Changing with Families - A Book About Further Education For Being Human

by Richard Bandler

  Marcie: No, I'm trying to understand what's going on here, and,. . .

  Therapist: Thank you, Marcie. (turning back to Dave) Dave, I want you to try something new for yourself and Marcie. Are you willing to try something new, Dave?

  Dave: Well, yeah, OK . . . I'll try. What is it?

  Therapist: Dave, I want you to look directly at Marcie and tell her how you're feeling right now, and as

  you do . . .

  Dave: (interrupting) Oh, no; I'd really like to, but I just can't.

  Therapist: You can't, Dave? What stops you?

  Dave: Huh? What stops me?

  Therapist: Yes, Dave, what stops you from looking directly at Marcie while you tell her what you are feeling?

  Dave: I don't know ... I really don't know. I just can't.

  Therapist: Dave, could you tell me what would happen if you did this?

  Dave: What would happen? I don't know . . .

  Therapist: Guess, Dave!

  In this portion of the transcript, the therapist has made a request to Dave to try something new, something which runs counter to the calibrated communication, involving the Mind Reading and Complex Equivalence, which is going on between him and Marcie. Dave's response is to state that it is impossible to do what the therapist has asked: I just can't. Now, the therapist knows from his own experience — of looking directly at Marcie when he communicates with her — that looking directly at her when speaking to her is possible for him. Therefore, if Dave thinks that this is impossible, then his claim is a signal that he has been asked to perform an act which is outside of his model of the world and, more specifically, outside of his model of what is possible for him with Marcie. One of the patterns which has assisted us most in organizing our experiences in family therapy is our ability to detect the limits of the family members' models of the world — what acts are, literally, beyond the limits which they allow themselves. In natural language systems (verbal), there are a small number of expressions which logicians call modal operators[12] of possibility and necessity. These are words and phrases which specifically identify the limits of the speaker's model of the world. By identifying these limits, we are able to help the person involved to extend his model to include what he wants for himself and his family, to turn into a choice something which he has regarded as inevitable. In the following exchange between Dave and the therapist,

  the two responses by the therapist assist Dave in extending the limits of his model to continue the process of change toward what he wants for himself and Marcie.

  Next, we list some of the most common words and phrases in the English language which identify limits in a person's model and, opposite them, the two verbal challenges we have found most effective in helping to change these limits.

  The therapist's challenges to these cue words and phrases, which identify the limits of the family's model of what is possible for them, have, in our experience, been extremely effective in assisting in the process of change.

  Closely associated with modal operators is the type of exchange illustrated by the following part of the transcript:

  Dave: Oh, no; I'd really like to, but I just can't.

  Therapist: What stops you?

  Dave: I really don't know ... I just can't.

  Therapist: Dave, what would happen if you did?

  Dave: I really don't know.

  Therapist: Guess, Dave!

  Often, when using verbal patterns to assist the family members in changing, we have received the reply, I don't know. We often ask them to guess. We have found that asking people to guess relieves them of the pressure to know accurately, and, therefore, they can come up with more relevant material. By responding with a congruent guess, time and again we have enabled family members to express something important about what stops them from getting something they want for themselves. When requested to guess when he claims not to know the answer to some question, the family member invariably produces an answer. The answer can come from only one place, his model of the world. Thus, his answer tells us a great deal about how he organizes his experience, what resources are available to him, what limits he accepts, etc.

  We continue now with the transcript. Essentially, in the section we skip, the therapist continued to work with Dave, assisting him in understanding just what it is that he wants for himself and for his family. The therapist accomplished this, primarily, by insuring that he understands what Dave is telling him; he insists that Dave communicate in language without nominalizations, deletions, relatively unspecified verbs, or nouns without referential indices. We begin the transcript again just after the therapist has turned his attention to Marcie, the mother/wife member of the family.

  Therapist: Well, Marcie, you have had an opportunity to listen and watch as I worked with Dave, your husband. I'm wondering what you were aware of as you did this. Would you be willing to say?

  Marcie: Sure; I think that I see pretty clearly what you are trying to do. You know — I have eyes, and I'm no dummy; I get the picture.

  Therapist: What specifically did you see, Marcie?

  The therapist is illustrating a very important principle here: He has directed his verbal communication to one of the family members. During this period, the other members of the family have had an opportunity to observe and to listen to the process of communication between the therapist and Dave. The therapist now asks Marcie to comment on her experience of the exchange between Dave and the therapist. By requesting her comments (by using embedded questions and polite commands [conversational postulates]), the therapist accomplishes several things:

  (a) He gives each member of the family the message that, not only does he accept comments on his behavior and the ongoing process of communication, but he, in fact, encourages them, that he takes seriously their ability to understand and make sense out of their expeiience and is interested in knowing what that experience is to them.

