Steve Lankton Interviewed by Judy Pearson
Everything is metaphor and in a certain sense everything is a half-truth...People...hold onto certain half-truths and defend them "at all costs' even though they bring pain and limit choice...People are burdened or blessed with...the opportunity to create...Man invents the existence of "time," "space," and "consciousness" and even "existence" itself and then projects his reminders of it onto the situation. He gives it meaning and convinces himself that it is, to some degree, not his creation at all. He is an actor on a stage that he created....There is no way to tell if the person prefers the part(s) that he plays unless he has a choice to change any and every part as easily as possible. And who is to say what is possible and what is not? (Practical Magic, p. 217)
Practical Magic Revisited: An Interview with Steve Lankton, M.S.W.
By Judith E. Pearson, Ph.D.
Steve Lankton's Practical Magic: A Translation of Basic Neuro-Linguistic Programming into Clinical Psychotherapy (Crown House, 2003, Meta Publications, 1980), was recently released in a second printing. Practical Magic describes how to integrate NLP into other therapeutic approaches, explaining the value and uses of representational systems, the Meta Model, pacing, anchoring, dissociation, reframing, strategy operations, metaphor and hypnosis.
For over twenty years, Steve Lankton has remained an influential force in NLP, family therapy, brief therapy, and clinical hypnosis. He is an internationally recognized therapist and trainer whose publications include eighteen books (the best known is The Answer Within with former wife, Carol) and over 50 professional papers and book chapters. He has a private practice in Phoenix, Arizona and teaches worldwide in university psychology departments, state associations, and private training institutions.
Steve graciously agreed to this interview regarding his life's work. The topics covered a wide territory: NLP, comparative models of psychotherapy, Milton Erickson, metaphor, hypnosis, mental health and magic. In the tradition of Milton Erickson, Steve answered many questions with metaphors and analogies, which made for an entertaining conversation.
Judy: Steve, why a new printing of Practical Magic?
Steve: I wrote Practical Magic in 1977 and it was the first time that many NLP concepts were put into print. I was very excited when I wrote it. I was saying, "Look, here is a burgeoning framework that promises to polish up and to improve a number of things in a very pragmatic fashion." It still contains that excitement and information and it's not removed, as many books are today, from the original principals of NLP.
Judy: What feedback have you received?
Steve: People love the book. People in all sectors read it-therapy, education, and the corporate sector---and find a way to apply it. For many people, it was their first exposure to NLP in the late 70s and early 80s.
There were only a few of us doing training at the time---Bandler and Grinder, David Gordon, Bob Dilts, and myself. There were a couple of others on the West Coast and in the Midwest. I hadn't met my friend Steve Gilligan at that time, but he was strongly connected. There were about eight of us developing this information and promoting it.
The book had that excitement, virginity, if you will, of NLP when it still had the impetus of modeling, simulating, and replicating, instead of what it later became a franchising, robot training activity. Third and fourth generation practitioners are losing that connection. Today you seem to be able to (even) get New Age NLP and spirit guides. People have taken it a long way from what its valuable contribution really is.
Judy: Your book shows how to adapt NLP to various models of psychotherapy. Can you elaborate?
Steve: Process has always been my interest, regardless of my theoretical training. I was well-trained as a therapist, prior to bringing Grinder to Michigan for the first time. I was published in bioenergetics. I studied Gestalt therapy for years. I was certified in Transactional Analysis (which is no small matter). With a background in Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, body therapies, transpersonal psychology, and many of those other therapies that existed in the 70s-to me what they had to offer wasn't content so much as process. I was increasingly attracted to each new approach that offered a more positive view of the human experience.
If you look at Transactional Analysis, well, there's a very positive view of the human experience. However, to buy the whole package, unfortunately, is to postulate a not-Ok Child ego state! It's better than postulating the rarified concepts of psychoanalytic theory, but not much of an improvement.
Gestalt process had to do with recognizing sequential incongruity in the person, and making it simultaneous incongruity, and then setting up a previously non-existent method for sharing data between those parts. Gestalt Therapy doesn't postulate anything negative about the human experience - although there are these ugly little impasses. Perls would work with you, and you are moving along, until Fritz didn't know where to go next. Then he'd say, "You have an impasse." Well, excuse me, Fritz, but we have an impasse! How come it's me again? He takes himself out of the process. So I recognized that as a negative aspect of Gestalt. Gestalt, as psychoanalysis, is steeped in terms of conflict.
