Richard Bandler - Changing with Families - A Book About Further Education For Being Human

The presence of a family in a therapy session is a statement by that family that their present state — their present ways of coping, communicating and interacting — is unsatisfactory to them. It is a statement that the family recognizes, at some level, that there is a discrepancy between what their present experience as a family is and what they want for themselves. The typical case in our experience is the one characterized by the family arriving for the initial therapy session, each member having some idea of what it is that he wants to change. The initial focus of the therapist is to find out what those changes are. The simplest, and a very effective, way of doing this is for the therapist to introduce himself to each of the family members and to ask them what it is, specifically, that they want for themselves as individuals and for their family. This process is a model presented to the family to assist them in learning to make meaning congruently. The therapist understands that, while the content — the specific hopes of this particular family — is important, the way he secures this information, the powerful process of communication, is taking place at the unconscious level, with himself as the model.

What do you want for yourself and your family?

In what way, specifically, would you like you and your family to change?

What are you hoping for, for yourself and for your family, in therapy?

If you could make yourself and your family different in some way, what would that be?

If I were to give you a magic wand, how would you use it?

Any of these questions will start the process of determining the desired state for the family. As the family members begin to respond to the therapist's questions, they will, typically, present their ideas about what they want for themselves and their family in the form of a nominalization. For example, many families with whom we have worked state that they want more love, support, comfort, respect, etc. Each of these words is an event representation of a process, with most of the pieces of the process missing. The family members, sometimes, will begin by stating what they don't want. Using the linguistic patterns presented in Part I, the therapist works with the individual family members to secure positive statements of what they want — statements completely acknowledged by them of what each wants for himself.

As we pointed out in the first part of this book, nominalizations involve the language processes of deletion, lack of referential indices, and unspecified verbs. For a family member simply to say that he or she wants more love leaves out much necessary information — whom does this person want to love or to be loved by, and how, specifically, does this person want the other person (or people) to love him (or her)? By systematically identifying and challenging the deletions, lack of referential indices, unspecified verbs and nominalizations, the therapist gathers the information he needs to understand what the family members want.

During this phase of family therapy, the therapist is making use of his skills as a communicator to connect the words the family members use with what they want. The therapist has connected the family members' words with their experience (has adequately de-nomin-alized their speech) when his understanding is specific enough that he knows what observable behavior would indicate for that person what he really wants — when he would be able to act out some sequence of behavior with the family member which would be recognized as an example of what that individual desires.

Two general ways of proceeding to adequately connect language and experience (de-nominalization) are:

a) Employ the linguistic distinctions of deletion, lack of referential indices, unspecified verbs, nominalizations, and modal operators;

or

b) Have the family members act out a sequence of behavior which is an example of what they want.

These two general ways of starting the process of de-nominalization are, in our experience, more closely connected than the two categories would suggest. More specifically, when a family member is describing verbally what he wants or what stops him from getting what he wants, almost invariably both that person and the other family members will be acting out before your very eyes the thing being described. In other words, family members match their verbal communication with their nonverbal behavior. Knowing this, the therapist can accelerate the process of understanding what the family member wants by being sensitive to the non-verbal signals which are being sent at these points in the therapy session and then shifting to focus on that process. For us, these two ways of proceeding to connect language with experience are fully integrated. As a guide for ourselves in this area, we invent, both for us and for the family members, experiences which include as many of the sensory channels and representational systems as possible. This action, for us, is a basic assumption about what are the most effective conditions for learning and changing. By choosing to act out an experience, rather than simply to talk about it with the family, the therapist engages all of the family members' channels for experiences (visual, kinesthetic and auditory).

The process is complete when the therapist understands what kind of observable behavior is an adequate example of what the family member wants — in other words, the de-nominalization is complete when the therapist has established which experience (Complex Equivalence) counts for the family members as an example of what they want.

One of the major tasks for the therapist in Phase I is complete when he has successfully connected language with experience for each member of the family (de-nominalizations). However, there is one very important step remaining for the therapist in this area, as he is attempting to gather information regarding the desired state for the family as a unit. The de-nominalization for each of the family members may result in a set of experiences (Complex Equivalences) which are relatively unrelated. To establish, for the family as a unit, a desired state which will be helpful for the therapist to use to guide his behavior in creating a unified experience with the family, he works to find some way to coordinate the experiences which the family members want for themselves. In other words, he must choose a route to de-nominalization by which the individual experiences (Complex Equivalences) which they want will overlap, or, at least, will connect. Since the therapist is going to use these Complex Equivalences as the basis for creating an experience with the family in Phase II, these experiences to which the family members agree will have to fit together. In the process of delicately and gracefully integrating the different experiences wanted by the separate family members, whatever is common among those experiences will emerge naturally. In our experiences in family therapy, often the most diverse-sounding word descriptions, once connected with experience, will automatically merge for the family members involved.

The therapist can be sure that he has adequately connected the family members' words with experience (de-nominalized the family as a unit) when the result is a set of experiences (Complex Equivalences) which, themselves, connect. As the process continues, if the therapist notices that there is little connection among them, he might ask one of the family members to present (either as a verbal description or in any representational system, e.g., pictures, body movement, etc.) an example of an occasion when he failed to obtain the very thing he desired. As one of the family members does this, the therapist might then ask the others how the description or action being presented is connected with what they want (their de-nominalizations). In our experience, this has never failed to produce an overlap in the experiences (Complex Equivalences) which the different family members want.