The difference between when the six–step model is particularly useful and when building parts is particularly useful is the difference between building parts that stop things and building parts that do things. With the six–step model you usually start out with some behavior you don't like and get new choices so that you no longer use the unwanted behavior. That's using reframing in order to stop something. The situations where building a part is most appropriate are those in which a person wants a part that does something: he wants to generate certain desired behaviors, and he is not doing it. When people ask for a part that stops something, then the six–step model, the secondary gain model, is going to be much more appropriate.
Man: How about building a part that differentiates between professional relationships and personal friendships? College professors who lecture at you when you are chatting could use a part like that.
Yeah, I can think of some people who could use that.
Man: How about a part that will give more flexibility to a person who has a lot of polarities?
Well, you have to be more specific about what you mean. You're being very general. What you're thinking of may be really groovy, but you have to be careful about how you describe it, because we've got this other human that we're going to install it in. Does this mean that he is going to become tolerant of having his parts fight with one another? What do you mean?
Man: Let's say the person has a polarity response to situations involving groups of people; you develop a part that will allow the flexibility for that person to listen.
Oh, you mean the ability not to have the polarity response. If you do that, you have to consider the possible secondary gain. If he always has a polarity response, is there some positive function? There may or may not be. The nice thing about your example is that if something is that overgeneralized in behavior, very often you can just build a part that listens to lectures and no other part in him will object to that, because there is no secondary gain to not listening in that context.
No matter what the difficulty is, you can act as if there is secondary gain and fix it. That will always work. If you pretend well enough, you can get anything to be real. But it may turn out that there is no secondary gain. There may only be secondary gain in a polarity response when you are being lectured by parents as a teenager. The polarity response allows you to rebel. However, you overgeneralized that response to all situations.
You become one of the people who sit at the back of one of our seminars. Afterwards, you say «Well, but what about insomniacs? It works well for phobias, but what do you do with depressives?» That person will leave the lecture not knowing anything about how to work with phobias because of his polarity response.
The point I'm making is that not listening may have no secondary gain in one context; it may in another. So if you just build a part for that particular context it may work great, but to avoid objections you have to be very specific about what it's going to do.
Man: A part that will get a person to show up on time for therapy sessions, or a part to do homework on time.
Which of the three models is going to be most appropriate for the example he just gave? «People are late.» What does that sound like? … It sounds like two parts tripping over each other's toes. So you'd use the negotiation model for that.
Woman: A part to discriminate between a dangerous situation and a safe one.
A part to discriminate between what's dangerous and what's safe. What do you think about that? What does that sound like? Does that sound like a situation in which you've got to 1) reframe one part, or 2) build a part, or 3) negotiate between parts?
Man: You could do any of those.
Well, you can always use any of these models, but which one sounds most appropriate? Woman: Build a new part.
Bilclass="underline" Rebuild an old part. Take the part that has kept him safe enough to get here, that kept him from getting hit by cars or anything, and—
How do you know that? She didn't say anything about that. What happens if you have someone who's always stepping in front of trains? She didn't specify any of that.
Man: He must be getting missed by trains or he wouldn't be here.
That's a pretty big assumption. You can verify that with sensory experience, but I can think of examples of people who need to have parts that distinguish between situations which are dangerous and those which are not, because they get them mixed up.
Woman: That's particularly true of children.
Right. Your parents all built one of those in you. It's part of how you got here. Think of all the people who didn't make it to this seminar.
Let me back up and run through the whole thing again quickly. I made a statement at the beginning that one thing I noticed about therapy is that most of what people are doing is building parts. That's about eighty percent of what many therapists actually do. If that's true, then why is building parts so prevalent? Building parts is often inappropriate. I don't think everybody needs a «parent," a «child," and an «adult," but I think some people do. The question is «Who's going to need a part?» and then «What, specifically are they going to need?» What kinds of familiar contexts occur where people need parts? (Someone walks very noisily across the room.)
How about a part that gets someone to pay attention to sensory experience when they walk across the room, and to notice that they are making a tremendous amount of noise? We just had a demonstration of that need. That would be an exquisite part for some people to have. Perhaps in some situations lacking that part won't be detrimental. However, if you don't have a part that pays attention to how people are responding to you, there may be a lot of people who act as if they don't like your behavior, and you won't have any way of noticing that or changing that. There are many, many people in therapy who have that particular problem. They don't have any friends, and they don't deserve any. How many of you have had clients like that? You may tell them that somebody out there is going to like them, but deep down inside you don't like them. Often the problem is that they really have no way of knowing how people respond to them. That would be a really prime example of where it's appropriate to build a part. Where else are you going to need to build a part?
Woman: In couple relationships, you might need a part that would negotiate with your partner.
You get on the borderline there when you talk about having a part that carries on the negotiations. What are the rest of the parts doing in the meantime? I want to know what the outcome of installing this part would be.
Let me give you an example. A couple came to see me because they both had stupid behaviors that fired off automatically and prevented them from talking about what they wanted to discuss. I just picked one of them and installed an interrupter part. The new part did something that captured the attention of both of them, and interrupted the stupid behavior long enough that they could go back and talk about what they wanted to talk about. I don't know what you have in mind, but that's one thing that I've done.
Woman: You could install a part to tell reality from hallucination.
Now that would be a hell of a good part! Someday I may try building one of those. Later on this year I'm going to a state mental hospital to train the staff. This hospital's main function is to «warehouse» the patients that nobody really knows what to do with. A very interesting person has just taken over control of this hospital through an odd set of circumstances. The only thing that I intend to teach when I go back there is how to use this model to build a part that makes distinctions between what is shared reality and what isn't. Many psychotics do not have a part to do that.