WHEN I PUBLISHED Trance-formations more than a quarter of a century ago, it almost immediately became the benchmark for books about hypnosis. Even now, long after it is out of print, copies are trading at dozens of times the cover price.
Before then, hypnosis was seen as a rather mysterious and inaccessible subject. Most hypnotherapists adopted an extremely directive approach. It was widely believed that the hypnotist had to dominate his subject’s will and drive him into hypnosis with repetitive, monotonous commands.
Predictably, only a relatively small number of people responded. There was absolutely no suggestion that this might be the hypnotist’s fault. Everyone, it was suggested, was hypnotizable to a greater or lesser degree. It was considered to be an innate trait, rather like the size of your feet or the color of your eyes. If you had difficulties going into trance or were unable to perform complex, deep-trance phenomena, it demonstrated your shortcomings, rather than your hypnotist’s.
Even Milton Erickson believed that subjects had to be “trained” to become good hypnotic subjects. Most of his followers still see him as a kind of instant miracle-maker, but he made no secret of the fact that he sometimes took between one hundred and one thousand hours to prepare his patients for therapy. The idea that hypnosis was something that anyone could experience, or do to another person, was inconceivable at the time.
Trance-formations changed all that. It demonstrated that hypnosis was a natural phenomenon, open to everyone to experience, and that getting people into trance—even really deep trance—was an easily learnable skill, and that hypnosis could be a tool that therapists and teachers in all fields could apply to help their clients and students to learn.
It was the first book ever to demonstrate that hypnosis had a structure, and the structure could be modeled, learned, and taught.
In that book, I outlined several hypnotic patterns, all of which could be immediately applied. These patterns had either been modeled or refined from the work of Milton Erickson or were developed from my own work in the field. The purpose of revealing the “inner structure” of several patterns was to encourage hypnotists to be systematic. It was never intended to suggest that any of these patterns represented “the” way to do hypnosis, nor that the hypnotist was expected to favor one over the other.
However, within a very short time, these patterns were copied and reproduced many, many times. Each new book that came out, each new “creator” of these techniques, presented them as if carved in stone.
What people need to understand is that no one induction is automatically better than another. The most powerful factors that decide whether your subject goes into trance are your rate of speech, tonality, breathing, and your own overall ability to alter your state as an unconscious way of guiding her into an altered state.
The specific patterns and exercises that follow, therefore, are intended both as a guide and a means of developing flexibility. My experience is that the failure of someone to go into hypnosis has nothing to do with “hypnotizability” and everything with the hypnotist’s ability to respond creatively to the person being hypnotized.
If you are new to hypnosis, I suggest you take each pattern and practice it until it feels easy and natural. It is not necessary that you have a subject to practice, but the important thing is to do it as if you do. Speak out loud, listen to your own tonality, and alter your performance as you go along.
It can be useful to record your early efforts, then listen to them later to find out whether they have any kind of effect on you. If you cannot put yourself into trance, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do so for others.
One of the characteristics of trance-inducing speech is its use of transitional, or linking, words and phrases.
A competent hypnotist speaks smoothly and effortlessly, with few discernible ends to his sentences. Even though linking phrase with phrase and sentence with sentence may not be grammatical or even logical, the effect is soothing and reassuring to the listener.
Even though his voice was deep and gruff, Milton Erickson was the master of rhythm. He achieved this in a number of ways, including the way he rocked his body from side to side to mark out certain phrases to the listener’s unconscious. In compiling the Milton Model, we identified a number of linkages, some stronger than others. As with all the language patterns, I strongly suggest you not only closely study the Resource Files at the end of the book but that you create and write down as many of your own versions as possible.
Possibly the easiest, but also the weakest, way of connecting phrases is to use simple conjunctions, such as “and” and “so.” And…as you do so…learn to listen to your own voice…so you can develop your own sense of rhythm and confidence…and become confident enough…so you can expand your capabilities far beyond anything you…and anyone else…might have thought possible…
The second, somewhat stronger, linkage is created by what, in the Milton Model, we call “implied causative.” Simply put, this kind of pattern suggests a cause without actually stating it. The fact that a direct claim of causation is not made makes it extremely difficult to resist. If you learn to incorporate the implied causative in both your normal speech and your hypnotic inductions, then you will dramatically increase your ability to influence others, and while you consider what that could mean to your career and your personal life, your unconscious is already thinking of new ways to apply these learnings.
Even stronger is the Cause-Effect pattern, which suggests that one event triggers another. The second exists because of the first. The word “because” itself may or may not be in the sentence. These patterns are laid out in the Resource Files section, which means you have a reference easily at hand. The more you practice these patterns, the more spontaneously you will generate them, because simple repetition will ensure that you remember them both consciously and unconsciously.
