Thom Hartmann, a radio veteran since 1968, hosts a highly popular, nationally-syndicated talk show; is a renowned innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics; an award-winning, best-selling author of fourteen books; and an entrepreneur who founded seven corporations. The former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, he has helped set up and support hospitals, schools and communities for vulnerable children throughout the world and has been a pioneer in the study of ADHD. His most recent books are Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Unequal Protection, and What Would Jefferson Do?

Thom Hartmann
Beyond Framing: How Deep Neuro-Linguistic Programming Communicates
Bioneers 2005

Bioneers is changing the world. This is the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil that creates the cyclone, you know, off the coast of Africa or something. This is the beginning of it all, and I am so pleased to be a part of it.

I remember way back 20 years ago or so, when I was first starting to study psychotherapy and psychology, and hooked up with Richard Bandler. We were in a room with a bunch of people, virtually all of them health care professionals, psychologists and psychiatrists for the large part. Bandler was talking about the importance of the stories that we tell ourselves, which is the theme that runs through most of my books. Without wandering off onto that, he was talking about the importance of the stories that we tell ourselves, and how we actually have internal dialogues, and we tell ourselves stories about what’s going on. We’re monitoring the world and discussing it with ourselves. Ouspensky, actually, and Tertium Organum in The Fourth Way, talks about this in more detail. In any case, there was a psychologist in the room who speaks up and he says, “You don’t really mean to say that people have conversations inside their heads and that’s normal?” And Bandler says, “Yeah, I absolutely mean to say that. And in fact one of the most therapeutic things you can do is figure out what people’s conversations are, and figure out if they’re healthy conversations, and if they’re not, help them make them healthy conversations.” And the guy says, “No, come on. You look in the psychiatric manuals. People having conversations with themselves in their heads—that’s a psychiatric illness. These people are mentally ill.” And so Bandler turns to him and he says, “Well, have you ever had a patient who had conversations inside their own head?” And the guy says, “Oh yeah, yeah, just last week I had a guy come in, and he was telling me about this long conversation he was having with himself about whether or not he should divorce his wife.” Bandler turns to him and he says, “And what did you say to yourself when he told you about this internal conversation?” The guy says, “I said to myself, this guy is nuts.”

I want to talk about the stories that we tell ourselves. Not just as you and me telling ourselves stories about who we are and where we fit into the world, and what it’s all about, and what’s going on, and what’s happening over there and all that, you know, kind of Buffalo Springfield stuff, but in a larger sense the stories about democracy; the stories about what we call liberty and freedom; the stories about the founding of this nation; the stories about humanity; the stories about what it means to be a citizen of the United States, and what it means to be a citizen of the world; the stories of what it ultimately means to be human.

There are a bunch of different levels at which this stuff gets communicated. My goal is to share with you some of those technologies, some of those techniques. Everybody is a communicator. The bottom line is, we all communicate constantly. We’re all trying to communicate in order to accomplish some end. There are a million reasons why people communicate, but we’re all doing it all the time. It’s just that some people are very competent at it and some people are very incompetent at it. The goal, of course, is to become more competent at it. If you combine that competence of communication with a good ethical base, then you have a force that can be a very powerful and useful thing. Hitler combined a competence of communication with a lack of an ethical base and did incredible harm, as I would say others in our country at this moment are doing as well. So, just as a scalpel, this sort of thing can be used to heal or it could be used to wound. I just want to preface all of this. Yet, the bottom line is these are the simple tools of communication that people use.

The first, of course, is framing. Framing is one of the oldest pieces in NLP. My first work on attention deficit disorder was to reframe attention deficit disorder. My son was diagnosed with it 15 years ago. When he was diagnosed with this, the guy sat him down and told him that he had a mental illness. It devastated him. And I thought there has got to be a better way to say this. So I came up with the idea that kids with ADD were really hunters in a world full of farmers. Actually, now the science is in my last book on this topic. It’s called The Edison Gene. It’s true actually, and this is actually a gift and a positive thing—something that I’ve been saying for 15 years and now science is catching up. But my main goal was to create a story because we all need stories; to create a story that these kids could use to get themselves through the day, and not just get themselves through the day, but to accomplish the extraordinary things that they are capable of.

