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Sometimes it helps to be able to anchor tonally. Virginia Satir anchors tonally. She has a certain tone of voice she uses whenever she does change work. She talks in a regular tonality for six hours, and then suddenly she changes her tonality. When she uses that tonality, boom Thats it. The people change. Erickson has a special tonality he uses when he wants people to go into trance. A lot of people in trance have their eyes closed. What does Erickson do for anchoring at that point, since hes in a wheelchair and he cant reach around and do kinesthetics Close your eyes for a moment. Im going to talk, and as I talk, Im going to move my head back and forth. I want you to notice whether you can detect the spatial dislocation of my voice, even from this distance. If you can, fine. If you cant, you detected it unconsciously. Ill guarantee you, because thats one of the major anchoring systems that Erickson uses with people who have their eyes closed in trance. All of those will work. The choice you make about what system you anchor in will determine the kind of response you get. If you want to involve the persons consciousness, anchor in all systems. If you want to be covert and go around a resistant conscious mind, anchor in any system that is not represented in consciousness. If the persons predicates and their eye movement patterns give you the information that they are primarily kinesthetic, dont anchor in that system unless you want their conscious resources involved. If you anchor that same person tonally, they will have no conscious representation of it. Anchoring Exercise We are going to ask you to begin with kinesthetic anchors. They seem to be the easiest to learn and the most useful. Youll generalize naturally from those. You can anchor in any system. Pair up again, A and B. You are both going to operate in both positions. A, your job is to do the following Face B, and place your right hand lightly on Bs left knee. Then ask an accessing question Do you remember the last time that you had a really good sexual experience Wait for an appropriate response. Youve got to be able to detect a response before you can anchor it. As you begin to see changes, you begin to apply pressure with your hand. You observe the changes in the parameters of muscle tone, skin color, breathing, lip size, etc. As you detect them, let those actually drive the pressure in your hand. When the changes level out, then you just lift your hand off. Then you will have a perfectly timed anchor. Dont anchor initially until you can see a difference in your partners response. Your ability to see a difference depends on how forceful you are in amplifying what you are getting. If you do things like this low, slow voice Have you ever been really excited or high, quick voice Have you ever been really sad that wont work as well as if you congruently say excitedly, Look, have you ever been really excited The more expressively you access, the more expressively they will respond. Then you place your left hand on their right knee, and ask them, What in your experience is the opposite of that They will access whatever is the opposite, for them. As the changes occur, again you increase the pressure as you see the changes until they plateau, and then lift your hand off. Then you have two anchors. What we want you to do is to use one and notice the changes. Pause, and then use the other one, and notice the changes. It works even better if you distract your partners consciousness with something neutral, like, Do you remember seeing the lights as we came into the building as you use that anchor. See if you can regularly get the same response when you use your anchors. When you are satisfied that you have two anchors that work, and you can see the difference between them, then we want you to hold both at the same time, for about 30 to 60 seconds, and watch an amazing event, called integration. Watch your partners face. You will first see half of the face with one of those responses and the other half with the other, and then they will integrate. Anchors are not buttons you have to hold them until you see the full response. Once the integration begins, you dont have to hold any more. The purpose of this exercise is not to do therapy with your partner. The purpose is simply for you to verify with your own sensory apparatus that anchors exist, and that you are capable of anchoring. All you are doing is learning to anchor. This afternoon well teach you how to use it to do therapy. Go ahead. Important Questions during the Exercise There was one question that came up repeatedly during the exercise. Bill said, Well, I was imagining a time with my wife that was extremely sensually pleasurable there on the one knee. And on the other knee, I was remembering a time when she didnt seem to be willing to be with me, or the demands of keeping the house, etc. didnt allow us time to sit down together, and I got angry. Bills partner was able to get the two distinctly, and to go back and reaccess them the anchoring worked fine. He collapsed the two anchors and the integration occurred. And their question is, What will happen now when he sees his wife The answer to this is really important. What will happen now is that when he sees his wife, he will have the choice of those purely sensual, pleasant feelings in the past, or the feelings of anger from the past, or—and this is very important—any combination of the two. Those were two antagonistic, dissociated feeling states in the past. When you anchor each one, you also anchor the antagonistic physiology, muscle patterns, breathing, etc. Then when you stimulate both at the same time, the physiological patterns which are antagonistic literally interrupt each other—you could see that in the persons face, in their breathing, and so on. In the process they become integrated so that the person can come up with any combination of those feelings which were previously dissociated, and respond appropriately in context. The presupposition behind our behavior in this area is that given a set of choices, a person will always make the best choice that they have available in the context. Integration of Opposite States I think its entirely appropriate for anyone to have the ability both to be fully sensual with another person as well as to be angry, and all the mixes in between. By integrating in this way, using anchoring as an integrative device to break down the dissociations, we make sure that you have a full range of response in that area. One of the Lies We Told You One of the lies we told you was that the anchoring exercise you did is not therapy. You are just going to anchor this here and that there and then you are going to collapse the two and integrate them. I want you to think about that. What you did with the knee anchors and the integration is formally identical to gestalt twochair work. Gestalt people use chairs as anchors and when you switch from one chair to the other, your feelings actually change. If you were on the outside as the therapist, you would actually see facial, postural and color changes as the person moved from one chair to the other. Those chairs are anchors. The problem is that its hard to get integration. How do you push the chairs together So you have to make people go back and forth really fast. Now wed like you all to pair up again and do the changing personal history pattern that we did this morning with Linda. Ill review it briefly First, what response does your partner have now that she wants to change Anchor that to stabilize the situation, and to give you access to it. Now, how would you like to behave, or what resource would you need, to behave in a way thats more congruent with your present resources When you originally went through this experience, you didnt have all the resources you now have. Which resource would you take back to change your personal history When have you had an experience of that resource Anchor the response. Then put the two together. Hold both anchors as your partner goes back and relives the past with the new resource, changing and creating new old history, until she is satisfied. Here your sensory experience is important. Check for congruency. Did you like the way it turned out If not, do it again. What other resource do you need Sometimes you have to give people a couple of resources. Or sometimes people think that all they needed is a certain resource and they take it and go back and it turns out to be a dud. The conscious mind has a limited understanding of whats needed back there. The only way youre going to find out is by having them go back to reexperience parts of their personal history. After they are satisfied that they have a new resource that worked back there, you need to bridge, or futurepace. What experiences in your present life are sufficiently similar to that old one to trigger the unwanted response What is the first thing you see, hear, or feel that lets you identify this kind of situation Then anchor the new resource to those contextual cues.