The solution has to take the part that overeats and give it some other way of getting what it wants so that it goes back to eating in moderation. And the part that diets like crazy also has to be reframed, because otherwise when you reframe the eating part, the diet part will go «Ahhhh! Now is my chance!» and go crazy, and then you will get a backlash in the other direction.
After I've worked with the two states in someone with a sequential incongruity, I usually build a part whose job is to integrate these two states, or I set up some kind of unconscious program to lapse together the times when they operate. With the secretary, the times were six months, so I didn't want to do it that way because it would have taken years to get anywhere. I decided to do time distortion: I went into the past and set up a program for integration to begin five years earlier and have the date of integration be the date she was in my office.
It didn't take me long to do this, because anybody who is that dissociated is a great hypnotic subject. She would have to be, or she couldn't be so dissociated in the first place. I did a hypnotic induction and arrived in her past as someone else, some shrink she had seen five years ago. As that shrink I installed the integration program in her unconscious, and then had her create all the necessary alterations in her history so that she could conclude the integration spontaneously in my office, five years later. Sometimes in order to be able to work these things out, you have to create a lot of personal history.
Woman: I have a client who became amnesic for everything preceding an incident in which he «came to» and found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun, with a stick on the trigger to fire it. Now he's totally amnesic for his whole life prior to that time. As you might expect, he comes from a really awful family situation. He also has a lot of experience at dissociation, having been an alcoholic for a long time. Now he's a sober AA person.
I think you're talking about the same formal situation. What has he requested from therapy?
Woman: Well, his stated goal is to get his memory back.
That kind of goal reminds me of a kind of fairy tale from my childhood. When I was a little kid, my folks used to read me fairy tales at bedtime. I was the oldest of nine kids, and we used to have these big family storytimes that were really fun. It was a nice ritual.