La repetición en los ciclos de la naturaleza

RED LIGHT DISTRICT

If you were driving down a busy uptown street, and suddenly a green light turned red, would you…stop now! It’s probably safe for me to assume that you would, under most circumstances. If we were to examine this simple act of stopping, we could then move forward into a new area together. We might discover some complex and interesting “things.” We might agree that the red light has become a simple symbol that elicits a complex sequence of behavior which we would call “stopping.” Within the behavior called “stopping” are included perceptual problem-solving skills, psycho-motor, neuro-motor activity—eye, hand, foot, etc.—coordination, driving skills and much more, all chained together as a complex sequence called “stopping for a red light.”

The red light, through learning processes, has become what behaviorists term an “external stimulus.” Other theorists would call the red light an

“anchor” or “trigger” (Bandler and Grinder). They would claim, and I would agree, that the red light now anchors: that is, it has associated with it a whole series of behaviors through a more or less coded, sequential and repetitive manner. We might even say that the anchor (red light) is so strong that even if you are not the driver, certain aspects of the response are elicited anyway. (How many times have you jammed on the non-existent brake when you were the passenger and not the driver?)

ANCHORS: A SIMPLISTIC DEFINITION

Anchors can be most easily understood if we reduce them to a simple stimulus-response construct. But no one promised you that this book was to be easy. Accepting the easy definition will help you to not learn the subtleties of anchors. For those of you who want it easy, here goes: Anchors (triggers) = any stimulus that triggers a set of internal responses and/or actions.

However, you might want to consider everything within human experience is, in effect, an anchor, or, if you will, a red light that sets into motion a chain of responses. Take the words you are now reading, comfortably deep or deeply comfortable. Each word is an anchor for an experience of understanding. As you read each word, those symbols or

anchors lead you to an unconscious process that includes, but is not limited to, interpreting the word itself and attaching your personal experience and understanding to it.

For example, as you read the word “house,” what memories will that evoke in you…NOW? Try an experiment, if you will. Get together with several friends, and give each one a paper and pencil (or pen or crayon).

Say the word “house,” and ask each to write down in detail what s/he is reminded of. The diversity of triggered or anchored memories should be very interesting, for someone.

In most cases, the word “cumquat” will not evoke the same anchored response as the word “sex” will now! Anchors, like all other experiences (which themselves are anchors), come in different intensities and are different for each one of us. What turns me on may turn you off, and if what turns you on turns me off…well… However, words are only one form of anchors. Again, everything can be, and is, for someone at some time an anchor. If, for our purposes, we were to understand anchors to be any trigger—internal or external—which evokes within someone a certain set response in all or most all cases, regardless of whether we label the response good or bad, and when such response is ritualized, we should have an anchor for the word anchor.

ANCHORS IN POST-HYPNOTIC RESPONSE

If we were to get a little metaphysical, we might say that anchors are a form of post-hypnotic suggestion. That is, that circumstances, situations, people, schools, smells, traumas, etc., have suggested certain responses to all the anchors in our world. (Remember, if you’ve now forgotten, there’s no such thing as hypnosis.) Within the framework of traditional hypnosis, the hypnotist might “suggest” that at a snap of the fingers, the subject will remember his/her 5th birthday. If this suggestion were successful, we could say that the snap of the fingers had become the anchor to trigger the suggested memory.

Now, I am going to upset some of you who might believe that the concept of anchoring is new. Boy, have you been anchored if you believe that! If, for the moment, we leave aside natural anchors (whatever they are), and limit this part of our discussion to anchors and hypnosis, we could together learn something new. Modern old-time hypnotists were the first to discover “suggested” internal anchors (unless specified to not be the case,

from now on we will discuss anchors as suggested intentional phenomena).

Old-fashioned trance induction was and is a very long, tedious procedure.

The modern old-time hypnotist discovered what are now called “reinduction cues.” Before the subject was “counted out” (or whatever) from hypnosis, the following type of suggestion would be given: “…when I touch your forehead [shoulder, what have you] and count [backward, forward, up, down, it doesn’t matter], you will re-enter into this pleasant [deep, comfortable] state.” (Kroeger, 1963; Wolberg, 1964).

Where this post-hypnotic suggestion “took” you would have, in effect, a one-trial learning anchor. From that point on, each time the hypnotist triggered that anchor, the subject would re-enter the so-called trance state.

In some cases, any other person triggering the anchor would find the subject entering into a trance. Pavlov, with his development of classical stimulus-response conditioning, was one of the first to recognize anchors and to realize that anything could be used as a stimulus to produce a response. He discovered, in his work with dogs, that food—the unconditioned stimulus (US)—leads to an unconditioned response (UR):

salivating. Pair a bell to the US, and in a short while, the bell becomes a conditioned stimulus that elicits the UR. Another way of describing that condition would be: The bell has become an anchor (trigger) that produces the response of salivating, as if the bell were food.

