CHAPTER 4
THE BODY’S SECRET LANGUAGE
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give
other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated
from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
— MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
Back in the late 1970s, I was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused and emotionally disturbed kids. The psychologist we had hired to help the kids showed me how we could consciously use language to produce unconscious change. I started taking Richard Bandler’s classes on communication techniques1 and eventually became a certified NLP communication trainer.
I discovered that once you decode the way that human beings make decisions—how our neurons fire—you can shape your language to take advantage of that code. The National Security Agency (NSA) knows this code. So does Madison Avenue. (I’ve done training for both.) And no one has cracked the communication code more effectively than modern Republicans.
Here’s an example. You may remember a series of infamous ads that the George Bush Sr. team created during the presidential election of 1988 when he ran against Michael Dukakis. They were what are broadly known today as “the Willie Horton ads”
Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts. He had reduced the unemployment rate in his state from 11 to 4 percent, balanced his state’s budget, cut taxes, and improved programs to care for society’s most vulnerable and fragile citizens. It was a stellar record, one that anyone familiar with Massachusetts knew was solid. Dukakis believed he could run and win on a campaign of “doing for America what he did for Massachusetts”
Because this was such a powerful political message, the Bush/Quayle team decided to attack Dukakis where he was strongest—on his record as governor of Massachusetts. They combed over the many different things that had happened while Dukakis was governor.
Back in 1972 Republican Massachusetts governor Francis W. Sargent had signed into law a bill that—as part of a more comprehensive program to build rehabilitation into the prison system—allowed some prisoners to have weekend furloughs.
It was still law when Dukakis came into office, and he abolished it on April 28, 1988. Before it was abolished, however, a murderer named Willie Horton had been let out on a weekend furlough and had committed rape and murder.
After letting Dukakis build a strong and recognizable following on the “doing for America what he did for Massachusetts” slogan, the Bush campaign let loose with their secret weapon. On September 21, 1988, three weeks before the general election and half a year after Dukakis had ended the prison furlough program put into place by a previous, Republican governor, they began running the Willie Horton ads.
The first set of ads, created by the Americans for Bush arm of the National Security Political Action Committee, was called “Weekend Passes” and featured a menacing photo of Willie Horton along with a litany of his crimes while on furlough, including “kidnapping, stabbing, and raping”2
On October 5, a day after the “Weekend Passes” ad was taken off the airwaves and also the date of the infamous Bentsen-Quayle debate (“You, sir, are no John Kennedy”), the Bush campaign ran its own ad, “Revolving Door.”3 That ad, as described by InsidePolitics.org, told viewers that Dukakis had “vetoed mandatory sentences for drug dealers” and “vetoed the death penalty” while showing images of prison guards at work. Then the ad told viewers, “His revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole.” The ad showed an image of a revolving door formed by bars, rotating as men in prison uniform walked through, with the message “And Many Are Still at Large” superimposed. Then came the punch line: “Now Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts.”(The picture changes to a guard on a roof with a watchtower in the background.) “America can’t afford that risk.”
This ad didn’t mention Willie Horton—but it didn’t have to. The “Revolving Door” ad was creating a code that linked the earlier ad that used the same visual and auditory techniques and named Willie Horton, rapist and murderer, to the small color picture of Michael Dukakis and his signature phrase that he wanted to do for America what he had done for Massachusetts.
Notice what happened. Reality no longer mattered (that Dukakis had already ended the program—or that a Republican governor had started it—wasn’t even reported in most of the mainstream corporate media, although they did cover the ad at length). The content delivery—with its unconscious reminder of the fear elicited by Willie Horton—overrode the content itself.
It didn’t matter that Dukakis had reduced the unemployment rate in his state from 11 to 4 percent, or that he did that while balancing the budget, cutting taxes, and taking care of society’s most vulnerable and fragile citizens.4 What Mike Dukakis had done, what he stood for, what he said, didn’t matter because when people saw and heard those Bush team ads, all they felt was fear.
As Dukakis’s campaign manager, Susan Estrich,5 said: “The symbolism was very powerful…you can’t find a stronger metaphor, intended or not, for racial hatred in this country than a Black man raping a White woman…. I talked to people afterward…. Women said they couldn’t help it, but it scared the living daylights out of them.”
For the last two weeks of the campaign, whenever Dukakis used his signature phrase, people recoiled in fear. Politically, he was as dead as Willie Horton’s victims.
FEELING COMES BEFORE THINKING
When we communicate with each other, we often believe we are using the most rational parts of our minds. We think we know exactly why we say something in a certain way. We think we know what someone else is saying to us.
But we humans, being the product of a long evolutionary process, really have three brains. And politicians who win campaigns do so because they speak to all three of those brains.