If we have a theory that postulates things in terms of warfare, attack, aggression, repression, conflict, and defense, then we will never eliminate warfare as our metaphor of the human personal experience. As we move through history we have always explained our models with current technology. So we have the hydraulic model with psychoanalysis, with warfare mixed in. Then Perls brought a cybernetics piece into it. Then Transactional Analysis comes in with the metaphor of family communication. It was so organic that everyone could relate to it.
Then as we were developing this material that later became NLP, once again, we moved forward with a metaphor from modern experience, which is computer programming. I embraced it because it removed one more piece of negativity from the human experience. There was no moralizing. If you do this, this will happen. If you do that, that will happen. You choose which one you want. How much more beautiful and elegant can you get?
Judy: You were in that original group of people that studied with Milton Erickson in Phoenix. How did you meet him?
Steve: I met Erickson through Gregory Bateson. In 1974, I had lunch with Bateson and we talked about his work in double-bind theory. I said it seemed to me that when I work with people in therapy, they exhibit a resistance to change that is absolutely the same as people who are under the post-hypnotic suggestion to fail to notice XYZ. For example, the perfectly silly cliché of a woman who says "I can't find anyone to date. There are no nice and trustworthy men in the world." In my case, I'm sitting there listening to this, and I'm thinking, "Excuse me! Hello! Here's a nice and trustworthy man right here in front of you!" Why in the world, do they say there are no nice and trustworthy men in the world, when it's so weird that they are actually talking to one, and telling him their innermost secrets, while denying that there is anyone they can trust?
This happens when a person walks over to a bookshelf, under the post-hypnotic suggestion that they won't find any red books on the shelf. Then the therapist insists that there are some red books there, and the client insists there aren't any red books there. I said to Bateson, "It seems that we could take Eric Berne's or R.D. Laing's idea that children have been inadvertently hypnotized by their parents and explore it. We could consider therapy a way to de-hypnotize them." I asked Gregory if he looked at it that way.
Author's note: Throughout the next section of this interview, Steve did engaging impersonations of Bateson and Erickson, which kept me chuckling most of the time.
In his very thick British accent, he told me to "speak to Milton Erickson." I didn't even know Erickson was still alive! I was under the impression Erickson had died. I'd read one of Jay Haley's books about Erickson in high school. Haley described Erickson as in the autumn of his years. I thought, like any high school kid, that anyone in the autumn of his years would be dead. I said to Bateson, "I wish I'd met Erickson before he died."
Bateson darn near had a heart attack at that! "Oh no, he's quite alive and living in Phoenix," he said. "Go see him." So I called Erickson on the phone and told him I was familiar with his work and I was doing training programs in Michigan, and I'd like to bring him in to speak to my training group. I didn't know who I was talking to. He was in a wheelchair and not able to travel. He explained that to me, but I couldn't quite understand him.
Erickson said, "I'm crippled and in a wheelchair. You'll have to come see me."
"We have a really bad phone connection. I can't hear you very well."
"We don't have a bad connection. I'm crippled and my damn lips are paralyzed. Write a letter suggesting some dates."
"Write a letter suggesting some dates?"
"Yes." And he hung up. There were no social amenities like hello, goodbye, "here's my address," or anything like that. So that was my introduction to Erickson and I went to see him.
I worked in Family Services of Michigan at the time. Thank God for their policy that allowed four weeks of paid vacation. I also had a conference allowance. So I had a huge amount of time to take off work. My parents lived in Phoenix, and of course Dr. Erickson lived in Phoenix.
Like clockwork, every three months I would go see Erickson for some portion of one of his trainings. I would stay with my parents, use their car, eat their food, and visit Erickson all day long, and it cost me nothing and I got paid for it (paid vacations)!
Judy: What about Erickson's influence on you and your work?
Steve: At first, I didn't understand what he was doing. I was mortified. Look, it took me six years to get through undergraduate school because I switched majors four times---engineering, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and history. When I graduated, I was five credits short of a major in mathematics and a couple of semesters short of a major in chemistry. I was used to taking things apart, figuring them out, and putting them back together. It was a joke in my family that if you bought me a toy, I would have disassembled it before getting it home, and possibly reassembled it and have no further interest in it, once I figured out how it worked.
