What made the difference was a trick. Inside his mind, not only was he calmly flying along, but he also left town for the first time in years. Now, since part of his brain could perceive that experience as real, I could start to put together the stimulus he had with the response he desired. We sent him out to go for a drive, and he was away for hours. When he came back he was astonished. He said he’d driven to the city limits, come to a bridge leading out of Huntington, all the time waiting for his phobia to kick in—but he just drove on.
Needless to say, some psychiatrists were deeply skeptical. They kept telling me that change had to be painful and slow, and I said, “Well, that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve changed rapidly, many times, without any trouble.”
Actually, we all have. Maybe you read something in a book that changed your life in a second. Someone might have said something that instantly changed not only the way you did certain things but the entire quality of the experience you were having. Suddenly, without actually realizing it, something happened that switched off the problem and turned on the solution.
It fascinated me that among all the warring factions, a few therapists scattered around the country seemed capable of acting as genuine change agents, and I was driven by curiosity to know how they did it. That was my rule then and remains my rule now: if you want to find out how to do something you can’t yet do, find someone who can and ask them. Now we call that process “modeling,” and some people have turned it into an unnecessarily long and complicated process.
When I first began investigating modeling, I was astonished to find that highly successful people were flattered to be asked how they got that way and were usually happy to talk. The only problem was that they didn’t always know how they came to be the way they were.
Exercise: Changing Feelings by Dissociation
1 Recall an experience that still causes you sadness or distress. As you remember it, make sure you are reexperiencing it as if it were happening right now. See every thing through your own eyes, feel all the feelings—including the associated emotions—through your own body. Pay particular attention to any sounds; these might include anything that was said by you or any other significant participants in the original scenario. It may also include your own self-talk. Make a mental note of the degree to which this memory still causes you pain.
2 Now pretend or imagine you can step back out of the experience so you can see yourself there, as if on a screen. Push the entire scene away from you, further and further, noticing, as it moves into the distance, how the colors begin to leach away and the detail diminishes. Push it as far away as you need to push it to notice a distinct difference in the way you feel about the events.
Note: Unless you particularly wish to have the discomfort back, you can leave the experience where it is—or even spin it away into space and have it explode into the sun.
The Birth of Personal Freedom
NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING WAS born many years ago, partly out of the events one night in a hypnosis seminar. The people there were achieving deep hypnotic states and demonstrating dramatic hypnotic phenomena.
Some of them were doing things like limited vision and positive hallucinations; others were controlling their blood pressure. One young girl even speeded up the way her eyes worked, but not the rest of her, so she could see the world in slow motion. Without any training at all, she was able to run rings around a martial artist friend of mine. From her point of view, everything was slowed all the way down. To the observer, she was moving twice as fast as the other guy.
Of course, different people were able to achieve different levels of competence, and that set me thinking.
Already, those psychologists studying hypnosis had decided there was such a thing as “hypnotizability” that could be measured—meaning that one person could be more or less hypnotizable than another.
I didn’t really believe that. I wasn’t impressed with the idea of a hypnotizability scale. I kept asking, “Has anybody got one? Has anyone even seen one?”
What the research really told me, though, was that if you use the same input with some people, they will respond differently than others. In the case of hypnosis, some people go deeper, others not. To me, the analogy was simply that if you keep punching a group of research subjects at the same height, you’ll hit some in the head and hit the really tall ones in the knee. The whole thing begged the question: What was one person doing with his brain that the other wasn’t? It seemed to me that these psychologists were really measuring not hypnotizability, but their own incompetence.
Some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the world we perceive ourselves in is only a representation of reality, whatever that is. Hans Vaihinger, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bate-son all made the same observation. They all discussed variations on the theme of “our experience of reality is not the same as reality itself.” Some very old cultures came to the same conclusion. They realized thousands of years ago that what was outside the mind was not the same as what was inside the mind. Part of their way of dealing with it was to meditate for years to become enlightened and dissolve the “illusion.”
But the problem remained for the rest of us. Even if we accepted that our experience was constructed in our minds, what then? What could we do with that knowledge? What difference would it make?
In volume one of The Structure of Magic, I wrote: “We as human beings do not act directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live—that is we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.”
My point was that those people in that workshop who could create positive or negative hallucinations, or become selectively amnesiac, or anesthetize their arms, were representing their world differently from those who could not do those things. They changed their way of looking at things; they changed their beliefs. The intriguing thing is that, in some cases, not only did their subjective experience change with the suggestion, but their physiology did, too.
Hypnosis, therefore, was central to the development of NLP because it allowed us to explore altered states. We could push boundaries with it, because it was a tool that allowed us to begin to learn what was possible. Once we saw some of the things that were possible, we could begin to look at how they happened and what we needed to do to replicate the outcomes. In this sense, NLP may be thought of as the underlying “structure” of hypnosis.
It wasn’t possible to turn to psychology for help, because not only were most of the “experts” fighting with each other to decide whose theory was correct, they were also focused only on why people became ill or stuck, or how they came to fail.
I once spent a whole winter house-sitting for a psychiatrist friend, and out of sheer boredom I read every book he had. It was a fascinating experience. The hundreds of texts by all these important doctors and professors could tell you everything you needed to know about how people got sick or stuck—but not one of them had even the glimmer of an idea of how to help them get better. It didn’t even seem to occur to them that it might be a useful direction to follow.
That was a question I found myself asking again and again. How do people get better? Some of them do get better, sometimes with the help of doctors or psychologists. Others just get better all by themselves.
But my interest went beyond that. I wanted to know how people achieved their goals and what made some of them exceptional in their field. I wanted to know how some people achieved excellence.
A few therapists at the time were getting far better results than those of their colleagues. They lived and practiced in different parts of the country; their methods were