First there’s the most primitive of our brains, sometimes referred to as the “reptilian brain” because we share it in common with reptiles like alligators and komodo dragons. The reptilian brain has a singular focus: survival. It doesn’t think in abstract terms, and it doesn’t feel complex emotions. Instead, it’s responsible for fight or flight, hunger and fear, attack or run. It’s also non-verbal—you can stimulate it with the right words, but it operates purely at the level of visceral stimulus/response.
The second brain is one we share with the animals that came along after reptiles: mammals. The “mammalian brain”—sometimes referred to as the “limbic brain” because it extends around and off of the reptilian brain in a dog-leg shape that resembles a limb—handles complex emotions like love, indignation, compassion, envy, and hope. Anybody who has worked with animals or had a pet knows that mammals share these emotions with humans because we share this brain. Although a snake can’t feel shame or enthusiasm, it’s completely natural for a dog or cat. And, like the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain can be stimulated indirectly by words and is also nonverbal. It expresses itself exclusively in the form of feelings, most often felt in the heart or the gut.
The third brain—the neocortex (“new” cortex)—is something we share with the higher apes, although ours is a bit more sophisticated. Resting over the limbic brain (which is atop the reptilian brain), our neocortex is where we process abstract thought, words and symbols, logic, and time.
Recent research has shown that the brain creates information as well as processes it. A study published in 2005 demonstrated that the brain uses the same exact mechanism to perceive a smile and to create a smile.6 This is pure biology—our senses detect a smile and our brain replicates it.
Does that mean we are just machines? No. In a way scientists are just beginning to understand, these biological processes are also related to our feelings. When we see a smile, and when we smile back, we actually feel happier. Actually, anytime we smile, we feel happier. The leading psychologist of human emotion, Dr. Robert Zajonc, has shown that simply smiling can make you feel happy.7
This is a very deep part of the communication code. Above and beyond all the amazing things we do, we humans are still animals, and our communication is tied to our biology. We react to sensations. That is why the primary modalities of truly effective communication all are based on the senses. And within these modalities are submodalities that drill down even deeper into the brain.
HOW FEELINGS AFFECT COMMUNICATION
Since Renè Descartes, many in the Western world have believed, I think, therefore I am. We prioritize thinking. That point of view has led to some very important achievements. Some would say that America would not be a democracy today if the Founders hadn’t believed they could rationally determine the very best system of governance.
Rationality was at the core of our nation’s founding. One of the essential differences between the conservative and the liberal worldview is that liberals believe in rationality whereas conservatives believe that human events are ordered by forces that are beyond the ability of our rational mind to understand or control. (This belief in rationality was so strong among the Founders that Thomas Jefferson even took the first four books of the New Testament—the four Gospels that tell the stories of Jesus—and cut out of them all supernatural events. What he strung back together were largely the words and the nonmiraculous deeds of Jesus, and Jefferson’s handiwork has been continuously in print for more than two hundred as The Jefferson Bible.)
Yet even for the most stolid believers in rationality, the reality is that when we are making the most important life decisions, we almost always base them on our feelings rather than our rational thoughts. Some people call these feelings their “gut” or “intuition.” Some people who are as rational as Jefferson like to call them “rational certainties.” Call them what you will; the decisions we make are based in small or large part on feelings.
Science, that most rational of endeavors, has finally acknowledged that feelings precede thinking. In a groundbreaking work published in 1980 in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Robert Zajonc argued persuasively that decision-making is based on our feelings.8
Zajonc points out that we can “like something or be afraid of it before we know precisely what it is and perhaps even without knowing what it is.” That’s because we “think” first through the limbic brain. Zajonc writes, “The limbic system that controls emotional reactions was there before we evolved language and our present form of thinking.” He continues, “It is rather…likely that the affective system retained its autonomy,” remaining separate from cognition. That means our ways of feeling precede and are different and separate from our ways of thinking.
Our five senses transmit sensory data directly to the reptilian brain, which translates the data into our most primitive forms of emotion. Those data are then transferred to the higher limbic and cortical brains. We feel before we even have a chance to think.
What that means for communication is that the most effective communicators rely on feeling-based (kinesthetic) communicative strategies. They reach people at the level of the limbic brain, at the seat of feeling.
THE SUBMODALITIES CODE
The communication code for our feelings is based in the sensory modalities. But within the primary modalities are submodalities that allow us to fine-tune and direct our specific impact and message toward the limbic brain.
Auditory submodalities have to do with how we hear. Do you hear the idea or event behind you? Do you hear it in front of you? Is it loud or soft, distant or far, clear or muffled?
Kinesthetic submodalities have to do with where we experience our feelings in our bodies (there is always a physical corollary to kinesthetic content) and how we feel them. Our language reveals that we often feel ideas in parts of our body: “He felt that like a hot poker to the leg”; “He felt punched in the gut”; “Her heart raced.”
