Richard Bandler's Guide to Trance-formation: Make Your Life Great

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 as “phobic,” when in reality they’re suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder. Anxious people have to work up to their anxiety attack; phobics don’t. They see or even just think elevator and instantly go, “Aaargh!” They never make an exception.

Phobias can either be learned, say, from a parent or caregiver, or instantly acquired by some emotionally overwhelming incident. Phobias are a graphic demonstration of the brain’s ability to learn something really quickly—often in a single pass.

Addressing phobias intrigued me for several reasons. Not only was I ready to respond to the challenge of doing the “impossible,” but I knew how useful it could be if people could learn to use the brain’s ability to learn quickly and easily to acquire more useful responses. Think of how different someone’s life would be if they learned to feel instantly and completely delighted every time they saw their partner—and vice versa.

Even though people are often disabled by their phobias, they are always incredibly creative and committed to having them. They need to experience a unique trigger, make complex decisions, and have responses in less time than it takes to describe it. If they fear heights, they have to know precisely what “high” is to have the response.

One of the weirdest height phobias I ever encountered was in Michigan. I asked three hundred people if anyone had a really outrageous phobia, and a very distinguished gentleman, aged about fifty, raised his hand and said, “I’m afraid of heights.”

This didn’t seem particularly outrageous, but when I invited him up on to the stage, which was just a couple feet high, he turned pale and said, “No.”

I reached out my hand and said: “Step up on just one step,” but he stepped backward and his knees gave way. To me, that’s a real, flaming phobia. I went down in the front of the audience, turned him around, ran him through the Phobia Cure (see Chapter 16), then asked him what he did for a living.

He said, “I’m an airline pilot.” Something about my reaction or expression prompted him to say, “I know what you’re thinking, but once you’re in the plane it’s not the same.”

He explained that walking up a flight of stairs was impossible for him. He could only fly planes, such as 747s, that were accessible by a ramp. He told how, when he was in the air force, he had to close his eyes, then be lifted backward into the cockpit. Once he was inside an F-16, he was fine. He couldn’t climb a ladder to the plane, but he could fly it at twice the speed of sound and drop napalm across Vietnam without a second thought.

His problem had to do with the distinctions he made in his mind of how high “high” was. It had nothing to do with going up; it was all to do with looking down. Once he was high enough up, he was okay. He even told me: “If I get in an elevator and I go up to the eighth or ninth floor I can look out the window, or off the balcony, and I’m fine. But if I get off on the first floor, I’ve got a problem.”

If he was in one of those glass elevators, he wouldn’t be able to look out. He couldn’t cope with walking around and looking out of the first floor, but felt quite safe if his room was on the sixteenth floor. The only thing was, he had to go up to his room with his back to the glass, staring at the wall or the door.

How he developed his phobia to such an elegant degree is probably all very complicated, but it doesn’t really matter. What’s significant is that he made the distinction that being at a certain height meant he could fall—but if it was much higher, he was safe. As soon as he got high enough, the phobia simply stopped functioning.

Somewhere in his brain were a starting point and a cutoff point—both very specific, and both functioning entirely outside his conscious awareness. His starting point for a height phobia was the lowest I’ve ever seen.

When he left the air force and became a commercial pilot, he had no problem flying people around in 747s, but he couldn’t take a single step up. Of course, I did everything I could to get him fixed as quickly as possible. I don’t want crazy people in the cockpit of my plane. I want people who are completely unflappable, with great sensory acuity, so they know exactly where real danger begins and ends.

Interestingly, phobias often make a kind of sense. People usually become phobic about something that could actually harm them under certain circumstances. When people come to me and say, “I want to be completely fearless around spiders,” or “I don’t want to be bothered by heights, no matter how high up I go,” I always make them step back and take a realistic look at what they are requesting. In some countries, such as Australia or Africa, having no fear of spiders would be extremely stupid. Some spiders are very poisonous. Likewise, a man with a phobia of heights who told me he wanted to be able to dance fearlessly along the rail of a balcony four floors up needs a reality check.

The outcome in curing phobias should always respect the fact that part of the person’s brain has actually been working very efficiently to help them avoid danger. The real problem is overreaction. The brain needs a new perspective to be able to change.

At the time I began investigating phobias, everyone was arguing over the right approach to psychotherapy. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of different schools of psychology, all fighting over who was right. The interesting part was that none of them was successful. Nobody was actually managing to cure anyone of their problems. To me, it seemed particularly foolish for a group of people who couldn’t do something to be arguing about the best way to not do it.

These therapists were limited by their own unconscious patterning, which predisposed them to failure. They were all looking at the content of the client’s experience—the “why”—to discover what was wrong and find ways to put it right. They were paying too much attention to trying to interpret what their clients were saying, and not noticing what they were doing.

I approached it differently. I advertised in the newspaper for people who’d had phobias they’d recovered from and offered to pay them money just to sit down and talk about their experiences. I didn’t really expect to get more than a few, but it turned out there were many, many former phobics who were happy to talk about themselves.

They all told me more or less the same story. They said things like: “One day, I’d just had enough. I said: ‘That’s it! No more!’” Then they all said: “I looked at myself and for once I saw how stupid it was to be acting the way I was and I started to laugh…,” and then they changed.

I noticed that when they made the change, they switched to watching themselves doing the behavior. Those people who lost the phobia were no longer thinking of the experience as if seeing it through their own eyes but were literally recalling it from a different point of view—that of an observer. No matter how scary the phobia had been, it no longer affected them the same way when they took up this detached or “objective” point of view. Inadvertently, they’d discovered how to dissociate from the problem experience.

People who still had their phobias, on the other hand, were looking at spiders or planes or elevators as if they were actually there. Because they were representing the thought from a point inside the experience, part of their brains responded as if the experience was actually happening and plunged them even deeper into a state of panic.

Even though each of them had differing stories to tell about their particular phobias, the only difference I could see was in the way they were representing the experience of their phobias to themselves. So I had some people with phobias apply what I had learned. I had them “step out” of their bodies and watch their responses as if from across the room. And it worked. They got rid of their phobias really quickly. Their brains simply shifted the way they perceived their situation, and their problems went away.

The psychiatrists responded by sending me more and more people with phobias. Some of them were extremely creative and entertaining in the way they had set up their problems. For example, one man had developed a phobia about leaving Huntington, Ohio. He’d be driving along quite happily, then come to the city limits, skid to a halt, and freak out. He hadn’t been able to leave town in four and a half years.

Since I was always trying to find easier and faster ways of doing things, I had him imagine he was Superman. I got him to float out of his body and fly alongside, watching himself driving his pickup truck. He flew for a couple of miles, then saw himself begin to get nervous, jam on the brakes, and start to panic…but he flew on!

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.

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