Meta-commenting is one choice, and I think it's a good choice. However, it is only one choice. When I watch and listen to therapists communicate, I often notice that that's the only choice that a lot of them have when presented with incongruity—that the people who are in the business of choice don't have any. You want to have a lot of choices in responding to incongruity. You want to have the choice of exaggerating the non-verbal, or of calling them a liar and attacking them, or of ignoring it, or of simply mirroring back and saying incongruently "I'm so glad!" (shaking head and sneering)
Or you can "short-circuit" them by reversing the verbal and nonverbal messages: "That's too bad" (smiling and nodding head). The response you get to that is fascinating, because most people have no idea what they verbalized." Either they will enter a confusion state, or they will begin to explicitly verbalize the message that was previously non-verbal. It's almost as if they take all the conscious material and make it unconscious and vice-versa.
Or you might choose to respond with an appropriate metaphor: "That reminds me of a story my grandfather O'Mara told me once. He was Irish himself, but he told about this Baltic country that he had spent some time in as a youth when he was traveling in Europe—poor, destitute, but nevertheless out having experience. And the duke that ruled this little principality—this was before the Second World War, when there were a lot of small countries—had a problem. The Minister of the Interior did not have good communication with the Minister of the Exterior. And so some of the things that the Minister of the Exterior could see needed to be attended to in order for a judicious trade arrangement to be made with other entities—other neighboring, surrounding people—came into conflict somehow with some of the needs that the Minister of the Interior felt..."
Now how do people learn to be incongruent? Think of a young child who comes home and hands a piece of homework to his parents. The parents look at the homework and the father says (scowling face and shaking head "no," with harsh tonality) "Oh, I'm so glad you brought that home, son!" What does the kid do? Does he lean forward and meta-comment? "Gee, Dad! I hear you say you're glad, but I notice..." Not if you're a kid. One thing that children do is to become hyperactive. One hemisphere is registering the visual input and the tonal input, and the other hemisphere is registering the words and their digital meaning, and they don't fit. They don't fit maximally where the two hemispheres overlap maximally in kinesthetic representation. If you ever watch a hyperactive kid, the trigger for hyperactivity will be incongruity, and it will begin here at the midline of the torso, and then diffuse out to all kinds of other behavior.
Let me ask you to do something now. I want you to raise your right hand…. Did anybody notice any incongruity?
Man: You raised your left hand.
I raised my left hand. So did many people out there! Some of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your right hand. Some of you didn't notice which hand I lifted. The point is that when you were all children, you had to find a way of coping with incongruity. Typically what people do is to distort their experience so that it is congruent. Is there anyone in here that actually heard me say "Raise your left hand"? Many of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your left hand and probably thought you raised your right hand. If you didn't notice the incongruity, you somehow deleted the relationship between your own kinesthetic experience and my words, in order to make your experience coherent.
If there are mixed messages arriving, one way to resolve the difficulty is to literally shut one of the dimensions—the verbal input, the tonal input, the body movements, the touch, or the visual input— out of consciousness. And you can predict that the hyperactive child who shuts the right hemisphere out of consciousness—it's still operating, of course, it's just out of awareness—will later be persecuted by visual images: dead babies floating out of hot dogs in the air above the psychiatrist's desk. The ones who cut off the kinesthetics will feel insects crawling all over them, and that will really bug them. And they will tell you that. That is a straight quote from a schizophrenic. The ones that cut off the auditory portion are going to hear voices coming out of the wall plugs, because literally they are giving up consciousness of that whole system and the information that is available to them through that system, as a way of defending themselves in the face of repeated incongruity.
In this country, when we have gone into mental hospitals we have discovered that the majority of the hallucinations are auditory, because people in this culture do not pay much attention to the auditory system. In other cultures, hallucinations will tend to cluster in other representational systems.
Woman: I'd like you to comment some more because I stumbled into some of this out of talking with people about hallucinatory phenomena.
Hallucinatory phenomena in my opinion are the same thing you've been doing here all day. There's no formal difference between hallucinations and the processes you use if I ask you to remember anything that happened this morning, or what happened when I said "Ammonia" and all of you went "uhhhrrrhhh!" As far as I can tell, there are some subtle differences between people who are in mental hospitals and people who are not. One is that they are in a different building. The other is that many of them don't seem to have a strategy to know what constitutes shared reality and what doesn't.
Who has a pet? Can you see your pet sitting here on the chair? (Yes.) OK. Now, can you distinguish between the animal that you have here, and the chair that it is sitting on? Is there anything in your experience that allows you to distinguish between the fact that you put the visual image of the pet there, and the fact that the image of the chair was there before you deliberately put it there? Is there any difference? There may not be.
Woman: Oh, yes, there is.