Visual submodalities have to do with how we see an idea or event. Is it big or small? Near or far? Bright or dim? Color or black-and-white? Still picture or a movie? Crystal clear or fuzzy?
Submodalities are the ways our brain sorts sensory information. Sensory information does not come in through the rational part of our brain, the left hemisphere, the part that is logical, the part that does quadratic equations. Instead, all the information we gather about the world comes in through our sensory reptilian and limbic brains; it is first processed, mostly in the irrational and nonspeaking right hemisphere of our neocortex.
We have experiences throughout the day; we see things, hear things, feel things. We have to figure out a way to make sense of and to store and save those experiences as memories. Throughout the course of the day, we write many of them down on a little one-day scratchpad in the reptilian brain called the hippocampus.
Then at night, as we dream, we process that information, which is one reason why our dreams seem irrational: we’re trying to figure out, Okay, what happened today that I need to store and what do I need to throw away? We attach emotional tags to ideas and events that we need to store. We store information by emotion.
Imagine that the mind’s filing system is like the Pentaflex office filing system. Imagine your mind is filled with colored folders—blue, yellow, red, each representing an emotion; then inside those folders you can put the smaller manila file folders representing specific event memories. Speaking metaphorically, the big colored folders encode or sort and store information by emotions. There’s a yellow folder for happiness, a green for love, and a red folder for anger, and each folder is very subtle. There are thousands of variations of emotion for which we don’t even have words: these are the many colored folders. And inside of those are the smaller manila folders made up of the individual experiences.
The way the larger, colored folders are organized is by sub-modality. Submodalities are the labels that define not only where the memories are but also how they exist.
Here’s how we crack the communication code: because we actually understand the world through these submodalities, you can use them to change how you—and others—feel and thus how we (or they) think.
CREATING A POLITICAL SCALPEL
You can actually change how someone feels about past events or ideas by helping them change their “locations” in their sorting system.
If your listener is willing, you can actually change how he thinks about an event in just a few minutes by asking him to refile the experience under a different submodality. If he sees his experience in color, change it to black-and-white. If he sees it close up, ask him to push it farther away. If he feels it as cold, ask him to make it feel hot.
CHANGING SUBMODALITIES
A Transcript from the Thom Hartmann Program December 15, 2006
After describing how submodalities work, I asked for volunteers to call in who would be okay with my changing one of their memories on the air, using the submodality filing system. The first volunteer was Barbara, listening in Los Angeles.
THOM: Hi, Barbara! Thanks for calling in. What I’d like you to do is remember something in the recent past, the last week or so, that was a moderately unpleasant experience. The example that I would give is like somebody flipping you off in traffic or a surly waiter.
BARBARA: Yeah, I got one.
THOM: You got one, okay, great. Now I want you to describe to me the submodalities associated with it. In other words, when you remember that experience, and you see the picture of that, do you see the picture in color or black-and-white?
BARBARA: Color.
THOM: Okay. Describe in space where it is: in front of you, behind you, you know, where is it?… Is it like 5 feet in front of you, is it 20 feet behind you, is it 6 feet off to your left?
BARBARA: In front of me.
THOM: It’s in front of you. And how far away?
BARBARA: I would say 10, 5 feet.
THOM: 5 feet. Okay. Is there sound associated with it?
BARBARA: Yeah, there’s sound.
THOM: Okay. And is it a movie or is it a still picture?
BARBARA: It’s a movie picture.
THOM: Okay, great. So, what I’d like you to do, Barbara, is first of all push that picture, so we figured out some of the submo-dalities associated with it, right?
BARBARA: Yeah.
THOM: What I’d like you to do is push that picture about twice as far away from you. Push it like 10, 15, 20 feet away from you first of all.
BARBARA: Okay. I’ve done it.
THOM: Okay, and now turn it black-and-white.
BARBARA: Okay. But that’s hard. That’s hard, to turn it into black-and-white.
THOM: Oh, interesting. Okay, well you can leave it color if you want. Maybe your brain doesn’t want it black-and-white yet.
BARBARA: No, my brain doesn’t want black-and-white.
THOM: Okay, well that’s cool. Leave it as color. I want you to scroll all the way to the end of the movie and freeze-frame it…
BARBARA: Freeze-frame it, okay.
THOM: And now, in just a second I’m going to make a whoosh sound and I’m going to ask you to play it backward; and you know how you play a movie backward, everybody moves like in the old Charlie Chaplin movies and everybody talks backward like Donald Duck. And I want you to right now play it backward all the way back to the beginning with everybody going, everything going backward— whoosh. Like that.
BARBARA: Yep. Yep, I did.
THOM: Okay, all the way to the beginning. Now freeze-frame it at the beginning; and do you see yourself in the picture or do you see it as if you were there?
BARBARA:I see myself in the picture.
