6.23 Rehearsing Synesthesia Patterns.
Rehearsing synesthesia patterns is another powerful method of installing sequences of representational system activity that is independent of specific content. For many people, certain synesthesia patterns will be unfamiliar and underdeveloped, and they may experience difficulty in making the transition from one certain type of representational system to another. Practicing synesthesia patterns, independent of specific content, will increase the ease of access and the the "representational vocabulary" (the discriminative capabilities) of particular individuals with underdeveloped systems.
If the programmer wanted to install a strategy that followed the sequence Aid →Ke →Ait →Vi, he would instruct the client, starting with any particular portion of an internal dialogue, to generate seven tactile body sensations or movements. The instructions might go: "As you listen carefully to those words in your head, pay attention to what body sensations come from them. When you have identified one set of feelings, listen to the words again and allow another feeling to emerge from the words. Keep doing this until you have come up with seven different feelings. " The client is then instructed to pick the feeling that is most appropriate to the words being pronounced internally, and from that feeling he is to generate seven sounds that are not words. For example: "Get in touch with that feeling and allow it to turn into a sound." Have him repeat the process until he has generated seven sounds. Next, have him choose the sound most appropriate to the feelings it was derived from and instruct him to generate seven internal visual images from that sound.
Visually, we can represent this process in the following manner:
The synesthesia process may be greatly facilitated by teaching the individual to overlap accessing cues. For example, taking a deep breath in the abdominal area while looking up and to the left would help to produce a V→K overlap (or fuzzy function). Looking down and right, defocusing one's eyes and breathing high and shallow in the chest will facilitate K→V overlap. Looking up and right and touching one's face or chin would promote Vc →Aid synesthesia.
Have the individual repeat the process until the transitions become smooth and easy.
Within the process of installing any particular strategy, of course, the programmer will want to use combinations of both anchoring and rehearsal techniques. Some steps will be more appropriately anchored in, while others should be rehearsed to help make the transitions smoother. For instance, the programmer may want to have the individual rehearse a synesthesia pattern that is difficult for him, but then choose to anchor the next step on to the synesthesia. The programmer will most often want to establish anchors for each step and fire them off as the individual rehearses.
6.3 Interrupting Strategies.
Installing a new strategy requires that you make it as available in context as an existing one. As we said at the beginning of the chapter, this can generally be accomplished with ease through timing — firing of the anchor(s) you have established for the new sequence at the appropriate time in the existing sequence — or by conditioning the new sequence via repeated rehearsal. If the new strategy you have designed is sufficiently adaptive it should reinforce and perpetuate itself naturally.
Sometimes, however, the existing strategy will have a particularly well-beaten path and will be unusually ingrained. If the outcome of the strategy interferes with what you are attempting to accomplish and is producing behaviors that are counterproductive to the achievement of the meta-outcomes of the client (such as the depressive strategies we discussed in the design chapter), it will be to the client's benefit for you to interrupt the existing strategy.
There are three basic ways to interrupt a strategy: (1) through overload, (2) by diversion and (3) by "spinning out" the strategy.
6.31 Interruption By Overload.
Overloading occurs when more information is being poured into a strategy or strategy step than it can handle. Overloading happens naturally in many everyday experiences — for example, when a person in a noisy place "can't hear himself think," or when a person feels so good (or bad) that he doesn't know what to do or say (this is often called "being overcome by emotion"). Other natural interruptions are situations like being overwhelmed by beauty or practically "knocked out" by some smell or fragrance.
The behavioral result of overloading, as with any of the interruption phenomena, is that person's strategy is stopped from completing its cycle. When a strategy is interrupted completely, the individual is left without a next step in behavior (in a sort of behavioral "limbo," or what is sometimes known as "somnambulistic trance" —see Patterns II) and is prone to jump for whatever next step is offered to him by the situation. That is, they display a strong tendency to respond to whatever anchor for response is provided by the situation. This is a phenomenon that you can easily take advantage of to install a strategy, if you time your anchors right.
Occasionally you may want to interrupt an existing strategy simply to stop its ongoing negative outcomes. As one of the authors was preparing to leave his house to board a plane for a week long trip, the phone rang. When the author answered it, an extremely worried and frantic voice came through the receiver, pleading with him to help a deeply depressed relative who was on the verge of suicide. It was impossible for the author to postpone his trip to work with the phone caller's relative, so he quickly told her to bring the suicidal relative to the airport and gate he would be departing from. He would see what he could do. They arrived just as he was preparing to board the plane. Left without time to attempt anything then, the author simply reached out, grabbed the relative's wrist, and squeezing it as hard as he could, made an extremely animated and contorted face and yelled at the top of his lungs, "Everything that you do this week has to come through this channel." He then released her wrist and boarded the plane. The rationale was that the simultaneous multi-sensory overload was sure to interrupt any ongoing strategy. Upon returning the following week and working finally with the depressive relative, the author was told how she had remained around the house all week, entertaining no thoughts of suicide. All she could remember experiencing, in fact, was a sustained visual image in her mind's eye of the face the author had made at the airport.
6.32 Interruption by Diversion.
A strategy is diverted when a particular input shifts the representational sequence away from the ongoing strategy. A person who is lost in thought, for instance, will be interrupted when some noise or movement draws his attention to his external environment. The stimulus does not overload the person's strategy; it instead overrides the ongoing sequence, drawing the person's behavior to some other locus. Often, after such an interruption, the person who was formerly lost in thought may have a difficult time reaccessing the strategy he was in and may even forget what he was thinking about. Diverting someone's attention so that it breaks his concentration or stops him from completing some particular behavior, has been employed as an effective interruption technique throughout the ages.