Verbal communication constitutes only a portion of the complex process of communication which goes on between people. At the same time that people are presenting one another with words and the formal verbal patterns we have identified, they are also holding some portions of their body in a certain posture; they are moving their hands and feet, their arms and legs with smooth or erratic, rhythmic or arhythmic motions; they are speaking with a tone of voice which is melodic, raspy, lilting, or grating; they are speaking at a constant tempo, or speeding up and slowing down; they are moving their eyes in a rapidly shifting scan, or maintaining a fixed stare, with their eyes focused or unfocused; they are altering the rhythm of their breathing, etc. Each of these movements, gestures, tones, etc., are choices which they make, usually at the unconscious level, about the way they present themselves, the way they communicate. Each of these is, in fact, a message about their ongoing experience, about the way they organize their world, of what they are most acutely aware. Just as with the verbal patterns, when each of the patterns, once detected by the therapist, could be used by him for a specific, effective therapeutic intervention, here also, in the case of the messages carried by the person's voice, body movements, etc., the therapist can train himself to identify patterns and to intervene to assist the person to grow and change.
One of the most useful ways of proceeding in this complex area, in our experience, is for therapists to educate themselves to identify patterns of congruity and incongruity. When a person is communicating congruently, all of the messages which he conveys match — they are consistent, they fit with one another. Incongruent communication is presented to us when the other person sends out messages with his body, with his voice tonality, with the words he uses, which do not match. In order to learn to detect this mishmash and to respond creatively to it, either in therapy or in the day-to-day contact we have with one another, we must have clear, open channels for receiving and organizing all of this information. There is no substitute for the therapist's ability to see, to hear, and to feel. In order to distinguish congruent from incongruent communication, the therapist must clear his input channels. By failing to clear the channels he runs the risk of either being preoccupied and missing the other person's messages or of hallucinating spurious messages instead of being receptive to what's actually being presented. When a therapist fails to clear all of his senses, he usually succeeds only in Mind Reading rather than in identifying and responding creatively to the messages from the person with whom he is working.
Each of us has a nervous system, a personal history, and a view or model of the world which are unique to us. When we meet another person and communicate carefully, we are sensitive to the other individual in hopes of truly making contact and learning to appreciate his uniqueness, even as we, ourselves, change and grow from our experience of the differences between us. Much of our education is directed toward insuring that the verbal language which we share with other speakers (English, for this book) overlaps enough to enable us to make contact. This gives the people in the same language/ culture group a basis for communication. In the case of the languages of the body, tonality, etc., almost no formal education is given to us; in fact, little is known about these languages. Yet, these non-verbal messages constitute the bulk of the information which is communicated by human beings.
One of the ways in which each of you can become more sensitive to the variances from person to person in the non-verbal language which carries so much of our communication is to consider the differences in gestural and body language from culture to culture. In some cultures (Italian, for example), holding the hand palm-up at about chin level, extended in front of you, and opening and closing the hand is a way of signaling goodbye, while, in our culture, this gesture means something close to come here. It is also true in our experience that within cultures there are many differences in the meaning of the elements of non-verbal language. The furrowed brow for one person may be a signal of anger and displeasure while, for another person, it may simply signal concentration. Or again, shifting your gaze from the face of the person to whom you're speaking, just after hearing a question and prior to responding, is a signal in the behavior of one person roughly equivalent to Vm uncomfortable and don't want to respond, while, in another person, it is simply a way of cueing himself (specifically, of making a picture which will serve as the basis of the response) to respond appropriately. Translating it into words, it means (approximately), I'm organizing my experience with pictures and will respond in a moment. Each of the body movements, postures, tonalities, etc., which we employ in the non-verbal languages we use to communicate is the result of our own personal history, our own nervous system; few, if any, of these are conscious; few, if any, of these are standardized, either within our culture or across cultures. The point we are making here is that, while the bulk of communication between people is non-verbal, little of it is calibrated, and there is a great deal of room for miscommunication, especially in the Mind-Reading and Complex-Equivalence phenomena we have previously identified.
One very general overview of the process of communication which we have found useful in organizing our experience is that each communication — composed of the specific body posture, movement, voice tone and tempo, the words, and the sentence syntax — can be understood to be a comment on three areas of the ongoing experience:
The communicator, Self;
The person to whom the communication is addressed, the Other; and
The Context.
We represent this visually by the symboclass="underline"
We have found it useful to check a person's communication for his ability to be aware of and communicate about each of these dimensions. If, for example, a person is unable, at a given point in time, to be aware of and to represent to himself and to others (communicate) each of these parts of human experience, then this present inability is connected with the difficulties in his life which brought him to us for therapy. Thus, it indicates to us where we may choose to intervene to assist him in developing his ability to experience and make sense out of each of these parts of human experience, thereby creating more choices for himself. Notice that the same modeling processes detailed in the patterns of verbal communication in Level I of this part of the book also occur here at this higher level of patterning. When a family member says to us,
I'm scared.
we understand that he has deleted (linguistically) a portion of his experience; specifically, who or what is scaring him. When a family member is unable to be aware of and communicate about his own feelings and thoughts, or his experience of another family member with whom he is communicating, or the context in which the communication takes place, he is deleting (behaviorally) a portion of his experience and also a portion of his potential as a human being. In our experience, the process of restoring this deletion will be a very powerful learning experience for the individual, and it will assist him in having more choices in his life.
One of us [Virginia Satir] has identified four communication categories or stances which people adopt under stress. Each of these Satir categories is characterized by a particular body posture, set of gestures, accompanying body sensations, and syntax. Each is a caricature: