Newsgroups: sci.psychology
From: Lee Lady
Subject: Re: NLP
Summary: You have to find your own way of visualizing
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992
In article <17jvapINNbbd@smaug.West.Sun.COM> dab@ism.isc.com (David A. Butterfield) writes:
>
>I think that NLP does not rely on the ability to visualize, because
>you can apply NLP techniques using different senses than vision.
>However, most of the books and maybe practitioners seem to be strongly
>oriented toward the visual sense, probably because that's the sense
>they and most people find easiest to relate to.
>
>If you have a difficult time with visualization, try modifying the
>techniques to a different sense. If one step in the technique says,
>for example, to imagine a picture of an object and then imagine the
>image becoming smaller or more distant, try instead imagining the
>sound of that object and making the sound seem softer of more distant.
>If you're a kinesthetic type, try imagining the ``feel'' of the object
>(however it is you, personally, experience thinking about that object)
>and then imagine the feel of that object becoming smaller or more
>distant from you.

The videotape from NLP Comprehensive on the Swish Pattern shows Connirae Andreas doing an auditory swish. The subject is a mother whose problem is that a certain tone of voice used by her daughter drives her up the wall. (It is not obvious in the beginning that the tone of voice is the main stimulus that pushes the mother's buttons, and Connirae explores some visual images before they finally decide that the voice is the controlling factor.) I posted a review of this tape in sci.psychology last year.

That is unusual, though. It's just about an article of faith in NLP that the three representational systems -- visual, auditory, and ``kinesthetic'' -- are equals. But in practice, the visual is usually the crucial one for most techniques, even for subjects who ``can't visualize.''

And I think that eventually NLPers are going to realize that the ``kinesthetic'' category is essentially of a different nature from the auditory and visual ones and that there are too many diverse things that NLP clumps together under the ``kinesthetic'' rubric.

I thought that I'd got past the ``I can't visualize'' problem several years ago. But this summer, when I retook the NLP Master Practitionner training in Colorado, I realized during the first week that I was in real trouble. Looking over the syllabus, it seemed that most of the training was going to be about submodalities and even though I was very familiar with much of the material and had successfully used it with other people, I was discovering that I just couldn't do it for myself.

In a way, I could imagine seeing things. But when people would ask me ``Is your picture in color? Is it three dimensional?'' I just had no idea. My partners in the exercises tried giving me the stock answers: If I said ``Well, my picture is very dim'' they'd reply ``Brighten it up.'' If I said ``It's really blurry'' or ``It's not very clear'' they'd say ``Sharpen the focus.'' But this really missed the point, which was that I didn't actually see an image at all. And when people tried to get me to change the submodalities -- ``Make it brighter, make it larger'' -- I'd totally lose my tenuous grasp [note kinesthetic predicate!] on the picture.

This is not that uncommon. Here's a quote from Gerry Schmidt, who taught the last three days of my training. ``I remember when Connirae and I were first learning NLP. She turned to me and said 'I don't understand this submodality material at all. Can you see any of this stuff?' And I replied 'No, I can't see anything either.' But when we just went ahead and pretended to change the submodalities, somehow it seemed to make a difference.''

In article <1992Aug27.185854.28601@philabs.philips.com> ehf@philabs.philips.com (Eberhard Fisch) writes:
>
> ... unconscious level. In the books:
>Change Your Mind And Keep the Change and Heart of The Mind Steve and
>Connirae Andreas address this kind of problem by saying ``just pretend you are
>doing it". I tried this approach and it also didn't seem to work.

When people told me ``Just pretend,'' I didn't really know what that meant. My way of pretending was to close my eyes and say to myself ``I'm seeing a picture.'' That didn't work for me at all.

If I had myself as a client and were trying to teach me to visualize, I'd say something like ``Pretend there's a cat sitting on that chair there.'' (``Um, okay.'') ``What color is it?'' (``I don't know -- I don't really see the cat.'') ``Yeah, I know you don't see it, but pretend you do. What color is it?'' (``Um, it could be black and white.'') ``Good, it's a black and white cat. [Notice how the teacher changes the verb from ``could be'' to ``is."] Now, what kind of cat is it?'' Etc. etc. I don't guarantee that this approach will work for other people.

Another idea it to look at something and then close your eyes, but pretend your eyelids are invisible and you're still seeing it through your lids.

If you keep working at it, you'll find ways to improve your ability to visualize. I discovered last summer that part of my problem was that I often couldn't relate to the way people phrased the instructions. The instruction ``Make a picture of that person'' didn't work for me, because it would cause me to think of a flat picture in a picture frame. Essentially what happened was that I was trying to visualize a picture instead of visualizing the person. An instruction that worked better for me was ``Imagine you're seeing that person now'' or ``Remember what that person looks like.''

Or just ask ``What does that person look like?'' which will force me to visualize. (It's very difficult for me not to answer a question someone asks me.)

--

Imagination is greater than knowledge.    -- Einstein
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