THOM: Okay, great. What I’d like you to do is I’d like you to paint rainbows across that picture now and put donkey ears on everybody in the picture except yourself…
BARBARA: Okay.
THOM: Now, how do you feel about the experience right now?
BARBARA: Laughter. What I did is I went back to the beginning and said, “Okay, this didn’t happen.”
THOM: Aha! So, you’re laughing now. A few minutes ago I’m guessing you weren’t laughing about this experience.
BARBARA: No, I wasn’t.
THOM: Okay, number one, you’re laughing now, and, number two, what you just told me is that story about the experience has changed. Has it?… The story that you tell yourself about what happened there?
BARBARA: Yeah.
THOM: Typically, what happens is stories change from Oh, gee, I was a victim to Oh, that happened but I learned from it. That kind of a transition, was it something like that?
BARBARA: No, it was, Okay, that happened; let’s just accept it and deal with it, that’s it, instead of being so anxious about it.
THOM: Okay, so you have transformed a memory by simply shifting the filing system that your brain uses for it.
BARBARA: Okay, thank you, Thom.
THOM: You’re welcome…. Thanks, Barbara, for calling.
The point is to change how the experience is filed. As your listener changes the submodalities, he is actually moving the memory to different physical parts of the brain. You can see that happen on an electroencephalogram (EEG): different parts of the brain have different resources; they have different ways of dealing with things.
In the field of psychotherapy, if you want to heal a negative memory, you can let the brain do that work by moving the memory around. (I describe this technique in my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-being [Park Street Press, 2006].) Somewhere along the line, that memory will pass through a part of the brain where there is a resource—some skill or experience—that will be able to change the memory. You’ll know when you’ve succeeded in truly changing the emotional charge and filing system associated with a memory because the story about the meaning of that memory changes.
In the political field, the key is knowing how we use submo-dalities to encode data in the mind. They’re the “sharp edge” of the scalpel of modalities; and if we include them carefully, our message will have more impact.
For example, Reagan’s speechwriter quoted John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” It was a powerful metaphor, first used by John F. Kennedy, in a January 9, 1961, speech, in which JFK said:
I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.
“We must always consider” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.”
Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill—constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities.
But Reagan’s speechwriter added a critical submodality to it—shining. This so dramatically increased the impact of the image of the city on a hill that most Americans don’t remember tha Reagan’s speech had essentially plagiarized Kennedy’s or that Kennedy had been quoting Winthrop. We think Reagan invented the concept and that the concept itself was world changing.
All because the submodality of shining was added into the visual metaphor of a city on a hill.
Here’s the key: if you can change the submodality under which an experience or idea is filed, you can change not only where the experience or idea is filed but also how someone experiences or thinks about it. That’s called anchoring, and it’s a very powerful communication tool that we take up in chapter 5.
ECOLOGY CHECK
The ability to use modalities and submodalities to modify feelings is one of the most powerful tools of competent communicators. It’s the main reason why television is so powerful—because it can quickly incorporate visual and auditory information in a way that rapidly evokes emotion.
Consider the video of the planes striking the towers on 9/11—how it was replayed over and over again, creating a powerful visual and auditory image connected with a welter of visceral primitive emotions. Politicians played on these emotions like the string section of a symphony whenever they wanted to promote a particular program, from their war in Iraq to destroying the civil liberties that people have fought and died for since King John first signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.
This considerable power was once constrained by a liberal law requiring that “news” actually be news of relevance to people’s lives and to the interests of the nation. Reagan, a conservative who believed that a government of laws was morally and functionally inferior to corporations’ responding to a “morally neutral free market,” stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1986, removing the requirement that radio and television stations program “in the public interest” in exchange for their use of the radio frequency spectrum (the airwaves that we all collectively own as part of the commons). Bill Clinton further sold off these commons with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The result has been that so-called “news” operations no longer provide news; instead we now receive infotainment packaged as news. Instead of having the purpose of informing the public about issues critical to our lives (the goal of news), we now have corporations feeding us infotainment packaged to draw as many eyeballs as possible, thus increasing ratings and advertising revenue. The bottom line is now corporate profit instead of the well-informed citizenry our Founders envisioned when they named the “Press” as the only industry to be protected in the Constitution, subsidized news through special fourth-class postal rates, and subsidized the production of newsprint.
Not only is this new form of infotainment highly uneco-logical, it also opens the door to a 1984-like control of citizens and government through massive corporate disinformation campaigns. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon wrote a book, Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News, which details how a number of large corporations have used their “news” operations to advance a variety of corporate interests at the expense of the public interest—all since Reagan’s fateful decision rooted in the conservative notion that morality-neutral corporations would run things better than governments responsive to morally evil human voters.
Fast-moving images, whoosh sound effects marking changes from story to story, and other subtle visual and auditory tools—all help create an emotion of urgency and importance for what is increasingly banal and insignificant.