Decide on the state you would like to induce in a subject, and write out at least three ten-minute inductions using three examples of each of the following patterns in turn:
- Simple conjunctions
- Implied causatives
- Examples of the Cause-Effect pattern
This will give you nine statements for each trance to refine and develop.
Note: This is not a suggestion that you use prepared scripts with clients. The end-point of this and most other exercises in this book is to help you learn how to spontaneously generate inductions in any form you choose.
A pleasant tonality is extremely important to effective change work. It is not simply what you are saying to the person that carries the message. You bathe his entire body with your voice; every cell resonates to the waveforms you generate. I can’t recall how many hypnosis workshops I’ve attended and how often I’ve heard someone say in the screechiest, most annoying tone possible: “Relax, now…you are feeling more relaxed…” You know from the very start that it isn’t going to work.
A “good voice” isn’t necessarily something you’re born with, but it’s certainly something you must acquire. Over the years, I’ve trained myself to be able to shift accents from New Joisey to the Deep South, via any state you care to name. I can take on Erickson’s voice, his rhythm and tonality, as easily as I can use my own. In workshops, I often take people through the following steps:
The other important pattern to develop is that of authority and credibility. This is simply a matter of learning to drop your voice in the right place in the sentences you use.
Knowing and applying these simple rules can markedly increase your flexibility, and therefore your effectiveness, as a hypnotist. For example, by downwardly inflecting what superficially seems like a question, you can deliver a command to the listener’s unconscious.
Repeat the sentence “Would you like to relax now?” out loud, first inflecting upward at the end as usual, then downward. Notice the difference, both in the way it sounds and how it feels viscerally. My students often report feeling a lot more confident, grounded, and in command when they learn to manage their own tonality. Women, especially, can gain considerable authority in this way.
Exercise: Toning Inflection
Choose a section from this, or any other, book and read it out loud, in turn:
- Inflecting upward at the end of every sentence
- Uninflected throughout every sentence
- Inflecting downward at the end of every sentence.
Now, set aside a whole day during which you attempt to downwardly inflect every sentence you speak. It is unlikely you will achieve this, but with practice it becomes easy and natural, and will considerably increase your authority without challenging the status and power of the people you meet.
Erickson once defined trance as “reduction of the multiplicity of the foci of attention.” What he was saying in a very ponderous way is that hypnosis allows us to narrow our attention until we are focused just on a specific area of our subjective experience.
Another way of thinking about trance is as a shifting of the subject’s outer awareness to his inner experience. Whenever our attention moves inward, we begin to alter our state…or go into hypnosis. Whenever the “foci of attention” move outward, the subject returns to his normal waking state.
Knowing this can act as a systematic guide to the new hypnotist, informing both the overall “shape” of her induction and the language she uses.
Combining this outer-to-inner direction with “pacing,” the subject’s experience provides an easily remembered model for doing hypnosis that is both naturalistic and effective.
Pacing is a behavior that both tells subjects you are aware of, and respect, their experience and acts as a feedback mechanism to guide them further into trance.
The effectiveness of this particular technique depends almost entirely on creating and stacking agreement upon agreement, then linking that with a specific command. Compliance increases more or less to the degree we can get the subject to agree, even if agreement is about issues unrelated to issues other than the one at hand.
Putting it more simply: if we can get someone to agree with two or three irrefutable facts (that is, verifiable through their senses), they are likely to comply with any non-sensory-specific suggestions we might make.
Example: “You’re sitting back in the chair, your feet are on the ground, your hands in your lap…and you can start to feel more relaxed.”
The first three statements are irrefutable truisms, the fourth is an injunction or command.
It is extremely important for this model to work that the hypnotist avoids any form of opinion or judgment in the three pacing statements. You may not say, “You’re sitting comfortably on your chair…,” simply because “comfort” is potentially deniable. Perhaps the subject has a sore back, or a headache, or the seat is too soft.
The formula is to pace the subject (preferably three times), then lead him with a suggestion that corresponds with the outcome you’ve decided.
The induction is built out of successive pacing/leading statements and, as the subject relaxes more, becomes increasingly internally directed.
You can increase your flexibility and effectiveness as a hypnotist by learning to make artfully vague statements that are nevertheless still undeniably true: “feeling the temperature of the sun on your skin” is preferable to “feeling the warmth of the sun.” This ability will prove especially useful in the models for doing hypnosis that follow. Remember: the less content you presuppose, the less likelihood there will be of you being wrong. The more process-oriented you are, the greater your chances are of pacing your subject’s inner experience.
Exercise: Using Truisms to Induce Hypnosis
Write out an induction using the following model:
- Three statements that are inarguably true, followed by one suggestion of increasing comfort and relaxation. Repeat this step three times, giving you nine pacing statements and three suggestions. Now, add…
- Two “truisms” and two “comfort” suggestions. Repeat three times. Add…
- One truism and three comfort or trance-deepening statements. Repeat three times.
