' That's a strange set of instructions, isn't it? I had no idea if she would be able to deal with those instructions on any level, but she answered in a really interesting way. She looked back at me and said "Well, I don't know. I'll be sitting in my room at night and I'll switch off the electric light, I'll lie down in my bed … and, you know, it's really very shocking because I've been in treatment for years now, but I still wake up scared and covered with sweat."
• If you listen to that communication, it's pretty straightforward. The words that she marked out were "electric shock treatment." That gave me the information I needed. Her present psychiatrist didn't know it, but in the past another psychiatrist had given her electric shock treatment.
Some time ago her husband had become wealthy and moved her from a neighborhood where she lived around people whom she loved and enjoyed, to a very fancy house on a hill where there were no other human beings. Then he went off to work and left her there alone. She was bored and lonely, so she began to daydream to entertain herself. She was seeing a psychiatrist, and her psychiatrist "knew" that daydreaming was "escaping reality" and that escaping reality was bad. So he gave her electric shock treatment to cure her. Every time she began to daydream, her husband put her in the car and took her down to the hospital where the doctors hooked her up to the electric shock machine and zapped her. They did this 25 times, and after 25 times she stopped daydreaming.
However, she still dreamed at night. She tried not to dream, but as soon as she began to dream, she began to experience electric shock. It had become an anchored response. She had all the physiological indications of it. When I went to school, this was called classical conditioning. However, her psychiatrist didn't believe in classical conditioning, so this never occurred to him.
This is an example of well–intentioned psychotherapy that created a problem. The people who gave her the shock treatments really believed they were doing her a favor. They believed daydreaming was escaping reality, and therefore bad. So rather than channeling her fantasies in a useful direction, they gave her electric shock treatment.
Exercise 5
I'd like to have you all practice using analogue marking to get a response from someone else. I want you all to pair up and first pick some observable response to get from your partner. Pick something simple, like scratching her nose, uncrossing her legs, standing up, getting you some coffee—whatever you want. Then start talking to her about anything, and weave instructions to do the response you selected into your conversation. You can include the instructions one word or phrase at a time, marking them out tonally or visually, so that your partner can respond to them as one message.
You see, with what we've discovered so far about hypnosis, we've only begun to scratch the surface, and no one really knows what we'll learn next, I hope it can be an uplifting experience. But you've got to hand it to those who are facing the possibilities… . Now already there are lots of people in this room lifting their hands to their faces and scratching their noses. It can be that simple.
Often when you do hypnosis, the responses you'll go for in another person won't be quite as obvious as the ones I'm suggesting that you choose for this exercise. For now I want you to choose something that's so obvious you will know whether or not it's occurred.
If your partner is aware of what response you are trying to elicit, she may incorporate the movement you are asking for into another movement that she consciously makes. That's fine. Just notice whether you get the response you are after. If you don't, embed another set of instructions for the same response into your conversation and mark it out.
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Discussion: Negative Commands and Polarities
Michaeclass="underline" How can I gracefully set up a verification of a suggestion I make to someone to stop doing something? Let's say someone bumps into me a lot, and I deliver the message "Don't do that again."
If you say "Do not do that again," he'll do it again and again because you told him to. If you phrase any suggestion with a negative in front of it, that will happen. If you say "Don't think of blue," he'll think of blue.
Michaeclass="underline" All right. "You will not interrupt me again."
Then he will interrupt you again. You are giving him a hypnotic command to interrupt you again. If you say "Go away!" he is likely to go away, and you will have an immediate test: either he will leave or he won't.
Michaeclass="underline" Assuming you are able to phrase it so that there's no problem—I mean phrase the suggestion properly—
Yes. Assuming that you have phrased it properly, he will either carry it out or he won't. If it is something that you can't detect, then you won't have a way of knowing in that context. If you say "feel good" you won't know if he is carrying it out except by the subtle responses that he makes.
If I were you, I would very explicitly teach myself to phrase things positively, because you just went through three negative suggestions in a row. No single pattern that I know of gets in the way of communicators more often than using negation. Negation only exists in language and does not exist in experience. For instance, how do you experience the following sentence: 'The dog is not chasing the cat."
Man: I saw a dog chasing a cat and then I saw a big black "X" across the picture.
Woman: I saw a dog chasing a cat, and then they stopped and stood still.
. Right. You have to first represent whatever is negated. If I were you, Michael, I would spend a week learning to phrase everything you say positively, without negation. Learn to specify what you do want instead of what you don't want.
Typically clients come in with a long list of what they don't want, and usually they have been telling everyone around them what they don't want. That effectively programs their friends to respond in ways that bring unpleasantness and dissatisfaction. "Now I don't want you to get upset by what I'm going to tell you." "Don't get angry at what Billy did."
Of course you can use the same pattern to get a useful outcome.
'Don't get too comfortable." "I wouldn't ask you to relax."
Negation is particularly effective to use with anyone who has what we call a "polarity response." A polarity response simply means an opposite response. If I say to David "You are becoming more relaxed" and he tightens up, that's a polarity response.
Sometimes people call this "resistance" and assume you can't work with such clients. People with lots of polarity responses are very responsive; they're just responsive in the reverse direction from what you instruct them. All I have to do to utilize this is tell them not to do all the things I want them to do. They will be caught in a polarity response and do them all. "You are listening to the sound of my voice, and I don't want you to close your eyes." "I don't want you to have a growing sense of comfort and relaxation." So that's a context in which negative commands are very useful.
Another way to handle polarities is to use tag questions. "You are beginning to relax, are you not?" A tag question is simply a negation in the form of a question added on at the end of a sentence. "That makes sense, doesn't it? "You do want to learn about tag questions, don't you?"