One thing you can do is to identify the one or two individuals, or several, on the jury who might, by virtue of their own strategies, persuade the others to go along. And of course that is what family therapy is all about. Everything is going to interact in a system. I don't care who you put together for what length of time, the systems are going to start clicking. I try to figure out who in the family elicits responses the most often. Because if I can get that one person to do my work for me, it will be really easy. Very often it's someone who doesn't speak much. Son here says something. He has external behavior. And when he does, you get an intense internal response from the mother. Although her external behavior is subtle, some little cue, everybody responds to it. When the father does something with external behavior, this kid responds, but not much else happens. And if the daughter does something, maybe we get a response here and maybe there.
I want to know who everybody else in the family responds to a lot. I also want to know if any one single person in that family can always get that person to respond. Let's say every single time the son does anything with external behavior, the mother responds. If I can predict something about how that happens, I can make one little change in the son, and then the mother will respond and get everybody else in the family to respond for me. I always spend fifty percent or more of whatever time is allotted to me gathering information, and testing it to make sure that I'm right. I’ll feed in an innocuous thing here, and predict what will happen over there. I keep running the system over and over and over again until I'm absolutely sure that if I make a change with this kid, it's going to change the mother's behavior in a way that will change all the other people in the family. That will set up a new stable system. Otherwise you usually get an unbalanced system, or they change in the office but they go home and go back to normal. I want something that's really going to carry over and be very, very permanent.
If I can set up a stable system by making only one change, it will be very pervasive with a family system. I think the main mistake of all family therapists is that they do too much in a session. If you're working with an individual, you can do a thousand things and get away with it, unless they go home to a family. One of the first things I always ask people when they come in is "What is your living situation?" because I want to know how many anchors I have to deal with at home. If they live with one other person, it's not so bad. You've just got to be careful that there's no secondary gain: that they don't get rewarded for whatever behavior it is they want to change.
Man: How much dependency on you is created by your methods?
One of the things we strive for in our work is to make sure that we use transference and countertransference powerfully to get rapport, and then to make sure that we don't use it after that. We don't need it after that. And since they don't get to sit there and tell us their problems, we don't become their best companion. There are real risks in doing content therapy because you may become someone's closest friend. Then they end up paying money to hang out with you because no one else is willing to sit around and listen to them drivel about unpleasant things in their life. We don't get much dependency. For one thing, we have a tool that we teach our clients to use with themselves, called reframing, which we are going to teach you tomorrow.
If you ask the people who were up here for demonstration purposes, my guess is they would assign very little responsibility to us for the changes that occurred in them—much less than they would in traditional content-oriented therapy. That's one of the advantages of secret therapy. It doesn't create that kind of dependency relationship.
At the same time, people who work with us usually have a sense of trust; they know that we know what we are doing. Or they may be totally infuriated with us, but they are still getting the changes they want. And of course we work very quickly, and that reduces the possibility of dependency.
In our actual private practice, which is severely reduced now because we're moving into other areas of modeling, we tell stories. A person will come in and I don't want them to tell me anything. I just tell them stories. The use of metaphor is a whole set of advanced patterns which is associated with what we've done so far. You can learn about those in David Gordon's excellent book, Therapeutic Metaphors. I prefer metaphor artistically. I don't have to listen to client's woes, and I get to tell very entertaining stories. Clients are usually bewildered or infuriated by paying me money to listen to stories. But the changes they want occur anyway—no thanks to me, of course, which is fine. That's another way to make sure there is no dependency. You do things so covertly that they don't have the faintest idea what you are doing, and the changes they want occur anyway.
Is there anybody here who has been to see Milton Erickson? He told you stories, right? Did you find that six months, eight months, or a year later you were going through changes that were somehow associated with those stories that he was telling?
Man: Yes.
That's the typical report. Six months later people suddenly notice they've changed and they don't have any idea how that happened, and I then they get a memory of Milton talking about the farm up in Wisconsin or something. When you were with Erickson did you have the experience of being slightly disoriented, fascinated and entranced by the man's language?
Man: I was bored.
Milton uses boredom as one of his major weapons. If Milton were here, one thing he might do is bore you to tears. So you'd all drift off into daydreams and then he has you. I get bored too quickly myself to use that as a tactic. Milton, sitting in a wheelchair and being seventy-six years old, doesn't mind spending a lot of time doing that. And he does it exquisitely.
We have, during these days together, succeeded brilliantly in completely overwhelming your conscious resources. This was a deliberate move on our part, understanding as we do that most learning and change takes place at the unconscious level. We have appealed explicitly to each of both of you, that your unconscious minds would make a useful representation necessary for your education, so that in the weeks and days and months ahead you can be delightfully surprised by new patterns occurring in your behavior.
