OUR ABILITY TO OVERLAP from one sense to another can be a powerful, creative tool. It can also cause massive problems if we don’t learn how it works and how to manage it.
Overlapping occurs to different degrees, with different effects, with different people. Psychologists have identified what they regard as a rare ability that some people have to change one sense into another. This phenomenon, called synesthesia, describes how some people can hear colors, and others can taste sounds. Often those people who are regarded as particularly gifted—savants, psychologists call them—use synesthesia, together with more usual ways of processing information, to achieve extraordinary results. However, if the senses are hopelessly muddled without a strategy to sort them appropriately, immense suffering can result.
Even though some developmental experts believe all babies are synesthetic when they’re born and gradually learn to separate their sensory modalities into different channels, synesthesia is generally assumed to be rare and exotic among adults.
That isn’t to say we can’t—or don’t—use synesthesia. To some degree or other, most people are able, when pressed, to allocate a shape to a sound, or a color to a taste.
Earlier, when you were practicing the simple Previous Trance induction, you, or the person hypnotizing you, deepened the experience by mapping over from one sense to another, enriching the subjective experience. As you felt your eyelids begin to close, you could notice the shifting focus of your eyes; when you felt the rise and fall of your chest, you could also hear the gentle sound of the air moving in and out of your lungs. Being able to move from one sensory modality to another creates a fuller and richer experience, as well as providing you with more tools to generate new and wonderful skills that are limited only by your imagination.
Quite early on, I found that overlapping from one sense to another was not only possible but was also the source of creativity and, for some people, confusion and fear. Although the experience of having wonderful internal body sensations while listening to music is very different from feeling bad when we hear a nagging tone in our partner’s voice, the process is the same. This is a function of “fuzzy logic”—when the representational system used as an input channel is different from the system used by the output channel. Some people follow a hear-feel pattern, others a see-feel pattern.
Whenever you are communicating with other people, be aware that words are power, and the way in which you use words has to be as precise as the results that you desire. When I’m giving hypnotic suggestions, I build in fuzzy logic. For example, I may have somebody in a trance, knowing they have memories that terrify them. I tell them:
In a moment [which is a way of saying “not right now”] I’m going to tell you to go back and look at that memory, but I don’t want you to do it in the same way as before. From now on, the more you feel fear when you look at that memory, the more the image will shake and shrink, and the more you look at it, the more it will fade off into the distance. The more painful it is, the farther away it will be…
When I initially started doing hypnosis I was warned about abreactions. These are sudden eruptions of emotion that happen to some people as they go into a relaxed state. Instead of quieting down, they start freaking out. Sometimes abreaction is so intense that the person literally has convulsions.
I believe this abreaction happens because some people have never had the experience of truly relaxing, and the experience is so unfamiliar it scares them. The minute I see any sign of abreaction, rather than bringing the person out of trance as I was told you should do, I take an entirely different approach. I got my inspiration from an old John Wayne movie. In this movie he was badly hurt and in great pain, but he said: “Well, at least the pain lets me know I’m alive.” I remember saying to my first abreacting client: “Well, you know, feeling this fear lets you know you’re alive, and the more you become aware of the fear, the more it will disappear, and the more you’re sure you’re alive the better you’ll feel.” The abreaction just disappeared.
On another occasion, a trance subject went into a very unpleasant state. I said, “This is unpleasant, and the more unpleasant it is, the sillier it will seem.” This person suddenly burst out laughing, just like babies do when they start to cry, and you pretend to cry, and then you giggle and they giggle. This works because people can jump from one state to another, from one sensory system to another.
Linking the start of the problem—or even something before the start—to a new and more resourceful response is a useful approach. I like to get that shift as early as possible in the sequence. Some people make the mistake of calling this a pattern interrupt, but it’s really a function of punctuation ambiguity (see Resource File 5 on page 316).
I’m a mathematician and a computer scientist, and math to me is not a pure science; it’s a behavioral science. Math and computer programming are models of human behavior and the way humans think. Humans have “and” gates and “or” gates, which means when they get to a certain point, they could go either this way or that. This fact is particularly useful when you want to help people with problems such as asthma or anxiety attacks—with a lot of physiological activity.
