Shawn Carson, Jess Marion, with John Overdurf (2014)
Deep Trance Identification: Unconscious Modelling and Mastery for Hypnosis Practitioners, Coaches, and Everyday People
Changing Minds Publishing: New York. NY.
Introduction
Deep Trance Identification (DTI) is about using hypnosis to acquire new skills using advanced modelling techniques, including those expounded by Neuro-Linguistic Programming. The transfer of skills and abilities between people and among the population certainly counts as a meme and is a formative and cumulative component of culture. DTI, therefore, has ramifications for cliology, albeit indirect future ones. This will be a comparatively short review and analysis as DTI itself is slightly tangential and requires much more consideration.
Overview
Culture is imitation according to Tarde. Humans, especially children, have an innate capacity to imitate (Hayes). We naturally imitate as a way of acquiring skills, behaviours, language, attitudes and so on from those who already have those faculties. Children do this through play, using their imagination and mimicking the actions of adults, pretending to be superheroes or animals. Such imagination stimulates the mirror neurons and activates learning.
Hypnosis can be used to formalise our natural inclination to imitate and can be used to accelerate the imitable. This is particularly applicable to adults who need to be better at some skill, such as public speaking, by circumventing adult self-limitations, and age regressing into a more playful and neuro-plastic state of mind. The modeller (the person doing the learning) in essence pretends in their imagination to be the model (the person who already has the desired skills) – they “identify” with them. The model can be a real, or historical figure, but may also be an animal, or fictional, such as a superhero. Deep trance is what enables new representations to be constructed and integrated into the modeller’s unconscious mind.
Carson, Marion and Overdurf, have detailed how hypnosis accelerates skills acquisition, and in particular have employed the trance models as described by the language of NLP in setting out various protocols, both therapeutic and generative.
For cliology and memetics, DTI is very much a “pull” motility of memes. Skill transfer is an evolving component of culture. Such are often trained (or imposed) by others in the “push” motility. The pull motility, in contrast to the push of a trainer-trainee relationship, involves the intention, incentive and actions of an individual who wishes, in the service whatever value, to acquire a new or improved behaviour: the relationship is modeller-model, and the model does not necessarily need to actively participate (or for that matter, be real!). Of course, most cultural transfer (i.e. memes) is a back-and-forth sequence between “push” and “pull” – classical conditioning and DTI are probably the bookends of the spectrum.
Deep Trance Identification is a formalisation of natural curiosity and learning as driven by the learner. Memes are naturally conveyed this way anyway, but DTI itself is a skill that facilitates advanced and accelerated acquisition: DTI is a meta-skill and one that needs to be acquired like any other skill. Hayes would recognise such a cognitive gadget. As DTI offers a technology of meme transfer (specifically, in terms of the cliologial frameworks, an acquisitional and meta-acquisition noam in the pull motility) then its relation to cliology becomes a little clearer, even if its cliological exploitation still needs some thinking about.
Dissection
Along with some theory and history, Carson (et. al.) present a protocol for deep trance identification with clients and with the self. This is a deep-dive approach exploring variations on the protocol according to different contexts and requirements. It is written in what I have come to call the “Bandlerian” style popular in NLP books. That is, it is penned in a voice of simple, conversationally hypnotic, practical self-reference, rather than academese. It assumes that the reader is wanting to actually learn how to use this hypnosis stuff (to learn DTI and all that entails), and employs copious amounts of slippery Ericsonian language in the process.
As these reviews want to concentrate on the content that can be applied to cliology, then empirical aspects and details are left as reference for the reader to pursue: DTI presents many variations on a theme. However, a few notable points are worth raising.
The natural mode of learning for children is imitation and play. In pretending to be adults, or cartoon characters, or animals (or even aeroplanes), kids take on the characteristics of who they are mimicking; they learn new behaviours and perspectives that are relevant to a context. Indeed, this continues into adulthood where norms are embraced by newly introduced members of an organisation – for example, a work setting. The authors say
‘… deep trance identification is an entirely natural process we all used when we were children, we just forgot our natural ability as we aged. Our purpose of this book is to help you remember what you knew as a child. In hypnosis, reverting to childhood is called a ‘regression’…’.
