The mother's programs for communicating with men and women were totally different. The little girl did weird things in the session— things like getting up and knocking papers off the desk, interrupting, and making noise. If the son even took his eyes off what was going on, she'd shout «Pay attention!» But the little girl was safe from that.
Woman: And you didn't directly comment on that at all? You just watched it?
What good would it do to talk about it? If I tell them all the things I make distinctions about, that would make it easier for them to stay the same.
In order to test what I had observed, all I had to do was switch back and forth between acting like the son, the father, and the little girl, and see what different responses I got from the mother. I could actually get different responses from her by adopting the little girl's analogues. She began to respond to me in a way that mixed how she usually responded to men and to women.
There was just no way in the world to get the mother to attack the little girl. I asked «What's the worst thing the little girl's ever done?» She said in a sweet voice «Oh, one time she spilled blah, blah, blah.» When the mother talked to the little girl, the entire family loved it. They wished the two of them would run away together! They all responded positively, because the little girl got treated the way they all wanted to be treated. If the little girl communicated to the mother, the mother responded positively, but if the little girl communicated to one of the other people, the mother did not respond. That's very important. If she did, I could have made trickier interventions. I could have gotten the little girl and the brother going, and gotten the mother responding to that. But the mother didn't respond positively to anyone in the family except the little girl communicating directly to her. Everyone in the family responded to the mother.
So I had to figure out what I could get this little girl to do, to get the mother to respond in a way that would get the rest of the family to make the changes they wanted. When I first learned family therapy, I was told that everything works in triads—that when three people communicate, if person one communicates with person two, person three is always going to respond to that communication. It's not true. You can get them to respond to it, but they're not necessarily doing it already.
What I want to know in any family is what they are already doing, because then I can use what's going on now in order to change the system. This is a very important principle: How can I introduce a small change that will channel all the interactions in the family system in ways that force the system to change itself? When you can do that, the family system will do most of your work for you. If I want everybody to change in this particular family system, then I'm going to change the daughter. She will alter the mother's behavior, and ultimately everyone else in the system will change in response to the mother. However, it doesn't work the other way. If I had changed the younger son, it wouldn't have affected anyone else, because no one in the family responded to him. He was about as close to non–existence as it's possible to get. It was «to be or not to be» and he wasn't.
By setting such high standards, the mother made it easy for the men to succeed at failing. I wanted her to lower her standards and to respond in some kind of softer way with them. What I did sounds really direct, but sometimes the direct approach is best. I took the little girl aside, and I told her «Look, I need your help. I want you to play this game with me, and it's going to be our secret. If you play this game with me, something magical is going to happen when you come back here next time.» Previously the little girl had always run away and hidden whenever the mother started to criticize one of the brothers. I told her «You don't need to do that. I want you to test your powers, because I'm giving you powers that you didn't know you had, that you have now. If she's yelling at Billy, I want you to go up to her and simply tug on your mother's hand and ask her the following question: 'Mommie, do you love Billy?' and keep doing it until you are convinced that she is telling you the truth.»
Of course, this little girl was great at it. She would say «Mommie, do you love Billy?» And the mother would say (angrily) «YES!» When she asked again «Mommie, do you love Billy?» the mother would say (softly) «Yes, yes I do.» «Do you really, Mommie?» The girl just went on and on and on like that.
What's going to happen in this system as a result of this intervention? The whole family was convinced that the mother was the Wicked Witch of the North—and you'd probably agree with them! But it's very hard to be the Wicked Witch of the North when a cute little girl is going «Mommie, do you love Billy?» Now, in the middle of «Look, you indifferent slob, you forgot to take out the garbage!» Billy's going to hear things like «Yes, I love him.» That's going to change the whole ball game.
Man: So he got both the yucky negative and the «Yes, mother loves me.»
Yes. But getting negative messages became an opportunity to then have positive feelings.
Man: «Getting negative messages becomes the opportunity to have good feelings» sounds like the way to program somebody to go through behaviors in order to generate negative messages so that he can feel good.
But these people didn't do anything wrong to get criticized. And when the mother answered the little girl's question, she typically went into an explanation of what she was doing. «The only reason I'm telling him this is that I'm afraid that if I can't do something to motivate him to do well in school, then he's going to have to be a hard laborer like his father and work in the coal mines. I don't want him to have to work in the coal mines. I want him to have a job that is clean.» She started to communicate what she was trying to do—the intention behind her behavior. Basically, that little girl accomplished a reframing of the mother's behavior.
Man: The girl must have had some way of coping with the mother if the mother turned on the girl and said «Stop asking me these damn questions.»
The mother would never do that. I knew that before I intervened. The mother couldn't yell at her, or at any other woman.
Woman: The little girl anchored something for the mother.
The little girl became an anchor. Everybody wanted to hang out with her from then on. It wasn't safe to be anywhere else! This little girl had always been ignored before. Being ignored happens very often to middle children, and to children after about the fourth–born. If you decide that's not useful, find some way to make the child an anchor for all kinds of positive behaviors. That's a very powerful intervention.
When the family came back the next week, the difference in the way they looked and interacted was immense. As this new family system develops, ultimately people are going to respond to the younger son because this little girl is going to demand that they do, and it will happen through the mother. The little girl's job now is to pay attention to all these people because I told her to.
Woman: That's fascinating, because you really used the person who is least troubled. Other therapists would say there is no problem with this girl and the mother.
Well, there isn't a problem with anybody. I don't believe in problems. The important point is this: not only do I utilize the system that is there, I use the existing system to create a new system. In order to do that, I have to determine who is the one person in the system who will be able to change all the others. Very often it's not the aggressive, boisterous person who will be able to do that. People often think that persuasion comes with noise, and it doesn't. Persuasion comes with tenacity. People who are very expressive are also very changeable. Anyone who explodes in anger will also have severe polarity responses the other way.