He really became quite functional. Then his wife would say things like "I want you to take out the garbage and mow the lawn, because there are so many things that we're behind on" and suddenly his arms would become paralyzed. He would go "Oh, damn! I can't do it now." His business partners would ask him to engage in the most unpleasant of activities in their business–doing bookkeeping and things like that—and the paralysis would mysteriously emerge.

Once while I was trying to learn about symptom substitution, a lady who had numb feet came to me. Her feet were numb all the time. They were so numb that she couldn't balance herself, and she even had to have people help her walk. She had been in therapy for some time. Before she first went to therapy, her feet only got numb sometimes, and after being in therapy, they kept getting worse and worse. She thought that they had been getting worse all the time, and that the therapy hadn't helped, but my guess is that the therapy had made her have numb feet constantly.

I always think of symptoms as being people's friends, not their problems, because 1 think of symptoms as communication channels. However, as with most communications between people, the purpose and the outcome is often forgotten. Symptoms, like people, don't always realize the difference between what they intend to communicate and what they do communicate.

This woman was brought into my office by a very conservative counselor from a place in California where you have to be rich to qualify to live. The counselor explained to me how she had done family therapy with this woman, and the woman now had a perfectly happy family. The counselor had thought that the woman's numb feet had something to do with family interactions. But since she had worked through all the family difficulties, and the symptom was still there, something else must be going on. So they thought, as a last straw, they would try hypnosis.

The poor client was sitting there dressed in a sweatshirt and pedal–pushers. She wasn't an unattractive person, but she appeared to have worked very diligently to make herself look unattractive. There she was, sitting next to a very well–dressed forty–year–old woman therapist,' who was saying things to me like "Her family problems are solved." Every time the counselor said that, the client didn't say anything, but her nonverbal response was dramatic. Her face would go asymmetrical and her breathing would become shallow and rapid. I thought "Hm … something is going on here."

So I looked at her, and said "You've come to me with numb feet … and your therapist says … this has nothing to do with your family problems… . Your therapist believes … your problems have been solved … and your symptom persists… . Your doctor tells you … this is not neurological… . He says the problem is not a physical one … but it is in your head… . Now 1 know … and you know … that the problem is not in your head… . It's in your feet because you can't stand on them. … If you stood on your feet… without numbness … you wouldn't need … this therapist … or that doctor . . , because that's the reason you've come here… . Now I don't want to talk to you . , . because you've failed utterly to cope with this problem… . You haven't learned to stand on those feet … by yourself … without numbness… . I want to speak to your feet directly."

If you take somebody from Middle–class America and say something like that to them, they get weird. The difference between hypnotic communication and ordinary verbal communication is that when you use hypnotic communication, you don't care about the content. You only pay attention to the responses. I keep saying "Don't pay attention to the content, pay attention to the response" If you do that, you can say anything, and communicate with people in a way that no one else can.

Then I shifted my eyes and looked down at her feet and said "Numb feet, I know you have something important to tell us." That therapist looked down at the woman's feet, and the woman bent over and stared at her feet, too.

I said "Now, I know … that biologically … the right foot is the 'yes' foot … and the left foot is the 'no' foot. … Is there something that you want to say to me?" The "yes" foot moved, and the woman and the therapist both gasped. I said "All right. Is there something that you've been trying to tell this woman for years, and she hasn't understood?" The "yes" foot moved again. I said "Would you be willing to tell her is a new way?" The "no" foot moved. I said "Have you noticed that this way doesn't work as well as you would like it to, and that the price is too high?" The "no" foot moved again. Her feet thought that what they were doing worked just fine.

Then I said "Would you be willing to try another approach anyway, if it worked better?" and the "yes" foot moved. So I said "All right, feet. If you like this idea, what I want you to do is to remove every ounce of numbness. Restore complete and solid and firm balance. And only at the moments that you need to communicate, I want you to become numb. But I want you to do a more thorough job. I want you to become numb from the tip of the toes to at least a foot above the knees. And then when you no longer need to communicate, go back to full balance. Because the way you communicate now, she doesn't know when you are communicating and when you are not, so she can't understand what you are saying. Even though she obeys, she obeys when she doesn't need to. And she could obey more fully, could she not?" And the "yes" foot moved. Then I said "Begin now."

The woman said "My feet aren't numb!" She picked her foot up and she looked at it, and she moved her toes. She stood up and she could balance. The therapist said "Now, I don't want you to get too optimistic, because sometimes these things don't last" and the woman got numb all the way up to her knees, and she fell over. She lifted herself up into the chair and said to her therapist "Don't tell me that!" and the numbness went away.

Now, her symptom became a teacher for her. When she left my office and went home, she was delighted. She cleaned the house and did things she hadn't done in a long time. When her husband came home, she told him the good news, and said "Why don't you take me out to dinner to celebrate?" He said "I'm too tired. Why don't you just cook me something." She responded "Well, OK" and the numbness began to creep up her legs. She said "No, I think we'd better go out" and the numbness went down.

Her numbness became her best friend for quite some time. It became a teacher. When a symptom becomes a teacher for you, it becomes an ally, because there is nothing in the world that can't be made useful in some way.

If you think of psychotherapy, hypnosis, and medical science in general as making war on symptoms, you will be very limited in what you will be able to do. Fighting with her own unconscious mind is something the client doesn't do very well, and your conscious mind won't be able to do it much better.

A long time ago, before I became an official hypnotist, I had a relative who had a tremendous problem with her weight. She was a member of Weight Watchers Anonymous and she did all kinds of things like putting signs on her refrigerator. What impressed me about her was that she always bought food so she could resist eating it. There was always food in the house to not eat.

I remember that one time when I was just a kid and didn't know much about things, I went to the supermarket with her. As we were walking through the supermarket, I was kind of bouncing along behind her. She was putting lots of things in the cart that she wouldn't eat. One of the things she was getting was a half–gallon of ice cream. I asked her why she was getting the ice cream, when the day before she'd gone to so much trouble to not eat it. She said she was getting it for me.