  (b) He requests that another member of the family present him with the results of her ability to make sense out of a complex piece of family interaction.

  The therapist pointedly requests that Marcie present her learnings and understanding of the interaction between Dave and himself. This is one important way that the therapist may explicitly present the message that, although he has been directing his verbal communication to Dave, all of the family members are involved at the same time; they are all participants in the ongoing process of communication. Secondly, when the therapist encourages Marcie to comment about her experience of the Dave-therapist interaction, he is asking her to repeat a learning experience with which we are all familiar. As children, each of us learned a great deal of what we understand about the world by observing and listening to our parents and other adults communicate. This time, the context openly invites people to "listen in," in contrast to much of childhood's experience in which this was tacitly forbidden. By explicitly repeating this situation, the therapist provides an opportunity for Marcie to up-date her old learnings — her understandings from her original family system.

  Each of us organizes and represents our experiences of the world and each other differently, in ways which are unique to each of us. My experience of the "same world" will differ from yours in some ways. Through our initial genetic heritage and from our extensive experience in coping and living, each of us has created a map or model of the world which we use to guide our behavior. We do not experience the world directly but rather through the models of the world which we have developed to help us organize our ongoing experience. The means by which we develop and elaborate our models of the world are the three universals of human modeling — deletion, distortion and generalization.[13] When we pay attention only to selected portions of our environment and ignore others, we are using the modeling principle of deletion. When we represent to ourselyes a two-dimensional object, we are distorting. When we approach a door which we have never seen before, reach out and grasp the door handle, turn it and pull open the door without any conscious decision about the process,
we are making use of the modeling principle of generalization — that is, in our previous experience, whenever we saw and felt a door with a handle, we succeeded in opening the door by grasping the handle, turning it and pulling it, so we automatically generalize to the new experience — the new door. Over our years of experience, we have each developed strategies (mostly unconsciously) for modeling our experience. By asking Marcie to comment on what she was aware of during the exchange between himself and Dave, the therapist has an opportunity to compare his awareness of the model he created with Marcie's impressions. Specifically, the therapist can learn, by listening to Marcie's response, which of the different ways of representing her experience she values most highly — that is, what Marcie's most used representational system[14] is. How can the therapist specifically determine this from the response he receives from Marcie? Below, we list the descriptive verbs and other parts of the sentences which Marcie uses which are most closely associated with verb or process descriptions:

  We will refer to these words as process words (predicates) which, roughly, include verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nominalizations. Of the eight predicates used by Marcie in this first communication, four are words which presuppose a visual representation of Marcie's experience. The other four predicates are unspecified with respect to the kind of representation they indicate. For example, a person can try or do something using sounds (an auditory representation) or feelings (a kinesthetic representation), etc. One way to understand an important type of patterning in Marcie's communication and in her ability to make sense out of (or model) her experience is to notice that her choice of predicates confirms that the primary way by which she creates a representation of her experience is by creating pictures or images of it. In the terms we are developing here for our family therapy model, Marcie's choice of predicates reveals that her most used representational system is visual. Next, we list some of the predicates which Dave used to express himself earlier in the transcript.

  Of the ten predicates listed above used by Dave, more than half of them presuppose a kinesthetic representational system — that is, Dave organizes his experience, his model of the world, by feelings. Thus, Dave's most used representational system is kinesthetic. The remaining predicates used by Dave are consistent with this statement, as they are unspecified with respect to representational system.

  Knowing a person's most used representational system is, in our experience, a very useful piece of information. One way in which we have found this useful is in our ability to establish effective communication. As therapists, if we can be sensitive to the most used representational system of the person with whom we are working, we then have the choice of translating our communication into his system. Thus, he comes to trust us as we demonstrate that we understand his ongoing experience by, for example, changing our predicates to match his. Being explicit about how the other person organizes his or her experience of the world allows us to avoid some of the typical "resistant client—frustrated therapist" patterns such as those described in Part I, The Structure of Magic, II, Grinder and Bandler:

  We have in past years (during in-service training seminars) noticed therapists who asked questions of the people they worked with with no knowledge of representational systems used. They typically use only predicates of their own most highly valued representational systems. This is an example:

  Visual Person: My husband just doesn't see me as a valuable person.

