Now to answer your question. The limiting case is a person who has had very, very little real world experience. We had a client who had been locked up for twelve years in his parents' house and had only left the house to see a psychiatrist three times a week, and had been on tranquilizers from age twelve to twenty-two. He didn't have much personal history. However, he had twelve years of television experience, and that constituted enough of a resource that we were able to begin to generate what he needed.

Let me reinterpret the question. If you ask a client "How would you like to be?" and they congruently say "I don't know what I want. I really don't. I don't know what resource I would have needed back then," what do you do? You can ask them to guess. Or you can say "Well, if you knew, what would it be?" "Well, if you don't know, lie to me. Make it up." "Do you know anyone who knows how to do this?" "How would you feel if you did know? What would you look like? What would your voice sound like?" As soon as you get a response, you can anchor it. You can literally construct personal resources.

For most of the people who come to you, and for all of you sitting here, your personal history is a set of limitations on your experience and behavior in the present. Anchoring, and the construction of new possibilities using anchoring, can literally convert your personal history from a set of limitations to a set of resources.

Another way to answer the question is that if a person hasn't had the direct experience they need as a resource, they have some representation of what it could be, even though it may be other people's behavior. That is, there is a representation within them which they label "other people's behavior" that they don't allow themselves to have. However, it is a representation that's in them. If you can access it fully, you can anchor it. You can do it directly or covertly. "Well, I can't see the images that you are looking at right now, your representation of this friend of yours who knows how to do this, so would you pretend to be that friend to give me an idea of what we are working toward?" "Display that behavior for me so that I can get an idea about how Joe would act." "Show me how you wouldn't act. "Then anchor it as they do it. That's now a piece of behavior that is as real as any other behavior.

Or you can make them do it. When people tell you "Well, gee, I could never be like that," it's not necessarily true. We had a woman that came in and told us that it was impossible for her to say what she wanted and to assert herself. She couldn't get people's attention. And she was an assertiveness trainer, too, which is interesting. She couldn't go to a regular therapist because it would ruin her reputation. So we told her to wait a second, we were going to go discuss it, and we went out in the living room and read magazines for about two and a half hours until she came flying angrily out of the office "If you don't get back in here, blah blah blah." If you are flexible enough in your behavior, you can elicit what you want right there on the spot. We made the assumption, the presupposition, that this woman knew how to get somebody's attention if a proper context were supplied. We supplied the proper context; she made the move. We just anchored it, and then transferred it to other contexts where she wanted it.

There's a huge advantage to doing it this way. We don't have to decide before we start working with somebody how many parts they have and what the parts do. I think the Michigan TA model is up to nine specific parts: critical parent, natural child, adult, little professor, etc. At theoretical conventions they argue about how many parts a person should have. That's how the TA trainers and therapists instruct themselves about how to organize another person's experience. None of my clients have a "parent," "child" and "adult," except the ones that come from a TA therapist. And then they actually have them.

With anchoring, you don't have to decide before you begin the session what the legitimate categories of human experience or communication are going to be. You can simply accept whatever comes up without understanding the meaning of any of it. I don't know what X and Y were for Linda, but I know that I can operate at the process level, without ever knowing the content, and assist her in changing. You don't have to decide beforehand how many parts you are going to allow that person to have. You don't have to demand that your clients be flexible enough to reorganize their experience into your categories. You simply accept whatever is offered, anchor it, and utilize it.

Woman: Do you always anchor the negative feeling? Because that's already in her repertoire.

We don't always do anything. It's often useful to anchor the response a person doesn't want, and there are several ways to use it. You've all had the experience of beginning to work with a client on a particular problem—especially children, because children are so fluid in their consciousness—and suddenly you discover you are doing something else. The initial anchor that I established stabilized the thing we were going to work on, so we can always go back to it. If I had wanted to go back and find out where it came from in Linda's personal history, that anchor would have given me an excellent way to do it.

In gestalt therapy if a client is troubled by a feeling, the therapist will say "Intensify the feeling, stay with the feeling, exaggerate it! Go back through time... and what do you see now?" The therapist is stabilizing one part of the person's experience, namely the kinesthetic component, the feelings that person has. And they are saying "Keep those constant, and then let them lead you back in your own personal history to a full, all-system representation of what we are working on." By using an anchor you can always get back to the same set of kinesthetic responses that you began with, and thereby easily stabilize what you are working on. That's one use.

Another use that I demonstrated is testing. After we had done the integration work, after she had the resource and relived the experience with the resource so that she changed her personal history, I gave her a few moments, and then I reached over and triggered the original anchor. The response I got was an integrated response, thereby informing me non-verbally that the process had worked. I recommend that you never let the client know you are checking your work that day. It gives you a covert, non-verbal way of checking to make sure that your integrations have worked before the person leaves your office. Given our historical development in humanistic psychology, most of you want verbal, explicit, conscious kinds of feedback. That is the least useful kind of feedback you can get from your client.

Now I'd like you to realize that there is nothing that your client will do that you won't anchor. As long as you are going to anchor it, you might as well know what the anchor is. If the client comes in and says "I'm really depressed" and you just go "umhm," that's as adequate an anchor as touching them on the arm. And since you will be doing that, you might as well know which anchor is which. We recommend to people in the beginning that they practice using kinesthetic anchors for a period of a month. As they do that, they will discover that they are anchoring anyway, constantly, in all representational systems. Most of the time people use anchors in a way that slows down the process of change, because they don't know what they are anchoring or how they are anchoring.

There is another important point. When you say "Do you always anchor the negative thing?" there was nothing "negative" about it. "Negative" is a judgement about experience. It is not experience itself; it's a judgement specifically made by the person's conscious mind. The experience that Linda had which was unpleasant now serves for her, as well as for everyone else in this room, as a foundation for your learning in the future if you use it that way. If you grew up for the first twenty years of your life without a single unpleasant experience, you would be dull and unable to cope with anything. It's important that you understand that all experiences can serve as a foundation for learning, and it's not that they are positive or negative, wanted or unwanted, good or bad.