No, I can induce any belief system in just about anybody, so that wouldn't work. So what if I can convince somebody else of my hallucination? That is the way that a lot of therapies operate right now. The therapist says, «Well, you know, what I'm feeling right now is X. Are you feeling that now?» The person goes «I hadn't noticed it, but now that you mention it, yeah.» So now that we have a shared hallucination, we'll act as if it is a basis for choice. That isn't going to work.
You have to learn to make distinctions, and it's probably best to start doing this with couples. You have to figure out what is going on in terms of the naturally–occurring anchored sequences. Let's say that each time he begins to use one tone of voice, you notice that she starts accessing kinesthetically, but if he uses another tone of voice, she accesses visually. When you notice that this relationship exists, then your job is to be able to test it behaviorally. You can always do that inside quotes, of course. You can say «Well, if Jane here said to you …» and then you can become Jane. As you do this, you watch Ralph, and notice whether the predicted response occurs. Then you can be Ralph and test another portion of the calibration. «If Ralph said …» So you can always test for calibrations fairly explicitly by using quotes. Or you can just adopt the calibrated analogue behavior covertly, and notice what happens.
A friend of mine is a mime. One of his great skills is mimicking another person, both tonally and visually. When we're talking, Lennie will say «Oh, yeah, I saw Jimmy the other day» … and then he will become Jimmy. If Jimmy's wife is there, she'll begin to respond to Lennie as though she's married to him. All the systems that operate between Jimmy and his wife will then operate between Lennie and her. And then he can become somebody else and she will respond differently.
One of the things that Lennie jokes about is that when my students come in and he wants them to do something, he simply becomes me. They respond immediately, because they are programmed to respond to me.
I do this kind of role–playing with individuals, too. I become one of their parts, and it works just the same way. I find out how they respond to the part. Behavioral testing is the only way I know of that you can count on for validating your sensory experience in systems relationships. You and I and Linda over there may have the same hallucination, but that's no basis on which to make a decision.
Man: Could you give us an illustration of becoming a part?
I've been doing that for two days now!
Man: Could you label one so my conscious mind would know?
I'm capable of it, but I'm not going to do it. I'm going to tell you about a family I worked with, to give you an example of how to determine and utilize the family system. In this family the mother was a matriarch. And her mother had been a matriarch. Her grandmother had founded a church, and there were streets named after her in the Midwest. This woman knew her dead grandmother's name, but she couldn't remember her grandfather's name even though he was still alive!
The one thing that was really noticeable to me was that everybody in the family responded to the mother. All she had to do was to look at them, and everyone would cringe. All the males were freaked out. The husband was an alcoholic, the older son was a hoodlum, and the younger son was failing in school and was starting to follow in the older son's footsteps. It's a typical pattern. However, there was a five–year–old girl in the family who was very cute and very expressive. She could get the mother to respond positively to her every time she did something.
In order to intervene effectively in this family, I needed to find out how the family operated as a system. I wanted to know what the natural sequence of interaction was. The best way to do that is to create a crisis, which is something that most family therapists avoid. If I make everything nice and lovely and warm, then I don't get down to the nitty–gritty. So I usually mention the most taboo things in the world for the family.
Virginia Satir taught me this. A lot of people think Virginia doesn't do it, because she does it in a nice tone of voice, but Virginia talks about everything that the family doesn't want to talk about. My style may be a little bit closer to Frank Farrelley's in the way I go about it, but it accomplishes the same thing.
So the family comes in and I say «Well, what are you doing here? What went wrong?» Immediately the mother says «This lousy kid over here has been getting out of hand.» I might turn around and say to the son «You son–of–a–bitch!» And then I ask the mother «What has he been doing, swearing?» Immediately the family goes into crazy land, and the system begins to operate. I can say «Well, what do you do if he does this? You probably don't scold him or anything.» She'll immediately start in quotes «Well, I tell him blah, blah, blah» and then immediately the kid will lose quotes and say «Look, goddamit, get off my back!» Then the father will say «Can I get a drink of water around here?» As soon as the family system starts operating, I sit back and observe, because I want to know how the family system operates without me. If it starts to slow down, then I step in and kick it to get it going again. I find out what the really sensitive areas are, so I can keep mentioning them to keep the family going.
This also wears them out, which is really useful. That's one of the things that makes my job easy. I've tried for a long time to train students to do this, but they get caught up in the content of what the family is doing, rather than stepping back and letting the family fight it out so that they can find out how the system operates.
The program in this particular family was really interesting. When the mother spoke, the husband responded like crazy. He went into what psychologists call «massive denial.» He climbed into the back of the chair and hid in the cushions. The oldest son was a carbon copy of the mother, and fought right back at her «RRrrrrhh!» And the more he fought back, the more the mother attacked him. If I interrupted the mother's behavior, the son kept attacking, but the father relaxed. That's important to know: the father was not responding to the son; he was only responding to what the mother did.
Woman: What did you do so that the father relaxed?
I shut the mother off for a while. When the fight got rolling, I just got up and stood in front of the mother, and the son yelled right through me. As soon as I cut off the mother visually, the father sighed and relaxed, even though the son was still screaming at the top of his lungs. When I stepped out of the way, the father immediately tensed up again. You can't do that kind of testing if you are glued to your chair the way many therapists are.
In this family, the younger son responded positively to his older brother. And when the mother went after the older brother, she might as well have gone after the younger one, because he responded as if the mother were going after him. He was a completely vicarious human being. If you talked to him directly, he always looked behind himself, no matter where he was sitting. He actually did that. I asked him «What do you think about this?» and he looked behind himself and said «Ah, well, ah … I don't know.» It was as if he weren't all there. But he really responded to whatever the mother did, even if the mother did it to the father or to his older brother.
The mother fought it out with me tooth and nail, and she was almost my caliber. She could hold her own against me, and there aren't too many people who can do that. But I have some really underhanded ways of fighting. I can switch logical levels so fast that I kept a little bit ahead of her, but I worked hard to do it. There were two male students and one female student in the room with me, and whenever the female student spoke to the mother, her behavior completely changed. The female student said things like «You are so unfair to your son.» The mother turned around and said gently «Well, now, dear, some day you are going to be a little older and you are going to be in my place… .«It was a completely different program. If a male had said that to her, she'd have boxed his ears off!