Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming - Richard Bandler

We also treat alcoholism as a psychosomatic process—like allergies or headaches or phantom-limb pain. The alcohol is an anchor, just as any other drug is. What an alcoholic is saying to you by being an alcoholic is essentially "The only way I can get to certain kinds of experiences which are important and positive for me as a human being—camaraderie, escape from certain kinds of conscious process, or whatever it is—is this anchor called alcohol." Until the secondary gain is taken care of by some other behavior, they will continue to go back to that as an anchor. So there are two steps in the treatment of alcoholism. One is making sure the secondary gain gets picked up by some other activity: they can have camaraderie but they don't have to get drunk in order to get it. You have to find out what their specific need is, because it's different for everyone.

Once you have taught them effective ways to get that secondary gain for themselves without the necessity of alcohol, then you anchor something else to take the place of the alcohol stimulus so they don't have to go through the alcohol state to get to the experiences that they want and need. We've done single sessions with alcoholics that stick really well, as long as we make sure that those two steps are always involved.

Man: Do you make the basic assumption that an individual is consciously able to tell you what the secondary gain is?

Never! We make the assumption that they can't.

Reframing in the six-step format we did here has certain advantages that we talked about. For example, this format builds in a program which the person can use by themselves later to make change in any area of their life.

You can also do this behaviorally. In fact, this is a strategy and outline for behavioral therapy as well as what we've been doing here. In the more usual therapeutic relationship, the therapist takes responsibility for using all his verbal and non-verbal behavior to elicit responses, to get access to resources in parts of the person directly, and to communicate with those parts. The client in the normal therapeutic process will, in turn, become those parts. S/he will cry, become angry, delighted, ecstatic, etc. S/he will display with all output channels that s/he has altered consciousness and has become the part that I want to communicate with.

In reframing we take a step back in that process and ask that s/he create a part that will have the responsibility for maintaining an efficient, effective internal communication system between parts. However, the same six-step format can be used as an organizing principle for doing more usual kinds of therapeutic work. Step one, identifying the pattern, is equivalent in a normal therapeutic context to saying "What specific change would you like today?" and getting a congruent response.

In usual therapeutic work there are a lot of ways of establishing communication with a part, as long as you are flexible. There's playing polarity, for instance. Suppose that I'm with someone who is really depressed. One way for me to contact the part in him that is really depressed is to talk directly to him. If I want to contact the part that doesn't want him to be depressed, I can say "Boy, you are depressing! You are one of the most depressing—I'll bet you've been depressed your whole life. You've never had any experience other than being depressed, never at all."

"Well, not my whole life, but for the past—"

"Oh no, I'll bet it's been your whole life."

"No, not my whole life, last week I felt pretty good for about an hour...."

In other words, by exaggerating the position that is offered to you, you get a polarity response if you do it congruently. And as soon as the person accesses the polarity, you can anchor it.

Woman: I have a client who will say "This is ridiculous! I don't want to do it."

Fine. So what?

Woman: Do you laugh at that point? Or do you, you know ...

No. Well, first of all, I've never had anybody tell me that. And I think that's because I do a lot of "set-ups" before I get into this. I do a lot of pacing, matching, mirroring. So you might take this as a comment that you didn't set up this person sufficiently well.

Or you might take it as a signal that you just accessed the part that you need to communicate with. Their behavior gives one set of messages and the verbalization gives another. If you recognize that the part which is now active and just told you that this is ridiculous is the part you need to communicate with anyway, then you don't do it in the six-step format. You immediately move into the usual therapeutic format. You've already established communication with the part. Reach over and anchor it in the same way we were talking about earlier. That will always give you access to that part whenever you need it. That response is a successful response in the usual therapeutic format.

Whether you do it in the six-step format or in the format of more normal therapeutic encounters, such as I just talked about, you now have established a communication channel. The important thing here is to accept only reports—not interpretations from the person's conscious mind. If you accept interpretations, you're going to fall into the same difficulties that they are already in: the communication between their conscious understanding and the unconscious intent is at variance. If you take sides you are going to lose—unless you take sides with the unconscious, because the unconscious always wins anyway.

If your client refuses to have anything to do with exploring unconscious parts, you can say "Look, let me guarantee that the part of you that you are attacking consciously, the part of you that keeps you doing X, is doing something useful for you. I'm going to side with it against your conscious mind until I am satisfied that this unconscious part of you has found patterns of behavior that are more effective than what you are presently doing." Now, with that it's very hard to get any resistance. That's been my experience.

Step three of reframing is the major component of what most people do when they do family therapy. Let's say that you have a father who loses his temper a lot. Virginia Satir waits until he has expressed quite a bit of anger. Then she says "I want to tell you that in my years of doing family therapy I have seen a lot of people who are angry, and a lot of people could express it. I think it's important for every human being to be able to express what they feel in their guts, whether its happiness, or anger like you just felt. I want to compliment you, and I hope all the other members of this family have that choice." Now, that's pacing: "accept, accept, accept." And then she gets in real close to the father and says "And would you be willing to tell me about those feelings of loneliness and hurt underneath that anger?"

Another form of behavioral reframing is to say "Do you yell at everyone like that? You don't yell at the paper boy? You don't yell at your mechanic? Well, are you trying to tell her that you care about what she does? Is that what this anger is about? I mean, I notice you don't do it with people you don't care about. This must be a caring message. Did you know that this was his way of expressing that he cares what you do?"

"Well, how do you feel about knowing that now?" How many of you have heard Virginia Satir say that? That's a weird sentence; it doesn't actually have any meaning. But it works! That's another example of behavioral reframing. It's the same principle, but it involves content. That's the only difference.

