Once I worked with a man who had severe pain. He had been in an accident that had resulted in a back injury. I don't know the medical details, but there was some physical reason why he ought to have pain. He came in and said he wanted hypnosis. I said I didn't know if I could help him with his pain, I had a procedure that worked very well, but only on people who are mature and intelligent, and frankly, I didn't know if he was mature enough.

I told him "Look, the most mature and intelligent people arc the ones who are able to see things from different perceptual points of view." By the way, according to Jean Piaget, this is actually true. So I explained Piaget's theory and test of intelligence to this man.

According to Piaget, being intelligent means being able to tell what things would look like from different perspectives. If I wanted to test a child, I could use a block of wood and a thimble. I'd bring the child over, show him the thimble, and place the block of wood in front of the thimble to block the child's view of the thimble. Then I'd ask "Is there anything behind the block?" If the child says "No" he's not very "mature." The "mature" child can visualize the thimble when it's hidden, and he can also see what the thimble, the block of wood, and they themselves would look like from the other side of the table. The testers literally ask "What would it look like if you were over there on the other side of the table?" The better you can see things from different points of view, the more "mature" and intelligent you are. One consequence of that kind of visualization is that you become dissociated from your feelings. This is what some modern methods teach kids to be able to do. They teach kids to grow up and be dissociated from their feelings, because that's what it means to be "mature."

I told this man that there was something I wanted him to go home and practice, because I was going to test him extensively on it the next week to find out how mature and intelligent he was. What he needed to do was to find out what he would look like lying in his bed, first from the perceptual viewpoint of one corner of the room, then from the viewpoint of the opposite corner, and then from every point in between. I told him that next week I would pick one viewpoint at random, and have him draw it in detail. I would measure it and find out exactly what the angle was, and by looking at his drawing I would be able to compute his intelligence,

He went home, and when he came back a week later he had done this task. He had worked on it methodically. He was highly motivated; he wanted me to treat him and thought I could help him. And when he came back, he said "You know, the strangest thing is, I haven't had much pain at all this week." Giving someone an appropriate task is another way of going after the same outcome.

There are other bizarre ways to deal with pain. You can do anything in trance as long as you presuppose it. Once I told a man who came to see me "I want to speak to the Brain. As soon as the Brain is ready to talk to me, and no conscious parts know anything about what is going on, then the mouth will open and say 'Now.'" He sat there for twenty minutes and then he said "Nowwww." I said "All right, Brain, you fouled up. Pain is a very valuable thing. It allows you to know when something needs to be attended to. This injury is already being attended to as well as it can be. Unless you can come up with anything else that needs to be done, it's time to shut off the pain." It said "Yessss!" I said "Shut it off now, and turn it back on only when it's needed: not before." Now, I have no idea what all that means, but it sounds so logical, and presupposes that the brain can do what I ask. After that he had no pain whatsoever.

Amnesia

I want to comment on something from one of the exercises. One man did something that can be used to get amnesia. He did the exercise, and as the woman he had induced into a trance returned, he looked at her and said "Notice how quiet it is in the room." When a person returns and opens his eyes, if you look at him and immediately comment on anything other than the experience he just came out of, you will abruptly direct his attention elsewhere, and you will tend to get really profound amnesia. This is true whether he is coming out of a deep trance, or whether you are in the middle of an ordinary conversation with him. For example, you could be talking about hypnosis and suddenly you turn and begin to talk about the necessity for checking your brakes before you go down mountain roads, and very congruently go into extreme detail about it. If you then ask "What was I just talking about?" he probably won't remember. Since there's no continuity, the probability that what happened just before the interruption will be consciously remembered is really small. So you get amnesia.

Try this with your clients when you aren't doing official altered states work. Deliver the set of instructions you want them to carry out for homework, and then immediately change the subject. They will have amnesia for the instructions; however, they will typically carry them out. There won't be any interference from the conscious mind when you do it that way. They won't remember the assignment, so they won't be able to have any "conscious resistance" to carrying it out.

Man: I've had clients apologize for not remembering the homework assignment I had given them, and then describe exactly how they fulfilled it.

Excellent. That's really good feedback to know that you've gotten the message across.

When you are doing official trance work, as soon as the person arouses from trance, you can begin in the middle of a sentence to comment about something that is completely unrelated to what occurred before or during the trance. That's an unconscious cue to him that you would prefer not to talk about what just occurred, and that it need not be available to his consciousness, either. Amnesia is as easy to get as most other "deep trance" phenomena, and this is one way to get it.

Man: i used to have trouble eliciting amnesia with my clients. Then I started doing just one thing differently: I waited about fifteen minutes before bringing up anything that happened in the trance. That's the only thing I changed, and amnesia started to occur.

Man: I've found that if I say to somebody "Then you will make a decision on this by next Tuesday," change the subject abruptly, and—

Well, I wouldn't be that direct. I would presuppose the decision. I would say "And when we get together to continue the discussion next Tuesday, I would like you to go ahead and indicate what your decision is in some way that is particularly interesting for me" and change the subject. If you do that, the behavior will occur and there won't be any consciousness about what's going on. That's an advantage if there is any conscious resistance to what you propose.

By the way, amnesia is a way to convince a "non–believer" that he's been in a trance. When he arouses from a trance, immediately engage his attention on something else and then later demand that he describe all the events that occurred, to prove to you that he wasn't in a trance.

Milton Erickson's office was the Land of Clutter. There were four hundred thousand objects in his office, so he had lots of choices about what he talked about and what he directed your attention to. He always arranged the clocks so that he could see them and you couldn't. He loved to bring people out of a trance, change the subject, and then say "Now, before you look at your watch, I would like you to make a guess about how much time has transpired." Of course you never knew what time it was, because Erickson did time distortion really well.

That is usually a convincer for people. If they can't account for the last two hours, they become convinced they were in a trance.