Most people don't really ask multiple personalities any questions. But I really questioned the ones that I've been around, to find out how they functioned. The experience of being multiple for one may be very different than it is for another.

One of the women that I worked with described every single one of her parts as part of the same process. She was really, really visual; she had a picture of them all. There was a couch backstage, in the back of her mind, and all these women sat back there on the couch doing their nails and chatting. Every once in a while, one of them would hop up and walk through the curtains. When it walked through, it would step into her body. Some of them knew about what the other ones did, because they would go and peek out through the curtains. I hypnotized her and went backstage with her and did the visual squash technique and put them all together.

That visual squash method is a very powerful way of integrating sequential incongruities by making them simultaneous in a dissociated state. If you have a sequential incongruity, you can never represent both parts simultaneously in any system other than the visual, as far as I can tell. It takes a very complex auditory representation to have two voices going on at the same time—as opposed to alternating—and people can't pull it off kinesthetically. But you can take sequential incongruities and make them simultaneous by visual/kinesthetic dissociation, and then integrate them by pulling the hands together, and then get the integration in the other two systems.

I don't understand the significance of moving the arms when you do the visual squash, but if you do it without the arms it doesn't work. And I have no idea why. I've tried it both ways; if people don't actually hold out their hands in front of them like this and pull the images together, it doesn't work. People don't have to hold out their hands to get cured of phobias, but apparently with multiple personalities they have to. That doesn't make any sense to me logically, but it happens to be the case. If I were to make a generalization, I would make the reverse one. But I have found out that's the case in experience.

We are a lot more willing to experiment against our intuitions than most people. When most people have a strong intuition, they'll follow it. A lot of times when we have a strong intuition, we'll violate it to find out what will happen—especially when we have clients that we have ongoing contact with, and can be sure of being able to deal with the consequences. That kind of experimentation has resulted in many useful patterns and discoveries.

One woman had been a homosexual for years, and had fallen in love with a man. She was really stuck in this dilemma. A very strong part of her now wanted to become heterosexual. There was another part of her that was afraid it was going to have to die. She was going through the visual squash with these two parts. She was trying to pull her hands together, and she was wailing "I can't do it! I can't do it! I can't do it like that!" Richard and I were standing on either side of her. We looked at each other, and then we each grabbed one hand and pushed them together suddenly. The changes that occurred in that woman were fantastic!

You can create change without being elegant; I think people do it all the time. However, the ramifications of doing something like that are not predictable, and predictability is something that we have always tried to develop. We just went blammo, pow! and rammed it in. She did change; she got what she wanted, and it's lasted a long time; I'm sure of that because I still know that woman. However, I don't know what the side effects were. She isn't totally wonderful in many areas of her life, and I don't know how much of that is a consequence of what we did. She's certainly better off than she was. And at the time we really wanted to know what would happen.

When you start including more sophisticated ingredients in your work and tinkering with them carefully, then you get better, more elegant changes. You can also predict what will happen much more precisely. Sometimes you get much more pervasive change, too, which I think is very important. If you can do just one little tiny thing and get the outcome that you want, it will also generalize and get all the other outcomes that are really needed but haven't been mentioned. The less you do in the more appropriate place, the more generalization to other contents and contexts will occur naturally. That's one reason why we stress elegance so much: "Be precise, if you're doing therapy."

If you're just doing utilization skills it's a very different game. Business people are usually only interested in utilizing strategies. If you are doing sales training, then all you need to know is what strategies you want your salespeople to have, and how to install them. If the trainer for an organization is a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, then he says "OK, we're going to have this person be a salesperson and they're going to do this, and in order to do that, you have to have these three strategies." Then he can stick them in and block them off so that nothing else gets in their way. Those strategies don't have to generalize anywhere else in the person's life. It's not necessary for that business outcome. It might be desirable, but it's not necessary.

If somebody's personal life is really interrupting their business functioning, you can put a barrier around it to keep those strategies separate. There are a lot of different kinds of outcomes you're going to have as a business person, but they're fairly limited.

As a lawyer, for example, you're mostly just utilizing strategies; you're not concerned with installing anything. You're only concerned with using a strategy to get a specific outcome: to make a witness look like a jerk, or to get your client to trust you, or something like that.