And we suggest to your unconscious mind that you make use of the natural processes of sleep and dreaming, to review any experiences that have occurred during these two days, and sort out those things that your unconscious believes will be useful for you to know, making a useful representation at the unconscious level, meanwhile allowing you to sleep deeply and soundly, so that in the days and weeks and months to come, you can discover yourself doing things that you didn't know you learned about here, so as to constantly increase, at the unconscious level, your repertoire in responding to people who come to you for assistance…. And you didn't even know they were there. Not at all.
The last time that I went to see Milton Erickson, he said something to me. And as I was sitting there in front of him, it didn't make sense. Most of his covert metaphors have made... eons of sense to me. But he said something to me which would have taken me a while to figure out. Milton said to me "You don't consider yourself a therapist, but you are a therapist." And I said "Well, not really." He said "Well, let's pretend ... that you're a therapist who works with people. The most important thing ... when you're pretending this ... is to understand... that you are really not ….You are just pretending.... And if you pretend really well, the people that you work with will pretend to make changes. And they will forget that they are pretending... for the rest of their lives. But don't you be fooled by it." And then he looked at me and he said:
"Goodbye."
III. Finding New Ways
There are several organizing assumptions that we use to put ourselves in a state which we find useful to operate in as we do therapeutic kinds of work. One is that it's better to have choice than no choice, and another is the notion of unconscious choice. Another is that people already have the resources they need in order to change, if they can be helped to have the appropriate resources in the appropriate context. A fourth one is that each and every single piece of behavior
has a positive function in some context. It would be wanton and irresponsible of us simply to change people's behavior without taking into account a very important notion called "secondary gain." We assume that the pattern of behavior somebody is displaying is the most appropriate response they have in the context—no matter how bizarre or inappropriate it seems to be.
The context that your clients are responding to is usually composed of about nine parts of internal experience and about one part of external. So when a piece of behavior looks or sounds bizarre or inappropriate to you, that's a good signal that a large portion of the context that the person is responding to is something that is not available to you in your immediate sensory experience. They are responding to someone or something else internally represented: mother, father, historical events, etc. And often that internal representation is out of consciousness. Linda and Tammy can verify that the responses that they changed when they came and worked with us here, were responses to events that occurred sometime in the past.
That shouldn’t surprise any of you. I’m sure you all have been through experiences that support that statement. Our specific response to that understanding is to realize that all of us are complex and balanced organisms. One way to take that complexity into account when you go about assisting someone in making some change, is by using a pattern that we call reframing. Reframing is a specific way of contacting the portion or part—for lack of a better word—of the person that is causing a certain behavior to occur, or that is preventing a certain other behavior from occurring. We do this so that we can find out what the secondary gain of the behavior is, and take care of that as an integral part of the process of inducing a change in that area of behavior.
This is best illustrated by an example. A woman came to us referred by a psychiatrist. She wanted to lose 45 pounds. She had lost this weight in the past, but every time she lost it, she regained it. She could get it off, but she couldn't keep it off. We discovered through reframing that there was no part of her that had any objection to her losing weight. However, the part of her that caused her to overeat was doing that in order to protect her marriage. Can you make that connection? If you can't, let me explain a little further. In the opinion of this part of the woman who was overweight, if she were to lose the weight and weigh what she wanted to weigh, she would be physically attractive to men. If she were physically attractive to men, she would be approached and propositioned. In the opinion of this part she did not have adequate resources to make good decisions for herself in response to those propositions. She wasn't able to say "No." There was no part of her that wanted her to be overweight. There was, however, a part of her that used her being overweight to institutionalize the choice of not having to cope with a situation that it believed she couldn't cope with effectively, and that might lead to the end of her marriage. This is known as "secondary gain."
The heart of reframing is to make the distinction between the intention—in this case to protect her marriage, and the behavior—in this case overeating. Then you can find new, more acceptable, behaviors that satisfy the same intention.
One thing that people rarely understand is that people's symptoms work. As long as being fat worked and accomplished the intention, that part was going to keep her fat. When it had better ways of protecting her marriage, then it could allow her to lose the weight, which in fact she did without dieting.
Let's demonstrate now. Who wants to change?—secretly….
OK, Dick, we want you to keep any content to yourself, leaving the people here free simply to observe the process that we go through. Either Dick is doing something now which he doesn't have a choice about, a sort of compulsive behavior which he would rather replace with something else, or there is something he would rather do but he isn't able to do. Those are the two verbal ways of coding the world of possibility.
Dick: It's the first.
OK. If it's all right with you, let's give the code name X to the pattern of behavior you presently have which you would rather replace with something else more appropriate. And I assume that pattern X, in your conscious judgement, is not a good representation of you as a total adult organism. We've just identified the pattern, the thing the person wants to change. That is step one.
The next step is to establish communication with the part of Dick responsible for this pattern X that he wants to change.
Embedded in this context is a notion that I will state directly to him and that I want to point out to the rest of you as well. Dick, I have respect for the part of you that is responsible for pattern X occurring over and over again in your behavior. You got here. You're sitting here and you are successful in doing a lot of the things that you do in your life. I am convinced that the part of you that runs pattern X—even though you consciously don't appreciate it—is attempting to do something positive in your behalf. I will induce no changes until the part of you that is responsible for running X is satisfied that the changes are more appropriate for it, as well as for you as a total organism.
This only makes sense if you have a belief system that says "Look. If he had conscious control over this behavior, it would have changed already." So some part of him which is not conscious is running this pattern of behavior.
I can guarantee you that ninety-nine times out of a hundred when a person wants to make a change and they come to you for assistance, there's going to be a dissociation, a conflict, between their conscious desires and some unconscious set of programs. The unconscious is far more powerful. It knows far more about his needs than his conscious mind, and far more than I could ever possibly know from the outside. I ally myself immediately with the unconscious, and that's what I just finished doing. That's one way to accomplish that, verbally and explicitly: "Look, I'm not talking to your conscious mind. I'm talking to the part ofyou responsible for this pattern of behavior. It's going to run the show. I'm going to serve as its consultant."
Now how do you communicate with that part? If you had to go to the Federal Building in San Francisco and get someone to sign a paper, you'd be faced with a very complex task. Because out of the 450 people in that building, there's only one of them whom you need to get to. If you were to adopt the strategy of searching for the one person whose signature you need by stopping at the door and talking to the guard and asking if he'll sign it, and then moving down the hallway, office after office, searching for the person who is authorized to sign, you'd waste a great deal of time. It would be an inefficient strategy for you to use to get what you want in that bureaucratic setting. That's a really close metaphor for a lot of the work that therapists do.
Therapists have been trained to pay a great deal of attention to the conscious requests of their clients. Typically the conscious mind is the one that knows the least about what's going on in their behavior. The fact that a person would come into my office and say to me "I'm X-ing and I no longer want to do that; help me make a change," is a statement to me that he's already tried to make the change with all the resources that he can get to consciously and he's failed miserably. It seems as absurd as beginning with the guard and working your way through every office, for me to engage his conscious mind in a discussion of these possibilities. I want to go directly to the office where the person who can sign that paper is residing. I want to go directly to the part of Dick which is controlling his behavior at the unconscious level in this context.
I also make the assumption that the part of you that makes you X— even though you don't like that consciously—is doing something on your behalf, something that benefits you in some way. I don't know what that is, and from your response you consciously don't know what it is, because you want to stop it.
So let's establish contact with that part officially. This is step two. It's already happened, but let's do it officially. Dick, do you know how to use words to talk to yourself on the inside? OK. What I'd like you to do is to go inside in a moment and ask a question. I'll tell you what the question is. Your job, after you've asked this question, is simply
to attend to any changes you sense in your body sensations, any kinesthetic changes, any images, or any sounds that occur in response to the question. You don't have to try to influence this in any way. The part of you responsible for this pattern will make its needs known through one of those sensory channels. You just have to be sensitive to detect the response.
The question I would like you to ask is "Will the part of me responsible for pattern X communicate with me in consciousness?" And then simply notice what happens—any change of feelings, images, or sounds.
Your job out there, while Dick is doing this, is to observe him and always get the answer to the question I have him ask before he gives it to us. And you already have it. That's really typical. We talked the other day about meta-commenting as a choice in communication. This is one context in which I strongly recommend that you do not meta-comment, unless you simply want to shake somebody up. If you can always get the answer before your client does, you have a really powerful direct channel of communication to their unconscious, outside of their awareness, that allows you to do really powerful congruency checks. If the answer that you observe is different from the answer they get in their awareness, that's an important thing to know.
Dick, what was your experience after you asked the question?
Dick: Confusion.
OK. "Confusion" is a nominalization. It's not experience; it's a conscious judgement about experience. It's irrelevant to talk about his conscious judgements because he's already done the best he can with his conscious resources, and it hasn't worked. We need to work with experience. What was your experience that you labeled "confusion"? How did you know you were confused?
Dick: Flushing.
So you felt a flushing, a change in blood pressure. Was there a temperature change that went along with it, or a sense of pressure? Was it localized in some part of your body?
Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming Page 18