OK. What is the difference? How do you know that there is a real chair and there's not a real dog?
Woman: I really can see that chair in my reality here and now. But I can only picture the dog in my head, in my mind's eye—
You don't see the dog over here sitting in the chair?
Woman: Well, only in my mind's eye.
What's the difference between the image of the chair in your mind's eye and the image of the dog in your mind's eye? Is there a difference? Woman: Well, one's here and one isn't.
Yes. How do you know that, though?
Woman: Well, I still see the chair even when I look away and look back. But if I stop thinking about the dog in the chair, the dog isn't there anymore.
OK. You can talk to yourself, right? Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you at the unconscious level that is capable of having the dog there when you look back? Would you make those arrangements and find out if you can still tell the difference? Because my guess is there are other ways you know, too.
Woman: The image of the dog isn't as clear.
OK, so that's one way that you make a reality check. Would you go inside and ask if there is a part of you that can make it as clear?
Woman: Not while I'm awake.
I know your conscious mind can't do it. I'm not asking that question. Can you talk to yourself? Can you go "Hi, Mary, how are you?" on the inside? (Yes.) OK. Go inside and say "Is there any part of me at the unconscious level which is capable of making that image of the dog as clear as the chair?" And be sensitive to any response you get. It may be verbal, it may be a feeling, it may be something visual. While she's doing that, does anyone else know how they know the difference?
Man: Well, earlier when you hit the chair I could hear a sound. When you hit the dog, I couldn't.
So essentially your strategy consists of going to another representational system and noticing whether there is a representation that corresponds in that system to what you detected in another system.
Woman: I know I put the dog there.
How do you know that?
Woman: Because I can remember what I did.
OK, how do you remember putting the dog there? Is that a visual process? Do you talk to yourself? OK. Now I want you to
do that same process for putting the chair there. I want you to put the chair here, even though it's already here. I want you to go through the same process you used to put the dog here to put the chair here and then tell me what, if any, difference there is.
Does anybody know the point of all this?
Woman: We're all schizophrenic.
Of course we're all schizophrenic. In fact, R. D. Laing is far too conservative when he talks about schizophrenia being a natural response. Evolutionarily the next step, which we're all engaged in, is multiple personality. You're all multiple personalities. There are only two differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: (1) the fact that you don't have to have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, (2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don't have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.
The point that we're trying to make that the difference between somebody who doesn't know their hallucination is a hallucination and yourselves is only that you have developed some strategy by which you know what is shared reality and what is not. And if you are going to have hallucinations, you probably have them about ideas instead of about things.
If one of you in the audience said "Well, wait a minute, there really is a dog there, anybody can see that!" then probably one of the other people in this room would take you away.
Now, when Sally used the word "pensive" earlier, she was hallucinating with exactly the same formal process that a schizophrenic does. For example, there was a mental patient who looked at us and said "Did you just see me drink a cup of blood?" He was doing exactly the same thing. He was taking input from the outside, combining it in an interesting way with a response he was making internally, and then assuming it all came from the outside.
There are only two distinctions between anybody in this room and an institutionalized schizophrenic: (1) whether you have a good reality strategy and you can make that distinction, and (2) whether the content of your hallucination is socially acceptable or not. Because you all hallucinate. You all hallucinate that somebody's in a good mood or a bad mood, for example. Sometimes it really is an accurate representation of what you are getting from the outside, but sometimes it's a response to your own internal state.
And if it's not there, sometimes you can induce it. "Is something wrong?" "What's bothering you?" "Now I don't want you to worry about anything that happened today while you were gone."
Drinking blood in this culture is not acceptable. I've lived in cultures where that's fine. The Masai, in Eastern Africa, sit around and drink cups of blood all the time. No problem. It would be weird in their culture for somebody to say "I can see that you are feeling very bad about what I just said." They would begin to wonder about you. But in this culture it's reversed.
When we trained residents in mental hospitals we used to go up early and spend time in the wards because the patients there had problems we never had the opportunity to encounter before. We would give them the task of determining for themselves which parts of their experience were validated by other people, and which were not. For instance, with the cup-of-blood guy, we immediately joined his reality. "Yeah, warm this one up for me, will you?" We joined his reality so much that he came to trust us. And then we gave him the task of discovering which parts of his reality other people in the ward could validate for him. We didn't say this was really here and that wasn't, but simply asked him to determine which parts of his reality other people could share. And then he learned—as most of us have as children—to talk about those parts of reality which are either socially acceptable hallucinations, or that other people are willing to see and hear and feel, too. That's all he needed to get out of the hospital. He's doing fine. He still drinks cups of blood, but he does it by himself. Most psychotics just don't have a way of making distinctions between what's shared reality and what's not.
