There's a huge advantage to doing it this way. We don't have to decide before we start working with somebody how many parts they have and what the parts do. I think the Michigan TA model is up to nine specific parts: critical parent, natural child, adult, little professor, etc. At theoretical conventions they argue about how many parts a person should have. That's how the TA trainers and therapists instruct themselves about how to organize another person's experience. None of my clients have a "parent," "child" and "adult," except the ones that come from a TA therapist. And then they actually have them.
With anchoring, you don't have to decide before you begin the session what the legitimate categories of human experience or communication are going to be. You can simply accept whatever comes up without understanding the meaning of any of it. I don't know what X and Y were for Linda, but I know that I can operate at the process level, without ever knowing the content, and assist her in changing. You don't have to decide beforehand how many parts you are going to allow that person to have. You don't have to demand that your clients be flexible enough to reorganize their experience into your categories. You simply accept whatever is offered, anchor it, and utilize it.
Woman: Do you always anchor the negative feeling? Because that's already in her repertoire.
We don't always do anything. It's often useful to anchor the response a person doesn't want, and there are several ways to use it. You've all had the experience of beginning to work with a client on a particular problem—especially children, because children are so fluid in their consciousness—and suddenly you discover you are doing something else. The initial anchor that I established stabilized the thing we were going to work on, so we can always go back to it. If I had wanted to go back and find out where it came from in Linda's personal history, that anchor would have given me an excellent way to do it.
In gestalt therapy if a client is troubled by a feeling, the therapist will say "Intensify the feeling, stay with the feeling, exaggerate it! Go back through time... and what do you see now?" The therapist is stabilizing one part of the person's experience, namely the kinesthetic component, the feelings that person has. And they are saying "Keep those constant, and then let them lead you back in your own personal history to a full, all-system representation of what we are working on." By using an anchor you can always get back to the same set of kinesthetic responses that you began with, and thereby easily stabilize what you are working on. That's one use.
Another use that I demonstrated is testing. After we had done the integration work, after she had the resource and relived the experience with the resource so that she changed her personal history, I gave her a few moments, and then I reached over and triggered the original anchor. The response I got was an integrated response, thereby informing me non-verbally that the process had worked. I recommend that you never let the client know you are checking your work that day. It gives you a covert, non-verbal way of checking to make sure that your integrations have worked before the person leaves your office. Given our historical development in humanistic psychology, most of you want verbal, explicit, conscious kinds of feedback. That is the least useful kind of feedback you can get from your client.
Now I'd like you to realize that there is nothing that your client will do that you won't anchor. As long as you are going to anchor it, you might as well know what the anchor is. If the client comes in and says "I'm really depressed" and you just go "umhm," that's as adequate an anchor as touching them on the arm. And since you will be doing that, you might as well know which anchor is which. We recommend to people in the beginning that they practice using kinesthetic anchors for a period of a month. As they do that, they will discover that they are anchoring anyway, constantly, in all representational systems. Most of the time people use anchors in a way that slows down the process of change, because they don't know what they are anchoring or how they are anchoring.
There is another important point. When you say "Do you always anchor the negative thing?" there was nothing "negative" about it. "Negative" is a judgement about experience. It is not experience itself; it's a judgement specifically made by the person's conscious mind. The experience that Linda had which was unpleasant now serves for her, as well as for everyone else in this room, as a foundation for your learning in the future if you use it that way. If you grew up for the first twenty years of your life without a single unpleasant experience, you would be dull and unable to cope with anything. It's important that you understand that all experiences can serve as a foundation for learning, and it's not that they are positive or negative, wanted or unwanted, good or bad.
As a matter of fact, it's not even that they are. Pick any experience that you believe happened to you, and I will guarantee you that on close examination it didn't. The original personal history that Linda relived, re-experienced today as she went through the experience, is as much a myth as the new experience she went through with the resource. The one we made up is as real as the one she "actually had." Neither one of them actually occurred. If you want a demonstration of this, wait two or three months, remember about having been here for three days and then look at that videotape that they are making now. You will discover there is very little relationship between it and your memories of "what happened here." Since your personal history is a myth anyway, use it as a resource instead of a set of limitations. One way to do that is with anchoring.
Those of you who have done TA "redecision" work as a client: remember all those vivid scenes and experiences that you so well recollected from when you were two years and eight months old?
Woman: Well, mine really happened.
Nothing ever really happened. The only thing that happened is that you made a set of perceptions about events. The relationship between your experience and what actually occurred is tenuous at best. But they really are your perceptions. Doing a redecision about an experience that never occurred is just as valuable as—perhaps more valuable than—doing a redecision about one that did occur, especially if it's less painful, and especially if it opens more choices. I could very easily install memories in you that related to real world experiences that never occurred and could not be documented in any way—that were just bizarre hallucinations out of my fantasy. Made-up memories can change you just as well as the arbitrary perceptions that you made up at the time about "real world events." That happens a lot in therapy.
You can also convince your parents. You can go back and check up with your parents and convince them of things that never actually occurred. I tried that, and it worked. My mother now believes she did things to me when I was a child that never happened. And I know they never happened. But I convinced her of it. I told her I went to a therapy group and I made these changes which were really important to me, and it was all based on this experience when I was little. As I named the experience, she had to search through her history and find something that approximated it. And of course we had enough experience together that she could find something that was close enough that it fit that category.
It's the same as if I sit here and say "Right now, as you sit there, you may not be fully aware of it, but soon you will become aware of a sensation in one of your hands." Now, if you don't, you are probably dead. You are bound to have some sensation in one of your hands, and since I called your attention to it, you'll have to become aware of any sensation. Most of the things that people do as therapies are so general that people can go through their history and find the appropriate experiences.