as semantically ill-formed.[8] That is, sentences of this class make claims which are at odds with our usual understanding of the way the world operates. Specifically, these sentences claim that one person is causing another person to have a certain experience. However, since the experience which the sentences claim the second person is having is an experience which most of us consider to be beyond the conscious control of human beings, the sentences, literally, make no sense. In other words, since Sue (or anyone else) cannot control what she weighs on a certain day of the week, it makes no sense to claim that Max is causing her to control her weight in that way.
Within the context of therapy, we have found an extension of this linguistic class very useful. Specifically, any sentence such as:
He makes me sad.
is called Cause-Effect semantically ill-formed.[9] Several examples may help to identify the pattern in your experience:
She makes me really mad.
He really makes her sad.
Walking along the beach makes me feel refreshed.
We understand that these sentences may be a valid description of a person's experience. However, what we are saying is that the Cause-Effect relationship which each of these sentences seems to require is not necessary. We have determined in working with people in therapy that, all too frequently, their pain and lack of freedom and choice are connected with parts of their experience which they represent in the Cause-Effect semantically ill-formed pattern we have just identified. This, typically, takes the form:
This caused that.
I am helpless.
It is final.
We have found it useful in our work to assist people in having a choice about whether a particular movement, act, smile, word, etc., from someone else necessarily has to have the effect on them that they claim. Typically, people who do not have such choices experience little or no control and responsibility over their own lives. Specifically, as therapists we have found that we can effectively assist clients in coming to have these choices by asking them to describe in detail the process by which someone causes them to feel or sense what they are experiencing. The process of assisting the one with whom we are working in understanding the specific way in which he fails to have a choice in his verbal and non-verbal communication with others typically involves the linguistic patterns we have already presented, especially de-nominalization and the specification of verbs. We have found this pattern to be a very useful model.
We return, now, to the transcript.
Dave: You know, dependency makes me feel confused.
Therapist: Hold on a minute, Dave; let me see if I understand this. When you see Marcie look at you in a certain way, you know that she's depending on you and you feel tight, is that right, Dave?
Dave: Yeah, that's right. I never have been able to get a handle on it; you know, altogether, like I felt when you just said it now.
Therapist: Let's check this out, Dave, (turning to Marcie, the wife/mother in the family) Marcie, you heard what Dave said about knowing that you're depending on him when you look at him in a certain way, and I'm wondering whether . . .
Dave: (interrupting) Yeah, you know, Marcie, like right now, when your eyes get narrow and you lean forward, I know that you're unhappy with me, and .. .
Therapist: Wait, Dave, (turning again to Marcie) Marcie, are you unhappy with Dave right now?
Marcie: No, I'm trying to understand what's going on here, and …
One of the ways in which people in families create pain and unhappiness for themselves is by assuming that they can come to know the thoughts and feelings of another person without that other person's directly communicating those thoughts and feelings. We call this Mind Reading semantic ill-formedness.[10] Mind Reading occurs in any situation in which one person claims to know the inner experience of another without a direct communication of the second person's experience. Frequently, this takes the form of:
If you loved me, you would know without my telling you.
Extracting from the transcript, we have:
In these two exchanges, we can identify both the Mind-Reading pattern and one of the ways in which the therapist can usefully challenge this process by specifically asking for a detailed description of the process by which the person (Dave, in this case) obtained the information he claims to have. This process (Mind Reading) is one of the most tragic ways by which well-intentioned people in a family can distort their communication and cause pain. We realize that it is possible to understand a great deal about the inner experience of another person without his having to describe it in detail in words. One of the skills which we continue to sharpen in our work as therapists is the ability to identify and understand another person's experience through the analogue (nonverbal) messages which they present to us. The tone of voice, the posture, movements of the hands and feet, the tempo of speech — are all important messages which we each utilize in our work. We accept for ourselves the rule of explicitly checking our comprehension of non-verbal messages rather than basing further communication upon our assumed understanding of those messages. What we have noticed time and again is that, under stress, people tend to hallucinate the inner experience of others and to act upon those hallucinations without checking first to find out if they match the actual experience of the other person. Once this process of Mind Reading without checking begins, clear communication becomes difficult and finally collapses, and we see a family in pain. In our experience, the therapist's ability to identify and effectively challenge the Mind-Reading pattern is one of the most important interventions in assisting a family to move from a rigid, closed system to one which allows freedom to grow and change.
Closely associated with the general pattern of Mind Reading is another important pattern, that of Complex Equivalence[11] — the names which people attach to their experience.
Dave is presenting us with an excellent illustration of the way in which people calibrate their experience. Dave has decided that, whenever he sees Marcie looking at him in a certain way (not specified), she is depending upon him; she is experiencing an inner state which he labels "dependency." In the second example, Dave has decided that, whenever Marcie narrows her eyes and leans forward, she is unhappy with him. What is common to both instances is that Dave has equated a piece of Marcie's observable behavior with her total communication and then has labeled it an inner experience.
What we are illustrating here is that people cause themselves pain and difficulty by attaching a word (label) to some part of their experience and mistaking the label for the experience. One powerful phenomenon we have seen in our work is the fact that people pay particular attention to different portions of their experience and, subsequently, may come to attach the same label to a very different experience. For example, for people who use their visual skills most extensively, the word respect will, typically, have something to do with eye contact, while people who emphasize body sensations (kinesthetic representational system) will pay more attention to the way others touch them. By this process, people may use the same word to describe very different experiences. We call this process Complex Equivalence (the experiences which the words represent) and, typically, it may be quite diverse for different people. In other words, instead of using feedback (for example, asking Marcie what was going on), Dave has calibrated his experience so that, whenever he detects certain movements by Marcie, he "knows" what she is experiencing. Notice that the therapist makes two different types of responses to Dave's Mind-Reading— Complex-Equivalence statements. First, the therapist re-states the claim that Dave has made about Mind Reading and the specific Complex Equivalence which he uses. This serves two purposes: The therapist checks to make sure that he understands the Mind-Reading process which Dave is presenting; at the same time, the therapist's re-statement allows Dave to hear a complete description of the process. In fact, those with whom we work frequently will laugh out loud when the contention which they have just made is repeated to them, recognizing that the connection claimed is spurious. For others, the therapist's re-statement allows them to fully understand the process for the first time. Dave's response is a good example of this:
8
This category of verbal patterning — Semantic Ill-formedness — is one of the most powerful verbal patterns available to therapists and hypnotists in their communication. See pages 51-53 and 95-107 in
9
Cause-Effect semantic ill-formedness embodies all of the cases in which one person claims that another person is causing him to experience some feeling or thought, some inner state, without there being any direct physical contact between the two people. Our point is that each of us can come to have a choice about how the words, tones, body postures, movements, etc., of others will affect us. The technique of identifying Cause-Effect semantic ill-formedness by the language form in which it is presented is discussed in detail in
10
Mind-Reading semantic ill-formedness, along with Cause-Effect semantic ill-formedness, is the basis of much of the calibrated communication cycles which result in pain and dissatisfaction for family members. See
11