Now, we need to do one more thing that's very important. Linda has the choice sitting here in this room. You've all seen that. We want her to also have this choice in other contexts. All of you have had the following experience. You work with a client and you and the client both know that they have new choices. They leave the office and you're happy and they're happy and congruent, and two weeks later when they come back they go "Well, it didn't quite ... I don't know what happened. I knew it... and I uh..." Or worse yet they come back and present you with the exact same problem, with very little memory that you even worked on it two weeks ago!

Linda was in an altered state up here. She radically altered her consciousness to go after old experiences, to integrate them with new kinds of resources. The point is—and this was a primary insight of family therapy twenty years ago—if you simply induce changes in an altered state of consciousness known as an institution, or a therapist's office, or a group setting, it's very unlikely that most of your work will transfer the first time. You'll have to do it several times. You have to be sure that the new understandings and learnings, the new behavior, the new choices, transfer out of that altered state of consciousness into the appropriate context in the real world.

There's a very easy process that we call "bridging" or "future-pacing" that connects the new response with the appropriate context. It's another use of anchoring. You know what the new response is, and you know that the person wants it to occur in some context, so you simply ask them the following question: "What is the first thing that you would see, hear, or feel, that would allow you to know you are in the context where you want to make this new choice?"

Linda, there are other situations in your present life that are similar to the one that you saw in those pictures, right?—situations in which you respond the same way you responded to that picture, instead of the way you would like to respond. Now, what I need to know is what allows you to know that a context is similar to that one. Is it something about what you see? Is it the tone of someone's voice, the way someone sounds, the way someone is touching you? ...

Linda: It's the way someone looks.

OK, I want you to see what that looks like. And as you see that, each time you see anything similar, you will feel this. (He touches the resource anchor.) I want you to remember that you have this particular resource....

That's bridging. It takes a minute and a half or two minutes, and it guarantees that your work will transfer out into the real world. The same stimulus that in the past elicited the maladaptive stereotyped behavior, the feeling that she wants to change, now serves as a stimulus for which the resource is a response. Now she will automatically have access to the new choice in the contexts where she needs it—not just in the office, the group, the institution. This is stimulus-stimulus conditioning.

You're not going to be there to squeeze her shoulder, so you need to make some part of the actual context the trigger for her new behavior. The best thing to use as the trigger is whatever was the trigger for the unwanted behavior. If her boss' tone of voice makes her feel helpless, then make that tone of voice the trigger to access the resources of creativity, confidence, or whatever. Otherwise, if the old anchors that exist are stronger than the new ones that you've created, the old ones will override the new ones.

That is what prompted the development of family therapy. They take a schizophrenic kid and they put him in a hospital and they give him M&M's in the right order and the kid gets better and he's well and normal, happy, learning. Then they put him back in the family and he's schizophrenic again in a matter of weeks. And so they said "Ah!

Something in the family keeps the kid the same, so therefore we will treat the whole family." You don't have to treat the whole family. That's one way to do it: it's a choice. If you bring the family in, the anchors are there, and you can use them. In fact, I'll demonstrate. You can sit down now, Linda. Thank you.

I'd like two people to come up here and role-play a husband and wife…

Thank you. Larry and Susie. Now as a wife, would you give me some complaints. What does he do or not do?

Susie: He drinks too much beer. He’ll never watch football with me.

He'll never watch football with you? And how does that make you feel?

Susie: Mad. Deserted.

Deserted, so what you want is some attention from him.

Susie: Right.

And when you try to get attention from him, what—look at that, he went right up into a visual access. Boom! That's what typically happens. The wife says "I feel I want him to touch me," and the husband goes (looking up) "Well, I don't see how that's useful."Right? And then he comes into the house and says "Look, this place is a mess. I can't stand to see a cluttered house." And she says "But it feels cozy this way."

Now what I'm going to do here is use anchoring. I say "Well, I find that hard to believe, but let me check it out." So I come over here and ask the husband a few rhetorical questions, simply for the purpose of eliciting responses. I say "Larry, let me ask you a question. Are there some times when you feel like you really want to be close to her, give her some attention and some good feelings and really get close to her? Are there times like that?"

Larry: Sure, there are times. (He touches Larry's wrist.)