  Therapist: How do you feel about that?

  Visual Person: What?

  Therapist: How do you feel about your husband's not feeling that you're a person?

  This session went around and around until the therapist came out and said to the authors:

  I feel frustrated; this woman is just giving me a hard time. She's resisting everything I do.

  We have heard and seen many long, valuable hours wasted in this form of miscommunication by therapists with the people they work with. . . . The therapist in the above transcript was really trying to help and the person with him was really trying to cooperate but without either of them having a sensitivity to representational systems. Communication between people under these conditions is usually haphazard and tedious. The result is often name calling when a person attempts to communicate with someone who uses different predicates.

  Typically, kinesthetics complain that auditory and visual people are insensitive. Visuals complain the auditories don't pay attention to them because they don't make eye contact during the conversation. Auditory people complain that kinesthetics don't listen, etc. The outcome is usually that one group comes to consider the other as deliberately bad or mischievous or pathological.

  The point we are illustrating here is that one of the most powerful skills we, as therapists, can develop is the ability to be sensitive to representational systems. For change to occur, for the persons with whom we are working to be willing to take risks, for them to come to trust us as guides for change, they must be convinced that we understand their experience and can communicate with them about it. In other words, we accept as our responsibility as people-helpers the task of making contact with the persons we are trying to help. Once we have made contact — by matching representational systems, for example — we can assist them in expanding their choices about representing their experience and communicating about it. This second step — that of leading the individual toward new dimensions of experience — is very important. So often, in our experience, family members have "specialized" — one paying primary attention to the visual representation of experience, another to the kinesthetic portion of experience, etc.

  For example, we discover from the transcript that Dave's primary representational system is kinesthetic, while Marcie's is visual. Once we have made contact, we work to assist Dave in developing his ability to explore the visual dimensions of his experience and to assist Marcie, in getting in touch with body sensations.[15] There are two important results of this:

  (a) Dave and Marcie learn to communicate effectively with one another.

  (b) Each of them expands his/her choices about representing and communicating their experiences, thus becoming more developed human beings — more whole, more able to express and use their human potential.

  Within the context of family therapy, by identifying each family member's most used representational system, the therapist learns what portions of the ongoing family experience is most available to each person there. Understanding this allows the therapist to know where, in the communication patterns of the family, to look for faulty communication, where the family members fail to communicate what they intend. For example, if one family member is primarily visual and another auditory, the family therapist will be alert to note how they communicate, how they give each other feedback. Under stress particularly, each of us tends to depend only upon our primary representational system. We come to accept a part of our experience as an equivalent for the whole — accepting, for example, only what we see as equivalent to what is totally available not only through our eyes but also through our skin, our ears, etc. This explains the close connection between representational systems and the kinds of Mind Reading and Complex Equivalences developed by family members.

  At this point in the presentation of the patterns which we have identified as useful in organizing our experience in therapy, we are going to shift the way in which we present the transcript. We have identified the most important of the verbal patterns which are in our family therapy model and, with the presentation of the principle of representational systems, we have begun to move to the next level of patterns. Verbal communications and your ability to hear the distinctions which we have presented are very useful portions of an effective model for family therapy. These verbal patterns and your ability to respond systematically to them, however, constitute only a portion of the complete model. In the presentation of the transcript up to this point, we have confined ourselves to reporting the verbal patterns. In this way, we hoped to find a common reference point from whi
ch each of you could connect what we are describing with words here in this book with your own experience in therapy. We hoped that, by finding this common reference point, you would be able to utilize, immediately and dynamically in your work, the patterns which we have identified.

  Now we move on to patterns at the next level of experience, patterns which have as one of their parts the verbal patterns which we have just identified.

  PATTERNS OF EFFECTIVE FAMILY THERAPY LEVEL II

  Each of us, as a human being, has many choices about the way in which we present ourselves — the way by which we communicate. Most of the time, as we meet and separate and meet again, we do not make conscious decisions about the way we communicate. Normally, for example, we do not consciously select the specific words and even less frequently do we consciously select the syntactic form of the sentences with which we communicate verbally. Yet, even at this level of communication patterning, the unconscious choices which we make are systematic and reveal a great deal about the ways in which we organize our experience, grow and change. This, in fact, is one way to understand the verbal patterns which we have identified in Level I. These patterns of choice made by the persons with whom we are working in therapy about the form of the sentences which they use to present themselves are ways in which the therapist can come to quickly and efficiently understand their model of the world, the way in which they organize their experience.