One of the approaches I’ve used for many years is to put the person into a superdeep relaxed state, then give a posthypnotic suggestion that when he or she comes out of that trance, they’ll drop back the moment I tap the knee. Then I bring the subject out and trigger the panic attack, and at that precise moment I fire the relaxation anchor. I trigger an asthma attack, trigger relaxation, trigger high blood pressure, trigger relaxation, and I do it over and over and over again, until it starts to happen by itself.
The only way you can really panic is by being physically tense and holding your breath. You can’t panic if you’re really relaxed. You can’t have an epileptic seizure or a fit or an anger attack while you’re in a state of deep relaxation.
One of my clients—a really lovely person—was sent to me by the court because he attacked somebody in public in a blind rage. He said, “I don’t even remember it. The guy stepped on my foot, and I just started hitting him.”
He went to therapy, and the therapist told him he had a “hot button.” The therapist explained that once you had a hot button, there was nothing you could do about it. I love the optimism of that statement—the belief that if you’re a person who instantly goes into rage, you can’t be helped. Of course, my subject knew he was going to end up in prison.
When he told me all about it, I asked, “So if you have a button, it won’t go away?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I said, “You’re saying you have a hot button?”
“Yes,” he said.
I thought, “Cool!” At that moment, I knew exactly what I had to do.
I put him in a deep trance, made him feel totally relaxed and comfortable, and then gave him a posthypnotic suggestion. As I brought him out, I attached his hot button to my cool button. Once I’d attached the two buttons, I pushed the hot button and the cool button triggered. And then I stomped on his foot. He just smiled and laughed and relaxed.
It’s very important that you keep backing up to find out where the difficulty starts, and then put the resources in before the difficulty arises. Once you’re in a state of rage, it’s hard to get out of it; once you’re stressed, it’s difficult to relax.
Back in the days when we still used audiotapes, every company in the field of psychology products contacted me at one time or another to ask me to make a stress-reduction tape. I’d say, “Can’t we make one so that people don’t go into a stress state in the first place?” and the response every time was, “No, everybody has to go into stress.”
That turns out not to be true. If you find out the things that trigger stress, you can make them trigger relaxation or a state in which you don’t really care much about the pressure—a state in which you just get the job done without any unpleasant feelings.
Each of these problems is, in fact, an altered state. Anger is an altered state. So are rage and depression and anxiety and fear. Any state of consciousness can be triggered by pretty much anything else. Therefore, we can set things up so that one altered state immediately triggers another, more desirable, altered state. Posthypnotic suggestion is a powerful way of doing this, and anchoring (see Resource File 1 [page 305]) makes it work that much better.
EXERCISE: Hot Button/Cool Button
- Think of a response you have that you would like to change—for example, irritation, depression, anger, worry. Just for a few moments, fully immerse yourself in the last time you experienced this. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel exactly what you felt at the time.
- Now, step out of the experience and slowly run it backward as a movie, until you find the very first moment the response begins to develop. Shift the movie just one frame further back than that, and imagine this as a big red button—your “hot button”—on your left knee.
- Open your eyes, shift your position, then close your eyes again.
- Now, take three to five breaths, allowing the out-breath to be a little longer than the in-breath. Fire your “trance anchor,” or simply instruct your unconscious to float you down to a deeply relaxed and enjoyable state. Spin the feeling of comfort and relaxation so it begins to spread throughout your body.
- As this state begins to peak, imagine a large green “cool” button on your right knee. Keep pushing the button several times, going twice as deep each time.
- Open your eyes and fire your hot button. Immediately fire your cool button and hold both for a moment. Release your hot button and hold your cool button as you run through how your response would have been different if you had it instead of the hot button response. Make sure you shift representational systems as you do this: if the earliest reaction was an image, ensure that you end with a strong, desirable feeling; if the earliest response was a feeling, end with a picture of your discomfort flying away into the distance, and so on.
- Repeat steps four through six several times, until firing your hot button automatically triggers a cool response.
Synesthesia or fuzzy logic can also be used to increase creativity. The key to really unusual experiences lies not only in changing representational systems but also in manipulating submodalities.
