Here’s another simple presupposition. This one has to do with time.

Subordinate Clauses of Time

Like these: before, after, during, as, since, prior, while, yet, now, again

I have noticed that as people practice they gain greater fluency.

While kids text constantly their attention is bifurcated.

When you find friends who stand by you when the going is hard, cherish them.

She rode the horse which sold for the highest price that year again.

It’s Tuesday. Has the guy that always wears cowboys boots comes in yet?

After you read this you will find you want to use these skills daily.

Here’s another simple presupposition (where what is being presupposed is essentially the existence of the thing.)

Relative Clauses These are complex noun phrases where the noun is followed by a phrase beginning with who, which, or that.

I have noticed that people who practice their skills become most proficient.

It’s the kids who text constantly who worry me the most.

When you find friends who stand by you when the going is hard, cherish them.

She rode the horse which sold for the highest price that year.

Tuesday afternoons the guy that always wears cowboys boots comes in.

Reverse Meta Model
A “Presupposition” is something that is pre-supposed or accepted to be true in advance of any discussion. So if you and I were arguing about whether the moon were made of green cheese or not (everyone knows it is swiss cheese) it may not even be NOTICED that we’ve both accepted as a fact the existence of a moon. If one of us were from Mars we might not be aware of moons as a thing. It is actually pretty amazing how much we presuppose. How much we believe without seriously calling it into question.

Of course, when we hear other people doing this with their language, we can use the meta model to call it into question. (I guess “calling it into question” might be another name for the meta model.) As the therapist, however, we sometime may choose to deliberately presuppose certain things into our communication. Thus we reverse the meta model.

SImple Presuppositions

Bandler and Grinder’s book, “The Structure of Magic” is a treasure trove of incredibly useful presuppositions.  Here are five “simple presuppostions:”

1. Proper Names

(Presupposing that this specific person exists)
Won’t you be delighted when Agent Scully walks through that door?

2. Pronouns

(…that this general person exists)
Won’t you be keen when she walks in?

3. Definite Descriptions

(this specific thing exists)
I liked the woman in the blue uniform.

4. Some quantifiers

(all, every, some, few, many, none, each)
Everyone has many potentials that they are unaware of, yet are there.

5. Generic Noun Phrases

(Noun phrases standing for a whole class)
I have often considered the great communicators of our time to be poets.

I suggest you write out several examples of each one above. Because, when you write them, you know you know them and they will be yours to use. Or perhaps I am wrongly presupposing that that is of interest to you.

Neo-Ericksonian Approaches

Comparisons

I am blessed with having stellar dentist who took time from his vacation to see me last week. Seems I had a bit of a dental emergency and needed a root canal. Fortunately, I was on a staycation and could easily travel to see him. He fixed me right up, gave me a script for penicillin and made an appointment for a few weeks from now.

And - as great as that is - did I mention I had a root canal?

Them mothers hurt.

So as I was driving back from New Jersey I reflected on how amazingly fortunate I was. As little as a hundred years ago dentistry was pretty barbaric. Throughout the 19th century, there was no separate field as dentistry and tooth extractions were done by barbers! I’ve been barbers who hurt me when they cut my hair! But seriously. people DIED from complications of dental problems such as mine. They’d get an infection in a tooth - pull it out to try and save the patient, but without things like penicillin, people would frequently die from these infections. Heck, Bayer only invented aspirin in 1899. I had been given four ibuprofin.

So I started to feel pretty good driving along the Garden State Parkway. I mean I was in pain but the ibuprofin was starting to kick in, I was ALIVE, I had a prescription and a positive prognosis.

I was reminded of a simularity between Milton Erickson, MD, the great Hypnotherapist you may have heard of, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Monk, teacher, author of Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.

In both these great teacher’s teaching, the both make use of the common experience of a tooth ache. Milton was once doing a session with a client and asked her, “Do you have a toothache?” She said no. He said, “Isn’t that nice?”

Thich Nhat Hanh has pointed out that when we have a toothache, we focus a great deal of our energy upon it and wish it would go away. When it finally does we can be very happy.

What if could feel that way all the time?

A friend of mine, for a few days once, thought she had breast cancer. She was certain of it. Then was told that she did not - that she was clean. Don’t ya know the rest of her day went pretty well? Nothing else matters after that. Life is good.

