So I asked her to walk over to the window while she sang the National Anthem inside her head. Now that sounds kind of silly, except that she walked over to the window and she didn't have the phobic response! None whatsoever. She'd had the phobia for years and years and years.

A man who was a Cree Indian medicine man, a shaman, came to a workshop and we were discussing different mechanisms that worked cross-culturally as far as inducing change in a rapid and effective way. If a person has a headache, an old semi-gestalt thing to do is to sit them in a chair, have them look at an empty chair, have them intensify the feeling of the pain, and have the intensified pain they are feeling develop into a cloud of smoke in the other chair. Slowly the smoke forms itself into an image of someone they have unfinished business with, and then you do whatever you do. And it works; the headache goes away,

The counterpart for this shaman was that he always carries a blank piece of paper. Whenever anybody comes to him and says "I have a headache, will you assist me?" he says "Yes, of course, but before I begin I want you to spend five minutes studying this piece of paper in absolute detail, because it contains something of great interest for you." The thing in common about those two interventions is that they both involve switching representational systems. You break up the process by which the person is having the experience they don't want to have, by having their attention riveted in some other representational system than the one in which they are presently receiving messages of pain. The result is absolutely identical in both cases. By studying the blank piece of paper intently, or by intensifying the feeling and making it change into a picture in the chair, you are doing the same thing. You are switching representational systems, and that is a really profound intervention for any presenting problem. Anything that changes the pattern or sequence of events a person goes through internally—in responding to either internal or external stimuli—will make the response that they are stuck in no longer possible.

We had a man in Marin, California, and every time he saw a snake— no matter how far away it was, no matter where he was in respect to it or who was around it—his pupils would immediately dilate. You had to be close enough to see it. He would make an image of a snake flying through the air. This was outside of awareness until we uncovered it. When he was six years old somebody threw a snake at him unexpectedly and it scared him badly. He then responded kinesthetically as a six-year-old to the internal image of a snake flying through the air toward him. One thing we could have done was to simply change the content of that picture. We could have had him make a picture of someone throwing kisses. What we actually did was simply switch the order in which the systems occurred. We had him have the kinesthetic response first and then make the picture internally. That made it impossible for him to be phobic.

You can treat every limitation that is presented to you as a unique accomplishment by a human being, and discover what the steps are. Once you understand what the steps are, you can reverse the order in which the steps occur, you can change the content, you can insert some new piece or delete a step. There are all kinds of interesting things you can do. If you believe that the important aspect of change is "understanding the roots of the problem and the deep hidden inner meaning" and that you really have to deal with the content as an issue, then probably it will take you years to change people.

If you change the form, you change the outcome at least as well as if you work with content. The tools that it takes to change form are easier to work with. It's a lot easier to change form, and the change is more pervasive.

Man: What are some questions that you ask to elicit the steps in the process that people go through?

Ask them to have the experience. Ask them about the last time they had the experience, or what would happen if they were to have it right here, or if they remember the last time it happened. Any of those questions will elicit the same unconscious responses we've been showing you here. Whenever I ask a question or make a statement about something to someone here in the group, if you are alert the response will already be made non-verbally much earlier and more completely than the person will consciously be able to verbalize the answer explicitly.

"How do you know when you are being phobic, as opposed to when you are not being phobic?" "How do you know?" questions usually will take you to just about everything. People have a tendency to demonstrate it, rather than bring it into consciousness.

Our book The Structure of Magic, I is devoted to what we call the "meta-model." It's a verbal model, a way of listening to the form of verbalization as opposed to content. One of the distinctions is called "unspecified verb." If I'm your client and I say to you "My father scares me," do you have an understanding of what I'm talking about? No, of course not. "My father X's me" would be as meaningful. Because for one person "Father scares me" may mean that his father put a loaded .38 to his head. And for someone else it may simply mean that his father walked through the living room and didn't say anything! So the sentence "My father scares me" has very little content. It simply describes that there is some process—at this point unspecified. The pattern, of course, is to be able to listen to language and know when a person has adequately specified some experience with a verbal description.

One of the things we teach with the meta-model is that when you get a sentence like "My father scares me" to ask for a specification of the process that the person is referring to called "scare." "How specifically does your father scare you?". "How specifically do you know you are depressed, or guilty, or phobic?" "Know" is another word like scare. It doesn't specify the process. So if I say to you "Well, I think that I have a problem" that doesn't tell you anything about the process. If you say "How do you think it?" initially people will go "What?!"But after they get over the initial shock of being asked such a peculiar question, they will begin to demonstrate the process to you, at first non-verbally. They'll go "Well, I just think it." (eyes and head moving up and to his left) Or they'll go "Ah, I don't know. I just, you know, it's just a thought I have." (eyes and head moving down and to his left) The combination of the unspecified verbs that the person is using and the quite elegant non-verbal specification by eye movements and body shifts will give you the answer to the question, whether they ever become conscious of it or not.

If you keep asking questions, usually people will become conscious of their process and explain it to you. Usually people do it with disdain, because they assume that everybody thinks the same way they do, with the same kind of processes. One well-known therapist told us seriously one day "Every intelligent, adult human being always thinks in pictures." Now, that's a statement about him. That's the way he organizes a great deal of his conscious activity. It has very little to do with about half the population we have encountered in this country.