Online Lesson & Practice: The SWISH technique
To re-cap: The SWISH is about helping people plan their outcomes. Bandler & Grinder discuss how the process works to change the direction of thinking/behaving/belief, and Katina spoke of how we might term this neurological re-patterning. She gave a great example of how it helped her with a phobia, and it can be useful in many other issues.
It is a protocol with steps that your clients can be actively engaged in; we like to use it within the context of a fuller, more formal hypnotherapy session. Oftentimes it will lead to trance behaviour, so it can be useful to move from the SWISH into a formal hypnotic induction, using the trancework to affirm and consolidate the re-patterning that was achieved during the SWISH process.
- The example Katina walked us through is a process that primarily utilises the visual representational system (she directs her client to create two images), but note that she also gives attention to the feelings (kinaesthetic) and sounds (auditory) her client may or may not have associated with the image they are ‘creating’; she’s utilising the three main representational systems;
- Having your subject describe (even if just to themselves) the submodalities within each representation (“the differences that make a difference”) are essential to this process being effective.