I did not look for ‘what went wrong’ or the ‘whys.’ I did not look for cures. I looked at what worked, no matter how. If a few good therapists ‘fixed’ anybody, I looked at what they actually did. When people got over problems on their own, I looked at what had happened. The result is what is now called Neuro-Linguistic Programming – that is, a series of lessons that teach what others have learned that works.
I must start out by thanking the psychiatrists that helped me originally. They provided me access to clients so that I could test my work. They gave me information on those rare few clinicians – like Virginia Satir and Milton H. Erickson – who got results.
I also want to thank the courageous clients who let me teach them what I had found. For example, I looked at how more than a hundred people got over fears and studied what was common to them all. Then, I taught that process. Over these decades, I have refined and refined these procedures and, today, I believe they can help anyone to change their life.
If you’re plagued with the past, stuck in a fear or just unable to get your mental motor running on time, this guide will offer a variety of ways to get your life in order. If you have spent too much time in therapy and too much money trying to do it yourself, this is for you. If you want to take control of your life, this will help you do this effectively. Just be very thorough. Do all the exercises and take careful account of the information you read. It will make a difference.
I have broken this book into three pieces.
The first part is called ‘Getting Over It.’
The second part is called ‘Getting Through It.’
The third part is called ‘Getting To It.’
Richard Bandler
This book is designed to be a guide for your behaviour. It is a guide to help you make changes and avoid therapy – and avoid a slow, long process of change by helping you to learn to change more quickly. One of the things that I discovered in my work is that people acquire problems very quickly. It only takes one close call in an aeroplane for somebody to get an aeroplane phobia. After one bad accident, people can get a driving phobia. It takes bees to swarm once and people become phobic of bees. If people can learn to have fear in a short period of time, there’s no reason why it should take a long period of time to learn anything else, so my policy has always been to use another approach to find a quick way to do things.
What exactly was this different approach that I took? When psychologists wanted to study a particular difficulty, like phobias for example, they got together a bunch of phobics and tried to figure out why they were the way they were – effectively they looked at what made them tick. They tried experiments, like having the phobics face their difficulties and to try and help them to desensitize their fear over time. The psychoanalytical approach of travelling back in time and reliving traumas, looking for deep, hidden, inner meaning was used. This idea was based on the concept that insight produces change.
This seemed like a wonderful idea! If you could understand your problems somehow or other, they would just disappear. Sigmund Freud started the concept and it was, at the time, a great innovation and has been tried for some 100 years in various forms. The suggestion was that understanding the psyche could produce change. The idea that you could help a person change verbally rather than physically was a promising insight itself. However, the idea of getting insight into your problems just does not work.
Over the years, people have used both psychological approaches and physical approaches. They’ve tried things like operant conditioning where they tried conditioning people by rewarding them for good behaviour and negatively reinforcing bad behaviour. They would take smokers and give them a cigarette and shock the hell out of them. The problem is though that most people who smoke for a while realize that it’s not good for their health. They may even know why they started smoking – to look cool in front of their friends or to get over a nervous habit or to not eat so much – yet even though people know why they smoke, it doesn’t make them stop.
Many people also know why they have fears. I had a client who very much understood her fears. When she was a young girl, she was attacked, not by one person but by a group of people. She was severely beaten. She was severely raped and developed a fear of other people. She had a fear of going outside. In fact, she had a fear of almost everything. She’d seen a psychiatrist who treated her with therapy and drugs. I have to admit that taking valium made her more relaxed but, then again, taking narcotics makes heroin users more relaxed but it doesn’t deal with the real issue.
The real issue is that they’ve developed a habit of being afraid, when they don’t need to be. They have learned to engage in a certain behaviour that is in and of itself destructive. It destroys your quality of life. It destroys your freedom. It destroys the opportunity you have to live in a free society.
That particular girl didn’t live in a terrifying place where bombs drop every day or where soldiers rape you. She wasn’t being attacked and hadn’t been attacked in over twenty-five years. Yet, every day, she woke up afraid. Every night she went to sleep afraid. She was afraid to meet people, afraid to date, afraid to love, afraid to work, afraid of everything.
When she came to me after all the years of therapy, it was quite by accident. She enrolled in a course with over 500 people. I have people throw notes in the box on stage about questions they have and she literally wrote down what had happened to her. She said she understood why she had a problem but still she didn’t seem to be able to get away from it.
After I’d spoken to her privately, I brought her on the stage and explained to her the real truth that I didn’t need to understand how she became the way she did. I needed to understand how she kept being that way. It was pretty obvious why she was the way she was – something bad happened to her and she kept reliving it and everything in the world triggered that memory.
That wasn’t based on what had happened. It was based on what she did with what happened. It was based on the fact that when she woke up she was asking the question What could go wrong? and the same answer came up every single time. She would imagine a life-size memory where she saw the bad thing happening to her over and over and over again.
It only took me a matter of twenty minutes to get her to stop doing this because I didn’t have to find out why she did what she did, I just had to get her to stop it. Better yet, I had to get her to do something more important: develop a habit of feeling happy.
If you’ve been afraid most of your life, you may not have good examples of what ‘happy’ is. In that case, you can build it in. That’s what I do. You have to give people a really strong feeling of being relaxed, a really strong feeling of feeling good as a guide for their behaviour. You do this so that, in the future when they wake up, they start asking, How much fun can I have today? How much freedom can I find? How much more can I do than I’ve done before?
When people start asking good questions, they make good pictures inside their heads. If you make good pictures, you will get good feelings. Then life becomes something that you feel more enthusiasm for. This girl is a good example of how you can go from having almost no life to having a rich, full life where things get better from the top to the bottom.
In order for you to turn your own life around, it’s good for you to know how all these ideas came about so that you can discover why they are so effective. When I first started out, I asked psychiatrists to name one of the toughest problems they faced and they would tell me it was phobias. So, my approach began by figuring out how to help people get over phobias and the same approach turned out to work well for other problems too.
When