how deeply you sleep, it will wake you as effectively as any alarm.
If we can program ourselves to do one little thing—such as waking without an alarm—we can program our minds to do many things. We can decide to go to the supermarket. Maybe we need bread, milk, peanut butter, and a couple of cartons of juice. We can drive five miles to the supermarket, walk through a thousand products, maybe talking to someone on our cell phone, and still remember the juice, peanut butter, milk, and bread.
Academics sometimes challenge me for something they call “evidence.” They want to know the theory behind what I do; they want me to explain it, preferably with the appropriate research references. I’ve even had people ask for the correct citations for things that I’ve made up. The way I see it, it’s not my job to prove, or even understand, everything about the workings of the mind. I’m not too interested in why something should work. I only want to know how, so I can help people affect and influence whatever they want to change.
The truth is, when we know how something is done, it becomes easy to change. We’re highly programmable beings—as unpopular as that idea still is in some quarters. When I started using the term “programming,” people became really angry. They said things like, “You’re saying we’re like machines. We’re human beings, not robots.”
Actually, what I was saying was just the opposite. We’re the only machine that can program itself. We are “meta-programmable.” We can set deliberately designed, automated programs that work by themselves to take care of boring, mundane tasks, thus freeing up our minds to do other, more interesting and creative, things.
At the same time, if we’re doing something automatically that we shouldn’t be doing—whether overeating, smoking, being afraid of elevators or the outside world, becoming depressed, or coveting our neighbor’s spouse—then we can program ourselves to change. That’s not being a robot; that’s becoming a free spirit.
To me the definition of freedom is being able to use your conscious mind to direct your unconscious activity. The unconscious mind is hugely powerful, but it needs direction. Without direction, you might end up grasping for straws…and then finding there just aren’t any there at all.
The Secret of Effortless Change
VIRGINIA SATIR, THE FAMILY THERAPIST, once said something that has stayed with me for many years. She said: “You know, Richard, most people think the will to survive is the strongest instinct in human beings, but it isn’t. The strongest instinct is to keep things familiar.”
She was right. I’ve known people willing to kill themselves because they can’t face the thought of life without the partner who’s died or left them for someone else. Even thinking about how things could be different overwhelms them with fear.
There’s a reason for this. One of the ways we make models of the world is by generalizing. We survive and prosper by making things familiar, but we also create problems for ourselves.
Each day you see new doors, but at a practical level you know each is still just a door. You don’t have to figure out what each one is and how to open it. You shake hands with thousands of people, and even though it’s a brand-new hand each time, it’s not a new event, because somehow you’ve made it “the same.” It’s been filed in the compartment in your brain called “shaking hands.”
But if you go to a country such as Japan where traditions differ, and you stick out your hand and someone bows to you instead, that action completely shatters the pattern. You have to come back to your senses to figure out how to respond in that new situation.
But that’s the way it’s supposed to work. When we’re really thinking properly, we make everything familiar until the pattern doesn’t function anymore. Then we review it and revise the way we’re thinking.
Sometimes, though, we make something familiar, and even when it doesn’t function anymore, we stick with it, and that’s when it starts to make our lives dysfunctional. Instead of redefining the situation and coming up with a new behavior, we keep doing the same thing…only harder!
Pop psychologists talk about “the comfort zone” when they should more accurately be calling it “the familiarity zone.” People persist in situations that are extremely uncomfortable simply because they’re used to them. They’re unaware that they have choices, or perhaps the choices they present to themselves—like being alone for the rest of their lives because they’d left an abusive partner—are so terrifying that they refuse to change.
For years, psychologists have tortured rats by making them do things like run mazes for bits of cheese. The interesting thing about these experiments is that, when the scientists change the position of the cheese, the rats only try the same way three or four times before starting to explore other possible routes. When humans replace the rats, however, they just keep on and on and on, in the hopes that if they just do the same thing often enough they’ll get the desired result.
Apart from proving that rats are smarter than people, these experiments show us that people will often stick to their habits until they’re forced to change…or die to avoid that change.
All the work I do to accomplish change is based on one important principle. I go in and find out what works and what doesn’t work. I slice away what isn’t working and replace those areas with new states of consciousness that work better. It’s as simple as that.
The way I see it, there are three steps to making enduring change:
1 People must become so sick of having the problem that they decide they really want to change.
2 They have to somehow see their problem from a new perspective or in a new light.
3 New and appealing options must be found or created, and pursued.
As Virginia also said, if people have a choice, they’ll make the best one. The problem is, they often don’t have choices.
In these cases, hypnosis proves a valuable tool. By definition, we have to alter our state of consciousness to do something new. Hypnosis not only facilitates this but it allows us to minimize or remove the impact of past experiences and to create and install in their place newer, more useful, and more appropriate states. With hypnosis, we can help people discover choices and explore them. And, since time distortion is a characteristic of the phenomenon we call “trance,” just as it is of dreaming, we can lead people through choices very rapidly. The learning tool of altered states permits us to familiarize the subject with a new experience in a fraction of the time it would take for them in an ordinary waking state.
For this to happen, we need somehow to reduce the impact on the subject of their past negative experiences, to make way for new and more useful ways of experiencing oneself and one’s world. The way I work (and the techniques outlined in this book) permits a person who had been held prisoner by his past to make room for change.
Some of the patterns in this book lead people to “relive” their past in a new way, while other activities allow people to look at their past, and it just doesn’t feel like it quite belongs to them anymore.
But, to do any of this really creatively means that we need to understand how people create their representations of their world, as well as how we can help them build new and more resourceful alternatives. Why they behave the way they do is far less important than what they’re doing to set up their problem states and how they maintain them. When we know that, even the most impossible problem can have a solution.
When I started out, I asked some psychiatrists what were their most difficult clinical problems. Without hesitation, most of them said, “Phobias.”
This answer is easy to understand. Phobics always have their phobic responses, and they always have them immediately. They never forget.
People often describe themselves