One woman had been a homosexual for years, and had fallen in love with a man. She was really stuck in this dilemma. A very strong part of her now wanted to become heterosexual. There was another part of her that was afraid it was going to have to die. She was going through the visual squash with these two parts. She was trying to pull her hands together, and she was wailing "I can't do it! I can't do it! I can't do it like that!" Richard and I were standing on either side of her. We looked at each other, and then we each grabbed one hand and pushed them together suddenly. The changes that occurred in that woman were fantastic!
You can create change without being elegant; I think people do it all the time. However, the ramifications of doing something like that are not predictable, and predictability is something that we have always tried to develop. We just went blammo, pow! and rammed it in. She did change; she got what she wanted, and it's lasted a long time; I'm sure of that because I still know that woman. However, I don't know what the side effects were. She isn't totally wonderful in many areas of her life, and I don't know how much of that is a consequence of what we did. She's certainly better off than she was. And at the time we really wanted to know what would happen.
When you start including more sophisticated ingredients in your work and tinkering with them carefully, then you get better, more elegant changes. You can also predict what will happen much more precisely. Sometimes you get much more pervasive change, too, which I think is very important. If you can do just one little tiny thing and get the outcome that you want, it will also generalize and get all the other outcomes that are really needed but haven't been mentioned. The less you do in the more appropriate place, the more generalization to other contents and contexts will occur naturally. That's one reason why we stress elegance so much: "Be precise, if you're doing therapy."
If you're just doing utilization skills it's a very different game. Business people are usually only interested in utilizing strategies. If you are doing sales training, then all you need to know is what strategies you want your salespeople to have, and how to install them. If the trainer for an organization is a Neuro Linguistic Programmer, then he says "OK, we're going to have this person be a salesperson and they're going to do this, and in order to do that, you have to have these three strategies." Then he can stick them in and block them off so that nothing else gets in their way. Those strategies don't have to generalize anywhere else in the person's life. It's not necessary for that business outcome. It might be desirable, but it's not necessary.
If somebody's personal life is really interrupting their business functioning, you can put a barrier around it to keep those strategies separate. There are a lot of different kinds of outcomes you're going to have as a business person, but they're fairly limited.
As a lawyer, for example, you're mostly just utilizing strategies; you're not concerned with installing anything. You're only concerned with using a strategy to get a specific outcome: to make a witness look like a jerk, or to get your client to trust you, or something like that.
I once did some work with a lawyer who is a trustworthy person, but nobody trusts him. His non-verbal analogues are terrible; they make everyone suspicious. His problem was that he couldn't get clients to confide in him so that he could represent them well. And half the time he was court-appointed, which made it even worse. What he really needed was a complete overhaul in his analogue system. Rather than do that, I taught him a little ritual. He sits down with his client and says "Look, if I'm going to be your lawyer, it's essential that you trust me. And so the question that's really important is how do you decide if you trust somebody?" He asks "Have you ever really trusted anybody in your life?" and he sets up an anchor when the client accesses that feeling of trust. Then he asks "How did you make that decision?" Then all he has to do is to listen to a general description of their strategy: "Well, I saw this, and I heard him say this, and I felt this." Then he presents information back in that format: "Well, as I sit here, I want you to see blah blah blah, and then I say to yourself blahdeblah blah, and I don't know if you can feel this," and fires off the anchor that he made when the person had the trusting feelings. I taught him that ritual and it was good enough.
But there is a real difference between that outcome and the outcome that you're working toward as a therapist. Therapy is a much more technical business in the sense of changing things. As a therapist you don't need to be nearly as flexible in terms of utilization as somebody who's a lawyer. A lawyer must be a master of the art of utilization. You need to be able to do many different things in terms of eliciting responses. You have to get twelve people to respond the same way. Think about that. Imagine that you had twelve clients, and you had to get them all to agree when you weren't in the room! That's going to take skill.
One thing you can do is to identify the one or two individuals, or several, on the jury who might, by virtue of their own strategies, persuade the others to go along. And of course that is what family therapy is all about. Everything is going to interact in a system. I don't care who you put together for what length of time, the systems are going to start clicking. I try to figure out who in the family elicits responses the most often. Because if I can get that one person to do my work for me, it will be really easy. Very often it's someone who doesn't speak much. Son here says something. He has external behavior. And when he does, you get an intense internal response from the mother. Although her external behavior is subtle, some little cue, everybody responds to it. When the father does something with external behavior, this kid responds, but not much else happens. And if the daughter does something, maybe we get a response here and maybe there.
I want to know who everybody else in the family responds to a lot. I also want to know if any one single person in that family can always get that person to respond. Let's say every single time the son does anything with external behavior, the mother responds. If I can predict something about how that happens, I can make one little change in the son, and then the mother will respond and get everybody else in the family to respond for me. I always spend fifty percent or more of whatever time is allotted to me gathering information, and testing it to make sure that I'm right. I’ll feed in an innocuous thing here, and predict what will happen over there. I keep running the system over and over and over again until I'm absolutely sure that if I make a change with this kid, it's going to change the mother's behavior in a way that will change all the other people in the family. That will set up a new stable system. Otherwise you usually get an unbalanced system, or they change in the office but they go home and go back to normal. I want something that's really going to carry over and be very, very permanent.
If I can set up a stable system by making only one change, it will be very pervasive with a family system. I think the main mistake of all family therapists is that they do too much in a session. If you're working with an individual, you can do a thousand things and get away with it, unless they go home to a family. One of the first things I always ask people when they come in is "What is your living situation?" because I want to know how many anchors I have to deal with at home. If they live with one other person, it's not so bad. You've just got to be careful that there's no secondary gain: that they don't get rewarded for whatever behavior it is they want to change.
