|
On NLP Style Hypnotic Loops
What's a hypnotic loop?
Well the easiest way to think of it is a sub story or a sub plot that may or may not be complete in and of itself.
In the Titanic movie, for example, there's a shot of a beautiful old fashioned car being winched aboard in the opening sequence of the flashback in the harbour.
Titanic is looped anyway because it starts in the now, with people looking for a specific thing, a jewel called the Heart of the Ocean which is very valuable (oh! sweet metaphors abound!!). Well, it opens sub story after sub story, which, at the time, you're not aware of because there is a top level story that moves along and has all these things in it - a drawing they find in a safe that shows the jewel on a girl, the drawing being shown on TV, the girl, now an old woman, recognising the drawing and going out to the exploration vessel, and then she tells them things and the central flashback sub-loop begins with the harbour scene and there is this car being winched aboard.
You think nothing of it until an hour and a half later, there's the car again and it's used as a love nest for the participants.
Loops do a number of things.
They create a pre-familiarity before you get to the main point. That is much underrated when people use it in hypnotic inductions (badly) and by not making a big deal out of the opening parts of the loop it goes much deeper and has more profound effects when you pick it up again later. The parameters are already set and you need to do so much less work to make something fit into any given context, it makes the process *seamless*.
We've already seen the car and had our various responses to it up front. The question of where it came from, whether it's nice or not, how it got to be there, all of that is already done and dusted when we come back to it later. It's an old friend, if you will.
In paint-by-numbers hypnosis, or in basic training, you start to tell a story, start a second, then a third, (and up to however many you want), do a central piece and finish the stories in reversed order 3-2-1 to close the loops.
You can leave one or more loops open to keep people processing (that's the "Where the devil did that man's hat go???" process that sometimes happens in movies when the continuity is off or the director exceptionally smart and knows what he's doing).
In proper story telling, you're not doing concentric circles but you weave loops in and out - a single metaphor, sub story or sub plot may appear many times such as those petals in American Beauty.
Generally with all these sub stories, loops or whatever you want to call them, it is customary to build them up until the 4th 5th and then resolve them like a cascade (in Titanic, when the thing goes down, loads and loads of the subplots get resolved simply because a lot of the metaphors and story people head for the bottom of the ocean at that point!).
Lastly, you get loops within loops within loops.
Get any movie out (preferably something that got a hell of a lot of acclaim from both audience and critics such as American Beauty or Titanic and regardless of whether YOU thought it sucked) and track the most obvious symbols, story lines and things/objects/references/metaphors that keep turning up. See if you can find the key piece in the movie, how the loops are resolved, which ones are left open, and what the message may be of each loop by itself and then all of them as a cocktail.
It's an interesting thing and useful in the context of understanding the nature of structuring descriptions of experience beyond hypnotic loops.
Now to the question as how to *construct* loops.
The truth is, you can of course have a go at constructing loops as a practise exercises with four or five sheets of paper, with a story on each and see if you can mesh these stories into a loop set that resolves at the 4/5 ratio backwards in the end.
The truth is also that *real* loops are constructed unconsciously because there are way, way too many details to hold in consciousness; the very name *loop* is a misnomer in the actuality of an interwoven, fully fledged story line, or the occurrence of repeated (or rather, rising and falling) themes, components and their relevant positioning in a good hypnotic induction.
Silvia Hartmann 2000
http://starfields.org
Want to learn metaphor?
Study Project Sanctuary.
|
