III. Finding New Ways
There are several organizing assumptions that we use to put ourselves in a state which we find useful to operate in as we do therapeutic kinds of work. One is that it's better to have choice than no choice, and another is the notion of unconscious choice. Another is that people already have the resources they need in order to change, if they can be helped to have the appropriate resources in the appropriate context. A fourth one is that each and every single piece of behavior has a positive function in some context. It would be wanton and irresponsible of us simply to change people's behavior without taking into account a very important notion called "secondary gain." We assume that the pattern of behavior somebody is displaying is the most appropriate response they have in the context—no matter how bizarre or inappropriate it seems to be.
The context that your clients are responding to is usually composed of about nine parts of internal experience and about one part of external. So when a piece of behavior looks or sounds bizarre or inappropriate to you, that's a good signal that a large portion of the context that the person is responding to is something that is not available to you in your immediate sensory experience. They are responding to someone or something else internally represented: mother, father, historical events, etc. And often that internal representation is out of consciousness. Linda and Tammy can verify that the responses that they changed when they came and worked with us here, were responses to events that occurred sometime in the past.
That shouldn’t surprise any of you. I’m sure you all have been through experiences that support that statement. Our specific response to that understanding is to realize that all of us are complex and balanced organisms. One way to take that complexity into account when you go about assisting someone in making some change, is by using a pattern that we call reframing. Reframing is a specific way of contacting the portion or part—for lack of a better word—of the person that is causing a certain behavior to occur, or that is preventing a certain other behavior from occurring. We do this so that we can find out what the secondary gain of the behavior is, and take care of that as an integral part of the process of inducing a change in that area of behavior.
This is best illustrated by an example. A woman came to us referred by a psychiatrist. She wanted to lose 45 pounds. She had lost this weight in the past, but every time she lost it, she regained it. She could get it off, but she couldn't keep it off. We discovered through reframing that there was no part of her that had any objection to her losing weight. However, the part of her that caused her to overeat was doing that in order to protect her marriage. Can you make that connection? If you can't, let me explain a little further. In the opinion of this part of the woman who was overweight, if she were to lose the weight and weigh what she wanted to weigh, she would be physically attractive to men. If she were physically attractive to men, she would be approached and propositioned. In the opinion of this part she did not have adequate resources to make good decisions for herself in response to those propositions. She wasn't able to say "No." There was no part of her that wanted her to be overweight. There was, however, a part of her that used her being overweight to institutionalize the choice of not having to cope with a situation that it believed she couldn't cope with effectively, and that might lead to the end of her marriage. This is known as "secondary gain."
The heart of reframing is to make the distinction between the intention—in this case to protect her marriage, and the behavior—in this case overeating. Then you can find new, more acceptable, behaviors that satisfy the same intention.
One thing that people rarely understand is that people's symptoms work. As long as being fat worked and accomplished the intention, that part was going to keep her fat. When it had better ways of protecting her marriage, then it could allow her to lose the weight, which in fact she did without dieting.
Let's demonstrate now. Who wants to change?—secretly….
OK, Dick, we want you to keep any content to yourself, leaving the people here free simply to observe the process that we go through. Either Dick is doing something now which he doesn't have a choice about, a sort of compulsive behavior which he would rather replace with something else, or there is something he would rather do but he isn't able to do. Those are the two verbal ways of coding the world of possibility.
Dick: It's the first.
OK. If it's all right with you, let's give the code name X to the pattern of behavior you presently have which you would rather replace with something else more appropriate. And I assume that pattern X, in your conscious judgement, is not a good representation of you as a total adult organism. We've just identified the pattern, the thing the person wants to change. That is step one.
The next step is to establish communication with the part of Dick responsible for this pattern X that he wants to change.
Embedded in this context is a notion that I will state directly to him and that I want to point out to the rest of you as well. Dick, I have respect for the part of you that is responsible for pattern X occurring over and over again in your behavior. You got here. You're sitting here and you are successful in doing a lot of the things that you do in your life. I am convinced that the part of you that runs pattern X—even though you consciously don't appreciate it—is attempting to do something positive in your behalf. I will induce no changes until the part of you that is responsible for running X is satisfied that the changes are more appropriate for it, as well as for you as a total organism.
This only makes sense if you have a belief system that says "Look. If he had conscious control over this behavior, it would have changed already." So some part of him which is not conscious is running this pattern of behavior.
I can guarantee you that ninety-nine times out of a hundred when a person wants to make a change and they come to you for assistance, there's going to be a dissociation, a conflict, between their conscious desires and some unconscious set of programs. The unconscious is far more powerful. It knows far more about his needs than his conscious mind, and far more than I could ever possibly know from the outside. I ally myself immediately with the unconscious, and that's what I just finished doing. That's one way to accomplish that, verbally and explicitly: "Look, I'm not talking to your conscious mind. I'm talking to the part ofyou responsible for this pattern of behavior. It's going to run the show. I'm going to serve as its consultant."
Now how do you communicate with that part? If you had to go to the Federal Building in San Francisco and get someone to sign a paper, you'd be faced with a very complex task. Because out of the 450 people in that building, there's only one of them whom you need to get to. If you were to adopt the strategy of searching for the one person whose signature you need by stopping at the door and talking to the guard and asking if he'll sign it, and then moving down the hallway, office after office, searching for the person who is authorized to sign, you'd waste a great deal of time. It would be an inefficient strategy for you to use to get what you want in that bureaucratic setting. That's a really close metaphor for a lot of the work that therapists do.
Therapists have been trained to pay a great deal of attention to the conscious requests of their clients. Typically the conscious mind is the one that knows the least about what's going on in their behavior. The fact that a person would come into my office and say to me "I'm X-ing and I no longer want to do that; help me make a change," is a statement to me that he's already tried to make the change with all the resources that he can get to consciously and he's failed miserably. It seems as absurd as beginning with the guard and working your way through every office, for me to engage his conscious mind in a discussion of these possibilities. I want to go directly to the office where the person who can sign that paper is residing. I want to go directly to the part of Dick which is controlling his behavior at the unconscious level in this context.