A lot of school children have problems learning simply because of a mismatch between the primary representational system of the teacher and that of the child. If neither one of them has the flexibility to adjust, no learning occurs. Knowing what you now know about representational systems, you can understand how it is possible for a child to be "educationally handicapped" one year, and to do fine the next year with a different teacher, or how it is possible for a child to do really well in spelling and mathematics, and do badly in literature and history.

You can also translate between representational systems with couples. Let's say that the husband is very kinesthetic. He comes home after working hard all day and he wants to be comfortable. He sits down in the living room, kicks his boots off here, throws a cigarette down there, gets a beer from the icebox, grabs the paper, and sprawls all over his chair, and so on. Then the wife, who's very visual, walks in. She's worked hard all day cleaning house so it will look good, as a way of showing respect for him. She sees his stuff scattered all over the living room and gets upset. So the complaint from him is "She doesn't leave me enough space to be comfortable, man. It's my home. I want to be comfortable." What she says to him at this point is "You're so sloppy. You leave stuff lying all over and it looks cluttered, and when it looks cluttered like that I know that you don't respect me."

One of the things Virginia Satir does is to find the kinesthetic counterpart of her visual complaint, and vice-versa. So you can look at the husband and say:

"You don't understand what she said, do you? You really have no idea what she experiences. Have you ever had the experience that she went to bed first, and she's been sitting there watching TV in bed, eating crackers? And you come in and get into bed and feel all those cracker crumbs all over your skin. Did you know that's what she experiences when she walks in and sees your stuff lying all over the front room?"

So there's no fault, no blame. You don't say "You're bad" or "You're stupid" or anything like that. You say "Here's a counterpart that you can understand in your system."

He says "Well, when we're in public, and I want to express affection, she's always standing back, always pushing me away." And she says "He's always making scenes in public. He's pawing me all the time!" That is his way, of course, of simply being affectionate, but she needs to see what is going on. He complains that she moves away and he falls flat on his face. He reaches out toward her and nothing happens. So you find a counterpart and say to her:

"Have you ever had the experience of wanting and needing help, really seeing the need for companionship and assistance, and it's like you're standing in the middle of the desert and you look around in all directions and there's no one there? You don't see anybody and you are all alone. Do you know that's what he feels when he comes toward you and reaches out and you back up?"

The point is not whether those are actually accurate examples or not. The point is that you can use the principle of sorting people by representational systems, and then overlapping to find counterparts between them. That establishes something that even the major insurance companies in this country have adopted, "no-fault" policies. Family and couple therapists ought to at least have that, and have a way of demonstrating it.

As I stand back and give her space to see what I'm saying, and I get in close to him and make good solid contact with him, the teaching at the unconscious meta-level is this: I can get responses from her that he would love to get, and I can get responses from him that she would love to get. That's never mentioned; that's all at the unconscious level. So they will model and adopt my kinds of behavior to make their communications more effective. That's another way of making contact and establishing rapport with each individual member and then translating between representational systems, as a way of teaching them how to communicate more effectively.

Reference systems are also important. What if someone comes in and tells you "I don't know what I want." They are saying that they don't have a reference system. We taught a seminar just recently and a woman there said that she had a very difficult time. She could not decide what she wanted from a menu. She had no basis on which to make that decision. She said her whole life was like that; she could never decide things, and she was always dissatisfied. So we literally made up a decision strategy for her. We said OK, when you are faced with a decision, go inside and tell yourself what it is you have to decide, no matter what it is. Let's say you are in a restaurant. Tell yourself "You must choose food." Then go back to sensory experience and find out what your choices are. In other words, read the menu. As you read "hamburger" on the menu, make a picture of a hamburger in front of you, taste what it would taste like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. Then read "fried eggs," see fried eggs in front of you, taste what they would be like, and check whether that feels positive to you or not. After she went through the process of trying that a few times, she had a way of making decisions, and started to make them quickly and unconsciously for all kinds of things in her life.

As she went through that process a number of times, it became streamlined in the same way that learning to drive a car does. It drops into unconsciousness. Consciousness seems to be occupied by things we don't know how to do too well. When we know how to do things really well, we do them automatically.

Man: We were wondering about accessing smells. We played with that a little bit and discovered that they went visual to see the object and then to the smell.

Not necessarily. You used the sequence you described. You said "What we discovered they do is..." and then you described yourself. That is a common pattern in modern psychotherapy, as far as I can tell. Thomas Szasz said "All psychology is either biography or autobiography." Most people are doing therapy with themselves instead of other people. To respond more specifically to your statement, people can access olfactory experience in many different ways. One of the things you can notice, however, is that when people access smells, they will flare their nostrils. That's a direct sensory signal, just as the eye movements we've been talking about are direct sensory signals, to let you know what experience the person is having. They may or may not precede that with a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory access, but you can see the nostril flare.

Turn to somebody close by; one of you decide to be A and the other to be B. I'm going to ask A to watch B respond to the question I'm going to ask. A, clear your sensory channels and watch your partner's nose. B, when was the last time you took a good whiff of ammonia?... Now is there any doubt about that? It's an involuntary response. Usually the person will breathe in at the moment the nostrils flare.

Let me ask you all to do something else which is along these lines to give you another demonstration. As a child, you had lots of experiences. Maybe you had a grandmother who lived in a separate house that had special smells. Maybe it was some special food, or a blankie, or a little stuffed toy animal, or something else special to you. Pick some object from your childhood and either feel it, talk to yourself about it, or see it in your hands. When you have it in any of those systems, breathe in strongly and let that take you whereever it takes you. Try that for a minute. That's one way of accessing smells.

There are as many ways to use this information as your ingenuity permits. If you use visual guided fantasy with your clients, there are some clients you use it with automatically and it works fine. Other people you wouldn't even try it with. What's the criterion you use to decide that, do you know? If they can visualize easily, you use visual guided fantasy, right? We're suggesting that you reverse that. Because for people who do not normally visualize in consciousness, visual guided fantasy will be a mind-blowing, profound change experience. For those who visualize all the time, it will be far less useful. The only thing you need to do in order to make it work for people who don't normally visualize is to join their system wherever they are—wherever their consciousness is—establish rapport and then slowly overlap to lead them into the system you want to engage them in fantasy with. It will be extremely powerful, much more powerful than with someone who already visualizes.