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

One of our students taught the Meta–Model to the nursing staff of a hospital. The immediate result was the patients got well faster, and the average hospital stay was reduced by a little over a day. However, the job of the hospital administration is to keep the hospital as full as possible to maximize income. Soon they had empty beds, and then an empty ward.

When the administration started proposing staffing cuts, the nurses saw the handwriting on the wall, and the average hospital stay went back to what it had been before. The change that was good for the patients was not good for the hospital system as a whole. In order to make it ecological for the hospital, there would have to be some way to maintain the economics of the hospital—generate more patients to fill the empty beds, or slowly reduce the staff by attrition, etc.

Many people go to therapy, start changing, and end up getting divorced. Usually that's because the changes they make don't take their spouses into account. Of course, afterwards you can say that they «outgrew their marriage» or that their spouses «weren't willing to change» if you want to cover up your incompetence. But if you can use reframing with the whole family system, you can do really clean work. It will be much easier to do and it will last longer, because other parts of the family system won't try to undo what you're trying to accomplish.

In order to successfully reframe a system, you have to take into account the needs and wishes of all members of the system. This is the basis for what we have often called «outcome therapy.» I think you can do everything you need to do in couple therapy, family therapy, or conference work just using this one pattern. The first thing you do is notice any message that elicits a negative response in someone else— whether in a couple or family interaction, or during a corporate conference or consultation. Then you simply find out from the sender of the message if the response that he managed to elicit was in fact a response that he intended to elicit. In other words, it's the old formula «Message intended is not necessarily message received.»

Let me demonstrate one example of «outcome therapy» — what we call couple reframing. Beth and Tom, would you come up please? I'd like to have you role–play a couple. I'm going to arbitrarily ask you to interact in the following way: Beth, you say or do anything, and then Tom, you act depressed.

Beth: Hello, Tom, how are you today?

Tom: Oh, I don't know. (He starts to slump and talk in a monotone.)

OK. I don't know exactly what portion of Beth's behavior Tom is reacting to, but whatever it is, I can see that it is getting a response that isn't useful, so I interrupt the interaction and anchor Tom's response. If Beth had asked me that question, I would just answer it, but it seems to have a really profound and over–determined impact on Tom, so I know something important is going on.

My next step is to turn to Tom and say, «Are these feelings familiar?» as I press the anchor I set up a moment ago.

Tom: Oh, yeah.

What's the name of the message you get from Beth when she says «Hello, Tom, how are you today?» in that way? Tom: «Go away.»

«Go away.» OK, now hold on a minute here. Beth, was it your intent to give him the message, «Go away»?

Beth: No.

What were you intending? Beth: I just want to know how he is feeling. OK. So it was just a straight question. You are interested in finding out how he is.

Now I turn to Tom and say «Did you hear what Beth just said?» Tom: Yes.

Now, I understand that you got a different message than the one she intended. Do you understand that she didn't intend the one that you

got?

Tom: Yes.

OK. Now, Beth, are you really committed to getting across the message that you intended? Beth: Yes.

This commitment step is really necessary. I'm setting up the leverage that I may need later on if she objects to changing her behavior in order to get the response she wants.

Now I ask Beth, «Have you ever been able to approach this man and ask him how he feels without having that profoundly depressive effect on him?» (Yes.) «Go back into your personal history and recall what you did in the past that worked to get the response you wanted.»

If Beth can find an example of when she was successful in getting her intended message across in the past, then I will ask her to do it here, and notice whether or not it works.

Beth reaches out and touches Tom gently as she says softly «How's it going?» Tom responds positively.

In this case it worked fine. If she can't find an example in her own personal history that works, I can have her think of a woman she respects, and ask her how that woman does it. She can use that woman as a model and try that behavior.

If I can't find a new response easily in Beth's experience, then I'll get it from Tom. I'll turn to Tom and say «Have you ever gotten the message 'Hey, how are you?' and understood it simply as a message of interest and concern?»

Tom: Yes.

Would you demonstrate for Beth exactly how that message was given, so that she'll know exactly how to get across this message that she is committed to giving you.

Tom: Well, she came up and put her hand on my shoulder like this, and…

Good, thank you. So now I have Beth try that, and I sit back and watch to make sure it works.

If it doesn't work, I can ask Tom how, specifically, she could do this behavior differently to make it work, or ask Tom to go back and search for some other behavior that worked in the past. OK. Thank you, Beth and Tom.

Man: That doesn't seem like a very realistic example. It doesn't seem like Tom would get depressed when all Beth said was «Hello, how are you?»

It's actually quite frequent with real couples, that what seems to be an innocuous behavior triggers a powerful response. The stimulus may not be obvious, but Tom's response is obvious, and lets me know that something significant is going on. It may be that Beth's voice tone or the way she glances at Tom is associated with other experiences in their past that I don't know about.

The stimulus that elicits an unpleasant response in someone else may be hard for you to detect because it seems so trivial or innocuous. Once I worked with a schizophrenic teenager and his mother. All that was observable to me was that every time the son started to go berserk it was right after the mother had pointed to her arm. It turned out that the mother had survived the Nazi concentration camps. Every time the mother wanted a certain response from her son, she would point to the part of her arm where the identification number had been tatooed. I don't know how she had built that anchor up to have such an impact on her son, but it was as quick a knee–jerk response as I've ever seen. The kid would immediately start to go really berserk, yet the stimulus was one most people wouldn't have noticed.

When you use this format, you assume that people want to communicate in such a way that they get what they want, and that they want to respect the integrity and the interests of the other people involved. That assumption may not be true, but it's a very useful operating assumption, because it gives you something to do that can be very effective. If you make that assumption, it's always possible to find another solution—not a compromise—that satisfies both parties.

Any time there's a difference between the intended message and the response elicited, you first need to train the person who sent the message to recognize that he didn't get the intended response. You make it obvious to the person that the intent of his message was different from the response that he got. «What response did it elicit? Describe it. Did you notice you got it? Good.» This builds a perceptual strategy into the person who originally sent the message and makes him more sensitive to the responses he is getting. The next question is «Is this response what you wanted? Is this what you intended?» In ineffective communication I have never yet run into a situation where it is. Then you train the message sender to gather information that will be useful in varying his behavior to get the response he wants.