the other wasn’t? It seemed to me that these psychologists were really measuring not hypnotizability, but their own incompetence.
Some philosophers and scientists have suggested that the world we perceive ourselves in is only a representation of reality, whatever that is. Hans Vaihinger, Alfred Korzybski, and Gregory Bate-son all made the same observation. They all discussed variations on the theme of “our experience of reality is not the same as reality itself.” Some very old cultures came to the same conclusion. They realized thousands of years ago that what was outside the mind was not the same as what was inside the mind. Part of their way of dealing with it was to meditate for years to become enlightened and dissolve the “illusion.”
But the problem remained for the rest of us. Even if we accepted that our experience was constructed in our minds, what then? What could we do with that knowledge? What difference would it make?
In volume one of The Structure of Magic, I wrote: “We as human beings do not act directly on the world. Each of us creates a representation of the world in which we live—that is we create a map or model which we use to generate our behavior. Our representation of the world determines to a large degree what our experience of the world will be, how we will perceive the world, what choices we will see available to us as we live in the world.”
My point was that those people in that workshop who could create positive or negative hallucinations, or become selectively amnesiac, or anesthetize their arms, were representing their world differently from those who could not do those things. They changed their way of looking at things; they changed their beliefs. The intriguing thing is that, in some cases, not only did their subjective experience change with the suggestion, but their physiology did, too.
Hypnosis, therefore, was central to the development of NLP because it allowed us to explore altered states. We could push boundaries with it, because it was a tool that allowed us to begin to learn what was possible. Once we saw some of the things that were possible, we could begin to look at how they happened and what we needed to do to replicate the outcomes. In this sense, NLP may be thought of as the underlying “structure” of hypnosis.
It wasn’t possible to turn to psychology for help, because not only were most of the “experts” fighting with each other to decide whose theory was correct, they were also focused only on why people became ill or stuck, or how they came to fail.
I once spent a whole winter house-sitting for a psychiatrist friend, and out of sheer boredom I read every book he had. It was a fascinating experience. The hundreds of texts by all these important doctors and professors could tell you everything you needed to know about how people got sick or stuck—but not one of them had even the glimmer of an idea of how to help them get better. It didn’t even seem to occur to them that it might be a useful direction to follow.
That was a question I found myself asking again and again. How do people get better? Some of them do get better, sometimes with the help of doctors or psychologists. Others just get better all by themselves.
But my interest went beyond that. I wanted to know how people achieved their goals and what made some of them exceptional in their field. I wanted to know how some people achieved excellence.
A few therapists at the time were getting far better results than those of their colleagues. They lived and practiced in different parts of the country; their methods were different; and they didn’t know anything about each other or the way they worked. But those who knew them and saw their work described their results as magical—and they were, compared with the results of most of their peers.
Their followers praised their talent or genius or intuition, as if that explained their abilities, but nobody at the time really understood how they came to be this way, least of all the therapists themselves.
As a scientist and a mathematician, I knew there had to be a structure, and I wanted to know what that structure was. I knew that, if it could be identified, it should be possible to replicate it and even teach it to other people. Everybody could become magicians in their own right.
I spent some time with John Grinder studying these therapeutic wizards very closely. Initially, we focused on family therapist Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, the grandfather of modern hypnotherapy. We watched them at work, and instead of getting caught up in the content of what they were doing, we looked at the syntax of what they were saying and doing. As soon as we looked at it that way, the patterns popped out everywhere—in the questions they asked, the words they used, the gestures they made, in the tonality and rate with which they spoke. We started to notice that, even though they were all very different personalities, they shared many characteristics.
The interesting thing was that they all acted intuitively. They all had their own maps or models of therapy; there were similarities and there were differences. Often they had no idea at all why something they had done had been successful, but all shared a belief that the client’s model of the world could be changed. Regardless of what they did or thought they were doing, each believed in helping to expand and enrich the clients’ subjective experience.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) takes the position that no two people share precisely the same experiences. The map or model they create to make sense of and navigate around the world is partially based on these experiences and the distinctive ways in which each processes them. Therefore, each person’s model varies to some degree from the model created by every other person. We live in different realities, some richer, and some very much poorer, than others.
This fact alone doesn’t always cause problems. We have something called consensual, or shared, reality, which means we all, more or less, agree to operate according to the same hallucinations—and this is a useful thing. We need to have certain rules by which we all function. We need to agree on what is up and what is down. We need to know the difference between left and right—something I discovered for myself the first time I visited the United Kingdom and found out that they drive on the other side of the road from Americans. Stepping off the sidewalk and looking only one way is not a good idea if you’re still operating according to a map that applies to somewhere else.
Now, if a map or a model adequately represents the reality it is describing, the person who has created it is likely to be functioning adequately in her or his world. But experience shows us that most people who come to us in pain feel blocked and limited and without any sense of options or choices. In other words, it’s not the world they live in that’s limited; it’s the poverty of their maps that keeps them suffering and in pain.
It follows, then, that it’s often much more productive—and a lot easier—to change the map someone has been using rather than the territory in which the person is functioning. The therapists we modeled were showing us this approach in their behavior.
Despite the fact that some people, usually psychotherapists, believe change is only possible with a lot of time and effort—and then only if the client isn’t resistant—hypnosis, the effective therapists, and those people who “just changed” showed us that change could be a lot quicker and easier. The tools to do this were not available at the time, so I had to create them. Through NLP, I have been able to develop learnable principles, processes, and techniques that make change systematic and easy.
As I pointed out in Volume I of The Structure of Magic, perception and experience are active, rather than passive, processes. We all create our subjective experience out of the “stuff” of the external world. One of the reasons that we don’t all end up with the same model is that our experiencing is governed by certain restrictions or constraints: the constraints of our individual nervous systems (neurological constraints), the societies in which we function (social constraints), and our unique personal histories (personal constraints).
The
