WHEN I BEGAN WRITING this book, I described myself as an optimist. In spite of everything that’s happened in the world and some of the things I’ve seen, I’ll always remain an optimist, because I believe in our human capacity for learning and change.
There will probably always be people who say “it can’t be done,” and those, I believe, are the true pessimists. When I was a kid, they used to tell us it was impossible to go to the moon. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve been several times, even though we’re absolutely convinced there’s nothing of value there.
Ultimately, we will go to the stars. We’ll figure out how to get across space rather than through it—and this is going to come from our believing in what’s possible…and then doing it.
Psychiatrists told me many times that the schizophrenics in their care were “chronic” and without hope. I didn’t believe that, and so I went in with the idea that they were wrong, and that even the chronic and the hopeless could be set free.
And many of them were set free, because we have the ability to learn and grow. There are many things that were important in our childhoods and no longer apply. We can switch things around in our minds so they completely change their meaning. We have the ability to distort our generalizations, and that’s what makes us so smart and able to do such clever things.
My interest in hypnosis and altered states led me into many different and rewarding areas. Because I wanted to find out how far we could push things and whether there were limits to our ability to grow and develop, I created three important behavioral technologies.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, sometimes described as the study of subjective experience and what can be predicted from it, demystified hypnosis and brought its underlying structure into conscious awareness. Design Human Engineering (DHE) demonstrated that we could create entirely new states and experiences for ourselves, limited only by our imagination. Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR) was designed to use the hypnotic process to restructure people at the level of their cortical pathways.
It exasperates me that some people still cling to their limiting beliefs about all this stuff. I meet people, fundamentalist Christians mainly, who tell me that hypnosis is the devil’s work. I disagree. Stupidity is the devil’s work.
Sometimes just the sound of a word makes certain people feel bad—so, I say, call it something else. Call it hypnosis or call it altered states. But in practice, I really don’t care which word we use; I care about what we can accomplish.
Early on in my work, I realized that people get themselves into trouble because they engage in habitual behavior that keeps looping. I remember reading in a book, at least thirty years ago, that schizophrenics lived in a small but repetitious reality. When I got inside mental hospitals, I found the author was absolutely right. These people had a very limited behavior pattern that just looped and looped and looped. There was no variation…except sometimes at dinnertime.
It fascinated me to see how they could set aside their schizophrenia for just one little event. But it also meant that if they could do it then, they could do it at other times.
Many years ago, at Thanksgiving, I used to take my kids to feed homeless people at a church every year. The way we did it was different, because these were elderly people without homes or families. Many of them were seriously mentally disabled, because at that stage Reagan had closed many of the mental homes and put the majority of the residents out on the streets.
So, instead of having them standing in line and getting food slopped on to a tray, we set things up like a restaurant. We had tables and chairs and tablecloths and napkins. And the people were met at the door and taken to wash up before their meal, and when they got back, they found people waiting on them. We put people in parties of two or four, mixing them in with people living in the community.
What amazed me was that, even though some of these people were absolutely crazy, the way they were treated fired off some old anchor, and they all regressed to the point where they left their illness at the door.
Nobody acted crazy. Table manners and courtesy kicked in. It was so weird that I thought it was just going to be one group. But they kept coming, and no matter how terrible their state when they arrived, they switched immediately. They sat at the tables, chatting to each other politely, being courteous to each other and the people who were serving them. These were people who were stealing food from each other on the street and beating people up, but we didn’t have a single fight. We didn’t have a single loud word. They would get up and start to clear their dishes, and we’d say, “No, no. Leave that to the busboy.”
The truth is, if you put people in the right environment, their behavior will change. The worst environment of all is mental hospitals. There’s so much competition for who’s the craziest there that people have to accentuate their craziness to get noticed.
I remember a paranoid schizophrenic in a hospital once, hiding behind a couch. He spent all day popping up and peeking out. So I went and sat on the couch, and when his head came up, I yelled, “Boo!” and scared the hell out of him. I kept it up for an hour, moving to a slightly different position each time, and yelling “Boo!” each time.
After a while, he started laughing. Then I pulled him over the back of the couch and made him sit next to me. I said, “If you don’t sit next to me, they’re going to get you.”
I kept looking over the couch suspiciously, as though something bad was behind there. A little later, he was standing over at the coffee machine, drinking coffee and chitchatting with people.
The thing was, his psychiatrist had spent a whole year telling him that there was nothing to worry about…but, excuse me, if I keep looking at you and saying, “Now, there’s nothing to worry about,” you’d also probably freak.