So, my approach to psychotherapy was like that-looking at theoretical patterns of change to figure out how they work. It isn't good to "toot my own horn," but, truthfully, when I went to see Erickson, I knew most existing major and minor theories of therapy and change, and I knew them well, and I still couldn't figure out what he was doing! It just irked me! I knew behavior modification, existential therapy, scream therapy, body therapy, psychoanalysis, TA, object relations, feeling therapy, psychosynthesis, and psychodrama, etc., and I can't explain a damn thing he's doing! I'd read Freud, Reich, Adler, Finechel, Bettleheim, May, Perlman, Progoff, Goffman, Horny, Sullivan, Janof, Berne, Goulding, Kopp, Cartright and Zander, Arieti, Whittaker, Haley, Borzameni-Nagi, Moreno, and Perls, and so on, and anyone you want to name; and Erickon wasn't doing that! I couldn't explain it!
That pushed my button. If I can't figure it out, you'll get me on the case. I had to dissect it. I went back again and again. I just couldn't figure out how he pulled off this magic! It took me three years before I finally began to get the hang of it.
Judy: What did you learn?
Steve: I sat beside him - to his far right. His office was small. You come in the front door, and most people walked around the desk and sat in the back by the bookshelves. If you waited long enough, you could sit pretty close beside him, on his right. So I made sure I came in late enough to sit there. That way, I could watch the group much the same way Erickson was watching it. I would make small motor movements that were the same as Erickson's and imagine saying and doing what Erickson was saying and doing. Of course, I was in trance much of the time, as were most of the people there.
I realized I could move and continue to be in trance. Then I pretended that I was talking and moving as he was, and noticing what he was noticing. If someone uncrossed his legs and the story changed, I realized, "Oh my gosh! The story was about that person!"
There was a woman, for example, who uncrossed her legs, and Erickson changed his story midstream. And I thought, "Oh, his story is about this woman!" He talked about someone who broke up with her boyfriend. Then Erickson went on to say that she liked to go to parties. "And the man liked to stay home and ...eat Finnish pastry." Not Danish pastry or French pastry. I'd never heard of Finnish pastry. At that point, she closed her eyes and went into trance and didn't move for a long time.
So later, out in the parking lot I stopped her. I said, "Apparently you got Dr. Erickson talking to you at one point there. Did you notice?" She said, "Yeah. I just broke up with my boyfriend. He went back to Finland." Here I'm thinking-"Oh my God! I'm okay with she broke up with her boyfriend, and she likes to go to parties. But what I can't figure out is why he said Finnish pastry!" It just boggles the mind!
I could sometimes predict some things he'd say, but he'd still be way ahead of me. I continued to see Erickson until a couple of months before he died. By that time, I could replicate a lot of what he did but I sometimes didn't know why for a few years. It took me a couple of more years to put my own voice to it, without having to talk like Erickson.
Judy: Talk about metaphors in therapy.
Steve: What I like about metaphor is rudimentary to language in general. All language is about experience. All language is metaphor. I don't know why so many people don't know this. They think they have the truth by the tail, but really, they have a metaphor by the tail. Scientific theories are metaphors and religious concepts are metaphors. It's odd to me that this is not known at the household level.
Who in their right mind cannot notice this about science? Once it was true that everything was made of air, water, fire, and composed of sanguine, phlegm, and so on properties. Then we knew the truth that atoms were the building blocks. Then we are absolutely sure that the Bohr atom theory was right. Then we got the news that electrons aren't really anywhere. Then we got the truth that subatomic particles have component bits of quarks-that was the truth. Oops, Sorry! Now we must forget about that to get our arms around dark matter and dark energy - apparently they create the quarks and tachyons (and they go faster than the speed of light!) which create the electrons and protons. But a little while ago that wasn't true - the speed of light was constant. But not only don't tachyons respect this truth, we've stopped light in laboratories, too - so its speed really isn't all that constant. Hello! We honestly are never going to have the truth. We only have metaphors that are convenient.
Now look at psychotherapy. It used to be that demons possessed the person. Then it was neurotic complexes. Well, it wasn't that. Actually it's gestalts that don't break down, or child ego states that exhibit spontaneous emergence, or it's whatever. None of these are true. We all change as our language evolves. So if they are all metaphors, and we use them because they are convenient, then it seems that the logical question ought to be "convenient for what?"