Man: Many psychiatrists do not have that, when working with those people.
Many do not have it, period, as far as I can tell! The only difference is that they have other psychiatrists that share that reality, so they at least have a shared reality. I've made lots of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when I worked at an electronics corporation. The corporation people didn't come in in the morning and hold each other's hands and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes. Now, when somebody at the corporation sees somebody do that, they go "Urrrrhhh! Weird!" And the people in humanistic psychology circles think the corporation people are cold and insensitive and inhuman. To me, they are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you think about shared realities, the corporation people are in the majority.
Where you really have a choice is when you can go from one reality to the other, and you can have a perspective on what's going on. One of the craziest things is when a humanistic psychologist goes to teach a seminar at a corporation and doesn't alter his behavior. That inability to adjust to a different shared reality is a demonstration of psychosis as far as I'm concerned.
Therapists feel letters. I don't think that's any more peculiar than drinking cups of blood. Everywhere I go, people tell me they feel 0 and K. That's pretty weird. Or you ask people "How do you feel?" and they say "Not bad." Think about that for a moment. That's a very profound statement. "I feel not bad." That's not a feeling. Neither is "OK."
One of the most powerful tools that I think is useful for you to have as professional communicators is to make the distinction between perception and hallucination. If you can clearly distinguish what portion of your ongoing experience you are creating internally and putting out there, as opposed to what you are actually receiving through your sensory apparatus, you will not hallucinate when it's not useful. Actually there is nothing that you need to hallucinate about. There is no outcome in therapy for which hallucinations are necessary. You can stay strictly with sensory experience and be very powerful, effective, efficient, and creative.
You need only three things to be an absolutely exquisite communicator. We have found that there are three major patterns in the behavior of every therapeutic wizard we've talked to—and executives, and salespeople. The first one is to know what outcome you want. The second is that you need flexibility in your behavior. You need to be able to generate lots and lots of different behaviors to find out what responses you get. The third is you need to have enough sensory experience to notice when you get the responses that you want. If you have those three abilities, then you can just alter your behavior until you get the responses that you want.
That's what we're doing here. We know what outcomes we want, and we put ourselves into what we call "uptime," in which we're completely in sensory experience and have no consciousness at all. We aren't aware of our internal feelings, pictures, voices, or anything else internal. We are in sensory experience in relationship to you and noticing how you respond to us. We keep changing our behavior until you respond the way we want you to.
Right now I know what I'm saying because I'm listening to myself externally. I know how much sense you're making of what I'm saying by your responses to it, both conscious and unconscious. I am seeing those. I'm not commenting on them internally, simply noticing them and adjusting my behavior. I have no idea what I feel like internally. I have tactile kinesthetic awareness. I can feel my hand on my jacket, for instance. It's a particular altered state. It's one trance out of many, and a useful one for leading groups.
Woman: How do you adjust yourself in uptime? You said you keep adjusting until you get the response you want. What adjustments are you making? Do you explain more? Or talk more? Or...
Well, I adjust all the possible parameters. The most obvious one to me is voice tone. You can adjust your facial expression, too. Sometimes you can say the same words and lift your e
yebrows and people will suddenly understand. Sometimes you can begin to move your hands. With some people, you can draw a picture. Sometimes I can just explain the same thing over again with a different set of words. Those are some of the logical possibilities that are available. There are lots and lots of possibilities.
Woman: Well, as you're changing your behavior, don't you have to be somewhat aware of what's going on inside you?
No. I think most people try to do it reflexively, with conscious self-awareness, and most of the strategies of reflexive consciousness don't work. That's why most people have such crummy personal relationships. If I want you to act a certain way, and I make you the reference for what I'm doing, then all I have to do is keep acting differently until you look and sound and behave the way I want you to. If I have to check with myself to find out, then I'm going to be paying attention to my feelings and my internal voices, which isn't going to tell me whether I'm getting what I want. Most therapists succeed with their clients a dozen times before they notice it.
Woman: OK. I can see how that would work in therapy, being a therapist. But in an intimate relationship it seems like being in uptime wouldn't be as intimate.
Oh, I disagree. I think it would be much more intimate that way. I don't think intimacy is built on talking to yourself and making pictures internally. I think intimacy is built on eliciting responses. If I'm in uptime when I'm interacting with somebody, then I'm going to be able to elicit responses from them which are pleasurable, and intimate, and anything else I want.
Woman: If I'm talking to someone about something that I'm feeling and thinking is important to me, then I wouldn't be in uptime, would I?
If that is your definition of intimacy, then we have different definitions of intimacy!
Woman: I'm saying that it's part of being intimate; that's one way of being intimate.
OK. I disagree with that.
Woman: How can you do that if you're in uptime?
Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming Page 7