The psychiatrist wasn’t listening to his own language and didn’t realize that he was actually inducing even more paranoia in this guy. My feeling was: give him something to be paranoid about, and then he’ll stop being paranoid about nothing.
Over and over again I’ve been in the position where I’ve been hired by a family to help someone recover from hospitalization. Now, I know it’s not the hospitals’ fault they got there in the first place, but it certainly is their fault that they stayed there. Tolerating people’s lunacy and having them interacting with other lunatics is bound to have an effect. They really need to be in a situation that demands and triggers their best behavior.
I realize that it’s not a popular view, but I think Reagan did a good thing in getting most of the people out of mental hospitals and forcing them to cope. True, some of them became homeless, but a lot of them got jobs and places to stay. Some of them functioned better than others, and the more we force people to be able to function, the better off they’re going to be. Maybe they’re still crazy—but then, I meet crazy people everywhere, every day.
So, with this book, I hope to pass on some of my optimism—and a whole lot of other things that I don’t want left behind.
I’ve developed many patterns that haven’t been written about. Some have been written about, but the books are no longer readily available.
I want people to have those older things, and some of the new things, because the kinds of things that I do with people have worked. My clients get better, and the clients of so many of the people I’ve trained are getting better.
The problem is, it’s like being a cookie cutter. If you make your cookie cutter out of my cookies, and then somebody else makes a cookie cutter out of those cookies, as it goes down the road you have copies of copies of copies, and it’s just no longer as clear as it should be.
I’ve always done things the simple way. I look at how other people do training, and see people come out of their seminars with Practitioner and Master Practitioner certificates, and they can’t even fix a phobia. Frogs into Princes told you exactly how to do it. People read the steps in the book, followed them, and sent me postcards that said things like, “I got rid of my phobia for $8.95, after spending $160,000 on therapy. Thank you very much.” And I’d write them back and say, “Doesn’t the word ‘refund’” pop into mind?” It certainly would with me.
My concern is for the people who want to fix themselves and the people who really want to fix others. I want them to have the basic tools clearly defined and not mitigated through all the nonsense that’s out there.
Some people say that the things I’ve developed are common knowledge, so therefore everybody’s entitled to them. My feeling is that everybody’s entitled who does them right and can make them work. The rest of them are not entitled to write books about my work and aren’t entitled to talk about it. This is all about intellectual property rights.
Now, I could be suing everybody under the sun if I wanted to, but I think the best solution is to put clear representations out there so people who are serious about wanting to do this—learning to change their life, learning to change other people’s lives—have the resources they need.
Over the years, I’ve written a number of books. They all have different material in them, but as they become less available, I don’t want the knowledge in them to be lost. I also want some of the things that aren’t yet in books to be there so they’re not lost.
I’m not going to be around forever. I’ll be doing training for quite some years, but not everybody can get to a training seminar. Some of the people who have no training are going to want to learn from books. I have people who study my work in countries I didn’t even know existed. There are also some people who took bad training who want to clean up their misunderstandings.
Once this book comes out, it will get translated into other languages, and once again it will be the cookie-cutter effect. It will get a little distorted. But the people who want to read what I actually said in my own native tongue should have everything available to them. Those who don’t will at least have translations of what I was saying—not what somebody else said I was saying.
I am hopeful that my message about learning and change will endure. I think we need anything that helps us overcome our present limitations and move into the future.
The signs are good. I work all the time with Muslims and Hindus and Christians and Jews and atheists and pagans. All of them are in the same room, getting along perfectly well with each other.
This is one of the things I enjoy about my seminars, especially in cities like London, where they are cosmopolitan and polytheistic; there are people of every race, color, and creed, and often from twenty to thirty different countries. I did a seminar in Florida where we had people from Kuwait and people from Jerusalem. We had Jews and Arabs doing exercises together.
This is possible because one of the things we all have in common is thinking. We all think and we all believe—and once you realize that you can alter your thinking and beliefs, it changes the way you behave.
Beliefs aren’t about truth. Beliefs are about believing. They’re guides for our behavior.
There are many people who have the same religious beliefs but behave totally differently. There are Muslims who are very peaceful people, and there are Muslims who are murderers. There are Christians who are murderers and Christians who are pacifists.
It has nothing to do with which God you believe in. It’s about how you build your beliefs to guide your behavior. The more we get people to understand this, the less they’re going to build beliefs that require them to kill other people—and I think that’s ultimately a very important thing.