By now, you have been developing the ability to create increasingly complex and detailed subjective experiences with relative ease—for example, imagine standing or sitting near a crackling fire on a cold winter’s day. As you do so, watch the dancing flames, notice the subtly changing colors, smell the pungent wood smoke, and feel the side of your body closest to the source of heat becoming warmer than the other side. And as you allow the warmth to spread, speed up the process more and more, faster and faster, and let the warmth spread throughout your body, realizing that you’re actually on the very edge of a new and wonderful experience, because you’re about to use just some of the skills you’ve been learning to create an entirely new technique, and as you consider that, I want you to begin to wonder, as you warm yourself comfortably, what would happen, and how strange it would be, if the submodalities of one system affected the submodalities of another whenever you wished it to be so. What would happen, and how could that be?
When Milton Erickson was experimenting with hypnotic phenomena, he did some curious things, such as inducing temporary color blindness. But when he induced hypnotic color blindness, something strange happened. Some of the people became tone deaf. That and other, similar, occurrences were spontaneous demonstrations of the overlapping from one sensory system to another.
Now, what you’re going to do—either with a partner, or maybe even as you’re reading these words—is to consider, for example, right now, if you decided to drift into a trance, and that was to allow you to go deep enough, that your unconscious mind would begin to make all the necessary changes such that pain control, for you, can be accomplished by saying that everything that you felt in one arm took every single degree of pressure and turned it into a volume, with a particular location, so that where you were touched determined what sound you heard, so if somebody rubbed your arm, you wouldn’t feel a thing, but you’d hear the sound of something wonderful. It’s a lot more of a fun way to deal with pain control…
See, very often it’s done differently, and your unconscious mind understands this perfectly. So, now, or in a few moments, on your other arm, you can begin to feel an ice cube, and that ice cube could become colder and colder and spread all the way down to the point where if you put ice on something long enough, if you were to touch it with a pinprick, you don’t feel anything at all.
Now, let that ice cube go away, and let your attention go back to your other arm, and let your unconscious imagine what it would be like if, even more thoroughly, you took any sensory system and chose to have parts of that system go into another. And, for the purposes here, I want your unconscious mind to take a moment to review the list of submodalities in this book (see Resource File 3 on page 310), and I want you to just randomly, for no particular reason, realize there’s no need to hesitate and there is no need to wait. Just choose a few submodalities and move them from one system to the other. Imagine the ways in which you can do this, so that, like the last time I did this, I ended up playing songs on someone’s arm by making the pitch higher up the arm, and lower down the arm, the more I pressed, the louder the volume became, and while I played a song, somebody operated on that arm and the subject didn’t feel anything in that arm at all. However, they did notice that the song they were listening to had some strange static in the background.
Now, another thing you might do would be to take auditory external, and turn its pitch into a feeling; its volume can become the pressure of that feeling, and so on.
As soon as it’s practical, I want you to go into a profoundly altered state with a partner and begin to experiment with any kinesthetic sensations you have by turning them into sounds or pictures.
Be creative, and think of applications. For example, if certain people crave certain illicit substances, you might change their cravings into a picture, and set it up so that the more intense the feeling becomes the farther that picture goes away.
Exercise: Advanced Synesthesia Change Pattern
This exercise is designed to increase your flexibility and to provide a template for creating techniques that are new and appropriate to whatever situation you are working with.
- Decide on a desired outcome. Review in all sensory modalities how you or your subject will behave, feel, look, and so on, when fully experiencing that outcome.
- Identify whatever stands in the way of the outcome being achieved. As an example, say being confident in meeting people and enjoying new situations is your outcome; constructed images of “making a fool of myself” accompanied by an internal voice saying, “Don’t even try,” accompanied by a feeling of “dread,” stand in the way of accomplishing this outcome.
- Refer to a comprehensive list of submodalities (see Resource File 3 on page 310) and choose three at random. These might be color/black-and-white, sound/silence (both digital), and location of a kinesthetic feeling.
- Experiment with turning the feeling of dread into a sound (say, the screeching of a buzz saw—switching it off and on and off again, noting the response), or turning the sound of critical self-talk into a cascade of colors. Adjust the colors so they are bright and attractive. Keep experimenting with each submodality until you find one or more synesthetic shifts that change the entire experience.
- Attach a trigger to the shift so you or your partner can enter the state at will.
Synesthesia patterns open up many choices. If you incorporate finger signals, you greatly increase your flexibility. As your subject drifts deeper into trance, and deeper still, set up finger signals, and then ask his unconscious to agree to a period that you define, maybe five or ten minutes, in which he makes all the necessary adjustments, at an unconscious level, to all the submodalities you choose.