Woman: What kind of reports do you get about what happens when your new behavior occurs?

Usually people behave differently for a week before they notice it. Conscious minds are really limited. That's the report we get a lot. I used reframing with a woman who had a phobic response to, curiously enough, going over bridges, but only if they had water under them. She lived in New Orleans where there are a lot of bridges with water under them. There's one bridge in New Orleans called the Slidell Bridge, and she would always say "Especially the SLIDEell Bridge," accented that way. After I had done reframing with her, I said "Are you going to cross any bridges on the way home?" And she said "Yes, I'm going over the SliDELL bridge." That difference was enough of an indication for me that I knew that the reframing was going to work.

She was in that workshop for three days and never said a word. At the end of the workshop, I asked her about the work we had done on Friday. "You've been driving over bridges this weekend, and I want to know if you had any of that phobic response." She said "Oh, I really hadn't thought about it." A few days earlier she had been working on it as a problem. Two days later she was saying "Oh, yeah, they are just expressways over water." That's very, very close to the response that Tammy offered us yesterday. When Tammy fantasized doing it, she went "Well, it was driving across a bridge." It no longer had that incredible impact, that overwhelming kinesthetic response. People have the tendency not even to think about it. They have a tendency to discover it afterwards, which to me is really much hipper anyway than if they are surprised and delighted with it.

That same woman in New Orleans also said "Well, it's a really amazing thing. Actually I wasn't phobic of bridges!"

"If you weren't phobic of bridges, how come you freaked out when you got on them?"

"Because they go over water. You see, the whole thing had to do with almost drowning when I was a little kid; I was underneath a bridge, drowning."

"Do you have a swimming pool?"

"Now that you mention it, no."

"Do you swim very often?"

"I don't swim at all. I can't swim."

"Do you like showers or baths?"

"Showers"

She made a generalization somewhere in her past that said "Don't go near water; you'll drown." When that part noticed that she was going over a bridge, it said "Bridges go over water, and water's a good place to drown, so now is the time to be terrified."

We always have follow-ups. People come back or telephone, so we make sure that the changes they want did occur. Typically we have to ask for a report—which seems to me really appropriate. Change is the only constant in my experience and most of it occurs at the unconscious level. It's only with the advent of official humanistic psychotherapies and psychiatry that people pay conscious attention to change.

In Michigan, I worked on a phobia that a woman had. I didn't know what the content was at the time, but it turned out that she had a phobia of dogs. After we had done the work, she went to visit a friend who had a dog. What was really amusing to her as she walked in and saw the dog, was that the dog looked so much smaller. She said to her friend "My God! What happened to your dog? It's shrunk!"

Man: Dick's signal system gave a positive response that it received three new choices from his creative part. What if he got a negative?

It doesn't matter if you get a "yes" or "no." It only matters that you get one or the other. The "yes-no" signals are just to distract the conscious mind of the person you are working with. If you get a "no," then you offer it another way to go about it. "Then you go to your devious part and tell it to ally itself with your creative part and trick this part of you into having new choices." It doesn't matter how you do it.

I probably would have had him construct a creative part. I wouldn't have been satisfied that he had access to his creativity. I know there are lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. You can say "Do you know anyone else who is able to do this? I want you to review with vivid detail in picture and sound and feeling what they do, and then have this part of you consider those possibilities. "That's just a way of doing what we call "referential index shift."

What if you say to the person "Do you have a part of you that you consider your creative part?" And they say "No." What are you going to do? Or they hesitate; they say "Well, I don't know." There's a really easy way to create a creative part, using representation systems and anchoring. You say "Think of the five times in your life when you behaved in a very powerfully creative way and you didn't have the faintest idea how or what you did, but you knew it was a positive and creative thing that you did." As s/he thinks of those five in a row, you anchor them. You then have a direct anchor to the person's creativity. You've assembled one. You've organized their personal history. Or you can ask "Do you have a part of you that makes plans? Well, have it come up with three different ways you can plan new behavior." The word "creative" is only one choice out of a myriad ways of organizing your activities.

The only way you can get stuck in a process like this is if you try to run it rigidly. You say to a client "Well, do you have a part of you that you consider your creative part?" If they look you straight in the eye and say "No," then start making up other words. "Do you realize that you have a part of you that is responsible for all glunk activities? And the way you contact that is by touching your temple!" You can make up anything, as long as the result is that they generate new ways of accomplishing the intention. That is as limitless as your own creativity. And if you don't have a creative part, create one for yourself!

There are a lot of other ways that this could have not worked, too. Do you realize that that's what people in here are doing again? You all saw it work. And you're asking "What are all the ways it could have not worked?" I'm sure you could manufacture a hundred ways to make this not work. And in fact many of you will. The point is, when you do something that doesn't work, do something else. If you keep doing something else, something will work. We want you to make it work with each other so that you have a reference experience. Find someone you don't know to be your partner and try reframing. We'll be around if you get stuck.

(1) Identify the pattern (X) to be changed.

(2) Establish communication with the part responsible for the pattern.

(a) "Will the part of me that runs pattern X communicate with me in consciousness?"

(b) Establish the "yes-no" meaning of the signal.

(3) Distinguish between the behavior, pattern X, and the intention of the part that is responsible for the behavior.

(a) "Would you be willing to let me know in consciousness what you are trying to do for me by pattern X?"

(b) If you get a "yes" response, ask the part to go ahead and communicate its intention.

(c) Is that intention acceptable to consciousness?

(4) Create new alternative behaviors to satisfy the intention. At the unconscious level the part that runs pattern X communicates its intention to the creative part, and selects from the alternatives that the creative part generates. Each time it selects an alternative it gives the "yes" signal.

(5) Ask the part "Are you willing to take responsibility for generating the three new alternatives in the appropriate context?"

(6) Ecological check. "Is there any other part of me that objects to the three new alternatives?" If there is a "yes" response, recycle to step (2) above.