The Swish Pattern

1. The swish pattern is a rapid way to change any troublesome habit or other unwanted response, so it has a very wide range of applications. The swish was developed by Richard Bandler in the early 1980’s, and was first published in Using Your Brain for a Change (chapter 9) in 1985, over 30 years ago.

What’s next?

Gestalt was a part of the zeitgeist of the 1960’s that advocated paying attention in the here and now, which has been part of a number of very old spiritual traditions, and has been reincarnated recently in a secular form as “mindfulness.”

We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.

Virginia Satir (1916 - 1988) was an American author and psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations. She is widely regarded as the "Mother of Family Therapy". She is also known for creating the Virginia Satir Change Process Model, a psychological model (how change impacts organizations) which was developed through clinical studies.

“Life is not what it's supposed to be. It is what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.”

Virginia came from a farming family with an alcoholic father.

When she was five years old, Satir suffered from appendicitis. Her mother, a devout Christian Scientist, refused to take her to a doctor. By the time Satir's father decided to overrule his wife, the young girl's appendix had ruptured. Doctors were able to save her life, but Satir was forced to stay in the hospital for several months.

A curious child, Satir taught herself to read by age three, and by nine had read all of the books in the library of her small one-room school.

When she was six, she became very observant of human interactions when she developed deafness for two years following mastoiditis. She noticed that people appeared to communicate in very different ways from each other and decided then that she was going to be a detective of adults when she grew up. Unable to hear what they were saying, she learned to detect when they were blaming, placating, doing “super reasonable” (or computer), or distracting. She later explained that "I didn't quite know what I would look for, but I realized a lot went on in families that didn't meet the eye."

"The family is a microcosm. By knowing how to heal the family, I know how to heal the world."

Once she was an adult, she developed these defensive Communication Stances that she then recognized as defending low self-esteem. She taught people how to communicate congruently (sincerely but with consideration for the other's feelings); in other words, to be the same on the outside as they were on the inside and to be fully in touch with their whole Self.

When congruent, one can freely express one's own thoughts, feelings and opinions, and also acknowledge the thoughts, feelings and opinions of the other, and acknowledge the context of the relationship. She also taught that being congruent would raise self-esteem.

Virginia was internationally recognized for her creativity in the practice of family therapy. Based on conviction that people are capable of continued growth, change and new understanding, her goal was to improve relationships and communication within the family unit.

“Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible - the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family”

She was one of the three sources of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. These two videotaped her, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, the famous hypnotherapist. Richard Bandler and John Grinder discovered that these three magical therapists were using non-verbal cues and communication at a non-verbal level that can, in fact, be taught. NLP can be a potent tool for change, but asked what she thought of it, she said, “They have the mind of the matter, but not the heart of it.”

“We can learn something new anytime we believe we can”

Virginia Satir developed what she called "survival stances" that demonstrated how problems were dealt with. These four are:
• blaming,
• placating,
• being irrelevant and
• being super-reasonable.
These four stances were, she felt, developed throughout one's life; developed for survival which were used to protect themselves from perceived and presumed, verbal and nonverbal threats.
The four stances were used in therapy sessions as tools to determine her clients' issues and what the best avenue of productive therapy was needed. In addition, the therapy techniques were altered accordingly to help the client change their survival stances. By providing the client knowledge, awareness, experience and manifestation the therapies were enhanced and provided a positive outcome for the patient's.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

There are five points of philosophy that drove her work; she referred to them as the "Five Freedoms" which are as follows:
• The freedom to see and hear what is in the present instead of what was, should be or will be
• The freedom to say what one thinks and feels rather than what one should
• The freedom to feel what one feels rather than what one ought
• The freedom to ask for what one wants rather than waiting for permission
• The freedom to take risk's on one's own behalf rather than choosing to "rocking the boat"

“If I can have the same from you then we can truly meet and enrich each other.”

One of Satir's most novel ideas at the time, was the "presenting issue" or surface problem – that the presenting issue itself was seldom the real problem; rather, how people coped with the issue created the problem." Satir also offered insights into the particular problems that low self-esteem could cause in relationships.

