A double bind is a choice where both roads lead to the same place. You offer two options, your client picks one, and either pick moves things the direction you were already headed. “Would you like to relax in the chair now, or in a few minutes?” Now or in a few minutes, they’re relaxing in the chair. The only thing actually on offer is the route.
You’ll also hear this called the illusion of choice. The idea behind that name is that the choice narrows attention from whether to which, so the person is busy deciding how rather than deciding if. That’s the part that tends to do the work.
It’s one of the Milton Model patterns, and it’s a workhorse in conversational hypnosis. It also happens to be one of the few patterns that survives in writing, since it lives in the words rather than in your voice.
Building A Double Bind
Pick the outcome you actually want. Then offer two routes to it.
The outcome sits in the part of the sentence that isn’t up for grabs. The choice sits in the part that is. So if the outcome is “eyes closed,” the bind might be “you can let your eyes close now, or let them close when they get too heavy to hold open.” If the outcome is “we start the change work,” it might be “would you like to start with the smoking, or with the sleep?”
Both options have to be ones you’re happy to get. That falls out of the definition: if only one of the two roads goes where you wanted, it isn’t a bind.
Where The Name “Double Bind” Came From
The term comes out of Gregory Bateson’s group in the 1950s, and it didn’t start life as a hypnosis technique. Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland used it in a paper on schizophrenia to describe a repeated pattern in which a person receives one instruction, receives a second instruction that contradicts the first at a more abstract level, can’t comment on the contradiction, and is prevented from stepping out of the situation altogether.
That last ingredient is the one that matters here. The popular summary of Bateson’s bind is “no matter what you do, you can’t win.” “No escape” would have been the better phrase.
And even that isn’t quite true. There’s usually escape. Your client can say “actually, I’d rather do neither” or “can we do it a third way.” The escape is harder than the two options you laid out, because you’ve made those two easy and left the third one unspoken. Difficult escape is the honest description.
Which is worth sitting with, because it means the therapeutic version and the damaging version aren’t different machines. They’re the same machine pointed somewhere else. Bateson himself wrote about binds used constructively, and Erickson was one of his consultants. Erickson and Rossi later set out the hypnotic varieties in a 1975 paper for the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis.
What Makes A Double Bind Ethical
Not the structure. Not how hard the escape is. Where you point it.
Is the bind aimed at the thing your client walked in and asked for, or at getting them to buy a Subaru? “Would you like to relax in the chair now, or in a few minutes?” delivered to someone who booked a session to learn to relax is influence in the direction they hired you for. The same sentence structure aimed at a signature on a contract they didn’t come in wanting is a different act, and the grammar won’t tell you which one you just did.
That’s the test I’d apply. It’s usable in the moment, which the vaguer versions aren’t.
Start With Small, Easy Choices
Imagine you’re on a date, and your date says: “Would you like to get married tonight, or in the spring?”
Too much, too soon.
“Would you like to order appetizers first, or go straight to the main course?” is the same pattern at a size the moment can carry. The guideline is small, easy decisions first. Save the bigger ones for later in the relationship, when there’s more to carry them.
The same goes in your office. A bind about which chair to sit in is not a bind about whether to give up drinking. Working the small ones early tends to build the momentum the bigger ones need, and it costs you very little if one doesn’t land.
When The Client Takes Neither Option
First, it doesn’t come up all that often, in my experience. A double bind offered inside decent rapport, at a point in the session where the thing you’re proposing makes sense, usually just gets answered.
When it doesn’t, the useful move is to read it rather than push.
Say you offer, “Would you like to relax in the chair now, or in a few minutes?” and your client says, “Actually, this chair isn’t good for my back. Is it OK if I sit on the couch?”
That’s not resistance. That’s a person with a back and a preference. Take the couch.
Now, if they do that on every bind you offer, that’s information. Not about the technique. About them, and about where you and they actually are with each other.
Here’s how I’d handle it. Go back to rapport first. Then re-establish why they’re in your office at all. What did they come for?
From there, two ways to go.
One: keep offering binds, but leave out the obvious choice, the one you actually want them to take, and see whether they supply it themselves. Someone who has been reliably producing a third option will often produce the one you left out.
Two: stop using the technique with this client. That’s a legitimate answer and not a defeat. A person who has spent time around a gaslighter, or around pushy salespeople, may be sensitive to double binds in a way that has nothing to do with you. There are plenty of other ways in.
Double Binds Work Best Stacked
A double bind on its own is a small move. Mixed in with the other Ericksonian patterns, it gets considerably more interesting, and the combination is where most of the effect seems to come from.
Stack a couple of presuppositions, a double bind, a lost performative, some embedded suggestions, and the sentence takes real energy to pull apart. Most people don’t try. The bits that aren’t up for debate slide past as the furniture of the sentence, and what’s left to respond to is the choice you offered.
Which is also why binds sit naturally alongside pacing and leading and indirect suggestion. They’re doing related jobs.
If you want to work the whole family of these patterns rather than one at a time, that’s what the Hypnotic Language Mastery Pack covers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a double bind manipulation?
It can be. So can a plain question, depending on what it’s for. The structure is neutral, and the answer lives in what you’re aiming it at. Aimed at the outcome your client asked you for, it’s influence in the service of the thing they hired you to help with. Aimed at something they didn’t come in wanting, it isn’t, and the fact that it was phrased politely doesn’t change that.
Sources
- Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J., & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1(4), 251–264. The original description of the double bind, including the condition that prevents the person leaving the situation. Also reprinted in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
- Erickson, M. H., & Rossi, E. L. (1975). Varieties of double bind. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 17(3), 143–157.
- Bandler, R., & Grinder, J. (1975). Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., Volume 1. Meta Publications.
Enjoy,
Keith
