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?

A simple deletion is when an important element in a statement is missing. This is different from the earlier category of “unspecified nouns” because in the latter case the sentence has an object, it’s just unspecified. Here, it would be missing entirely.

Here are some examples of how a client might use them and thus inspire us, as therapists, to employ the meta model to recover information lost from the surface structure of their sentences:

I don’t know… it’s just awful.

This happens every time I go.

My Dad told me, and he was proven right over and over again.

And here are some examples of how we can purposely simply delete, for positive purpose:

“I know you are wondering.” (about what? - The listener must fill in the blank.)

“And as she drifted into trance she listened carefully.”

“Deeper and deeper. That’s right.”

In NLP’s “meta model,’ a “comparative deletion”  is when the speaker leaves unstated what things are being compared and/or how that comparison is being evaluated.

As an example, if you’re speaking with someone and they say something like ”it’s better,” you would have no idea what they’re talking about. And, instead of assuming or hallucinating some meaning that may not be true, it’s better to ask questions. Like - “What do you mean?” or “What’s better than what?” Or “In what way is it better?”  ANY of these questions will elicit more precise information from the person.

Examples:

Sugar’s sweeter. Love takes me higher. Bill is the smartest. Rail is faster. TexMex offers more.

AND - as you know by now - as hypnotists, we get to deliberately violate this meta model restriction in the service of artfully vague language that we employ to assist our client in a therapeutic way.

“It’s better to go into trance with your feet on the floor.”
“This is going to be the best one yet.”
“The best communicators have studied Ericksonian language patterns.”

So, as you continue to evolve as a communicator, isn’t it nice to know that you’re learning and growing and truly becoming better?

(Sometimes it’s good to just smile and say yes.)

This is an old Chinese Taoist story. It is a wonderful metaphor.

Once upon a time there was a village that was experiencing a terrible, prolonged drought. The elders of the village had heard of a Rainmaker, a man who could induce the rains to come. So they sent word that they wanted this man to come to help them.

When finally he did arrive at their village there was much rejoicing because their long collective hardship would soon be eased. They threw out the red carpet for this man. They gave him a tour of their village. They asked him, “What do you need to do your magic? Do you need a bonfire? A sacrifice? Drummers? Tell us what you need and we will provide it.”

He said, “No. Your village is very out of touch with the Tao. I only need a quiet place to stay that is outside the village, please.”

They provided him this and he moved in.  The first morning he rose with the sunrise, swept the front walk of the house, gathered wood for his fire, made the fire in the hearth, prepared his tea, cleaned up after his morning meal and later went to bed within an hour of the setting sun.

The next day he rose with the sunrise, swept the front walk of the house, gathered wood for his fire, made the fire in the hearth, prepared his tea, cleaned up after his morning meal and later went to bed within an hour of the setting sun.

On the third day he again flowed with the rhythms of the day.

On the fourth day it rained.

A “Selectional Restriction Violation” is when someone ascribes to a thing something, usually a feeling, that is technically impossible for it to possess (at least as far as we know). So if you hear someone say something like, “the grass was feeling annoyed at the moles.” We might be tempted to employ the meta model to clear up this distortion. “Precisely how do you know what the grass was feeling?” We also might be tempted to suggest that our client lay off the grass for a while.

But, when we reverse the meta model, it can be very useful to violate a selectional restriction.

As an example if, in the course of my telling a therapeutic metaphor, I were to say, “You can listen to the cheerful trees and sit on this noble divan while your hands decide which of them will lift up first,” I’d be employing this pattern three times. First, with the “cheerful” trees, second, with the “proud” divan, and thirdly with the hands being able to decide for themselves what to do. This pattern is especially useful while telling metaphors.

Because the listener realizes on some level that the selected thing can’t actually feel these feelings, they will personally identify with the feelings. This is especially true when the speaker uses a shift in tonality consistent with an embedded command. This is referred to as an interspersal technique.

Readers who have read Bandler and Grinder’s “Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson M.D., vol. 1″ will remember the section (pp.26-50) about the farmer named Joe who was suffering from cancer. Erickson spoke to Joe about tomato plants and how they feel good and comfortable when they grow.

That little seed, Joe, slowly swells, sends out a little rootlet with cilia on it…
…they must make the tomato plant feel very good, very comfortable…

So you, dear reader, are probably thinking that you could write a trance induction of your own using this and many of the other language patterns explored this year.

What a terrific idea! I wonder how much fun you could have doing that? Tell you what, send in your happy finished product and I’ll post it. Providing it’s appropriate content, of course… I reserve the right to not post it. Keep in mind, that while I can promise I won’t use it, other readers will have no such obligation. The possibility exists it might be “borrowed.”