In other words, DTI is a formal protocol in psychology for accessing playful and imaginative learning states.
Access to such learning states has a long and diverse history spanning many cultures around the world. Folk-lore, pantheons, legends and narratives are filled with DTI in one form or another, ranging from Homeric epics to Marvel film franchises. Examples given in the book are those of Balinese dancers, Greeks and demons, the Dionysian mysteries, tantric Buddhism, Ignatius’s spiritual exercises along with other forms of “possession” and shamanic shapeshifting. A modern incarnation of the doctrine of imitatio christi is the slogan “What Would Jesus Do?” Much of the history of the process concerns altered states of consciousness resulting from cultural evolution.
As psychology began to explain religious trance states, the processes started to become formalised. Alexander Raikov applied hypnosis at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Konstantin Stanislavski is known for a teaching system that became known as “method acting”. Milton Erickson, the father of modern hypnosis, extensively used regression and identification and became one of the cornerstone models of Bandler and Grinder’s NLP. Based on Raikov, Stephen Gilligan used hypnosis to model the hypnotic skills of Erickson. Robert Dilts further developed a more analytical NLP approach to modelling and codifying strategies of historical and fictional characters. The distinction between Gilligan and Dilts seems to be one of unconscious trance against conscious analysis.
Carson, Marion and Overdurf, in addition to using modern neuroscience to explain the DTI phenomenon, have incorporated NLP and hypnosis in providing a clear protocol for Deep Trance Identification. While this protocol is outside the scope of this review, chapters 13 to 29 of their work essentially cover a different variation on that schema, bringing in NLP classics such as the swish, new behaviour generator, neurological levels, timelines and so on, as well as lesser-known ones such as symbolic modelling and dream incubation. Plenty of examples are given on variants but the main value is in illustrating how to mix and match techniques (giving rise to some bizarre titles such as the double-reverse DTI) to generate new processes and flexibility based on the context. This is a wonderful example of memetic recombination.
As illustrated throughout the book, choosing a model is important and this could be drawn from real people, superheroes or supervillains, or even animals. In the spirit of NLP, and it’s favourite prefix “meta”, as exemplified by Gilligan’s deep trance identification experience of Milton Ericson, DTI can be used to identify with those who are skilled in DTI! Here we move into a system of recursion and induction, in a mathematical sense; or more in line with this review, a system of replication: an epistemological meme.
Clioanalysis
Deep Trance Identification is natural for children and age regressed adults. We imitate, and thus learn, from others directly which offers a form of memetic diffusion. However, we are capable also of “imitating” characters, real or fictional, from narratives. So much so that these imitations (to use Gabriel Tarde’s term) are embedded in the fabric of our storytelling, from oral traditions of folklore, mythology and legend, to immersive hyper-media. Heroes and mythical monsters abound. Propp’s structuralism suggests that these may also be memes of the “how-to” variety: instructional narratives, cautionary tales, moral guidance, or stratagems such as those of Br’er Rabbit’s, who succeeds by use of wit.
On the surface, the story, or variant, is learned by imitation and transmitted culturally through its retelling. At a deeper level, we make unconscious metaphorical connections, learning from the actions of the characters as DTI. It may well be that we never get to observe the response of a real person in an actual situation, and so never experience direct imitation. Cultural transmission by direct imitation alone would be cut short. Modulating wisdom in a transmissible narrative allows instruction to be passed from generation to generation via imitation of the tale rather than relying on direct imitative experience of a behaviour. The cultural evolutionary, memetic, and cliological implications of DTI and “how-to” stories, come into focus.
