When you go to California, most therapists have a different professional ethic. For example, in order to be a good communicator, you must dress like a farm worker. That's the first rule. The second rule is that you must hug everyone too hard. Those people are always laughing at the psychiatrists because they have to wear ties! To me, their behavior is just as restricted and one-dimensional and limited. The trouble with many professional ethical codes, whether they are humanistic, analytic or anything else, is that they limit your behavior. And whenever you accept any "I won't do it," there are people you are not going to be able to work with. We went into that same ward at Napa and I walked over and stomped on the catatonic's foot as hard as I could and got an immediate response. He came right out of "catatonia," jumped up, and said "Don't do that!"
Frank Farrelly, who wrote Provocative Therapy, is a really exquisite example of requisite variety. He is willing to do anything to get contact and rapport. Once he was doing a demonstration with a woman who had been catatonic for three or four years. He sits down and looks at her and warns her fairly: "I'm going to get you." She just sits there catatonically, of course. It's a hospital, and she's wearing a hospital gown. He reaches over and he pulls a hair out of her leg just above the ankle. And there's no response, right? So he moves up an inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. No response. He moves up another inch and a half, and pulls out another hair. "Get your hands off me!" Most people would not consider that "professional." But the interesting thing about some things that are not professional is that they work! Frank says that he's never yet had to go above the knee.
I gave a lecture at an analytic institute in Texas once. Before we began, for three hours, they read research to me demonstrating basically that crazy people couldn't be helped. And at the end I said "I'm beginning to get a picture here. Let me find out if I'm right. Is what you are trying to tell me that you don't believe that therapy, the way it's done presently, works?" And they said "No, what we're trying to tell you is that we don't believe that any form of therapy could overwork for schizophrenics." And I said "Good. You guys are really in the right profession; we should all be psychiatrists and believe that you can't help people." And they said "Well, let's talk about psychotics. People who live in psychotic realities and blah blah blah," and all this stuff about relapses. I said "Well, what kinds of things do you do with these people?" So they told me about their research and the kind of therapy they had done. They never did anything that elicited a response from these people.
Frank Farrelly had a young woman in a mental hospital who believed that she was Jesus' lover. You must admit that is a slightly unusual belief. People would come in and she would go "I'm Jesus' lover." And of course they would go "Unnhhh!" and say "Well, you're not. This is only a delusion you're having ... isn't it?" If you go into mental hospitals, most mental patients are very good at acting weird and eliciting responses from people. Frank trained a young social worker to behave consistently in a certain way and sent her in. The patient went "Well, I'm Jesus' lover," and the social worker looked back and said wryly "I know, he talks about you." Forty-five minutes later the patient is going "Look, I don't want to hear any more of this Jesus stuff!"
There's a man named John Rosen whom some of you have heard of. Rosen has two things he does consistently, and he does them very powerfully and gets a lot of good results. One of the things Rosen does really well, as described by Schefflin,is that he joins the schizophrenic's reality so well that he ruins it. That's the same thing that Frank taught his social worker to do.
The psychiatrists in Texas had never tried anything like that before. And when I suggested it to them, they all made faces because it was outside of their professional ethic. They had been trained in a belief system that said "Limit your behavior. Don't join your client's world; insist that they come to yours." It's much harder for somebody who's crazy to come to a professional model of the world, than it is for a professional communicator to go to theirs. At least it's less apt to happen.
Man: You guys are stereotyping a lot of people here!
Of course we are. Words do that; that's what words are for. Words generalize experience. But you only need to be offended if they apply to you directly.
One of the main places that communicators get stuck is on a linguistic pattern that we call "modal operator." A client says "I can't talk about that again today. That's not possible in this particular group. And I don't think that you're able to understand that, either." When you listen to content, you get wiped out. You will probably say "What happened?"
The pattern is that a client says "I can't X" or "I shouldn't X." If somebody comes in and goes "I shouldn't get angry" what you do if you're a gestalt therapist, is "Say 'I won't.'" Fritz Perls was German, and perhaps those words make a difference in German. But they don't make any difference in English. "Won't" and "shouldn't" and "can't" in English are all the same. It makes no difference whether you shouldn't or you couldn't or you wont, you still haven't. It makes no difference whatsoever. So the person says "I wont get angry."
Then if you ask "Why not?" they are going to give you reasons and that's a great way to get stuck. If you ask them "What would happen if you did?" or "What stops you?" you'll go somewhere else more useful.
We published all this in The Structure of Magic some years ago, and we ask a lot of people "Have you read Magic I"? And they go "Well, laboriously, yes." And we ask "Did you learn what was in it? Did you learn Chapter Four?" That's the only meaningful part of the book as far as I can tell. And they say "Oh, yes. I knew all that." And I say "OK, good. I'll play your client, and you respond to me with questions." I say "I cant get angry." And they say "Ah, well, what seems to be the problem?" instead of "What prevents you?" or "What would happen if you did?" By not having the meta-model responses systematically wired in, people get stuck. One of the things that we noticed about Sal Minuchin, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls is that they intuitively had many of those twelve questions in the meta-model wired in.
You need to go through some kind of program to wire in your choices so that you don't have to think about what to do. Otherwise, while you are thinking about what to do, you will be missing what's going on. We're talking right now about how you organize your own consciousness to be effective in a complex task of communication.
As far as the conscious understanding of the client goes, it's really irrelevant. If the client wants to know what's going on, the easiest way to respond is "Do you have a car? Do you ever have it repaired? Does the mechanic describe in detail what he is going to do before he does anything?" Or "Have you ever had surgery? Did the surgeon describe in detail which muscles were going to be cut, and how he was going to clamp the arteries?" I think those are analogies which are pertinent to respond to that kind of inquiry.
The people who can give you the most detailed and refined diagnosis of their own problems are the people I've met on the back wards of many of the mental institutions in this country and in Europe. They can tell you why they are the way they are, where it came from, and how they perpetuate the maladaptive or destructive pattern. However, that explicit conscious verbal understanding does them no good whatsoever in changing their behavior and their experience.