An unspecified verb is one that offers only a vague description of an action. When we use the meta model we endeavor to gather more precision by asking good questions.

As an example, if we heard someone say, “she went to the party,” we would have no idea exactly how she “went,” so we’d ask a question. We might ask, “Precisely how did she transport herself to said social gathering?” Or we might ask, “How’d she go?” Either question would serve the purpose of eliciting more information and a more precise description of her action.

Of course there are other things in this sentence we’re can’t be sure of either, like who she is, what party she was going to, etc., but for our purposes here, we are focusing on the unspecified verb.

By the way - it should be noted that ALL verbs are unspecified to a certain degree. No verbal description can ever completely convey the actual physical act. So if the answer to our above question was “she ran to the party,” we’d know much more than we did, but do we know if she sprinted, jogged, rushed, loped or cantered? No.

So that’s how you use the meta model. To “reverse” the meta model (itself an unspecified verb), we will be purposely vague. As hypnotic speakers, we can choose to deliberately be nonspecific in our verb choices so the listener can have more freedom to let their internal imaginings take place.

In the following “artfully vague” examples, we deliberately can say things that contain unspecified verbs:

“Go into trance now.”
“People can learn these patterns rapidly.”
“You may enjoy a delightful experience.”
“And you can drop down into that good feeling.”

“…and as you read these words
you may begin to discover
that you are learning
so rapidly
in ways that you were not even aware of … yet
are there and are yours
to keep and appreciate
how you can utilize these skills
as you practice everyday.”

This fine title is being brought to you by the department of redundancy department. “Unspecified Nouns” and “Unspecified Referential Index” are the same thing. They are both either unspecified people, places, or things.

What is so trancy about that, you ask? Well, whenever the listener has to go inside to wonder what exactly you’re talking about, you take a little slice of their consciousness momentarily. You are also giving them the opportunity to relate what you’ve said to themselves.
It may be a small thing but small things add up.

“People can learn these patterns rapidly.”

“It will be a delightful experience.”

“And you can drop down into that good feeling.”

They are also very useful when doing group trances because when you use unspecified nouns people can interpret what you’re saying in the way that works best for them.

“…and then you step out into the that beautiful place

so peaceful and serene

drink in your surroundings… the colors - so vibrant

listen to the sounds - are there any living creatures nearby?

reach down and feel the textures between your fingers…” 

You know, sometimes it’s fun to go out and practice these language patterns on actual people in actual situations. You know? Being respectful, of course. Write out a dozen or so examples first if you like, then go. Be daring. Do it.

Make the world a better place and put smiles on people’s faces. Notice when people are in naturally occurring trance states (elevators, cars, buses, classrooms, waiting rooms, etc.) and just speak. Make casual observances. Like, “Morning. Looks like somebody got some new shoes! Nice! You always feel like a million bucks with new shoes, don’t you?  My mother always said,  ”just stop and realize you can feel good for no good reason.” You know, like when you just don’t care what anybody else thinks and you just find yourself smiling inside? She’s right. It’s nice to do that sometimes, isn’t it? Anyway - this is my floor - have a nice day!”

Nominalizations

The Meta Model teaches us that nominalizations are verbs that have been changed into nouns. In other words, they are a process that has been changed linguistically into a thing. As an example, we hear people speak about their “relationship,” instead of “how they are relating to their partner.”

It’s really good to recognize them because clients use them all the time. A person seeking therapy may complain of “their depression.” They are speaking as if depression was a thing rather than the act of acting depressed. Dave Dobson taught that a useful response to them would be, “what are you acting depressed about?” This way of responding effectively turns their nominalization back into a verb. 

You’ll notice that the ending “ion” is common for nominalizations. 

discussion, completion, objection, consideration, decision, evolution

But there are many of them that do not have that ending.

discovery, movement, resistance, reaction, hope

(If you’re not sure about a particular word, use the wheelbarrow test: Can you put it into a wheelbarrow? As an example - a relationship may seem like a thing, but can you put it into a wheelbarrow?)

So then, how can we reverse the meta model and use nominalizations artfully and purposefully? Notice all the ones in the following example:

and you can feel that feeling

of trance deepen as you 

drift down and allow 

your unconscious

to find exactly the right resources 

to create the perfect solution

and let that understanding

permeate your spirit

now

or in sales:

The experience of this car’s responsiveness will cause you to feel a surge of elation that starts … right … there … and then spreads out and fills you with that intoxication of adventure that means you must possess it now.

Remember the rule, “The client must never be vague, the hypnotist — always.”