Man: When you collapse anchors for being drunk and being sober, don't you run the risk of making the person act drunk all the time?

That is a reasonable concern. Giving hypnotic process instructions such as those I've been describing is a way to make sure that the integration you get from collapsing anchors is useful. You say things about how those two states can begin to blend in such a way that the person incorporates all that is useful and valuable in each state, losing nothing, so that the integration can serve as the foundation for more choice, etc.

Let me remind you that this is only a preliminary step. I'm deliberately breaking down barriers between two dissociated states and inducing confusion. I'm literally violating a discrimination, an internal sorting process, that the alcoholic has unconsciously used to make himself effective in life. After doing this, I'm going to have to clean it up with reframing. All I've done is create the precondition for reframing. I now have access to the drunk part and the sober part at the same time. I have reduced a very difficult situation of sequential incongruity to something I can cope with: simultaneous incongruity.

After he recovers and is relatively coherent, I would simply proceed with six–step reframing to secure specific alternative behaviors, and to future–pace the new behaviors appropriately. At that point you reframe in the same way that you would reframe anything else.

However, one thing is very important. If you're working with something like drinking, smoking, or over–eating, you have to be sure that the new alternatives not only work better than the old choice, but that the new alternatives are more immediate. You need to be very sensitive to criteria, and «best» in addictions usually has a lot to do with immediacy. If your new choice for relaxing is taking a vacation, that's not nearly as quick and easy as eating a piece of chocolate cake that's already in the refrigerator. It's a lot easier to smoke a cigarette than to meditate or go running on the beach. You can't run on the beach when you're in an elevator, but you can smoke a cigarette.

You can build in immediacy by specifying it at step four. «Go in and find three choices that are more acceptable, more immediate, more available, easier, and faster than the one you are using now.» Often people don't do that when they do reframing. Their clients then come up with long–range alternatives that don't work, because they need something really immediate.

Another thing you can do with any addict is to make his actual feeling of desiring the drug an anchor for something else. The person needs to experience the feeling itself as having a different meaning. Right now he has a certain feeling that he interprets as a craving for a drink, and it pumps him into drinking. You can put him in a trance and make that feeling mean something else. The feeling of «craving» could now lead to intense curiosity about his surroundings, for instance.

I've used this approach of collapsing anchors and reframing effectively with alcoholics and heroin addicts in one session. I have up to two–year follow–ups now, and it's been successful.

After you've done reframing and found new choices for the secondary gain of the alcohol or the drug, you need to test your work. With an alcoholic, my test is to give him a drink and find out if he can stop after just one. I consider that the only valid test of whether I have done a complete and integrated piece of work. With heroin, I'd find out what anchors used to trigger off shooting up, and then I'd send the client out into that context to test his new choices.

Lou: That's really amazing. I've worked with people in AA, and they think that «Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.» Are you saying it's possible to cure alcoholics so that they can drink but not get drunk? They can go into a bar and have one drink and then walk away from it?

Definitely. When I work with an alcoholic, three months later I'll go out to some bar with him and have a drink. I watch and listen closely for any of the behavioral shifts that used to be associated with the alcoholic state. That will test whether I've done an integrated piece of work. I want to find out if he can have a drink and have the same response to it that I have; namely, that it's just a drink. I'm going to find out if he can perform the behavior that previously was automatic and compulsive without being compelled to go on and have more. Alcohol is an anchor, and using that old anchor is a good test of my work.

I don't mean to criticize AA, by the way. For decades AA was the only organization around that could assist alcoholics effectively. Historically it was a wonderful thing, and at this point we need to move on to something else. AA has a non–integrative approach, and people in AA are almost always bingers. They believe that «Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic," and for their people, that's true. If one of them sits down and has one drink, he won't be able to stop; he'll continue on a binge.

The claims I am making would be outrageous to anyone in AA, and also to the belief systems that most therapists have been taught. They are not incredible if you approach addiction from an NLP standpoint. From that standpoint, all you need to do is 1) collapse anchors on the dissociation, 2) get communication with the part that makes him drink, 3) find out what secondary gain—camaraderie, relaxation, or whatever—the alcohol gets for him, and 4) find alternative behaviors that get the secondary outcomes of alcohol but don't produce the damage that alcohol does. A person will always make the best choice available to him. If you offer him better choices than drinking to get all the positive secondary gains of alcohol, he will make good selections.

Lou: How would you deal with someone in AA then? They seem to believe that nothing will work except AA, and they won't listen to anything else.

Yes. AA is a «true believer» system. If you're working with someone who belongs to AA, you just accept that. You say «You're absolutely right.» Then you might add «Since you are so convinced that 'Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic' it won't be any threat to you if we try something different, because it will fail anyway.» When someone has a strong belief system, I accept it, and then find ways to work within it. Then I can always induce a covert trance and just program directly.

Your question about belief systems reminds me of something a medical doctor in England tried with heroin addicts. He had a clinic with a large methadone program to keep his clients from experiencing withdrawal. Once he had a new group of addicts coming in, so he did a controlled experiment in which he randomly divided the addicts into two groups. The control group just got methadone as usual. He trained all the subjects in the experimental group to be really good trance subjects. The two groups would come in at the same time for their methadone, but the experimental group would go to his office. There this doctor would put them all into a trance and have them hallucinate shooting up. At the end of six weeks, no one in either group had shown any withdrawal symptoms. At that point he told the experimental group what he had done, and all but two of them immediately went into withdrawal! That is an indication to me that the body is capable of handling the chemical imbalances if the person's belief system is consistent with doing so.

After I've tested for ecology, and to make sure the new choices work, I usually give the person something that he can actually get hold of to use as an anchor for his new choices. It might be a coin, or something else that he can put in his pocket and carry around with him. This will help take care of the old motor programs associated with drinking, smoking, or whatever. Part of the choice of drinking, for example, is actually going through the motions of holding onto a glass and moving it up to the mouth. Having some tangible physical anchor gives the person something else to do with his hands.