Richard Bandler Quotes

“All of these people, as they told me their stories, shared certain things in common. One example was that they reached a point where they got so fed up they stopped thinking about what scared them.

They started to look at themselves being afraid and started thinking, This is really silly. Elements like these, which they all shared in common, allowed me to develop the first 'phobia cure'. It wasn’t really a 'cure' so much as a 'lesson'.”

“Another thing to do is to freeze frame the memory. I know that sounds crazy at first, but the best thing to do then is to jump to the end, freeze-frame it and literally grab a whiteness knob in your mind and turn it very quickly so that it goes blank-out white. Very quickly, so the whiteness literally replaces the memory so you can’t see it.”

“Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you.

The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn’t help to relive trauma. Over the years, I’ve helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.”

“I did not look for 'what went wrong' or the 'whys'. I did not look for cures. I looked at what worked, no matter how.

If a few good therapists 'fixed' anybody, I looked at what they actually did. When people got over problems on their own, I looked at what had happened.

The result is what is now called Neuro-Linguistic Programming—that is, a series of lessons that teach what others have learned that works.”

“I know that I’m fond of saying this repeatedly, but the best thing about the past is that it’s over and when it’s not over something is amiss in your mind.

It’s not the original event or perpetrator that’s making you remember — it’s you, inside your own mind, holding on to terrible memories. None of us are exempt from this.”

“If you can help people to think differently and actively, they can change their lives.”

“If you’re looking for difficulties, you’ll always find them. If you ask the question, 'What can go wrong?' then something probably will.

On the other hand, if you’re asking the question, 'What works?' then you can find it and, in this case, I did.”

“If you’ve been afraid most of your life, you may not have good examples of what 'happy' is. In that case, you can build it in. That’s what I do.

You have to give people a really strong feeling of being relaxed, a really strong feeling of feeling good as a guide for their behavior. You do this so that, in the future when they wake up, they start asking, 'How much fun can I have today?', 'How much freedom can I find?', 'How much more can I do than I’ve done before?'”

“In my experience, the biggest challenge people face is learning to get out of their own way.

When you can see just how easy change can be, you can begin to take control over your life and make all the changes you want—but you need to take the action.”

“It may take a few tries at this because habits develop over years, but over time it will be effective.

For years and years, this particular woman who was r*ped had run the same life-size movie in her head over and over again. It became a habit. What she needed to do was to break it up.

If you can make the image small enough or, if you can, white it out often enough, that will make a difference. If you can run it backward enough, that will change the feeling.

You can also disassociate it. You do this by putting yourself in the picture and pushing it off into the distance. Then you can go inside your mind and replace it with something else because it’s not enough to get over the past, you have to start to look at what you want in the future.”

“Laughter releases endomorphins. If you can’t laugh at your past, you’ll never get free of it.

So it’s time to start laughing, even if it’s artificial laughter at first.

Put a little circus music in, add a little chaos, and move things backward. If they start to move forward, blank them out with white and then pull up an image of something you really desire.

Put your hopes and dreams in front of your nightmares and your terrors and your problems. A psychiatrist may call this repression. I call it planning. You should too.”

“Look at the last image and then run it backward to the beginning so that people walk backward, so that the sounds are like playing a tape recorder backwards. In fact, if you can, spin your feelings in the reverse direction.”

“Next, go back to the first bad image. Not the life-size one but the little one and push it off into the distance and suddenly pull up the new picture in its place and then make it life-size. Look at how you want to be, and you end up replacing your fears with your desires.”

“Nothing wears off, because as long as you think differently, you will feel differently.”

“Sometimes, people hang on to their problems because they want to feel unique or important. Their problems give them identities. They love to be victims of the world. They seek out ways to prove that nothing will work for them and they are hopeless cases.

Over the years, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Richard, and experienced in my own life, it is that there is no such thing as a hopeless case. There is always hope, and there is always a way out of your problems.

You can take control over your beliefs, and you can stop getting in your own way. You can believe in your ability to get over things, through things, and to them. You can also discover that the process of change is actually far simpler than you think.”

“The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival. Virginia Satir said something to me that has resonated with me for forty years. She asked, 'What do you think is the strongest instinct?' Like a robot I responded, 'Survival'.

For me, it had always been the strongest instinct. She said, 'No, Richard. The strongest instinct in human beings is the need to look at the familiar.'

People are terrified of the unknown. In fact, sometimes people will rather kill themselves than look at new things.”

“The techniques I’m describing to you aren’t techniques that you just do once, but things that you run over and over and over in your mind till they become familiar, to move away from pain and move toward hope.

The more you move away from pain and white out your pain and see yourself in your pain — and the more you look at yourself doing the things you want to do — the more you’ll begin to change your direction.”

“The trouble with long, drawn-out deaths — in fact, all deaths — is when people remember the person who has died, they make life-size images and they see those images as if they’re happening now.

It’s very difficult to get through the pain of death. When people look at good memories, they’ll see themselves in the good memories, but they’ll remember the funeral. They’ll remember the death as if it’s happening now.

In other words, they’ll be associated with it, and this is simply backward. The process of flipping pictures is how people come out of grief when they stop remembering the tragedy of death and start remembering the good times vividly and associating with good memories.”

“Thinking isn’t a passive process unless you do it passively. Thinking should always be an active process where you think in a way that gets you the results you want.”

“This will instruct your neurology which direction to go in. There is a tendency for some people to look at the past over and over again. Even in therapy, people going through it over and over again instruct the neurology that this is what they want.

Until you start to look ahead with desire, it’s very hard to get away from the past. The more you look at the bad things, the more you relive the bad things, the more familiar it gets.”

“We have been trained to believe that change isn’t easy and requires a lot of effort and a lot of time. I’ve always found this to be simply not true.”

“When I studied phobias, I didn’t study the people who had them. I studied the people who got over them.”

“When people start asking good questions, they make good pictures inside their heads. If you make good pictures, you will get good feelings. Then life becomes something that you feel more enthusiasm for.”

“Whenever people have trouble letting go of good things or bad things, it’s because they are associated to the memory. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just like being there. If you’re holding on to bad memories, it’s now time to look at them and shrink them down.”