So, that’s a frame. The story. Frames can be used to include or exclude things, and this is where they can be very useful or dangerous. For example, a wealthy person dies and leaves behind an estate. That estate is going to be transferred to somebody else. Traditionally in our society, we have this kind of cultural consensus that when we transfer money from one person to another, there are certain boundaries on that. For example, a parent can give up to ten thousand dollars to their children without it being a taxable event, but after that they have to start paying taxes on it. So we have agreed that we don’t want to land a gentry in the United States. We fought a revolution against that with England, that there are certain appropriate limits to extreme wealth and therefore, when an estate is transferred from a person who no longer exists to someone else, that there should be a tax on that. It’s called the estate tax. When you ask Americans if they’re in favor of an estate tax about 80 percent of them will say yes. If, on the other hand, you ask Americans if they’re in favor of a death tax, about 80 percent of them will say no. We’re talking about the same tax here. So it’s a matter of the frame. It’s very simple.

A frame can be as simple as changing one word. So, becoming very conscious of that—gay marriage. The gay marriage issue, civil unions, all these sorts of things. I wrote an op-ed for Common Dreams about two years ago when this was really firing up, titled “Blame it on Jefferson” and my point was this is not about gay marriage; this is about civil rights. Are we going to extend civil rights to all of the members of our society? That’s the frame that is increasingly being gotten by people.

There’s been a historic battle in the United States between corporations and labor, about a living wage versus what they call “the right to work.” The 1947 the Taft-Hartley bill, which, without going into the whole long story of it, basically was a right-to-fire bill, but they called it right-to-work. These are frames. The right-to-life movement is really fascinating. On my radio show recently, I had a republican attorney on who was talking about how life begins at conception. Now, I consider myself pro-life inasmuch as I’m all in favor of life. I am not in favor of the taking of life. I’m opposed to capital punishment, and as a man and as the father of three children, I can’t imagine, having watched my wife go through three pregnancies, what it would be like to be a woman and be carrying a baby. My personal take on this, with regard to the whole abortion issue, is that men shouldn’t even be allowed to vote on the issue because we can’t understand it.

In any case, a woman on the program was putting out her frame of, well—life begins at conception. So, my question was, okay, if life begins at conception, when somebody has a miscarriage, should there be a funeral? About 50 percent of fertilized ova never get implanted. Does that mean that we should be having funerals for every other menstrual period? Then the kicker: Okay, if life begins at conception, and abortion is murder, then do you want to put women to death who have abortions by hanging, by electrocution or by lethal injection? I mean, you know, if you’re going to criminalize abortion, what are the criminal penalties going to be? Uh, we don’t talk about that, right? So let’s redefine the frames. These are just some of a few of the more political ones.

Some of the weakest of the frames out there are the ones that are simply lies. The George Orwell frames—the “Clear Skies Initiative.” People are increasingly realizing this is about putting more mercury in the air. “The Healthy Forest Initiative.” Yes, let’s cut down the forests to save them. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” which originally, by the way, was named “Operation Iraqi Liberation.” Remember that? It lasted for one day until they discovered that the acronym was O-I-L. They changed the name just like that. But deeper than framing is the concept of identity. And identity is something that we really need to get, because framing is really just the surface. It’s just one piece of probably 20 or 30 different methods used in NLP and other forms of therapy, psychology, communication and linguistics to understand and enhance communication.

Identity is something that gets right down to the limbic brain. This is the core stuff: who I am, what tribe I’m part of, who my family is, what my identity is, what nation I’m part of, what community I’m part of, who is with us and who is against us, to paraphrase badly George W. Bush. These are things that really are burned into our DNA. An insect, a bee knows which hive to go back to. Virtually every form of life has some sense of tribalism or community associated with it. This, in a very real way, again, like that scalpel, can be something that heals, that brings us together, that allows us to help and nurture each other. Here we are, the Bioneers tribe. Or the dark side of it—the dangerous side of it—it can be used against us.

