This is particularly important in conference work, or in family therapy. I don't pay attention to the person who is actively communicating verbally; I'll watch anyone else. Anyone else will give me more information than that person, because I'm interested in what responses s/he is eliciting from other members of the family or the conference. That gives me lots of choices, for instance, about knowing when they are about to be interrupted. I can either reinforce the interruption, make it myself, or interrupt the interruptor to allow the person to finish. Peripheral vision gives you much more information, and that's a basis for choices.

Your personal history serves as a foundation for all your capabilities and all your limitations. Since you only have one personal history, you have only one set of possibilities and one set of limitations. And we really believe that each of you deserves more than one personal history to draw upon. The more personal histories you have, the more choices you'll have available to you.

A long time ago we had been trying to find expedient ways of helping people to lose weight. Most of the vehicles that were available at that time didn't seem to work, and we discovered that there were some real differences between the way people have weight problems. One of the major things we discovered is there were a lot of people who had always been fat. There were other people who had gotten fat, but there were a lot of them who had always been fat. When they got skinny, they freaked out because they didn't know how to interact with the world as a skinny person. If you've always been fat, you were never chosen first to be on a sports team. You were never asked to dance in high school. You never ran fast. You have no experience of certain kinds of athletic and physical movements.

So instead of trying to get people to adjust, we would simply go back and create a whole new childhood and have them grow up being a skinny person. We learned this from Milton Erickson. Erickson had a client whose mother had died when she was twelve years old, and who had been raised by a series of governesses. She wanted to get married and have children, but she knew herself well enough to know that she did not have the requisite background to respond to children in the ways that she wanted to be able to respond to them. Erickson hypnotized her and age-regressed her into her past and appeared periodically as the "February Man." The February Man appeared repeatedly throughout her personal history, and presented her with all the experiences that she needed. We simply extended this further. We decided that there was no need to just appear as the February Man, Why not March, April and May? We started creating entire personal histories for people, in which they would have experiences which would serve as the resources for the kinds of behaviors that they wanted to have. And then we extended it from weight problems to all kinds of other behaviors.

We did it once with a woman who had grown up being asthmatic. At this time, she had three or four children who wanted to have pets. She had gone to a very fine allergist who insisted that she wasn't allergic to animals as far as he could tell. If he tested her without telling her what the skin patches were, she didn't come out being allergic to animals. However, if you put an animal in her presence, or told her that one had been in the room recently, she had a very strong allergic reaction. So we simply gave her a childhood of growing up without being asthmatic. And an amazing thing happened: not only did she lose her allergic response to animals, but also to the things she had been found to be allergic to by the skin-patch testing.

Woman: How long does that take, ordinarily, and do you use hypnosis for that?

Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There's a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn't use such terms, since they don't refer to anything.

We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That's the function of every conversation. Let's say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they're trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called "words."

Do we have any official hypnotists here? How many of the rest of you know that you are unofficial hypnotists? We've got one. And the rest of you don't know it yet. I think that it is important to study official hypnosis if you are going to be a professional communicator. It has some of the most interesting phenomena about people available in it. One of the most fascinating things you will discover once you are fully competent in using the ritualistic notions of traditional hypnosis, is that you'll never have to do it again. A training program in hypnosis is not for your clients. It's for you, because you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people's everyday "waking activity." You will also discover that most of the techniques in different types of psychotherapy are nothing more than hypnotic phenomena. When you look at an empty chair and start talking to your mother, that's a "deep trance phenomenon" called "positive auditory and visual hallucination." It's one of the deep trance phenomena that defines somnambulism. Amnesia is another pattern you see everywhere…. What were we talking about?

I remember one time about two months after I entered the field and started studying it, I was sitting in a room full of adults in suits and ties. And a man there was having them talk to empty chairs. One of them said "I feel foolish"and I burst into laughter. They all looked at me as if I was crazy. They were talking to people who weren't there, and telling me that hypnosis is bad!

One of the things that will help people to learn about being good therapists is to be able to look at what they do and listen to it and realize how absurd most of what is going on in therapy is. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it still is definitely the major theater of the absurd at this time. And when I say absurd, I want you to separate the notion of absurdity from the notion of usefulness, because they are two entirely different issues. Given the particular cultural/economic situation in the United States, therapy happens to be an activity which I think is quite useful.

To answer the other half of your question, we don't ordinarily create new personal histories for people anymore. We have spent three hours doing it. And we have done it fifteen minutes a week for six weeks, and we trained somebody to do time distortion once, and did it in about four minutes. We programmed another person to do it each night as they dreamed. We literally installed, in a somnambulistic trance, a dream generator, that would generate the requisite personal history, and have her recall this in the waking state the next day, each day. As far as I know, she still has the ability to create daily a personal history for anything she wants. When we used to do change work with individuals, a session for us could last anywhere from thirty seconds to seven or eight hours.