Most instructional narratives, exemplified by folk-lore, seem to have arisen through cultural natural selection with fitter variations being passed on. Celilla Hays, along with her Cognitive Gadgets theory in Cultural Evolutionary Psychology, posits that, on top of teaching what to learn, the “how-to” can also be taught – this is epistemic engineering, of which literacy training is an example.
… this does not occur by chance or as a consequence of blind selection process. Literacy training is intended to make children literate; it has been designed by educators to have exactly that effect. P205
NLP can be seen in terms of epistemological engineering as it is very much about modelling out and transferring strategies of excellence. Ericksonian metaphors are tales deliberately woven to stimulate therapeutic change. The Milton model in NLP has more formally encoded these hypnotic patterns. NLP (in its fixation with “meta”) can itself be seen as a “how-to” of “how-to”; indeed NLP simply regards itself as a story, a way of talking about things.
In the same sense, DTI certainly qualifies as epistemic engineering as it is about “how-to get the how to”; in cliological terms, it is an instruct for acquiring instructs. DTI is also reflexive in that DTI was applied by Steve Gilligan in modelling the hypnotic approaches of Milton Ericson. It can be further applied to modelling Bandler, Grinder, Robbins, even Steven Gilligan or the authors of DTI in order to get better at doing DTI.
Of course, all these things are memetic: even discussing storytelling is memetic. There are cultural evolutionary implications of these instructional meta-narratives as they have all the hallmarks of information replicators. The applied science of storytelling would suggest novel strains of folk-tales, affecting a designer culture, could be epistemologically engineered. Tooling levels of DTI can be ordered starting from specific skill acquisition which would be its native use. But cliology would be more interested in bootstrapping DTI as a recursive meme, employing it to propagate the skills of DTI through a population thereby encouraging then next, and orthogonal stage of human cultural evolution.
The epistemological engineering of DTI as an instructional meta-narrative presents a very complex cliological archetype (to be codified elsewhere). However, a simplified illustration of its practical use can be sketched out here.
Organisations replicate and survive by passing on their knowledge, skills and routines from more established members and new ones. Some have adapted to exhibit this cliological archetype where instructions to model more senior figures are propagated. To some extent, the process is inherent in all organisations, as it is human nature to imitate. However, some organisations are a bit more explicit about imitative recursion. Perhaps the clearest examples are religions, and particularly that of Christianity, as it is built into the very fabric of scripture.
The doctrine of imitatio christi (and its modern-day counterpart: What would Jesus do?) is a call to DTI the characters in the gospels. Implicit in this (if not actual) is that the elders in the church will constitute examples to others, and in doing so pass on both that doctrine, along with the holy imitation skills that they themselves acquired. This is a fitness contribution in propagating the kerygma, but notably, variation and selective retention may account for denominational schisms.
More prosaic is the multi-level marketing of domestic cleaning fluids. Amway, for example, has a member-get-member means of recruitment and training and is premised on the “duplication” principle. New distributes are encouraged to duplicate the actions of their successful upline which includes the encouragement of duplication to successive downlines that they themselves sponsor.
The epistemological engineering and formal assembly of an instructional meta-narrative employing the recursive imitation of DTI is something for the far-flung future. It is though, in alignment with the principle of the learning organisation. Extrapolating this further, such an archetype may be an extropic template for the cultural evolution of wider society.
Conclusion
DTI, as presented in the book, focuses on the individual initiative for acquiring desired skills, but has tangential memetic interpretations. The DTI protocol is an encoding of natural human imitative faculties and its application is via a facilitator or the modeller learning how to use DTI. It is not immediately apparent to cliology’s focus on the populational level of spreading new culture because of its emphasis on the “pull motility”, of acquisition rather than dissemination of skill-related memes. It does, however, as an example of a designer cognitive gadget, contain traits that enable self-replication. Identifying the cliological archetype and bootstrapping DTI into a recursive meme is an advanced future application that remains to be fleshed out, but does have potential for benefit particularly in organisational development.