This session went around and around until the therapist came out and said to the authors:
I feel frustrated; this woman is just giving me a hard time. She's resisting everything I do.
We have heard and seen many long, valuable hours wasted in this form of miscommunication by therapists with the people they work with. . . . The therapist in the above transcript was really trying to help and the person with him was really trying to cooperate but without either of them having a sensitivity to representational systems. Communication between people under these conditions is usually haphazard and tedious. The result is often name calling when a person attempts to communicate with someone who uses different predicates.
Typically, kinesthetics complain that auditory and visual people are insensitive. Visuals complain the auditories don't pay attention to them because they don't make eye contact during the conversation. Auditory people complain that kinesthetics don't listen, etc. The outcome is usually that one group comes to consider the other as deliberately bad or mischievous or pathological.
The point we are illustrating here is that one of the most powerful skills we, as therapists, can develop is the ability to be sensitive to representational systems. For change to occur, for the persons with whom we are working to be willing to take risks, for them to come to trust us as guides for change, they must be convinced that we understand their experience and can communicate with them about it. In other words, we accept as our responsibility as people-helpers the task of making contact with the persons we are trying to help. Once we have made contact — by matching representational systems, for example — we can assist them in expanding their choices about representing their experience and communicating about it. This second step — that of leading the individual toward new dimensions of experience — is very important. So often, in our experience, family members have "specialized" — one paying primary attention to the visual representation of experience, another to the kinesthetic portion of experience, etc.
For example, we discover from the transcript that Dave's primary representational system is kinesthetic, while Marcie's is visual. Once we have made contact, we work to assist Dave in developing his ability to explore the visual dimensions of his experience and to assist Marcie, in getting in touch with body sensations.[15] There are two important results of this:
(a) Dave and Marcie learn to communicate effectively with one another.
(b) Each of them expands his/her choices about representing and communicating their experiences, thus becoming more developed human beings — more whole, more able to express and use their human potential.
Within the context of family therapy, by identifying each family member's most used representational system, the therapist learns what portions of the ongoing family experience is most available to each person there. Understanding this allows the therapist to know where, in the communication patterns of the family, to look for faulty communication, where the family members fail to communicate what they intend. For example, if one family member is primarily visual and another auditory, the family therapist will be alert to note how they communicate, how they give each other feedback. Under stress particularly, each of us tends to depend only upon our primary representational system. We come to accept a part of our experience as an equivalent for the whole — accepting, for example, only what we see as equivalent to what is totally available not only through our eyes but also through our skin, our ears, etc. This explains the close connection between representational systems and the kinds of Mind Reading and Complex Equivalences developed by family members.
At this point in the presentation of the patterns which we have identified as useful in organizing our experience in therapy, we are going to shift the way in which we present the transcript. We have identified the most important of the verbal patterns which are in our family therapy model and, with the presentation of the principle of representational systems, we have begun to move to the next level of patterns. Verbal communications and your ability to hear the distinctions which we have presented are very useful portions of an effective model for family therapy. These verbal patterns and your ability to respond systematically to them, however, constitute only a portion of the complete model. In the presentation of the transcript up to this point, we have confined ourselves to reporting the verbal patterns. In this way, we hoped to find a common reference point from which each of you could connect what we are describing with words here in this book with your own experience in therapy. We hoped that, by finding this common reference point, you would be able to utilize, immediately and dynamically in your work, the patterns which we have identified.
Now we move on to patterns at the next level of experience, patterns which have as one of their parts the verbal patterns which we have just identified.
PATTERNS OF EFFECTIVE FAMILY THERAPY LEVEL II
Each of us, as a human being, has many choices about the way in which we present ourselves — the way by which we communicate. Most of the time, as we meet and separate and meet again, we do not make conscious decisions about the way we communicate. Normally, for example, we do not consciously select the specific words and even less frequently do we consciously select the syntactic form of the sentences with which we communicate verbally. Yet, even at this level of communication patterning, the unconscious choices which we make are systematic and reveal a great deal about the ways in which we organize our experience, grow and change. This, in fact, is one way to understand the verbal patterns which we have identified in Level I. These patterns of choice made by the persons with whom we are working in therapy about the form of the sentences which they use to present themselves are ways in which the therapist can come to quickly and efficiently understand their model of the world, the way in which they organize their experience.
Verbal communication constitutes only a portion of the complex process of communication which goes on between people. At the same time that people are presenting one another with words and the formal verbal patterns we have identified, they are also holding some portions of their body in a certain posture; they are moving their hands and feet, their arms and legs with smooth or erratic, rhythmic or arhythmic motions; they are speaking with a tone of voice which is melodic, raspy, lilting, or grating; they are speaking at a constant tempo, or speeding up and slowing down; they are moving their eyes in a rapidly shifting scan, or maintaining a fixed stare, with their eyes focused or unfocused; they are altering the rhythm of their breathing, etc. Each of these movements, gestures, tones, etc., are choices which they make, usually at the unconscious level, about the way they present themselves, the way they communicate. Each of these is, in fact, a message about their ongoing experience, about the way they organize their world, of what they are most acutely aware. Just as with the verbal patterns, when each of the patterns, once detected by the therapist, could be used by him for a specific, effective therapeutic intervention, here also, in the case of the messages carried by the person's voice, body movements, etc., the therapist can train himself to identify patterns and to intervene to assist the person to grow and change.
One of the most useful ways of proceeding in this complex area, in our experience, is for therapists to educate themselves to identify patterns of congruity and incongruity. When a person is communicating congruently, all of the messages which he conveys match — they are consistent, they fit with one another. Incongruent communication is presented to us when the other person sends out messages with his body, with his voice tonality, with the words he uses, which do not match. In order to learn to detect this mishmash and to respond creatively to it, either in therapy or in the day-to-day contact we have with one another, we must have clear, open channels for receiving and organizing all of this information. There is no substitute for the therapist's ability to see, to hear, and to feel. In order to distinguish congruent from incongruent communication, the therapist must clear his input channels. By failing to clear the channels he runs the risk of either being preoccupied and missing the other person's messages or of hallucinating spurious messages instead of being receptive to what's actually being presented. When a therapist fails to clear all of his senses, he usually succeeds only in Mind Reading rather than in identifying and responding creatively to the messages from the person with whom he is working.
15
This technique — adding representational systems — is meta-tactic II, discussed in Part I of