- Add several suggestions that the subject enjoy three or four minutes of deep and refreshing rest, then return to full, waking consciousness.
Test your induction on a partner.
Achieving rapport by matching the subject’s behavior and sensory preferences is important, but not as important as some NLP “experts” would have us believe. You don’t need phenomenal amounts of rapport, simply enough that people understand what you’re doing.
If somebody is talking to you in pictures, you talk back to them in pictures so they can understand better. But of course, understanding is not the most important outcome. Changing is the important outcome; learning is the important outcome.
I am constantly amazed to meet self-styled experts in Neuro-Linguistic Programming who want to tell me what I really meant. These are usually people who have certified themselves, who woke up one day and said, “Hmm. I remember now—I invented NLP.” Even though I created this field and have been in it for forty years, I still have people come up and argue with me about the right way to do NLP.
One of the things I hear a lot about is the importance of getting rapport. Out there in the field of NLP, there are entire books about how to establish rapport. In fact, all I ever said was, if you need rapport—which I don’t think is necessary, most of the time—you could establish it by matching behaviors.
But there are times when you don’t want it. You don’t want to have rapport with paranoid schizophrenics, for example. I certainly don’t. I scare the hell out of them so they want to change.
One of my favorite paranoid schizophrenics, Andy, had the following bizarre complaint: he said people came out of the TV and followed him around. Just the thought of it gave me the willies, but when I heard about it, I just couldn’t pass it up.
The psychiatrists were very reluctant to take him off his drugs “in case he got out of control.” I pointed out that they were both over six feet tall and he only came up to their chests.
So they dragged him over to this place where it had been decided to film the entire process of my meeting with him. When he arrived, there were lights and cameras and technicians and people staring at us—exactly the sort of situation to reassure a paranoid schizophrenic.
His brother, whom he was very close to, came with him and told me that his ambition was to go on a trip together, something they had planned when they were young but had never done. But, he said they could never do it because his brother kept having violent arguments with people who weren’t there.
I asked, “Like whom?” which is not the kind of question most people would ask, but it seemed entirely relevant. He said characters from television shows would come out and have arguments with his brother—especially Mary from The Little House on the Prairie, a show that was very popular at the time. Other things that upset him, his brother said, were being touched and people with long hair (which, considering the length of my own hair at the time, promised to be interesting).
When Andy arrived, he turned out to be the cutest schizophrenic I had ever met, because he was so sincere about everything he did. He told me at great length how Mary would step out of the TV set and follow him around, nagging at him and driving him crazy. On one occasion a preacher got out of the set and followed him around, shouting at him and telling him everything he did was a sin.
Andy gave me a very penetrating look and said, “He also told me to watch out for people with long hair.”
I leaned over, touched him on the knee, and yelled, “Don’t worry about it!”
Andy yelped and scooted back. I scooted forward and said, “Andy, they tell me you’re a schizophrenic.” Andy agreed and then went on to give me a very detailed, official-sounding account of his diagnosis.
When he’d finished, I said, “Andy, you’re not schizophrenic.” The two psychiatrists who had brought him looked outraged; after all, it was their diagnosis, and even Andy looked confused. I continued, “The problem is not one of schizophrenia. It’s one of bad taste.”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Andy, have you ever heard of the Playboy Channel?”
There was a pause as Andy thought about this, and suddenly the Red Sea of schizophrenia parted in front of us. The two psychiatrists suddenly looked at Andy with envy in their eyes.
I said, “Andy, this is a multimillion-dollar disorder you’ve got. How many people would pay big bucks to be able to do what you’re doing? Think of all those traveling salesmen who’re away from home and can still have fun without getting into trouble with their wives.”
Andy looked at me and said, “You think?”
I replied, “Here’s another thing. You’ve also been watching the wrong cartoons. Have you ever seen those Bugs Bunny shows where the artist’s pencil comes into the frame and erases Bugs’s legs? And when he starts to complain, he erases his mouth?”
Andy responded, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that one,” so I made a very expansive gesture as if I was handing him a giant pencil, and I said, “Well, I want you to take this and erase Mary’s mouth.”
Andy took the “pencil” with a very determined expression on his face, turned, and obeyed without a single question. Then he sat back and started to laugh with a sense of power.
I said, “Don’t stop there. Now erase her whole head and put a giraffe’s head in its place.” The thing is, it’s not so bad when people hallucinate. It’s when the hallucinations get the better of them.
Even after I had worked with Andy, the psychiatrists took him back and pumped him full of drugs again “just in case.” Since the drugs acted as a powerful anchor, Andy went back into a schizophrenic state. So I sent the videotape of the session over to him and got him to watch what had happened while he was on the drugs.
After a while, he was able to do this new thing I’d taught him with or without Thorazine, because it was just a mental skill.
