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.
Stopping or blocking a person's accessing cues is an extremely direct and powerful way of interrupting his ongoing strategy. Strategies may be interrupted and diverted by waving or moving your hands in front of someone's face and knocking away their eye position cues. Having a depressed client sit up straight, hold his head up high, take a full breath in the chest, throw his shoulders back, open his eyes wide and smile, is one of the most rapid and effective ways of drawing a depressive out of a negative state. The typical depressive posture probably does more to elicit and perpetuate the depressed state than any other element. The posture is generally slumped and hunched over, eyes and head oriented downward to produce full kinesthetic access — it's no wonder that he isn't able to see or talk himself out of his problems. As we pointed out earlier, there tends to be an inverse relationship between the internal and external focusing of the same representational system — the more you are talking to yourself in your head, the less you can hear what's going on around you, and so on. For the depressed, then, who spend most of their time focused on internal kinesthetics, tactile awareness, especially through physical exercise and sports, will be an extremely effective diversion. To interrupt someone who is depressed, have him do something, no matter how meaningless the activity may seem.
A therapist once told the authors about an emergency call she received from a person who was very depressed and contemplating suicide. At the time of the call, however, the therapist was involved in a critical intervention with another client, one she could not abandon. Out of desperation, the therapist in a firm and congruent voice told the caller that she was to go out immediately, take a bicycle ride for at least 20 minutes and was to call the therapist again when she returned. The therapist's reasoning was that this would keep the person occupied so that she wouldn't harm herself, until the therapist had finished with the other client and could turn her full attention toward helping the caller. Much to the therapist's surprise, when the potential suicide called back, the crisis had passed. The bike ride, the caller said, had been just what she needed to break the depression. Prior to the ride she hadn't been out of her house for days because she'd been feeling bad. She said that she now realized how that had only contributed to her negative state. She still needed to work on a number of problems she faced, but the bike ride had averted a crisis.
6.33 Interruption By "Spinning Out" a Strategy.
A strategy will "spin out" when the end of the strategy becomes anchored to its beginning in such a way that the strategy keeps feeding back into itself (like the proverbial snake swallowing its own tail). Because it can't exit, the strategy is forced to continue looping. Most strategies have a kind of test, a meta-test you might call it, such that if the strategy operations are ineffectual after a certain period of time, the program will exit into a completely new strategy — thus, the "spin out."
The following is an illustration of how a belief strategy may be spun out:
A: How do you know that you can't get X outcome?
B: My experience tells me that I can't.
A: How do you know that your experience tells you that?
B: Because I've tried before and failed.
A: How do you know that you've failed?
B: I remember it.
A: How do you know that you remember it?
B: Because I can see it.
A: How do you know that you can see it?
The pattern here is obvious — whatever output is received from the strategy is fed back through the strategy again. This continues until eventually the strategy essentially runs through itself.
One of the authors was once working with a young man who was having motivational difficulties in his business. He kept finding himself taking on much more than he could possibly handle. Upon eliciting his motivation strategy the author found that it was such that if the young man was asked if he could perform some task or favor by a client, friend or associate he would immediately attempt to construct an image of himself doing what they had asked of him. If he could see himself doing it he would then think that he should do it and would begin to carry out the task requested of him, even if it interfered with other things he was currently involved in. The author tested the strategy by asking the young man if he would run up and down some nearby stairs for the rest of the afternoon. The young man replied that he could only see himself running up and down the stairs for a half an hour at the most, but actually began to get out of his chair to begin the task for that half an hour. The author then asked the young man if he could visualize himself not doing something that he could visualize himself doing. A rapid and profound trance state ensued as the man's strategy began to spin out. The author took advantage of this state to install some more effective tests and operations into the young man's motivation strategy.