Richard Bandler - Reframing. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Transformation of Meaning

There is a guy in Santa Cruz who exorcises parts. The exorcism is terrible; it takes a long, long time, and has some unfortunate consequences. This man has «discovered» an epidemic of multiple personalities in this country that no one else has noticed! He doesn't even begin to suspect that he is creating them.

I wouldn't recommend exorcism as an approach. I would rather tie parts to outcomes, whether or not they were tied together originally. If you act as if they are, they will be. Once you have an outcome, you no longer need to exorcise a part. You simply give it new behaviors.

If someone doesn't have a part to do something, you can create one, but you need to be sure that the part is designed to achieve a specific outcome. If you are not able to open doors, you can create a part that opens doors. It sounds simple; it's actually somewhat complicated. However, it's something that you do all the time. All of you have parts which you managed to make somehow or other. All the things we do explicitly with parts and reframing are things that people do anyway. These are all naturally occurring processes.

I think there's a tendency for human beings to organize themselves in terms of outcomes that are contextual. A man behaves differently with his wife than with his colleagues at work; he has an entirely different set of analogue behaviors in order to get different outcomes. That used to be called «role theory," and I think role theory was on the right track in some ways. However, therapists got stuck trying to prove that that's all there was.

Many of B. F. Skinner's students have gotten stuck in the same way. They said that since Skinner didn't look in the «black box," there wasn't anything in there anyway. Skinner didn't say «There's nothing in the black box»; he said «I'm not going to open it.» Those are two very different statements. Skinner's students took the connotations of his statement to mean there was nothing in there anyway. That is not the case, and I do not think, from reading his writing, that Skinner intended that. However, we all know how some people are: if they don't see something, it doesn't exist.

In order to build a part to achieve a specific outcome, the first consideration is to identify a «need.»

Woman: Could you distinguish need from outcome? I don't understand what you mean by need in this context.

Well, that's why I put it in quotes. What you're going to do is find an outcome. What your client is going to tell you is that she has a «need.»

The tricky part about this is to build a part that won't interfere with the rest of the person's outcomes. If there really is a part that stops her from doing something, and you build a part to do it, guess what's going to happen? WAR. To prevent this, we have built into the model that all the parts of the person that don't want you to build the new part become allies during the design process.

The first thing you do is identify whatever «need» it is that you are going to build the part for. For example, a woman might come in and say «Well, you know, I've been on lots and lots of diets and I never seem to lose weight. I'm just much too heavy, so I want you to put me in a trance and make food taste bad.» If she really wants that, I would recommend that you send her to one of those Schick clinics, where they will put big cakes in front of her and shock her. If she smokes, they will put her in a room full of cigarette butts and make her drink ashes, and all kinds of wonderful things.

That's a way of building a part that stops you from doing certain things. However, it doesn't take into account the secondary gain—the outcome of the problem behavior. That makes it a very difficult way to stop behaviors. It is an experiential way of going about it, and it will Work insofar as it's reinforced. Sometimes after a period of time, when the part that you have developed discovers that you're not going to get shocked any more, then it won't care if you smoke. So you might have to go back at a later time and repeat the procedure or do something else. That's a problem with building parts in that particular way. However, don't underestimate that approach, because it works. It seems a little severe and it doesn't work with everybody, but it does work; that's an important consideration. It's important to understand what goes on when people change, and to make up a metaphor or a lie to describe it that enables us to be able to make changes more elegantly.

Let's go back to our overweight client. Her expressed need is to «lose weight.» However, if you build a part whose job it is to lose weight, what's going to happen when she loses weight? She will lose some more! She may become an anorexic! So if you opened up a weight clinic and built parts to lose weight, you would end up needing another clinic down the street for anorexics. There you could build eating parts, and you could have the client switch back and forth every six months. There's nothing in her stated outcome that has anything to do with stabilizing weight.

Most people really don't understand substituting symptoms. There's one school of thought that says «Well, if you use hypnosis, then you will get symptom substitution.» My response is «Bravo! Let's deliberately substitute something and have it be something useful.»

Years ago a man wrote an article in which he described making cigarettes taste like the worst thing he could think of—cod liver oil. The client he did this with quit smoking, but he became a cod liver oil junkie! He carried a bottle of cod liver oil in his coat all day. I guess that's better than smoking. I don't know the ramifications of overdosing on fish oil. It sounds disgusting to me. I prefer to substitute symptoms that are positive.

So the really important question is «What is it that you are going to do in terms of an outcome?» If somebody comes in and says «I want to quit smoking» and you make the outcome no cigarettes, then the way you organize that person's resources to suppress that activity can have lots and lots of other outcomes that are not positive.

The question is «How can you conceptualize change work so that you avoid undesirable side effects?» When somebody comes in with a weight problem, what part are you going to build? In other words, what is going to be the outcome of the part that you build? At the moment, her need is to lose weight. But how can you do that and not have her end up an anorexic?

Ann: You could set a specified weight that she wants to weigh, and not let that part function when she gets under that weight.

Well, yes. We can put semantic conditions on when the part is to be active and when it's not. You could have the part begin to respond every time she weighs more than a certain amount. However, parts don't like to be inactive.

Man: You could get all parts to agree on the same outcome.

Try it some time! I'm serious. If somebody comes in and wants to lose weight, you try to get the part that likes candy to agree to that. His parts may all say «Well, that's a groovy outcome.» But if you get all his parts to agree that it's a great outcome, it still won't take him there. What the parts object to is the process of getting there.

Man: Could they generate alternatives?

You can have them do that, but then you're using a different reframing model. Then you're saying that the problem is a result of the interaction of the parts you have now. You could use the six–step model to do that. However, it's not very elegant, because then you have to go in and deal with a huge number of parts. The question is simply one of expedience: if you were only going to build one part, what would it do? I want you to make a distinction between the outcome—what you want to be sure happens—and the behaviors or procedures that the part uses to get the outcome. They are both important, but now I want you to specify outcomes.