Magic in practice 2nd ed, p.36
Magic in Practice (2nd ed), page 36
The astute reader (we hope) will detect several associations with the glyph and the psychophysical complexity out of which it emerges, as well as text (the sequential details of the patient’s and the practitioner’s understanding of events) and context, the field in which the patient (and the practitioner) function.
Philosophizing aside, here is a simple protocol to help you create meta techniques of your own:
Elicit the glyph by asking questions such as, ‘What’s it like?’, ‘What happens in your body when…?’, ‘How do you know to…?’ etc. Do not proceed until you have a clear and fully sensory-based description of the phenomenon. Ensure the glyph has distinct boundary conditions: size, location, defined edge, and so on.
Ask the patient to ascertain what changes might alter her experience. Encourage her to experiment.
If the patient is stuck, make some tentative suggestions. Would she like to knock, kick, throw, or blow it out of the confines of her body? What would happen if she shot it out into the sun and blew it up? What (imaginary) tools might she need to help her move it out of her space?
Or, and we’d argue that this might be the preferable approach…
What needed to happen for the glyph to continue to exist within her body differently?
EXERCISES
1. Take a few moments to relax, preferably with your eyes closed.
2. Scan your body, from the inside of the top of your head, right down to the tips of your fingers and toes. Notice any anomalies—discomfort, tightness, sensations that differ in some way from the surrounding internal landscape.
3. Ask yourself, ‘What is this like?’ and pay special attention to the physical attributes of the experience: size, color, location, movement, etc.
4. Now, either:
a. observe the glyph, with detached interest. Allow it to transform in its own way,
or,
b. Experiment by changing the characteristics—pushing it out of your body, blunting sharp edges, deepening or softening colors or textures, etc.
5. Notice how this transforms the experience, over both the short and long term.
6. Create an explicit technique or meditation out of your experience, and test it on an ongoing basis.
7. Do the same with at least six of your patients or clients and track their experiences.
Notes
270. Kermen R, Hickner J, Brody H, Hasham (2010) Family Physicians Believe the Placebo Effect Is Therapeutic But Often Use Real Drugs as Placebos, Family Medicine 42(9): 636-642.
271. Howick J, Bishop FL, Heneghan C, Wolstenholme J, Stevens S, et al (2013) Placebo Use in the United Kingdom: Results from a National Survey of Primary Care Practitioners. PLoS One 8(3): e58247.
272. Bohm, David (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.
21
Re-patterning and Future-Pacing: making and maintaining change
It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.—H.G. Wells
More than 30 years ago, the creators and developers of NLP could only speculate how many of the techniques they were using empirically could actually work. How was it possible that some people could free themselves from a long-standing phobia, allergy or trauma—sometimes in a matter of a few minutes?
Up until then, psychological change, we were led to believe, was possible, but only with considerable time and effort. Even today, the ‘brief’ cognitive therapies require upwards of eight sessions, and success often needs to be boosted with psychotropic drugs. However, research from the frontiers of brain science reveals that the belief that neuronal function can only be affected pharmacologically and/or with considerable psychological effort is questionable.
The key is the capability of the brain called neuroplasticity.
A few decades back, it was widely believed that the brain was a closed, machine-like system, functioning only within the boundaries of its genetic heritage. The neuronal patterns we started out with were the neuronal patterns we died with—give or take the ones we lost along the way to the ravages of time.
But the brain, as we are looking into it in the 21st century, is a very different affair. We know now that it co-creates our ‘reality’ according to past experiences and present events.
We can recognize how its moods and memories resonate in every cell of our bodies. We are beginning to realize that it mediates the way our bodies store and communicate the emotional assaults we experience.273 Added to that is an extraordinary ability to invent internal realities that can have as big an impact on our health and wellbeing as an external trauma or a germ or a gene. We have even come to suspect, through the new science of epigenetics, that it helps us hold our DNA in trust for later generations—for, if we drink, or smoke, or stress too much274 (or, conversely, alter the length of our telomeres by meditating regularly275), we may pass the consequences on to our descendants for centuries to come.
Above all—and, this is probably the brain’s most extraordinary quality—it is the only organism that we know of anywhere in the universe that has the capacity to evolve itself. By an experience, an act of imagination or learning, people can create a psychophysical reality that is more (or less) capable, resourceful, and healthier than the one they had a day, or a month or a year before.276
Repatterning, in the Medical NLP model, may be seen as a protocol that is aimed first at the neurological/experiential stratum, and then at the levels of behavior and its evaluation. This takes place in two main stages: the first, deconstructing and replacing the dysfunctional pattern with a more useful and appropriate response or behavior; and the second, applying conditioning techniques (future-pacing) to accustom the patient, both cognitively and neurologically, to the changes it is hoped she will enjoy in her post-treatment life.
