Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

When you do change work, don't back away from testing it; push it. Events in the world are going to push it, so you may as well do it so you can find out right away. That way you can do something about it. Observing your client's nonverbal responses will give you much more information than the verbal answers to your questions. (Amy smells the cigarettes, and her facial expression shifts quickly.) Oops, there it is again; the smell of the cigarettes brought back the compulsion. You'll have to go back and do the swish again, and add in smell this time. In that first picture, when you see someone offer you a cigarette, you'll smell that cigarette smell. And in that second picture, you'll see yourself satisfied that you can smell cigarettes and not be compulsed. Go back and do it again that way.

This is called being thorough. A mathematician doesn't just get an answer and say, "OK, I'm done." He tests his answers carefully, because if he doesn't, other mathematicians will! That kind of rigor has always been missing from therapy and education. People try something and then do a two–year follow–up study to find out if it worked or not. If you test rigorously, you can find out what a technique works for and what it doesn't work for, and you can find out right away. And where you find out that it doesn't work, you need to try some other technology.

What I've taught you here is a simplified version of a more general swish pattern. Even so, some of you got lost and confused. Another way to be thorough is to swish in all systems to start with. But it's usually much more economical to just do it in the visual system and then test rigorously to find out what else you need to add. Often you don't need to add in anything. Either that person doesn't need it, or she will add it in on her own without realizing it.

Amy, what happens now when you smell a cigarette? Amy: It's different. It's hard for me to say how it's different. Now when I smell it I want to put it down, instead of smoking it.

Brains don't learn to get results; they learn to go in directions. Amy had learned one set of behaviors; "Would you like a cigarette" — "Yes" — light up and puff. Chairs can't learn to do that. It's quite an accomplishment to learn something like that so thoroughly that no one could influence it for years. She has just used that same ability to learn to go somewhere else.

When you start beginning to use your brain to get it to do what you want it to do, you have to rigorously set up the direction you want it to go, and you need to do it ahead of time. Disappointment is not the only thing that requires adequate planning. Everything else does, too. Without adequate planning you become compulsed to do things you don't want to do: to show yourself old memories and feel bad about them, to do things that destroy your body, to yell at people you love, to act like a mouse when you're furious. . . .

All those things can be changed, but not while you're in the situation. You can reprogram yourself later, or you can program yourself ahead of time. Brains aren't designed to get results; they learn to go in directions. If you know how the brain works, you can set your own directions. If you don't, then someone else will.

What I've just taught you is what I often do in a one–day or two–day seminar. The "standard" swish pattern is something that somebody can grab hold of and use, and it will work more often than not. But it doesn't demonstrate to me any competent understanding of what the underlying pattern is. If you give anyone a cookbook, he can bake a cake. But if you give a chef a cookbook, he'll come up with a better product. A really fine chef knows things about the chemistry of cooking that guide what he does and how he does it. He knows what the egg whites are doing in there; he know what their function is. To a chef, it isn't just a matter of throwing a bunch of stuff together and whipping it up. He knows that certain things make things gel into a certain consistency, certain things have to be added in a particular order, and certain other ingredients have to do with changing the flavor in one way or another.

The same thing is true when you begin to use the swish pattern. As a first step toward becoming a chef, I want you to try using the swish pattern again, but find out what happens if you change one element. Last time we used the submodalities of size, brightness and association/dissociation as the elements that change as one picture swishes to the other.

Two of those elements, size and brightness, are elements that change continuously over a range. Anything that can be changed gradually is called an analogue variable. Association/dissociation is what we call a digital variable, because it's either one or the other. You are either inside of an experience, or outside of it; you don't gradually go from one to the other. Association/dissociation will always be one element of the swish. The other two analogue elements can be any two elements that have a powerful effect for the person.

This time I want you to keep everything the same, except you'll use distance instead of size. The first picture will start out bright and close. The second picture will start out dark and far away, and then it will quickly come closer as it brightens, while the first picture recedes into the distance and darkens. This is a fairly small change, and to some of you it may not seem different at all, since size and closeness are strongly correlated. But it is a first step toward teaching you how to use the swish pattern in a much more general and flexible way. Take another fifteen minutes to do the swish with distance, instead of size.

Did using distance rather than size make a difference for some of you? You can use any submodality distinctions to do the swish, but it will only work well if the distinctions you use are subjectively powerful to the person you are working with. Brightness and size are powerful for most people, so the version I taught you first will work more often than not. Distance is another submodality that is important to many people, so I had you try that one next. But if size, brightness, and distance aren't important to the person, then you have to find out which submodalities are impactful, and design a swish using those.

A couple of years ago I saw three clients for a videotape session (see Appendix II). The first client I saw was a woman who was suffering from "anticipatory loss." I love the names they come up with to describe how people are messed up! What it boiled down to was that if she had arranged to meet someone who was close to her and that person was a half–hour late, she had what she called a panic attack. She lost her marbles and began to step on them. When I asked her what she would like to have from the session, this is what she said:

I have a problem with a fear that is almost disabling to me at certain times. When I have it, I sort of go into panic attacks. What I would like to do is distance myself, so that when I'm in the situation I wouldn't experience the fear to the degree that I have it, where I could control myself and make better decisions.

Since she talked about wanting to "distance" herself, she gave me a clear indication that distance was an important submodality for her. She also talked a lot about people who were "close to her" and "close relationships." Later when talking about what she did when someone was late she said, "I need to allow them some distance — I mean allow them some time." With this woman a swish using distance will be much more powerful than one using size. In fact, I went ahead and tried the standard swish using size to find out if it would work. It had very little impact. Then I used distance, and it worked perfectly.

The most important part of doing the swish in a really artistic way is to carefully gather the information you need to set it up appropriately. When someone talks about something being "bigger than life" or being "blown out of proportion," that's a pretty good indication that size is an important variable to use.

When somebody describes a limitation he wants to change, you need to be able to pay attention to how this particular problem works. I always keep in mind that anything that anybody has done is an achievement, no matter how futile or painful it may be. People aren't broken; they work perfectly! The important question is, "How do they work now?" so that you can help them work perfectly in a way that is more pleasant and useful.