Try something. Close your eyes for a minute. Most of you here have been standing near a grove of trees at some time in your life. And as you stood there and looked up at those trees, you could see the leaves and the branches, and you could smell the air that surrounded the trees. You could feel the weather, the temperature of the air; you might even begin to hear a breeze, and as you hear that breeze you might notice the branches and the leaves responding with movement. You might turn to your left and see a large rhinoceros charging at you.
If that doesn't disjoint your reality, nothing will. In terms of inducing an altered state, disjointing can have a value and a function. But its function is not one of gently gliding someone somewhere.
Disjointed communication is a very powerful tool in family therapy. People come in and say things like "I wish my wife would just leave me alone" and I say "OK, lock her in a closet."
"Well, that's not what I want."
"OK, what do you want?"
"I just want her to stop telling me she wants things." "Do you want her to write you letters?"
Those are not natural transitions, and they elicit different kinds of responses. They are very useful in the context of family therapy when things have got to go quickly, and you often have to work around the limitations of the conscious mind by battering it back and forth.
You can use the absence of transitions to elicit very, very powerful responses. Here we're talking about smooth inductions into altered states. You can also pump people into altered states very quickly by communicating without transitions that are logical, meaningful, and smooth. We'll get to that later on. That's a more radical method, and I don't want to teach you both at the same time. I want to teach you one and then the other. It's always easier to understand when things are sorted into pieces.
In my teaching I've noticed something I'll mention to you. It's a funny thing about learning and the way people make generalizations. If you tell people "You know, I really think that Kansas City is a nice town" they'll say "What's the matter with Dallas?" This isn't idiosyncratic to psychological and communication arts; it's a very pervasive thing. In my teaching around the country if I tell people "This is something that will work" somehow or other they get the idea that something else won't work. And I'm not saying not using transitions won't work. I'm saying using transitions is helpful. It amplifies what you're doing and makes it better. The opposite can work just as well. but you have to use it differently.
In the context of hypnosis, you do not go fast by going quickly. You go fast by going slowly. You simply put your subject's conscious mind in abeyance. Or you can describe it as switching what is in consciousness by leading him into an altered state of consciousness. It's not that he loses his conscious mind and he can't see or hear or think; it's that the same paradigm that operates his conscious mind is not at work. It's still there, it hasn't disappeared, but when you shift him to an altered state, you can logically and systematically and rigorously build new learning. The first step is to learn to get a person into an altered state by using gentle transitions.
Man: I've seen the utility of transitions, especially when you're dealing with relatively unrelated concepts. Is it necessary when they're related—say in relaxation, when you're dealing with words like "feelings of tranquility, peaceful, feeling quiet, feeling very good"? Is it necessary to keep tying transitions onto those types of phrases?
Well, "necessary" is a funny word. Necessary always relates to the outcome. It's certainly not necessary; the question is "What is it that you want to accomplish?"
Man: What becomes the measuring device for knowing how often it's most beneficial to use those transitions?
Your eyes. As you begin to do this you're going to notice that people look different in altered states than they do when they're in their normal waking trances; and as you begin to notice that, you begin to notice when you do things which create discontinuity in their experiences. Very good vision is necessary in order to use hypnosis, because most of the time people are not providing you with as much feedback as they would normally. They're not talking much, and they're not behaving as obviously. In one sense this makes it easier, because there's not as much to confuse you, but it also requires that you have more visual acuity. If you don't have that, you'll end up doing what many hypnotists do—relying completely on finger signals to get yes/no answers to your questions. That isn't necessary. It's a good thing to know about in case you're not getting the feedback you want, or to use while you develop your sensitivity. However, if you have good vision, you can get any feedback you want without having to build in a feedback mechanism artificially. People respond externally, in ways that you can see, to what's going on in them internally.
If people have the internal experience of being disjointed when you say "quiet," "relaxed," or "comfortable" because they don't feel that way, you will see nonverbal responses which will indicate that. And if you see those kinds of things, it makes sense to mention them. "Someone says 'Why don't you relax?' and you try to relax, but it's difficult and you can't, and you say to yourself 'If only I could.' 1 could tell you 'Be comfortable' but it's hard to be comfortable deliberately. But it's very easy to think about a raindrop resting on a leaf." Even though those two things aren't related, people will relax a lot more thinking about a raindrop than they will trying to relax.
One of the things that impressed me more than anything else about Milton Erickson was that he did not use hypnosis as a direct tool. If he wanted someone to be colorblind, he didn't say "Become colorblind." He'd say "Have you ever read a book? What does it mean to have a book read (red)? It doesn't mean anything at all. Somebody told me one time that there was a 'blue Monday.' I said to myself 'a blue Monday. That doesn't mean a thing. These things go together somehow, but they don't have any meaning.' They don't mean anything to me. They don't need to mean anything to you."
The difference between Erickson and the other hypnotists that I've watched and listened to and studied with, is that Erickson didn't have any resistant clients. Either he selected his patients really well, or he did something important that other people weren't doing. Milton watched how people responded, and he gave them what was appropriate for them. Using transitions is one thing that is appropriate with anyone . who is a native speaker of English, because transitions are part of the basic structure of English; they are part of how our language is built. And as you do hypnosis, if you use transitions, they will help you.
I saw Milton do an official trance induction once, which was a very rare phenomenon, believe me. Most of the time people went in and started talking to him about intellectual things … and suddenly the time had passed. But once he officially induced a trance. He had a person sit down, and he said "And as you sit there I want you to stare at a spot on the wall, and as you stare at that spot you can realize that you're doing the same thing now that you did when you very first went to school and learned the task of writing numbers and the letters of the alphabet. You're learning … learning about something that you really don't know about. And even though you haven't realized it, already your breathing has changed (his voice tempo slows down), and you're becoming more comfortable and more relaxed." Those transitions helped to build continuity. Now what going to school and learning about numbers and letters of the alphabet have to do with becoming more relaxed is tenuous at best.