In order to understand better how the techniques we present below are structured, it should be recalled that most Medical NLP techniques rely on:
dissociation;
repatterning;
re-association; and
collapsing anchors.
Future-pacing and why it works
For many years, ‘visualization’ and other imaginal techniques were regarded as likely to have minimal effect on real-world functioning. Its popularity among followers of ‘New Age’ complementary therapies increased suspicion among many mainstream scientists, even though there were indications that it could be an effective supplementary approach to enhancing sports performance.277
This is changing and for good reason. It works.
Think of the number three for a moment. Imagine it written up on a surface inside your head. As you do that, your visual cortex lights up exactly as if you were seeing the same digit. Now, imagine picking up a heavy barbell and begin to perform a series of curls—the same exercise you might do with free weights at a gym. Hear your personal trainer urging you on. Imagine (without actually moving your body), that your bicep is beginning to tire; lactic acid is burning like hot wires. The weight seems to be getting heavier…
Experiments show that if you did this regularly enough with full absorption, your muscles would actually get stronger—only 8% less than if you had actually done the exercise.278
For some years now, scientists, including V.S. Ramachandran, have used a device called a ‘mirror box’ to treat problems such as phantom limb pain, reflex sympathetic dystrophy pain (chronic pain persisting long after an injury has healed), and ‘learned’ pain. The mirror box works by reflecting an image of a healthy limb onto its wasted or absent counterpart.
The illusion ‘rewires’ the patient’s neurology to facilitate improvement or recovery from his physical condition.
A problem encountered with mirror box therapy is that the longer the pain has persisted, the less effective treatment is likely to be. However, Australian scientist G.L. Moseley demonstrated that patients who were taught to simply imagine moving their injured limb reduced or completely eliminated their pain.279
Future-pacing—a form of conditioning—then, incorporates the imaginal capabilities of the mind, together with practical application of the new behavior pattern, wherever possible. It is important, when designing an intervention, that the patient’s response to both thinking about the problem, as well as his actual real-world experience, is tested (using the SMC Scale, if appropriate).
After intervention and future-pacing, patients should be encouraged to resume their normal (or their new) activities as soon as possible and report back for readjustment or reinforcement, if required. (A useful injunction is, ‘I’d like you to go back and notice specifically what’s different and better so we can talk about that next time.’)
Despite the simplified NLP model of internal processing outlined earlier, we do not mean to suggest that each sense is entirely localized in its own area of the brain.
The work of Harvard Medical School’s Alvaro Pascual-Leone has confirmed considerable cortical overlap between senses and has demonstrated that various ‘operators’ organize sensory data from different sources in order to create experience. These operators are in constant competition to process signals effectively, depending on both the significance and the context of the signal.280
Designing a future-pace
Rule 1: Ensure that it is fully represented in all sensory modalities, in as much detail as possible.
Rule 2: It should meet all the requirements of well-formedness. It must also be attractive and relevant to the patient and his model—not that of the practitioner.
Rule 3: A future-pace for an ongoing response or behavior (for example, exercising three times a week, or following a specific eating plan) should be dissociated. This is thought to prompt the brain to continually move to ‘close the gap’, facilitating maintenance.
Rule 4: A new state (for example, being a non-smoker) should be represented as associated, in order to ‘lock in’ a discrete condition with clear boundary conditions.
Rule 5: The new state, response, or behavior should be placed on the patient’s time line. If necessary, create a means of metaphorically locking it in place.
Rule 6: After the patient has been future-paced, she should be fully reassociated, together with her new pattern(s), using suggestions to ‘float back above your future road or pathway, bringing into the present all the experiences, learnings, and resources from your new future, and drop down into your own body so that you can fully own and apply everything you’ve learned now as you get ready to move on from here into the future…’ etc (note the hypnotic language).
Before applying any of the patterns below, ensure that:
the patient’s time line has been adjusted, with past events (including the problem) ‘behind’ her, but not hidden; and
the agreed outcome/direction is well formed in all sensory modalities and placed on her future time line, a little in front of her.
Note: All interventions are designed to be completed within a single session. Do not attempt to carry a pattern over from one consultation to the next. Interventions should be executed rapidly to ensure pattern recognition by the brain. Repeat until automated.
Remember to apply the Subjective Measure of Comfort Scale before and after each intervention.
The patterns
Re-storying the narrative
Elsewhere in this book (see pages 162 and 163), we report how the act of story-telling helps put the patient’s experience into a form that makes sense to her. Writing down or delivering a narrative version of illness—the patient’s ‘pathography’—is, in itself, a therapeutic act. However, sometimes the practitioner can assist the patient by helping her to re-create her narrative. In this way, and working together, patient and practitioner can arrive at a more resourceful, and, often healthier, conclusion.