You could say we have a toolbox with thousands of metaphors in it---thousands of ways of describing experience, and the outcome we get depends on the metaphor we use. If I follow psychoanalysis, then all I'm going to get is old and a lot of understanding about why I really can't change. With Transactional Analysis, I have a lot of options for stopping games, and changing the roles I play. Unfortunately, I have some extra baggage there in the not-okay adaptive Child. The point is am I happy? Have I satisfied my spiritual development, my interpersonal relationships, my financial needs, my responsibilities to my brothers and sisters on this planet by following those metaphors? If not, let's come up with some other metaphors, because metaphors are not true. They are just convenient, or not.
Of course I could get philosophical and say "Well, the truth is that there is no truth, and the truth is that all metaphor is jut a temporary description and then that is the truth.
John Lilly actually said this. He is a psychiatrist on par with Tim Leary in his contribution to human experience or whatever. Lilly studied dolphins and tried to understand inter-species communication. Then he began doing inner space research, using various drugs like LSD. He tried to chronicle what he was doing and be helpful about it in a way that was interesting. And when I met him he was the most incongruent person I have ever met! His first book was Programming and Meta-Programming the Human Bio-Computer. This was back in the 60s. He did a lot of sensory deprivation tank experiments back then and I did too, so I found his rendering of things very helpful. He said, to paraphrase, that "what we believe is either true or become true within certain limits that are to be experientially transcended." That's such a perfect explanation!
Whatever you hold as true is either true or will become true and then there will be certain limits on that, which will be transcended by your experience. It's such a wise comment. It says that whatever your metaphor now is, it will change with experience.
Judy: How do you work with those difficult clients who almost always do the opposite of what a therapist asks or recommends? You wrote about this in Practical Magic.
Steve: You want to recognize the problem solving skill that this person is using to get through life with. You have a person who is very good at disaffiliating in order to solve problems. So you word your interventions to honor that skill, and prescribe more of it. You say something like, "You are a self-made person. No one has ever helped you. You solve your own problems. It's best that you distance yourself from of all the bozos in your life as fast as you can. And I may be one of them. I probably don't have anything to offer you." Now at that point they may disagree and try to convince you that you do have something to offer. "Maybe, but I really doubt it, but time will tell. I doubt that you can think of one thing I've said that was helpful. You come back here next week and when I ask you, you won't be able to think of one thing that was helpful. That's because you are the kind of person that does this kind of thing by himself."
Now, I'm not talking about manipulating and being clever, I'm saying it from the standpoint of honoring this person's problem solving technique. You can say, "You are the kind of person who can hear someone say something and immediately decide what's wrong with it-why it doesn't apply. That's brilliant! I want you to do that with everything I say, because I don't know much about you and I doubt that I'm even being helpful. You aren't even a good psychotherapy candidate."
"What do you mean I'm not a good psychotherapy candidate?"
"Don't ask me to explain. You wouldn't understand."
"I can understand! Tell me."
"Well, okay, a good psychotherapy candidate is someone who can take some ambiguity and apply to himself. But you aren't like that."
"Tell me exactly what to do."
"When I tell you, you'll say, 'I tried that and it didn't work.' And that's fine. That's a great way to solve problems. It's just not a good way to learn in psychotherapy. You are not a good candidate. You can't use ambiguity to learn."
"Sure I can. I can use ambiguity to learn."
"Well, can you give me an example?"
"Sure, I'm a physics teacher. I have to think about what my students are saying-it's ambiguous. I have to present it in a way they can learn it. "
"Well, I guess that's a good example. But basically I just don't think you are a psychotherapy candidate. But I guess I'm not always right. Tell you what, let me give you some ambiguous assignments and you come back next week and tell me what you learned and I'll be convinced."
This is actually a dialog I had with a client who was a physics instructor. I gave him several activities to do. One was to take a glass of water, fill it with colored marbles, so he'd be sure not to swallow them, and with every meal, he was to drink his water with marbles in it, and he was to wonder what I might have expected him to learn. He came back the next week and he had written it all down. He said, "I noticed it was very frustrating. As my thirst got greater, my frustration increased. I think you wanted me to learn how frustrating things were for my wife." The thirstier she was for affection, the more frustrated she would become.
I could have told him that, and he would have disagreed. But because I respected the fact that he learned on his own, and gave him assignments, he could learn that way. I also respected the fact that he would disagree with me and argue with me that he could learn from assignments, and he was gung-ho to convince me that he could. It was amazing, because he did so much learning. If he had not done the assignment, I would have said, "You should come up with the assignments, instead of me, because my assignments are too stupid."