The way I look at it, Andy’s hallucinations were no worse than the person who comes up to me and says, “I can’t be happy” or “I can’t really experience love.” My answer is: not while you’re thinking like that, you won’t—because the more you think about what you’re not doing, the more you won’t do it.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s important to match primary representational systems at first, and then to overlap into all the other systems. This way, you expand the person’s ability to take in and process information. You open up new avenues in his brain. One of the ways of looking at my work is as extending people’s representational systems with great precision, to get a specific result.
Neurologically, all the systems overlap in the brain. The distinction between feeling and pictures and feeling and sound is tenuous at best. There’s a tremendous blending of these things.
Of course, people are often completely unaware of one or another representational system, and it’s here that their problems usually lie. When someone says, “My job’s just getting on top of me” or “I have a problem I need to get some distance from,” it tells us how they are structuring their experience, not that the person knows what they are doing. The truth is, just because somebody doesn’t see images or is unaware of his internal dialogue doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them.
It’s easy enough to establish where people’s problems really lie by asking Meta Model questions (see Resource File 4 on page 311). For example, they might say, “I’m depressed.” The response to that is, “How do you know that?” I always go for the biggest chunk question—the one that will give me most information. “How do you know?” and “What does that mean?” are two examples of big-chunk questions.
Usually, they’ll say, “I don’t know, I just feel it,” and then you respond, “Well, how do you know you’re depressed? How do you know when to be depressed? How do you know you’re not really happy?”
You’re listening for sensory-based information—and you’re also paying attention to what isn’t there. The fact that someone might have every sensory system in place but is not using them all in consciousness will answer a lot of questions about where their problems come from. If someone doesn’t see the images he’s responding to, he doesn’t stand a chance of altering them. It’s that simple.
It’s easy, then, to see that problems exist within the “hidden” representational system. But we should also be aware that when we help people extend their awareness of their representational systems, we also open up resources that have previously been shut out of their conscious awareness. In doing this, it soon becomes obvious that the person who is shifting awareness from one representational system to another is also profoundly altering his consciousness.
“Normal” waking consciousness usually corresponds with the individual’s functioning within her preferred—and, by definition, most familiar—sensory system. Overlapping systems rapidly alter states. When a very visual person starts to pay attention to her feelings, she will go into trance. When a predominantly auditory person makes pictures, she will go into trance. A kinesthetic person who learns to make vivid images goes into trance.
Extending sensory systems is most easily achieved by the process of overlapping. As the word suggests, the subject moves from one system to another, enriching her experience and capabilities in the process.
Exercise: Overlapping to Increase Skills
- Think of a physical activity you enjoy—running, dancing, or riding a bike, for example. Create as vivid an internal experience as possible, using the representational system that comes easiest to you. For example, you might visualize the road slipping past under the wheels of your bicycle, seeing your legs pumping rhythmically, and your hands gripping the handlebars.
- Now, add an example of one of the two absent sensory modalities. For example, as you look down at the road beneath your wheels, imagine, then intensify, the sound of the tires on the ground.
- When you have successfully added a second modality, think of a third and include that—perhaps the feeling of your knees pumping as you drive the pedals down.
- Continue the process, systematically adding another layer of modalities, until you have at least three examples of each.
- Notice how this alters the reality of this experience.
- If possible, try out the activity for real, and notice how using overlapping improves your performance.
It is necessary to overlap systems to achieve learning and change. This, by definition, is an altered state. Overlapping, therefore, is not only a powerful hypnotic technique but an educational tool with infinite potential.
Exercise: Overlapping to Induce Trance
- Working with a partner, ask him to tell you about a place that’s special to him. Note his preferred sensory system.
- Invite him to close his eyes and join you in a visit to his special place, starting: “And, as you imagine being there now, you can…,” and then begin to develop the experience with a succession of statements pacing his preferred system, and then overlapping into another system. Pay close attention to his nonverbal response. If he appears comfortable, continue.
- Make several more pacing statements, then overlap to another system.
- Continue in this way until you have overlapped into three (or possibly five) sensory systems.
- Allow the subject a few moments to reflect, and then suggest he return to normal waking consciousness as soon as he is ready.
Avoid being too specific. Refer to “the color of the sky” rather than “the clear, blue sky,” “the temperature of the air on your skin,” rather than “the warm breeze.” This is a challenging, but extremely rewarding, route to deep trance. Being artfully vague was a significant characteristic of Erickson’s work and is codified in the Milton Model (see Resource File 5 on page 316).
Note: It is perfectly permissible to use phrases such as: “I don’t know if/whether…” to facilitate content-free instruction. Example: “Now, I don’t know whether there are any clouds or not, but you can pay special attention to the color of the sky…especially…the difference at the horizon between the sky and the water…And the colors and tones and light on the water itself…And exactly how the air feels on your face…Or, if there is anyone else around and you can hear voices or not…or, are enjoying being alone…”