Conservatives and republicans and not an unnoticeable number of democrats as well, have been doing just exactly that over time. For example, back in the ‘70s, Richard Nixon said, “Let’s do the southern strategy.” The southern strategy was a euphemism for, “let’s promote racism” and “lets try and get all those racist democrats in the south and bring them into the Republican Party.” I remember I spoke with Bill Moyers. I interviewed him on my radio program last year and he was in the office with Lynden Johnson when they came in with the civil rights bill. They said, “Okay, here’s the final draft of the bill. Are you really going to sign this thing?” One of LBJ’s advisors was standing there, and as Bill Moyers related to me—and I’m paraphrasing, I’m sure Mr. Moyers can tell the story better than I, but nonetheless it really hit me—this guy said, “You know, President Johnson, if you sign this bill the democrats are going to lose the South for a generation.”

LBJ said, again paraphrasing, but essentially he said, if that’s the price to the Democratic Party, if that’s the price of doing the right thing, I’m willing to do that. And he signed that bill. And the republicans just leaped into that and said, cool, we’ll take the racist vote. And off they went with it. And thus we see the Willie Horton ads, and the George Herbert Walker Bush ads, and then they stepped off from the races to the homophobe vote. It’s all about racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

If you take the largest frame of all, the real struggle here has to do with the frame of identity: who we are. On the one hand, corporations and so-called conservatives try to convince us that our identity is that of consumers, when for a 230 some odd year history, and really for millennia, humans have understood that our real identity is that of citizens, that of participants and community, that of participants in a political process, in a local process. This is a critical point. To be a citizen means to be part of, and a defender of and here’s the most important one, and this is the one that it’s a tragedy they don’t teach in civics classes any more—to be a part of, and a defender of the commons. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the streets we drive on, the schools that we use, the fire departments, the police departments. There’s all the physical commons that we know about, and then there are also the cultural commons—the stories we tell ourselves, our histories, our notions of ourselves and on it goes. Jan Edwards is doing a great job with this kind of stuff about the commons, and I wish I had her website right in front of me. I’d share it with you. There’s so much good stuff about the commons out there.

FDR and LBJ got it about the commons. They got it that Franklin Roosevelt, in his “Four Freedoms” speech, when on July 27, 1936 he was re-nominated to run for president, he said, “Necessitous men are not free men.” Hungry people aren’t free people, no matter what you want to call them. And all the time I get conservatives on my radio program who say we shouldn’t have social security. We shouldn’t have Medicare. We shouldn’t have a social safety net. All that stuff is socialism. We need freedom. I respond with, “Wait a minute, a hungry person is not a free person.” They reply, “Oh, yes they are.” This is the fundamental debate: It’s about whether we’re a nation of consumers. Whether we’re a nation that defines ourselves by—and not just a nation by the way, all over the world—whether we are individuals who define ourselves by what we have and what we can get, or who we are and what we’re part of. It’s just a very fundamental notion.

To be a consumer, to reduce a person from citizen to consumer is to infantilize them, is to reduce them to the role of being an infant. The fundamental whispered message of all advertising is, “you are the center of the universe.” This is the baby’s worldview. In addition to that, advertising tries to convince people that they’re not good enough, they’re not sufficient enough, they’re not complete enough with out this product. And so, we bring about this whole notion of greed is good and stuff brings happiness.

The reality is a certain amount of stuff will bring a certain amount of happiness. I wrote about this in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. If you’re cold, naked and hungry, and outdoors, alone at night in the woods, you’re going to be unhappy. I think we can all agree on that. If somebody takes you in and says, “here’s some clothing you can put on. Here’s a fire you can sit next to. Here’s a nice bowl of soup. Here’s a bed you can sleep in,” you’re going to go from unhappy to happy pretty fast and stuff made it happen. Right? So there is some truth to the idea that stuff can make you happy. But this is where, then, the cons take this next step and this is where it gets nutty—they say, okay, if this much stuff will make you that happy, then twice as much stuff will make you twice as happy; ten times as much stuff will make you ten times as happy; a million times as much stuff will make you a million times as happy, and Bill Gates lives in a state of perpetual bliss. The reality is we know that is not true. That is one of the most toxic lies of our culture that is shoved down the throats of our children every single day in television advertising, in advertising in our schools, right across the board. And not just our children, I mean, adults as well. But this is one of the big lies, and it has to do with creating a frame that has to do with identity.