I had a client just recently with whom I used similar a sort of comparison. She was feeling limited in her choices, so I said I knew how she felt. I told her that I’d worked for a few years in the Department of Complementary Medicine at New York’s Columbia/Presbyterian Medical Center and would make my rounds of the 6th floor transplant wing, where the guys were all waiting to get a new heart. They couldn’t leave that wing because of the extreme fragility of their condition. I described how on certain holidays, like New Year’s eve, hopes ran high cause hearts often became available on those days.

I didn’t, of course, leave the discussion there, but by the time we both left the office that day, we were both really grateful to be able to walk under our own power and happy to enjoy the life we’d been given.

A reminder:
In NLP the “meta model” is Bandler and Grinder’s name for the wellformedness conditions of the surface structure of the English language. As Bostic and Grinder put it, it is “… designed for the express purpose of challenging the limitations in the mental maps carried by clients who seek professional assistance in changing themselves through the processes of therapy.”  (Whispering In the Wind.)

In Hypnosis we sometimes chose to deliberately violate these wellformedness conditions (”reversing the meta model”) in order to be purposefully and artfully vague.

Presuppositions
All sentences require certain things to be presupposed. As an example, the sentence, “The bird landed on the post,” presupposes many things, but clearly it presupposes the existence of a bird and that of a post. It also presupposes that the bird was flying in order for it to land, although there may be other circumstances wherein that could happen.

In a therapeutic context, clients will be presupposing a variety of things that may be part of the reason they need therapy in the first place. It’s really good for the therapist to recognise them and be able to question them when they appear. That’s where the meta model comes into play.

As the therapist, however, you can make good use of presuppositions for good purpose.

In Hypnosis, you can  purposely use  presuppositions to create responsiveness. In the examples below, in order to make sense of the communication, one of the things the client must accept is the Hypnotist’s presupposition of the existence of trance. By the way - there are at least five things presupposed in each sentence that will spring out at you if you stop to look for them. How many can you see?

Examples:

“As you listen to the sound of my voice you can float down even more deeply into trance.”

“And when your hands finally do touch, you may find that you automatically take a deep breath before you drift all the way down into a very deep trance.”

There is a famous example from the Ericksonian literature I’ll paraphrase here.

A man came in to see Erickson to quit smoking. Erickson looked at him and said, “How surprised will you be when you wake up tomorrow as a non-smoker?” When the man answered, “I’ll be very surprised!” Erickson dismissed him, knowing the therapy was complete. The man, in fact, did successfully quit smoking the next day. How did Erickson know? Because the man didn’t question the presupposition in Erickson’s question. His answer was not “I don’t think that will happen,” his answer was, “I’ll be very surprised (when it does).”

NOTE: The subject of presuppositions is a huge one. I’ll be writing more about them in the near future. For more information and insight, see the article by Robert Dilts on the “Articles” section of our web site, www.Ericksonian.info.

I’d like to invite you to be among the first to visit a new web site. It’s called ‘Stories from the Outside Inn.”

It’s a joint venture between myself and Nick Kemp. The official website is now live and you can download unique Hypnosis and NLP mp3s created exclusively for this site by Nick Kemp and Doug O’Brien.

As a member of the site (which is totally free) you get to access other downloads not available to the public. This is a very different type of site and we encourage you to scroll around the front page and explore the sections for video, audio downloads as well as the UK November workshop.

visit the site here

http://www.storiesfromtheoutsideinn.com

This project began from a conversation Nick and I had last December when I was over in Leeds to teach Sleight of Mouth. I told Nick about how when I was jogging recently, I had my iPod on the shuffle mode. This feature randomly plays selections from your collection of songs. I had a mix of different sorts of music and spoken word including hypnotic trance inductions. It was a wonderfully eccentric experience to go from listening to a song by the Beatles to a talk by Stephen Gilligan to Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Richard Bandler to Dave Mathews.

Nick told me about a book he’d read called “Not Quite What I Expected.” This book is a collection of six-word memoirs - a collection of entire life stories sumed up in only six words. It’s a fascinating book.

This led us to thinking about creating a web site where these sorts of brief story/trance experiences could be featured and people visiting could create their own experience by clicking around the site.

Please see how it turned out and join us.

Did we mention it’s free?