Then you have two anchors. What we want you to do is to use one, and notice the changes. Pause, and then use the other one, and notice the changes. It works even better if you distract your partner's consciousness with something neutral, like "Do you remember seeing the lights as we came into the building?" as you use that anchor. See if you can regularly get the same response when you use your anchors.

When you are satisfied that you have two anchors that work, and you can see the difference between them, then we want you to hold both at the same time, for about 30-60 seconds, and watch an amazing event, called “integration." Watch your partner's face. You will first see half of the face with one of those responses and the other half with the other, and then they will integrate. Anchors are not buttons; you have to hold them until you see the full response. Once the integration begins, you don't have to hold any more.

The purpose of this exercise is not to do therapy with your partner. The purpose is simply for you to verify with your own sensory apparatus that anchors exist, and that you are capable of anchoring. All you are doing is learning to anchor. This afternoon well teach you how to use it to do therapy. Go ahead.

There was one question that came up repeatedly during the exercise. Bill said "Well, I was imagining a time with my wife that was extremely sensually pleasurable there on the one knee. And on the other knee, I was remembering a time when she didn't seem to be willing to be with me, or the demands of keeping the house, etc. didn't allow us time to sit down together, and I got angry." Bill's partner was able to get the two distinctly, and to go back and reaccess them; the anchoring worked fine. He collapsed the two anchors and the integration occurred. And their question is "What will happen now when he sees his wife?" The answer to this is really important insofar as our understanding of our work goes. What will happen now is that when he sees his wife, he will have the choice of those purely sensual, pleasant feelings in the past, or the feelings of anger from the past, or—and this is very important— any combination of the two.

Those were two antagonistic, dissociated feeling states in the past. When you anchor each one, you also anchor the antagonistic physiology, muscle patterns, breathing, etc. Then when you stimulate both at the same time, the physiological patterns which are antagonistic literally interrupt each other—you could see that in the person's face, in their breathing, and so on. In the process they become integrated so that the person can come up with any combination of those feelings which were previously dissociated, and respond appropriately in context. The presupposition behind our behavior in this area is that given a set of choices, a person will always make the best choice that they have available in the context. I think it's entirely appropriate for anyone to have the ability both to be fully sensual with another person as well as to be angry, and all the mixes in between. By integrating in this way, using anchoring as an integrative device to break down the dissociations, we make sure that you have a full range of response in that area.

One of the lies we told you was that the anchoring exercise you did is not therapy. "You are just going to anchor this here and that there and then you are going to collapse the two and integrate them." I want you to think about that. What you did with the knee anchors and the integration is formally identical to gestalt two-chair work. Gestalt people use chairs as anchors and when you switch from one chair to the other, your feelings actually change. If you were on the outside as the therapist, you would actually see facial, postural and color changes as the person moved from one chair to the other. Those chairs are anchors. The problem is that it's hard to get integration. How do you push the chairs together? So you have to make people go back and forth really fast.

Now we'd like you all to pair up again and do the "changing personal history" pattern that we did this morning with Linda. I'll review it briefly:

First, what response does your partner have now that s/he wants to change? Anchor that to stabilize the situation, and to give you access to it.

Now, how would you like to behave, or what resource would you need, to behave in a way that's more congruent with your present resources? When you originally went through this experience, you didn't have all the resources you now have. Which resource would you take back to change your personal history? When have you had an experience of that resource? Anchor the response.

Then put the two together. Hold both anchors as your partner goes back and relives the past with the new resource, changing and creating new old history, until s/he is satisfied. Here your sensory experience is important. Check for congruency. Did you like the way it turned out? If not, do it again. What other resource do you need? Sometimes you have to give people a couple of resources. Or sometimes people think that all they needed is a certain resource and they take it and go back and it turns out to be a dud. The conscious mind has a limited understanding of what's needed back there. The only way you're going to find out is by having them go back to re-experience parts of their personal history.

After they are satisfied that they have a new resource that worked back there, you need to bridge, or future-pace. What experiences in your present life are sufficiently similar to that old one to trigger the unwanted response? What is the first thing you see, hear, or feel that

I lets you identify this kind of situation? Then anchor the new resource to those contextual cues. OK. Go ahead.

There are many, many useful ways of organizing the whole process called psychotherapy. One of the ways that is quite simple, and therefore elegant, is to treat every psychological limitation like a phobia. A phobia can be thought of as the paradigm case of psychological limitation. A person who has a phobia made a decision, unconsciously, under stress, sometime earlier in their life in the face of overwhelming stimuli. They succeeded in doing something that humans often have a hard time doing. They succeeded in one-trial learning. Every time that set of stimuli comes up again later in their life, they make exactly the same response. It's a remarkable achievement. You change over the years, and despite external contextual changes, you are still able to maintain that stimulus-response arc.

The thing that makes phobias sort of interesting is the fact that the responses are so consistent. If a person says "I can't be assertive around my boss," they are essentially saying "Somewhere in my personal history I have an experience or a set of experiences of being assertive. I cannot get to that resource in the context of my boss." When a person responds with a phobic response to a snake, that's a similar situation. I know that at other times in their experience, in their personal history, they have been able to be quite calm and courageous. However, in the context of a snake, they can't get to that resource.