Ultimately what’s at stake here is the branding of the United States of America, as well as the branding of citizenship around the world. There are very powerful forces that want to take citizenship out of the branding and to replace it with consumerism. What do we do about this? How do we communicate effectively? What are some of the tools that we can use to change the dialogue and to bring this back?

The first is establishing rapport. Rapport is establishing, “Hey, we’re humans here together.” When I get conservatives on my radio show for example, and I do this fairly frequently, I find it actually makes better radio to get people on that I disagree with than people I agree with, you know, and some very interesting conversations come out of it.
The first thing I’ll try and do is find common ground. We both love this country. We both live in this country. You know, find some kind of common ground. Establish rapport. In order to have any kind of effective communication—we all have people in our families who are of different political persuasions, people that we work with, people that we have to talk to around the water cooler—whatever it may be, find some commonality. Communication is not possible without first establishing rapport. And establishing rapport usually begins by finding common ground of some kind and then stepping off from that common ground into the areas where we digress so that there is a foundation to come back to, because we’re still related at the end of the day. We’re still friends at the end of the day with these folks.

The second is to be multi-modal. The three primary modalities that people experience and understand the world through, are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, their feelings. Interestingly, people will reveal to you how they experience the world by their use of language, by their use of predicates. This is purely cultural. I’ve worked in aboriginal and indigenous cultures on four continents and my experience has been that in aboriginal and indigenous cultures about 80 percent are kinesthetic. You never see that in “western” culture or “modern” culture, whatever you want to call it.

In our culture about 75 percent of people are visual. What they will say is, “I see what you’re talking about. That’s clear to me.” They’re using language of visual. I have people on the telephone who, as a way of saying goodbye say, “I’ll see you later.” You can’t see me now. What are you talking about? But they experience the world visually.

Other people experience the world in an auditory way. They’ll say things like, “I hear what you’re saying. I really like the sound of that. Hey, great to hear your voice. I’ll talk to you later.”

Then some people experience the world kinesthetically. They experience the world through their feelings. They like to touch. They like to hug. They talk about, “Hey, I can get my hands around that. That’s a good solid—I have a good feeling for that. I’ll catch you later.”

So when you’re communicating with a group of people or when you’re writing as I do, or if you’re doing media like I do, try to use all three. I’ll make a point to string them all together into a sentence. I’ll start out saying, “I want to talk to you today about the stories that we tell ourselves, the way we view the world, and the way we all feel as Americans.” I think that’s how I opened this conversation. So some visual people in the room are thinking, “I see that.” Auditory people are saying, “Oh, yeah, I hear that. That makes sense.” And the kinesthetic people say, “Feels good to me.”

So notice that, and notice when you’re communicating with other people the kind of language that they’re using and echo it back to them. It’s not about manipulation. This is about stepping into another person’s world and being there with them, for those of you who are kinesthetic. Or seeing it the way they see, for those of you who are visual. Or hearing the same stories they hear, for those like me, who are auditory. Always try to chunk up to the bigger picture. Always ask, okay, if this is so, what does that have to do with democracy? What does that have to do with humanity? What does that have to do with life? What does that have to do with the future of life on Earth? Where does that take us? What’s the logical result of this? So very often we get caught in these little debates about little issues, and in fact that’s one of the ways that corporatists, conservatives, but particularly corporatists, have grabbed so many debates—by staying at the level of the micro rather than the macro—the talking about two guys kissing in San Francisco versus civil rights.

Let’s take it from small stuff to big stuff. Let’s look at the large frames in every case. Every opportunity you have in one of these discussions, ask yourself—those of you who can talk to yourselves in your heads—if everybody did this, what impact does this have on democracy? Where does this lead us? Understand the unconscious power of language, of associating language with things. I want to share with you a list that was put together back in 1994 or earlier, by Newt Gingrich with the help of Frank Luntz. Newt actually held training sessions where republicans got together and they memorized these word lists. For ten years now, we have been subjected to this. You’ll catch these on the Sunday programs. He essentially said, use the list below to define your campaign and your purpose. Here are the contrasting words first. “Often we search for words to help us define our opponents. Remember that creating a list and creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that create a clear and easily understood contrast. In other words, these are the words that, whenever you’re going to use the word environmentalist, or use the word democrat, whenever you’re going to use the word liberal, whenever you’re going to use the word—any thing that we would consider positive values, you know, green, remember the green party? Whatever, predicate it with one of these words:

