sweating, voice cracking, everybody in the audience laughing, and you say: “Good plan. That’ll get you into the right state.”
Not only do they see that their old behavior was not a good plan, but that they’ve been doing it habitually and also unconsciously. By asking the Meta Model questions, you bring their behavior up into consciousness, make it move a little slower, then start slicing away the nonsense. It tells you everything you need to know, including what to do next.
One of my favorite cases, which I wrote about in Magic in Action, involved a woman who had psychotic episodes whenever anyone she was expecting to meet was late. She’d been in therapy for eight years, had three different therapists that I knew about, and whenever anyone asked her why she had these responses, she’d say, “I don’t know.”
But when the woman said, “I have a problem I’m too close to,” I knew the solution was to push away the pictures. She was making pictures of horrible road accidents that became progressively closer, bigger, and more detailed, until she smelled the burning metal and felt the warm blood spattering on her skin. That would scare anyone. She let me know that we needed to push the images out, make them less and less distinct until they disappeared. We did, and it worked, all in a fifteen-minute session.
MAKING THE DIAGNOSIS WRONG
I’m not trying to diagnose people with this approach; I’m trying to make the diagnosis wrong. If people come in and say they’re depressed, I want them laughing their asses off as quickly as possible, so, after that, every time they think about being depressed they burst out laughing.
I want to give them a better problem. Often I listen to clients and think: “What a sad little problem. They need something bigger and better.” They need to find the answer to questions like: How much pleasure can I stand? How much can I get done in a lifetime? How can I feel really great every time I go into a meeting or see my husband or wife?
If people don’t ask the right questions, their brains don’t learn. I always know when the questions are coming, so I throw out a better question. I say, “Stop and say to yourself, ‘It’s time to do something. What should I do?’” I just switch the Referential Index (who is saying what). It’s not elegant, but it works.
All the above examples illustrate how the Meta Model works. The questions lead us directly to where we want to go, because we’re looking at the syntax of the question, not its content. If you fall into content, you’ll drown because content is infinite. We all know how little kids going “why?” can go on forever. The fact that a psychiatrist might do that means therapy can last for years.
It doesn’t matter to me why something happened. I don’t try to read minds or encourage clients to read their own minds. I want answers that point me in the direction of making change. You have to know how to ask just the right questions, and then you have to know how to give just the right suggestions, in just the right way, so that you maximize the result that you want. Being able to move smoothly back and forth between knowing how something happens and what to do about it is what good NLP is about.
This is where the Milton patterns become so important. The Milton Model (see Resource File 5, page 316) is sometimes said to be the mirror image of the Meta Model, but while the Meta Model is applied to gain quality information, the Milton Model—derived from the patterns modeled from Erickson’s work—uses language in an “artfully vague” way to induce trance and promote change.
It’s often assumed I knew a lot about hypnosis before I heard about Milton Erickson, but when Gregory Bateson first told me about Milton, I knew nothing. So I gathered his collected works, all his journal articles, everything I could find written by him, and read it all. What I found interesting was that he was claiming to get results that nobody else said they could achieve.
I was intrigued by Milton’s claims, so I went out and got every book—literally hundreds of books—about hypnosis and read them all. I tried out everything, a lot of it on an extraordinary neighbor I had at the time. She was agoraphobic and had allergies and all sorts of things wrong, and we fixed them all. So, by the time I got to actually see Milton, I had quite a lot of experience, and I’d already analyzed his language patterns, from the journal articles and the transcripts.
It was fairly apparent that most of the people who knew about him were as mystified by him as they were by Virginia Satir and by Fritz Perls.
Virginia, who achieved consistently good results, didn’t claim to have the right approach to therapy. She just said that people could be helped more easily if all the family members were involved, rather than just the individual. Also, her ability to observe patterns and predict behavior was extraordinary. On one occasion, when I drove her to see a family whose epileptic daughter had been labeled a juvenile delinquent, she said, “Watch what happens. In the middle of this session, the girl is going to have a seizure. The moment I start talking to one or other of the family members, she’s going to fall down in a fit.” Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. This was the sort of thing that happened around Virginia. But one of the most important qualities she had was that she was absolutely relentless. She was warm and sweet and kind, but she didn’t give up. It didn’t matter to her if it took twelve hours. She would keep working until she got the change she was after.
Virginia was an exquisite hypnotist, something she strongly denied at first. I showed her videotapes of her and Erickson, and for the first ten minutes they said exactly the same things. Virginia had nicer tonality than Milton. He sounded a little like Boris Karloff. She sounded like the sweetest person on the earth.
It was superb hypnosis, but she said it was just a centering exercise. She’d talk about people’s uniqueness, how each was the only one in the world with those fingerprints, and so on. Then I’d turn on the Milton tape, and he’d talk about the individuality of his patients, how their fingerprints were unique—the same concepts, in the same order.
It took her time to admit it, but, finally she came around, and even asked me to use hypnosis to help her with a personal problem.
Virginia had met Milton and thought he was creepy and didn’t want anything to do with him. I have to admit, I understood why she felt that way. He was in a wheelchair, having had polio twice, and was suffering from postpolio syndrome. He wore purple pajamas, induced trance, and communicated covertly more or less all the time, even when he didn’t need to. But he did it to amuse himself. Interestingly, though, despite their differences, Virginia and Milton were, in my opinion, the best at getting results.
Fritz’s work was very hypnotic, too. Telling clients to hallucinate dead relatives in empty chairs—what is that if it isn’t deep trance hypnosis?
In reality, Fritz didn’t actually have a very good track record fixing clients. Everybody was impressed with his work, but he didn’t get good results. He couldn’t get an insomniac suddenly to be able to sleep, for example, and he was very open about the fact that he couldn’t work with psychotics or schizophrenics. He only worked with “neurotics.”
On one occasion, though, he did help a client get over his impotence by having him think about his nose and then his genitals and his nose again. He couldn’t explain how it worked; he just said it was something that fit his theory. Now, of course, we know that in the motor cortex, the wiring for the muscles of the nose and the genitals are right next to each other. If you move your nose, typically your genitals will move; typically, if you flare your nostrils or move the nose up and down, you stimulate your genitals.
When the patterns I identified were first published as the Milton Model, Milton was very pleased, even though he implied they only reflected a part of his repertoire. Milton’s approach could be very complicated. He very strongly identified with the concept of “being a hypnotist” and insisted that all his clients become exceptional hypnotic subjects before they went any further.
I was more interested in how far I could push this thing called hypnosis, so I tried everything that he ever claimed you could do. This was not because I wanted to disprove it, but because if I could produce the same effects, then I knew there would be a world of things