Long interested in the idea of networking, Satir founded two groups to help individuals find mental health workers or other people who were suffering from similar issues to their own. In 1970, she organized Beautiful People, which later became known as the International Human Learning Resources Network. In 1977 she founded the Avanta Network.

Two years later, Satir was appointed to the Steering Committee of the International Family Therapy Association and became a member of the Advisory Board for the National Council for Self-Esteem.

“Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.”

Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.

Some one mentioned hypnosis a while ago and seemed a little apprehensive. That’s not a good idea to do around a hypnotist so today I’ll talk a little bit about hypnosis.

Hypnosis is self hypnosis. It’s a relaxation state. You’re not forced, you don’t spill you guts and give out private information and you can’t be programmed to rob a bank. Unless you already do that. It’s also the power of suggestion working on the subconscious.

Stage hypnosis is different. People volunteer and they do what they’d do normally anyway.
I became interested in the 80‘s I had some pretty good tapes. Around that time NLP neuro linguistic programming was introduced. Developed by Bandler and Grinder it modeled the syntax of hypnosis methods of 3 hypnotherapists (Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls).

Milton Erickson could hypnotize someone with 2 words. “That’s right”. “That’s right”. He could also use hand gestures and body language to get someone under.

He didn’t necessarily use hypnosis. He sent one alcoholic to a nursery and told him to look at cactus plants for 3 hours. After 2 hours he got the message, went home and never drank again. A cactus plant can survive for days without water.

Hypnosis was first called mesmerism. And it was because of my interest in ancient history that I never watched the DVD the SECRET. Too hokey. But I did buy the book . The authors in the appendix intrigued me because I like to know the originator of something.

Of the 5 from the early 1900’s 3 were in it for the money. One Charles Hannel sold a course for $1500, that’s a first class ticket on the Titanic. Wallace Wattles may not have ever made any money. But two were legit. And they were part of the then self help movement called New Thought, Mental science or Mental Healing.

The father of that movement was Phineas P. Quimby . Inventor, clockmaker, daguerreotypist (the daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process) and mesmerist.

In 1840 he saw a demonstration and decided to try it. It took 10 minutes to succeed , then he didn’t know to do next so he shook his friend out of it and bought a book. After that he found a 15 year old assistant who was a great subject and they toured New England doing demonstrations for 10 years.

From his work in mesmerism Quimby discovered the power of the mind, the power of suggestion and the power of one’ s belief system and the ego. This was all around 50 years before Freud.

Quimby had a great line , he said the “The more outrageous the notion the mind will go to extremes to prove it”.

He lived until 1865 healing 16000 people by changing their beliefs.

Thomas Troward warned of the misuse of power of suggestion in 1907, shop keepers were trained to prey on unsuspecting customers to sell what they didn’t really want and there were dubious ads with wild claims running in the newspapers.

Today we can ad the internet and infomercials to the list.

Quimby’s outrageous notion is still applicable today. The are groups that believe there’s a planetary alignment and the Mayan calendar running out in 2012 so the world will end. NASA hasn’t confirmed any alignment and the Mayan calendar starts a new cycle in 2012, the same as it does every 395 years.

Egypt has similar wild claims.

Power of Suggestion may also apply to theReconnection as the eyes flutter there in a similar manner to hypnosis. As Quimby said “The More Outrageous the notion the mind will go to extremes to prove it”.


One famous hoax was perpetuated before the American Spanish war by a newspaper man in Chicago. People still believe it today. Penn and Teller staged it years ago. Although a retraction was printed it went unnoticed and the legend still survives.

Quimby said there was nothing or no one that could affect you unless you let it.

Your own beliefs use the power of suggestion on you and no one else. You alone.

Your own beliefs, operating on your subconscious.

As Byron Katie has said: “Our concepts are based on a life time of uninvestigated beliefs”.

So change your mind and you change your life.

Be yourself.