This process differs from the well-known Ericksonian technique of isomorphic metaphor. The latter is an entirely practitioner-centered approach, in which a story is created that parallels the problem condition, but with a resolution that suggests a new perspective and behavior to the patient.
Re-storying is, quite literally, a re-writing of history…at least, the history as it is remembered and re-presented by the patient. In order to do this, the patient and practitioner in partnership need to identify the ‘theme’ of the patient’s pathography, and then locate the point in the narrative where the story becomes problematical. The challenge then is to decide on a replacement theme, or a more useful resolution. This is largely an exercise in re-framing, so the practitioner needs to consider whether the content or the context of the patient’s experience needs to be changed (see Framing and Reframing, in Chapter 13, pages 177 to 180).
Very often, exploring the possible ‘positive intention’ of the symptom or condition will suggest a way forward.
Case history: A young woman, extremely ambitious and hard-working, had become hypothyroidal, and sought help to lose weight and regain her energy.
Her story was one of fear—mainly that she would lose clients and her standard of living if she didn’t work the long and tiring hours she believed were necessary. She had stopped all recreational activities, and it had been some years since she had taken a holiday. However, since she had already proved resistant to ‘taking it easy’ when it had been suggested to her by her primary care physician, the practitioner suggested re-storying her narrative.
He reviewed the patient’s written pathography, noting, as he did so, that negative-affect words far outweighed their positive counterparts, suggesting the patient had been unable even to imagine a way out of her impasse.
The practitioner explained the Medical NLP model of the ‘well-intentioned disease’, then asked her, ‘What do you regard as your biggest problem, aside from the thyroid trouble itself?’
Instantly, she said, ‘I know I work too hard—but I have to.’
‘And, what does hypothyroidism do for you?’
‘It slows me down.’
The practitioner said nothing, and simply waited for the patient’s response. It was a few seconds coming, then surprise flooded her face. When other people told her to slow down, she said, she felt immediately resistant. They just didn’t understand. ‘But, when my body told me in such an eloquent way, I suddenly realized I had to listen,’ she said.
The remainder of the re-storying involved exploring meditation, dietary options, regular check-ups, and a simple program of activity designed to create, rather than deplete, energy.
Simple scramble pattern
The scramble pattern may be used alone to change simple behaviors and responses.
It may also be used adjunctively, with other patterns, to disrupt more complex constellations of problems.
The principle is simply to interrupt a sequence by repeatedly ‘scrambling’ its component parts. A scrambled pattern should always be replaced with an alternative response to reduce the possibility of relapse.
Identify and number four or five distinct steps in the patient’s process. For example: (1) ‘I notice people watching me’; (2) ‘I begin to breathe erratically’; (3) ‘I feel my cheeks becoming warm’; (4) ‘I think, “I know they’ve noticed what’s happening”’; (5) ‘I start to blush.’
Starting with the original sequence, coach the patient into experiencing each step, using its number as a cue.
Begin to call out the numbers in different orders, increasing the speed as you go.
After six to eight cycles, stop and test.
If the unwanted response is not extinguished, repeat, ensuring that the patient is fully associated into each step as you call out its number.
Full sensory scramble
Have the patient associate into and hold the negative kinesthetic as strongly as possible.
Using a pen or your finger, have the patient follow with her eyes (without moving her head) through all eye-accessing positions in rapid succession. Ensure she tries to maintain the kinesthetic at its highest level throughout.
Increase the speed, and randomize the movements.
Continue for 60–90 seconds, change state, and then test.
Repeat, if necessary, until the negative kinesthetic has been substantially reduced.
Future-pace.
Visual-kinesthetic dissociation (fast phobia cure)
Visual-kinesthetic dissociation is the earliest, and one of the most commonly applied, techniques developed by the founders of NLP. It can be used to treat simple phobias, including ‘social phobia’, fear of public speaking, etc. It can also be incorporated in more complex protocols, as shown below. This version incorporates a final step (essentially a future-pace).
Note: Where the patient may have an extreme response to accessing thoughts about the trigger event or object, it is important to ensure she is ‘double-dissociated’ (that is, she is watching herself watching her dissociated self carrying out the procedure, rather than watching the procedure herself).
Instruct her to ‘step out of, or float up from, your body, so you are watching yourself from a safe distance, watching the events. You don’t have to watch the events yourself.’ Ensure the patient is fully relaxed, and anchor the state in case you need to bring her back into a calm and more resourceful state.
Have the patient imagine sitting in a movie theater, with a small, white screen placed in front of her and a little above eye level. On the screen is a small, still, monochrome picture of a moment or two before the sensitizing event that led to her phobic response (Safe Place 1).
Instruct her to imagine creating a movie containing ‘all the experiences, responses and feelings you have had about this problem’. Reassure her that the movie, when it is run, will be small, distant and in black-and-white, and when it is complete, the screen will ‘white out’ (Safe Place 2).