Carl Whittaker has one nice reframing pattern that is apparently uniquely his. The husband complains "And for the last ten years nobody has ever taken care of me. I've had to do everything for myself and I've had to develop this ability to take care of myself. Nobody ever is solicitous toward me." Carl Whittaker says "Thank God you learned to stand on your own feet. I really appreciate a man who can do that. Aren't you glad you've done that?" That's a behavioral reframe. If a client says "Well, you know, I guess I'm just not the perfect husband," he says "Thank God! I'm so relieved! I've had three perfect husbands already this week and they are so dull." What he does is to reverse the presupposition of the communication he's receiving.

We originally developed reframing by observing Virginia Satir in the context of family therapy. We have developed several other systematic models of reframing that will appear in a book titled Reframing: NLP and the Transformation of Meaning. In that book we also apply reframing to alcoholism, family therapy, corporate decision-making, and other specific contexts.

One aspect of reframing was introduced years ago in the process called "brainstorming," a situation in which people simply free-associate and explicitly suspend their usual judgemental responses. When brainstorming is conducted in an effective way, people generate a lot more ideas than they do in other modes of working together.

The primary way in which that works is that a really fine distinction is made between outcomes—what we are going to use this material for—and the process of generating ideas with other human beings. Reframing is the same principle applied more generally.

What I've noticed over and over again in corporate work, in arbitration, or in family therapy, is that there will be a goal toward which a number of members in the system want to move. They begin to discuss some of the characteristics or dimensions, or advantages or disadvantages, of this future desired state. As they do this, other members involved in that negotiation behave as if they feel compelled to point out that there are certain constraints that presently exist in the organization which make it impossible to do that.

Now, what is missing is the time quantifier. Indeed they are correct. There are constraints on the organization or the family which make it impossible, concretely speaking, to engage in that proposed behavior now. If you work as a consultant for an organization or a family, you can teach people to distinguish between responses they are making that are congruent with the description of the future state, and responses that are a characterization of the present state. Once that is done, you avoid about ninety-five percent of the bickering that goes on in planning sessions. You convince the people in the organization that it is useful for them to feel free to restrict themselves to discussing the future state, the desired state, propositions entirely distinct from present state constraints. This is an example of sorting out certain dimensions of experience, dealing with them in some useful way, and then later re-integrating them back into the system.

You also need a monitor. All of you have had the following experience. You're in an organizational meeting or a family system. And no matter what anyone says, there's one person who takes issue with it. No matter what the proposal is, there is someone who behaves as if it were their function in that system to challenge the formulation that has just been offered. It's a useful thing to be able to do, but it can also be very disruptive. What techniques do you have to utilize what's going on at that point? Does anybody have a way of dealing with that effectively?

Woman: You can escalate it; ask them to do it more. So you would use the gestalt thing of exaggerating. What's the outcome you typically get?

Woman: Ah, they stop.

They stop doing it. That's a nice transfer from therapy. She's using one of the three patterns which are characteristic of Brief Therapy therapists, the pattern of prescribing the symptom. For instance, when somebody comes to Milton Erickson and asks for assistance in losing weight, typically he demands that s/he gain exactly eleven pounds in the next two weeks. That might seem to be irrational behavior on his part. However, it's quite effective, because one of two things will happen. Either the person will lose weight—a polarity response— which is the outcome he is working toward anyway, or they will gain eleven pounds. Typically they don't gain ten or twelve, they gain eleven. Since they were able to accomplish that, the behavioral presupposition is that they can control what they weigh. In either case it unstabilizes the situation. I've never heard of people stabilizing. Something always happens. It's the same kind of maneuver that Salvador Minuchin makes when he allies himself with a member of the family to throw the system out of kilter. This is a really nice example of a transfer of a therapeutic technique to the organizational context.

Let me offer you another utilization. As soon as you notice that the challenging behavior is disruptive, you can interrupt the process, and say "Look, one of the things I've discovered is that it's useful to assign people specific functions in a group. In my experience of consulting and working with organizations, I have found that this is a useful way of organizing meetings. One group member keeps track of the ideas, and so on." Then you can assign this person the function of being the challenger. When a well-formed proposition is brought before the group by anyone, or by a sequence of suggestions, his job is to challenge that formulation at some point. You explain that by challenging the formulation, he will force the people making the proposal to make finer and finer distinctions and to hone their proposal into a form that will be effective and realistic. You've prescribed the symptom, but you have also institutionalized it. I've had the experience of simply prescribing the symptom, and at the next meeting the same thing happens, and I have to do it again. One way to make sure that you don't have to make that intervention over and over again is to institutionalize it by assigning the function of challenger to that person.

You've essentially taken over the behavior. Now you can control when the challenges will be made. This is an example of utilization. You don't try to stop the problem behavior, you utilize it. The primary metaphor for utilization is the situation where I never fight against the energy offered me by anyone, or any part of them. I take it and use it. Utilization is the psychological counterpart of the oriental martial arts, such as Aikido or Judo. This is a parallel strategy for psychological martial arts. You always accept and utilize the response, you don't fight or challenge the response—with one exception, of course. If the person's presenting problem involves their running over people then you clobber them, because the presenting problem involves the very pattern that they are using: namely, they get their way. But, of course, that's a paradox, because if they were really getting their way, they wouldn't be in your office.

So let's say that Jim here makes a proposal and Tony is the guy I have assigned to be the challenger. When Tony begins to interrupt, I say "Excellent! Good work, Tony! Now, listen, Tony, what I think you ought to be sensitive to is that we haven't yet given Jim enough rope to hang himself. So let him make a more complete proposal and get responses from other people, and then I'll cue you and you jump right on it. OK?" So I've essentially delivered the message "Yes, but not yet."