Andrew Salter (Conditioned Reflex Therapy, 1961) held that hypnosis—

that is, the state of hypnosis as separate from the method of producing hypnosis—is, itself, a series of conditioned responses. He further concluded that all symptoms, regardless of the labels, are a result of conditioned inhibitions, and that all humans are born with the capacity to be outgoing, spontaneous and fun-loving. (We might say born utilizing fully the right hemisphere, as well as the left.) Thus, we are conditioned in painful association (anchors) to be afraid of our natural state and instead to become inhibited. (Perhaps to become too left-hemispheric; see Chapter X,

“Left Meets Right Meets Left.”)

Whether Salter’s theory is correct or not does not take away from the implied conclusion: Individuals have the ability to associate unrelated (in reality) stimuli to produce complex responses. We might choose to call the stimulus an “anchor” which produces a set of learned responses.

Let’s suppose little Johnnie is trying independence on for size. He pulls

himself up to his full (fill in average height of a five-year-old) and thus, towering under his father, he says, “NO! I won’t!” Father becomes enraged and jumps to his feet pointing at Johnnie and yells, “Don’t you say ‘no’ to me or I'll knock your block off. Get to your room.” Several years later, Johnnie is sitting in a therapist’s office claiming that he can’t say “no” to anyone he sees as being in authority over him. If you were to conclude that, for Johnnie, saying the word “no” has become an anchor that elicits great fear, then you are right.

What you have read this far has anchored you into an understanding. In my clinical practice, I have heard people claim that certain facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, postures, words, smells, etc. have caused them to: get depressed, get anxious, throw up, get headaches, go crazy, etc., etc. You could consider all of the above conditioned reflex responses or anchors.

You’ve probably remembered by now that Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. Wrong! The dog conditioned a bunch of scientists to ring a bell whenever the dog salivated. Be careful to determine now who is anchoring whom.

ERICKSON AND ANCHORS

Milton Erickson discovered some very powerful uses for anchors which have influenced several individuals, including myself, in our interest, understanding and uses of anchors. Erickson observed that if he asked a patient to sit just as he had the last time he experienced trance, and Erickson began talking in the same manner and/or about the same subject as the last trance experience, the patient would re-enter the trance state without any so-called induction. Erickson named this technique

“recapitulation.”

A colleague of mine, David Dobson, and I became fascinated with this phenomenon, and began experimenting with it. In our experiments (separately and then comparing notes), we discovered (or stumbled upon) a very interesting additional phenomenon: If you could get a subject to remember a specific situation in his imagination, he would often manifest all the emotional responses that the subject associated with the actual incident as if he were actually there.

In one instance, a woman complained that when her husband touched her in a sexual way, she became “sick to my stomach. I feel like throwing

up.” I asked her to close her eyes and remember being with her husband, hearing his voice, smelling his after-shave, feeling his touch. At this point, she opened her eyes and began gagging. This was another form of recapitulation without a formal trance or regression and yet…

Dr. Dobson and I both concurred that the individuals were entering trance and regressing spontaneously whenever they were asked to “imagine a situation” and all their systems were involved (Kinesthetic, Visual, Auditory, and in some cases, Gustatory and Olfactory). Our experiments and observations led us to conclude that individuals were suffering the pain they suffered as a result of more or less powerful anchors which acted as if they were hypnotic suggestions, and produced powerful, repetitive conditional responses—just as a red light triggers a complex series of actions leading to stopping.

SPONTANEOUS ANCHORS

Many years ago, a serendipitous event brought out the ease with which people are anchored, the importance of anchors, and how anchors could not only be anything, but could produce responses entirely unrelated to the anchor itself. I had put a man into hypnosis while he was sitting in my office recliner (actually he put himself there), and asked him to go back to the source of a particular problem he was having. All hell broke loose. He cried, moaned, twisted around, and more. When I asked him to signal if he wanted to end this trance, he signaled “no.” He carried on this way for about 20 minutes, and then terminated his hypnotic state, claiming he had learned a great deal. He returned the following week for his next appointment, and I greeted him in the reception area. He looked relaxed and was smiling, and said he had had a great week with substantial reduction of his symptoms (one of which was asthma).

We walked into my office, and he sat down in the recliner… BANG!…the picture of Dorian Gray. His smile slipped away, his tone changed, he began to wheeze, cry, moan, etc. I asked him what was wrong. He said he didn’t know, and I was very puzzled by his response. Then I noticed his eyes were dilated and he appeared to be “out of it” or in “that state.” I took his hand and pulled him out of the recliner, and said sharply, “Look at me now and recall a time you were happy about something you just did.” Slowly, his breathing changed, his face relaxed, the wheezing stopped, and he began to smile. I asked him to sit in another chair, which he did without any

problem. After obtaining his permission for him to “experience” something, I asked him to again sit in the recliner. As he approached it, his body, posture and facial expression began to change, and as he sat down, all the previous behavior began to re-emerge. He jumped out of the chair and said he wasn’t going to sit there “cause the chair is doing something to me.” He was right. The chair had become an anchor, or post-hypnotic re-induction, that led him to re-experience his last painful time in that chair, with all the attendant memory and emotional response which he now blamed the chair for.

