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

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.

Bill: 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.

Man: Many psychiatrists do not have a part to do that when working with those people.

Many do not have it at all, as far as I can tell! The only difference is that they have other psychiatrists who share their reality, so they at least have a shared reality. I make lots of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when I worked at the Rand Corporation. People at Rand didn't come into the office in the morning, hold each other's hands, and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes.

When somebody at Rand sees somebody else do that, they go «Urrrhhh! Weird.» The people in humanistic psychology circles think the people at Rand are cold and insensitive and inhuman. Well, those are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you start talking about shared realities, the people at Rand have more people to share theirs with.

You really have a choice only if you can go from one reality to another, and you can also have a perspective on the process of what's going on. It's really absurd that a humanistic psychologist who is hired to teach at Rand Corporation doesn't alter his behavior. Think about how often that happens. If someone who has all the TA jargon goes to a gestalt institute, he'll get wiped out by the gestalt therapist, because gestalt people can yell, and most TA people can't. In that context, as far as I'm concerned, the inability to adjust to the shared reality is a demonstration of psychosis. Qualitatively it's not different. You just don't get put away.

Let's say you're a gestalt therapist or a TA therapist or an analyst or whatever your gig is—even a Neuro–Linguistic Programmer. Tomorrow morning you wake up and go down to some bar where all the guys are. You say «You know, I was working on strategies this morning with a client, and I was watching his accessing cues — " They say «What?» So you say «Well, you know, I studied with Bandler and Grinder. We watch the movement of people's eyes and we know how they are thinking.» They say «Sure you do.» «Oh, yeah, and then I elicited a response and I touched him, and then I associated it with this other memory simply by touching him.» They would think you're pretty weird.