Everyone else is taken.
From a speech I gave July 7th 2011

NLP

Richard Bandler (1950- ) is an American author and trainer in the fields of alternative psychology and of self-help. He is best known as the co-inventor (with John Grinder) of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a collection of concepts and techniques intended to understand and change human behavior-patterns[1]. He also developed other systems known as Design Human Engineering (DHE) and Neuro Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR).

John Grinder Ph.D. (1940 - ) is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. A graduate of the University of San Francisco with a degree in psychology from the early 1960s he returned to college in the late 60’s, after a stint in the military, to study linguistics and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1971. His dissertation, titled “On Deletion Phenomena in English”, was published by Mouton in 1976.

In the early 1970s, Grinder worked in George A. Miller's laboratory at Rockefeller University. After receiving his Ph.D., Grinder took a full-time position as an assistant professor in the linguistics faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He engaged in undergraduate and graduate teaching, and research. His research focused on Noam Chomsky's theories of transformational grammar specializing in syntax and deletion phenomena. He published several research papers with Paul Postal on the syntactical structures relating to "missing antecedents" or missing parasitic gaps for the pronoun. They argued that the syntactic structure of a deleted verb phrase (VP) is complete. Postal and Grinde's doctoral adviser at UCSC, Edward Klima, [2] was involved in the early development of generative semantics.

Grinder co-authored, with Suzette Elgin, a linguistics text book titled “A Guide to Transformational Grammar: History, Theory, Practice”.

In 1972 (during Grinder's stint at UCSC) Bandler, an undergraduate student of psychology, approached him for assistance in modeling Gestalt therapy. Bandler had spent much time recording and editing recordings of Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt therapy) and had learned Gestalt therapy implicitly. John Grinder, then a professor at the University, told Bandler that he could explain almost all of the questions and comments Bandler made using transformational grammar, the topic in linguistics that Grinder specialized in.

Starting with Fritz Perls, followed by a leading figure in family therapy Virginia Satir, and later the leading figure in hypnosis in psychiatry Milton Erickson, Grinder and Bandler modeled the various cognitive behavioral patterns of these therapists. This work formed the basis of the methodology that became the foundation of neuro-linguistic programming[1]. They developed a model for therapy and called it the meta-model.[3]

They cited Noam Chomsky's transformational syntax, which was John Grinder's linguistics specialization, and ideas about human modeling from the work of Alfred Korzybski as being influential in their thinking. Of particular interest was Korzybski's critique of cause-effect rationale and his notion that "the map is not the territory" which also featured in Gregory Bateson[4]'s writing.

"Modeling" in NLP is the process of adopting the behaviors, language, strategies and beliefs of another in order to build a “model” of what they do. The “model” is then reduced to a pattern that can be taught to others.

[1] "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" denotes the belief in a connection between neurological processes ("neuro"), language ("linguistic") and behavioral patterns that have been learned through experience ("programming") and can be organized to achieve specific goals in life.
Basically, it takes the way in which somebody learns something and gives it to somebody else

[2] Edward S. Klima (1931–2008) was an eminent linguist who specialized in the study of sign languages. Klima's work was heavily influenced by Noam Chomsky's then-revolutionary theory of the biological basis of linguistics, and applied that analysis to sign languages.

[3] The meta-model is a practical communications model used to specify information in a speaker's language. The meta model consists of categories of questions or heuristics which seek to challenge linguistic distortion, clarify generalization and recover deleted information which occurs in a speaker's language.
Typically, questions may be in the form of "What X, specifically?", "How specifically?", "According to whom?" and "How do you know that?".

[4] Gregory Bateson (1904 –1980) was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields.

Leslie LeBeau (formerly Leslie Cameron-Bandler) is an author and the co-developer of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). She was a part of the Grinder/Bandler research group.

Judith DeLozier is a trainer and author in Neuro-linguistic programming. Her interests are in culture, anthropology and Gregory Bateson's epistemology. A member of John Grinder and Richard Bandler's original group of students, she continues to contribute extensively to the development of NLP models and processes.

Robert Dilts has been a developer, author, trainer and consultant in the field of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).