decay, failure, collapsing, deeper crisis, urgency, destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they, them, unionize, bureaucracy, compassion is not enough, betray, consequences, limits, shallow, traders, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitudes, destruction, impose self-serving greed, ideological, insecure, anti-flag, anti-family, anti-child, anti-job, pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare corruption, selfish, insensitive, status-quo, mandate, taxes, spending, shame, disgrace, punish, bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abusive power machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape and patronage.”

Now, that’s a list. There are people who have memorized that list and use it on a regular basis. On the other hand, he said, “Whenever you are going to use the word republican or the word conservative, precede it by the words:

share, change, opportunity, legacy, challenge, control, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity, crusade, movement, children, family, debate, compete, actively, we, us, our, candidly, humane, pristine, provide, liberty, commitment, principle, unique, duty, precious, promise, caring, tough, listen, learn, help, lead, vision, success, empowerment, citizen, activist, mobilize, conflict, light, dream, freedom, peace, rights, pioneer, pride, building, preserve, pro-flag, pro-child, pro-environment, pro-reform, pro-workfare, eliminate good time in prison, strength, choice, choose, fair, protect, confident, incentive, hard-work, initiative, common sense and passionate.”

This is just a reality here that these folks are not unsophisticated. There are billions of dollars, trillions of dollars at stake worldwide in the corporate takeover of the planet. In the transfer of sovereignty from an individual nation, to an entity like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, where NAFTA chapter 11, our laws that we pass with our elected representatives are actually struck down by a group of corporations sitting around a table deciding whether our laws will be legal. We have surrendered our sovereignty with these trade agreements and it is making a huge fortune for a very small number of very, very wealthy people and very powerful corporations.

Ultimately the battle we’re looking at, and there’s a frame for you—battle. In any case, the battle that we’re looking at is the classic argument between conservative and liberal. It’s not really right and left. The old left is gone. The old left was the old Marxists, and the old communists, and the people who believe that the government should own all the factories and the means of production supply. And Joe McCarthy started taking them apart, and they’re gone by and large. There is no left in the United States any more. 85 percent of Americans say we should have single payer health care. 95 percent of Americans are in favor of a healthy social security program. The vast majority of Americans want clean air and clean water, and yet when they talk about these issues they say liberal. This is mainstream. This is human. These are fundamental human values.

Then on the other side there’s the right. There’s the group who says we should surrender all of our power to corporations. They are people after all. We should surrender all of our power to corporations and just let them govern us because they know what’s best for us and they can do the whole thing. The debate really goes back to the debate between Sir Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In the 1790s, Thomas Payne spent two weeks in Sir Edmund Burke’s home in London. Burke is the godfather of the modern American conservative movement. You can read about him in Russell Kirk’s book The Conservative Mind, the book that animated Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley. Burke said, in a letter to Thomas Paine, “it does me no harm if a man is to allowed to engage in a servile a profession as hairdresser or tallow maker (candle maker) but it does society great harm if such a man is allowed to participate in governance by voting.”

Thomas Paine proposed progressive income tax, inheritance tax, healthcare for all, labor unions, just the whole thing. Thomas Paine was the original progressive thinker. Sir Edmund Burke wrote a letter to him. This is the conservative worldview of a small, but very powerful, very wealthy aristocracy, and the rationale that Burke used was that that would create a stable society. And he was right. The conservative worldview for 7,000 years held very stable societies. But we have agreed for 200 years plus now in the United States that that’s not the kind of society we want to live in. We’re willing to put up with a little bit of instability to have freedom, and to have a quality of life, and to have a real middle class in America. And that’s the ultimate struggle. That’s the ultimate battle. So, to paraphrase Jefferson, as we water the tree of liberty with our words, and our deeds, and our actions, it can grow to a mighty oak that can provide protection for us, and for our families, and our children, and future generations, and for all nations around the world.