Judy: What is your definition of a mentally healthy person?
Steve: The definition of intelligence works for me here. If you study animal intelligence, you ask, "Does this animal demonstrate new behavior in a novel situation?" When you come down to it, every second is a novel environment. If you want a definition of healthy, then the smaller chunks of time people take to be real, and the more they demonstrate spontaneity, in those smaller chunks of time, the healthier they are. If I see the whole world as always the same, and I am anxious or depressed all the time, that's not healthy. If I have that experience only when watching a Rambo movie, then I'm healthier. If I chunk it down smaller, so that I don't even have it all the way through the movie, then I am healthier still. You can make those chunks smaller and smaller so that every moment is a novel moment and you want to make the most of it. To the degree that we chop our "here and nows" down to smaller "here and nows," and act in a spontaneous manner in each, the healthier we are.
Judy: In Practical Magic you say that hypnosis happens in all therapies, whether it is formally called hypnosis or not. What is your definition of hypnosis?
Steve: In writing Practical Magic, I watched a number of films with the help of my University of Michigan professor, Dr. Frank Maple, who helped me get my hands on a ton of material that I otherwise would not have had access to---tapes of Virginia Satir and Carl Whitaker, for example. Even given the classical definition of trance phenomena, we could see it in every one of these therapies. We saw hallucinations and post-hypnotic suggestions-all natural and normal definitions of trance. You can read some sections of those tapes in the book.
The thing about hypnosis that should be most obvious is that when you concentrate long enough on internal experience, by default (given the way the body operates), you will, to some degree, dissociate, have amnesia, body distortion and catalepsy, positive and negative hallucinations, and so on. Potentially, everybody should be able to demonstrate most all phenomena. But practically speaking, that is not the case. Some people will be better at one phenomenon than other ones. For most people it's a normal dimension of reality.
Judy: Any advice for practitioners readers who want bring more "magic" into psychotherapy?
Steve: Wisdom is a good idea. Wisdom will happen by accident over time to many people. I do know from experience that age doesn't necessarily help. When you are supervising young therapists, you notice that they are so eager to do something useful that they are not useful. On the other hand, if they don't want to be useful, that's not going to work either. The major aspect of being appropriate is to use the client's energy.
It's like Aikido, which is not about violence. It's about removing the violence from the transaction. When the other person, say, punches at you, you move instantly at the same speed and you accept what they have given you. That's what Dr. Erickson said about utilization. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, said, "When someone attacks you, you are happy, and you love your opponent for the energy they are giving you." Erickson said, " When someone offers you some resistance, heap it up and use it. Be glad they have given it to you."
Morihei Ueshiba said, "Replace the attacker in space and see the attacker in the attacker's eyes." Erickson said, "Put one foot in the client's world. Keep one foot in your own world. Speak the client's experiential language." Same thing. Accept the attack; see the presentation through the other person's eyes. Then, use what you are given. Ueshiba says about Aikido, "Find out what's missing in the attacker and apply it as soon as possible." That sounds more like psychotherapy than about martial arts. Erickson said, "The cure is being able to associate to the needed resources in the context in which they are needed."
In the martial art of Aikido, the person punches at you, and as you move to replace him in space, you guide the punch slightly past you, so that they lose balance and fall down (as they are thrown, basically). Erickson said, "I take a gambit. I say something acceptable to them, that is not quite an answer, and then I modify it and I add something new. I leave him teetering on the edge of expectancy. If I told them the answer right away they wouldn't follow my advice, but by the time I get to it, they are eager to embrace it."
Wisdom is not about being so clever that you solve everything. It is about being so clever that you blend with client's thinking and introduce some ambiguity and then observe what they make of it. If it's not helpful, then you reframe it and reiterate the process, until you get some result that is useful.
This article originally appeared in Anchor Point magazine.
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To purchase Practical Magic and other books by Steve Lankton, visit his web site at www.lankton.com.
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Judith E. Pearson, Ph.D., is a Licensed Professional Counselor practicing in Springfield, Virginia. She is a certified NLP Trainer and an Associate Trainer with the American Hypnosis Training Academy, in Silver Spring, Maryland, as well as Executive Director for the National Board of Certified Clinical Hypnotherapists. Contact her via her web site at www.engagethepower.com.
