Therapist: Well, Marcie, you have had an opportunity to listen and watch as I worked with Dave, your husband. I'm wondering what you were aware of as you did this. Would you be willing to say?
Marcie: Sure; I think that I see pretty clearly what you are trying to do. You know — I have eyes, and I'm no dummy; I get the picture.
Therapist: What specifically did you see, Marcie?
The therapist is illustrating a very important principle here: He has directed his verbal communication to one of the family members. During this period, the other members of the family have had an opportunity to observe and to listen to the process of communication between the therapist and Dave. The therapist now asks Marcie to comment on her experience of the exchange between Dave and the therapist. By requesting her comments (by using embedded questions and polite commands [conversational postulates]), the therapist accomplishes several things:
(a) He gives each member of the family the message that, not only does he accept comments on his behavior and the ongoing process of communication, but he, in fact, encourages them, that he takes seriously their ability to understand and make sense out of their expeiience and is interested in knowing what that experience is to them.
(b) He requests that another member of the family present him with the results of her ability to make sense out of a complex piece of family interaction.
The therapist pointedly requests that Marcie present her learnings and understanding of the interaction between Dave and himself. This is one important way that the therapist may explicitly present the message that, although he has been directing his verbal communication to Dave, all of the family members are involved at the same time; they are all participants in the ongoing process of communication. Secondly, when the therapist encourages Marcie to comment about her experience of the Dave-therapist interaction, he is asking her to repeat a learning experience with which we are all familiar. As children, each of us learned a great deal of what we understand about the world by observing and listening to our parents and other adults communicate. This time, the context openly invites people to "listen in," in contrast to much of childhood's experience in which this was tacitly forbidden. By explicitly repeating this situation, the therapist provides an opportunity for Marcie to up-date her old learnings — her understandings from her original family system.
Each of us organizes and represents our experiences of the world and each other differently, in ways which are unique to each of us. My experience of the "same world" will differ from yours in some ways. Through our initial genetic heritage and from our extensive experience in coping and living, each of us has created a map or model of the world which we use to guide our behavior. We do not experience the world directly but rather through the models of the world which we have developed to help us organize our ongoing experience. The means by which we develop and elaborate our models of the world are the three universals of human modeling — deletion, distortion and generalization.[13] When we pay attention only to selected portions of our environment and ignore others, we are using the modeling principle of deletion. When we represent to ourselyes a two-dimensional object, we are distorting. When we approach a door which we have never seen before, reach out and grasp the door handle, turn it and pull open the door without any conscious decision about the process, we are making use of the modeling principle of generalization — that is, in our previous experience, whenever we saw and felt a door with a handle, we succeeded in opening the door by grasping the handle, turning it and pulling it, so we automatically generalize to the new experience — the new door. Over our years of experience, we have each developed strategies (mostly unconsciously) for modeling our experience. By asking Marcie to comment on what she was aware of during the exchange between himself and Dave, the therapist has an opportunity to compare his awareness of the model he created with Marcie's impressions. Specifically, the therapist can learn, by listening to Marcie's response, which of the different ways of representing her experience she values most highly — that is, what Marcie's most used representational system[14] is. How can the therapist specifically determine this from the response he receives from Marcie? Below, we list the descriptive verbs and other parts of the sentences which Marcie uses which are most closely associated with verb or process descriptions:
We will refer to these words as process words (predicates) which, roughly, include verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nominalizations. Of the eight predicates used by Marcie in this first communication, four are words which presuppose a visual representation of Marcie's experience. The other four predicates are unspecified with respect to the kind of representation they indicate. For example, a person can try or do something using sounds (an auditory representation) or feelings (a kinesthetic representation), etc. One way to understand an important type of patterning in Marcie's communication and in her ability to make sense out of (or model) her experience is to notice that her choice of predicates confirms that the primary way by which she creates a representation of her experience is by creating pictures or images of it. In the terms we are developing here for our family therapy model, Marcie's choice of predicates reveals that her most used representational system is visual. Next, we list some of the predicates which Dave used to express himself earlier in the transcript.
Of the ten predicates listed above used by Dave, more than half of them presuppose a kinesthetic representational system — that is, Dave organizes his experience, his model of the world, by feelings. Thus, Dave's most used representational system is kinesthetic. The remaining predicates used by Dave are consistent with this statement, as they are unspecified with respect to representational system.
Knowing a person's most used representational system is, in our experience, a very useful piece of information. One way in which we have found this useful is in our ability to establish effective communication. As therapists, if we can be sensitive to the most used representational system of the person with whom we are working, we then have the choice of translating our communication into his system. Thus, he comes to trust us as we demonstrate that we understand his ongoing experience by, for example, changing our predicates to match his. Being explicit about how the other person organizes his or her experience of the world allows us to avoid some of the typical "resistant client—frustrated therapist" patterns such as those described in Part I, The Structure of Magic, II, Grinder and Bandler:
We have in past years (during in-service training seminars) noticed therapists who asked questions of the people they worked with with no knowledge of representational systems used. They typically use only predicates of their own most highly valued representational systems. This is an example:
Visual Person: My husband just doesn't see me as a valuable person.
Therapist: How do you feel about that?
Visual Person: What?
Therapist: How do you feel about your husband's not feeling that you're a person?
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The notion of representational systems refers to the way in which each of us typically represents to ourselves the world of experience. An extended presentation of this pattern and the ways in which it can be usefully employed is given in