I have a friend who is a college president. He is living in a delusional reality that he's intelligent and that he has a lot of prestige and all those things. He walks around stiffly, looks gruff and smokes a pipe; he does this whole number. It's a completely delusional reality. The last time I was in a mental hospital, there was a guy there who thought he was a CIA agent, and that he was being held there by the communists. The only difference between them is that the rest of the people in the world are more apt to believe the college president than the psychotic. The college president gets paid for his delusions. In order to pace either of them I'm going to accept their reality. With the college president I'm going to say that "Since he's so intelligent and prestigious he will be able to"—and then I'll say whatever I want him to do. If I go to an academic conference and I'm there with all the people who live in the psychotic reality of academia, I am going to pace that reality. Ill present a paper, because raw experience wouldn't pace their reality. If there was any experience there, it would just go right by them.

With the psychotic who believes he's a CIA agent I'll open the door, look back, slip in and close the door quickly, and whisper "At last we got through to you! Whew! I almost got caught coming in here! Now, quick, I only have a few minutes to give you these instructions. Are you ready? We have gotten you a cover as a college professor, and we want you to apply for this job and wait until you hear from us. You can do that because you've been trained to do it as an agent, right? Do it well, so that you're not discovered and sent back here. Got it?"

When you join someone else's reality by pacing them, that gives you rapport and trust, and puts you in a position to utilize their reality in ways that change it.

Non-verbal mirroring is a powerful unconscious mechanism that every human being uses to communicate effectively. You can predict by looking at people communicating with each other in a restaurant whether they are communicating well or not by observing their postures and movements.

Most of the therapists I know who mirror do it compulsively. We did a seminar in which there was a woman who was an exquisitely good communicator who mirrored very compulsively. As she was talking with me, I began sliding off my chair, and she literally fell on the floor. If you believe that you have to have empathy, that means that you have to have the same feelings that your client does in order to function well as a therapist. Someone comes in and says "Well, I have this kind of phobic response every time I walk down the street and begin to talk to somebody; I feel like I'm going to throw up, you know. I just feel real nauseous and light-headed and I feel like I'm going to sway... ."If you have to mirror, you're going to get sick.

How many of you have ever finished a day of doing therapy or educational work and gone home and felt like you took some of the residue home with you? You know that experience. The statistics show about eight years shorter life span for people in therapy than almost any other profession.

If you work with people who are diseased or dying, you don't want to mirror that directly, unless you want a very short career. People in therapy are always talking about pain, sadness, emptiness, suffering, and enduring the tribulations of human existence. If you have to understand their experience by experiencing it, then my guess is you're going to have a really unpleasant time. The important thing is to have a choice between direct mirroring or cross-over mirroring. With someone who breathes normally, pace with your own breathing. With someone who is asthmatic, pace with your hand movement or something else.

Now let's do something with this, and all the things we talked about yesterday. Is there someone here who has a past experience that they think about from time to time, and it makes them have a feeling that they don't want? ...

OK. Linda, this is secret therapy. Your task is always to keep the content of what goes on from the people here. Because if you tell them the content, they will become involved. And if they become involved, it will be harder for them to learn.

Whenever we ask a person to come and make a change here as a demonstration, we will insist that they keep the content to themselves. Usually we'll say "I want you to pick a code word, a color, a number, a letter for what you want to change." So the person will say "I want to be able to M" or "I don't want to have to three." That has a couple of positive dimensions. If the outcome we're after is to teach people how to do what we do, then we will demand that it be content-free pure process therapy. Then the only things you have available to pay attention to are the pieces of the process. You cannot hallucinate effectively on "number three"—at least not as effectively as you can on "assertiveness" or "love" or "trust" or any of those other nominal-izations.

In addition it has an extra advantage. If you are in any context in which people know each other, many people are reluctant to work on material which they think might change their relationship with the people who are there. By doing secret therapy you avoid that difficulty because nobody knows what they are working on.

Linda, what do you recall that gives you the unpleasant feeling? Is it a set of images or a voice? OK. She already answered the question nonverbally. If you were watching her eyes, you saw them move up to her left and then down to her right. So she makes an eidetic visual image and then has a feeling about it.

Linda, when you see this image you have certain feelings which are unpleasant to you. Now I'd like you to look at the image and find out if you still get the unpleasant feeling when you look at it now. And I'd like you to do a good job of that. You can close your eyes and really take a good look at it. (Pause. As she experiences the feelings, he touches her right shoulder.) And as you can all see by her responses, Linda is telling the truth: when she sees that picture she feels bad. So there is some past experience that occurred, and things didn't turn out quite the way you would have liked them to. That's an understatement if I've heard right.

Linda: Right. That's exactly right.

So from time to time an image comes into your mind, and when you think about it, you get the same kind of feelings that you had as a result of that experience. Now, I would like you to think what resource you would have needed back then to have made a different response to that situation, a response which would have given you a much more acceptable outcome if you had made it. Wait a minute, because I want to tell you what I mean by "resource." By resource I don't mean some outside help or anything like that. What I mean by a resource is more confidence, more assertiveness, more trust, more caring—any internal resource. At this point in time, some time has elapsed; I don't know how much, but during that interval you have gained resources as a human being that you didn't have access to then. I want you to select a resource that would have enabled you to have had a wholly different experience back then. I don't want you to tell me what it is. I just want you to think of what it would be. (Pause. As she thinks of the resource, he touches her left shoulder.)

Did those of you watching notice some changes? Let's call the response she gets from the picture Y, and the new resource that she needed back there we'll call X. Now, let's demonstrate. Which of those two responses is this? (He touches her right shoulder.)... Now, you should be able to see the color changes, lip size changes, breathing changes, actual trembling in her body, that we have called Y.

Now which response is this? (He touches her left shoulder.)... Now, when I say that she needs this resource X, I have given you as much information verbally as you ever get from your clients when they tell you what they want. If a client says "I want to be more assertive; I want to be more trusting; I want to be more caring, more respectful of other people," they have given you exactly the same amount of information as saying "I need X." In a way they have given you less. Because if they say "I want to be more assertive,"you're going to take your meaning of assertive and assign it to their behavior. If they say "Well, what I need is some X," you won't run the risk of misunderstanding them. Sometimes I think it would be easier to do therapy in a foreign language that you didn't speak. That way you would not have the illusion that the words you heard had the same meaning for the person who utters them as they have for you. And believe me, that's an illusion.