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So instead of trying to get people to adjust, we would simply go back and create a whole new childhood and have them grow up being a skinny person. We learned this from Milton Erickson. Erickson had a client whose mother had died when she was twelve years old, and who had been raised by a series of governesses. She wanted to get married and have children, but she knew herself well enough to know that she did not have the requisite background to respond to children in the ways that she wanted to be able to respond to them. Erickson hypnotized her and ageregressed her into her past and appeared periodically as the February Man. The February Man appeared repeatedly throughout her personal history, and presented her with all the experiences that she needed. We simply extended this further. We decided that there was no need to just appear as the February Man, why not March, April and May We started creating entire personal histories for people, in which they would have experiences which would serve as the resources for the kinds of behaviors that they wanted to have. And then we extended it from weight problems to all kinds of other behaviors. We did it once with a woman who had grown up being asthmatic. At this time, she had three or four children who wanted to have pets. She had gone to a very fine allergist who insisted that she wasnt allergic to animals as far as he could tell. If he tested her without telling her what the skin patches were, she didnt come out being allergic to animals. However, if you put an animal in her presence, or told her that one had been in the room recently, she had a very strong allergic reaction. So we simply gave her a childhood of growing up without being asthmatic. And an amazing thing happened not only did she lose her allergic response to animals, but also to the things she had been found to be allergic to by the skinpatch testing. Woman How long does that take, ordinarily, and do you use hypnosis for that Richard Everything is hypnosis. John Theres a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didnt use such terms, since they dont refer to anything. We believe that all communication is hypnosis. Thats the function of every conversation. Lets say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, theyre trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called words. Do we have any official hypnotists here How many of the rest of you know that you are unofficial hypnotists Weve got one. And the rest of you dont know it yet. I think that it is important to study official hypnosis if you are going to be a professional communicator. It has some of the most interesting phenomena about people available in it. One of the most fascinating things you will discover once you are fully competent in using the ritualistic notions of traditional hypnosis, is that youll never have to do it again. A training program in hypnosis is not for your clients. Its for you, because you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in peoples everyday waking activity. You will also discover that most of the techniques in different types of psychotherapy are nothing more than hypnotic phenomena. When you look at an empty chair and start talking to your mother, thats a deep trance phenomenon called positive auditory and visual hallucination. Its one of the deep trance phenomena that defines somnambulism. Amnesia is another pattern you see everywhere.... What were we talking about I remember one time about two months after I entered the field and started studying it, I was sitting in a room full of adults in suits and ties. And a man there was having them talk to empty chairs. One of them said, I feel foolish, and I burst into laughter. They all looked at me as if I was crazy. They were talking to people who werent there, and telling me that hypnosis is bad One of the things that will help people to learn about being good therapists is to be able to look at what they do and listen to it and realize how absurd most of what is going on in therapy is. That doesnt mean it doesnt work, but it still is definitely the major theater of the absurd at this time. And when I say absurd, I want you to separate the notion of absurdity from the notion of usefulness, because they are two entirely different issues. Given the particular culturaleconomic situation in the United States, therapy happens to be an activity which I think is quite useful. To answer the other half of your question, we dont ordinarily create new personal histories for people anymore. We have spent three hours doing it. And we have done it fifteen minutes a week for six weeks, and we trained somebody to do time distortion once, and did it in about four minutes. We programmed another person to do it each night as they dreamed. We literally installed, in a somnambulistic trance, a dream generator, that would generate the requisite personal history, and have her recall this in the waking state the next day, each day. As far as I know, she still has the ability to create daily a personal history for anything she wants. When we used to do change work with individuals, a session for us could last anywhere from thirty seconds to seven or eight hours. We have a different situation than you do. We are modelers. Our job is to test all the patterns we have, so that when we do a workshop, we can offer you patterns that we have already verified are effective with all the presenting problems that we guess you are going to have to cope with.