PAVLOV AND ANCHORS

The above incident made several things clear to me. The chair had become a conditioned stimulus—like Pavlov’s bell—in one trial; and a person could spend years in therapy trying to find out why they had a phobia about a chair. If a chair could become such a powerful anchor, so too could a word, a tone, a touch—or whatever. The anchor need not have any logical relationship to the response the anchor produces. (Just recently, I “helped”

an individual to develop a mini-phobic response to a telephone, and then used the same telephone to elicit memories and responses relating to the first time he had fallen in love.)

This incident also caused a regression (in me) to a time three years earlier. A professor of neurological psychology and I had a “little”

disagreement during a lecture he was giving on classical conditioning and neurological responses. I asked him a theoretical question: “If an individual could be conditioned to respond in a certain way to a given stimulus, could you use the same stimulus and/or response to trigger a new and different response? For example, if a doorbell triggered anxiety, could you help the individual to either 1) respond in a different way to the doorbell itself so that the doorbell became a trigger for say, relaxation, or 2) help the individual to use the first subjective feelings of anxiety—i.e., tightness—to trigger a response such as relaxation?”

The professor thought for a while, did some mathematical formulas on the blackboard, and then stated, “Theoretically it’s possible, particularly with animals, but probably unrealistic when it comes to people because of all the uncontrollable variables.” He asked me what methodology I would use and what apparatus did I believe would be needed to experiment with.

I responded that I wasn’t sure of the methodology, but the so-called

“apparatus” would be hypnosis.

He almost choked as he said, “Hypnosis!? It doesn’t exist, and even if I could get people to respond as I had suggested, it wouldn’t matter since hypnosis wasn’t science but witchcraft.” In retrospect, I can “see” that he had been hypnotized into believing hypnosis didn’t exist, and that the word

“hypnosis” was the post-hypnotic “cue” (anchor) that elicited his somewhat weird response. Nonetheless, the incident with the recliner triggered the memory of my earlier question or theory, and I again began to wonder if it could be done. Based on what had happened to the man and his response to the recliner, I knew it was more than possible; that it happened all the time in all of our lives.

CALM CONDITIONING

My first effort, or experiments, with what would later be termed

“anchors,” and the methods that would become part of what I call Unconscious Restructuring®, were very primitive. I called it “Calm Conditioning.” Simply put, I would ask an individual to “remember” the last time they were, for example, afraid. As they “remembered,” I would observe them for signs of discomfort such as tightness in the body or in the face; or rapid breathing; or?

When it looked to me that they were “remembering” it by feeling it, I would touch them (usually on the arm) and say, “Good. Hold on to that feeling so that you can become very familiar with how it feels inside.” Next, I would ask them to go back and re-experience that feeling again, but in slow motion, to become aware of the first strong physical sensation such as tightening in the stomach or chest, or wherever, and to signal me by lifting the first finger of their right hand when they had that sensation. I would then touch them on the spot I had touched before and tell them to begin.

When they signaled I would then apply a little more pressure to my touch for a few moments, and then remove my hand. Then, I would ask them to take several deep breaths and think of the beach or mountains or anything pleasant. The next step was to ask them to remember the most pleasant, relaxing place they have ever been—or to make one up in their imagination—and to signal when they had accomplished that. They were then asked to see themselves in that place again until they felt the calm, relaxed feelings that went with that experience, and to think of a word or two as a code to remind them of that pleasant place. I would then have

them “practice” saying the code word and seeing that place and feeling those relaxed feelings.

At this point, when we were successful, the individual had an associated response to my touching them on the arm and asking them to remember the feeling of anxiety and another more pleasant associated response to their code word. (I had not yet figured out that this procedure could be accomplished without the need of code words.) The next step was to have them close their eyes and think of some situation that usually caused them to get anxious, and to signal when they had thought of it. At the same time, I would touch the spot on their arm to help them “remember” the anxious feeling they were to find. As soon as they signaled, I would stop touching them and say somewhat sharply, “Stop. [A pattern interruption.] Say your code word to yourself and see yourself there, feeling those pleasant feelings.”

This procedure would be practiced many times (6 or 8) and then the individual, who by now would, in most cases, be in “that state” of hypnosis, would be instructed as follows: “Each time you feel that first signal of

“anxiety” such as [filled in with what they had reported as the first signal], you are to think of your code word and see yourself there, feeling those comfortable feelings. As you practice this procedure, it will become more and more automatic until soon it will happen, in all the appropriate circumstances, without thinking and without your conscious awareness of having gone to your special place.”

PROTOCOL PROCEDURE

In spite of the primitiveness of this first approach, and my lack of understanding of anchoring and systems (Visual—Kinesthetic—Auditory), it produced excellent results for the majority of people. Typically, they would report that when they used it, they would calm down; and many people reported that, within a few days, they were getting calm without thinking about it at all.

We might conclude that they were using a new anchor automatically which was generalizing to their real world. I would like to suggest that you…NOW…consider doing this procedure in a more updated form. Follow

We might conclude that they were using a new anchor automatically which was generalizing to their real world. I would like to suggest that you…NOW…consider doing this procedure in a more updated form. Follow