"I understand that you feel certain weight upon you, and these kinds of feelings that you have in your body aren't what you want for yourself as a human being. You have different kinds of hopes for this."
It doesn't really matter what she says, as long as she uses the same kinds of words and tonal patterns. If the same client were to go to another therapist, the dialogue might go like this:
"Well, you know, things feel real heavy in my life, Dr. Bandler. You know, it's just like I cant handle it, you know ..."
"I can see that, Mr. Grinder."
"I feel like I did something wrong with my children and I don't know what it is. And I thought maybe you could help me grasp it, you know?"
"Sure. I see what it is you're talking about. Let's focus in on one particular dimension. Try to give me your particular perspective. Tell me how it is that you see your situation right now."
"Well, you know, I just... I'm ... I just feel like I cant get a grasp on reality."
"I can see that. What's important to me—colorful as your description is—what's important to me is that we see eye to eye about where it is down the road that we shall travel together."
"I'm trying to tell you that my life has got a lot of rough edges, you know. And I'm trying to find a way...."
"It looks all broken up from ... from your description, at any rate. The colors aren't all that nice."
While you sit here and laugh, we can't even get as exaggerated as what we've heard in "real life." We spent a lot of time going around to mental health clinics and sitting in on professional communicators. It's very depressing. And what we noticed is that many therapists mismatch in the same way that we just demonstrated.
We come from California and the whole world out there is run by electronics firms. We have a lot of people who are called "engineers," and engineers typically at a certain point have to go to therapy. It's a rule, I don't know why, but they come in and they usually all say the same thing, they go:
"Well, I could see for a long time how, you know, I was really climbing up and becoming successful and then suddenly, you know, when I began to get towards the top, I just looked around and my life looked empty. Can you see that? I mean, could you see what that would be like for a man of my age?"
"Well, I'm beginning to get a sense of grasping the essence of the kinds of feelings that you have that you want to change."
"Just a minute, because what I want to do is I'm trying to show you my perspective on the whole thing. And, you know—"
"I feel that this is very important."
"And I know that a lot of people have a lot of troubles, but what I want to do is to give you a really clear idea of what I see the problem is, so that, you know, you can show me, sort of frame by frame, what I need to know in order to find my way out of this difficulty because quite frankly I could get very depressed about this. I mean, can you see how that would be?"
"I feel that this is very important. You have raised certain issues here which I feel that we have to come to grips with. And it's only a question of selecting where we'll grab a handle and begin to work in a comfortable but powerful way upon this."
"What I'd really like is your point of view."
"Well, I don't want you to avoid any of those feelings. Just go ahead and let them flow up and knock the hell out of the picture that you've got there."
"I... I don't see that this is getting us anywhere."
"I feel that we have hit a rough spot in the relationship. Are you willing to talk about your resistance?"
Do you happen to notice any pattern in these dialogues? We watched therapists do this for two or three days, and we noticed that Satir did it the other way around: She matched the client. But most therapists don't.
We have noticed this peculiar trait about human beings. If they find something they can do that doesn't work, they do it again. B. F. Skinner had a group of students who had done a lot of research with rats and mazes. And somebody asked them one day "What is the real difference between a rat and a human being?" Now, behaviorists not being terribly observant, decided that they needed to experiment to find out. They built a huge maze that was scaled up for a human. They took a control group of rats and taught them to run a small maze for cheese. And they took the humans and taught them to run the large maze for five-dollar bills. They didn't notice any really significant difference. There were small variations in the data and at the 95% probability level they discovered some significant difference in the number of trials to criterion or something. The humans were able to learn to run the maze somewhat better, a little bit quicker, than the rats.
The really interesting statistics came up when they did the extinguishing part. They removed the five-dollar bills and the cheese and after a certain number of trials the rats stopped running the maze…. However, the humans never stopped!... They are still there! ... They break into the labs at night.
One of the operating procedures of most disciplines that allows a field to grow and to continue to develop at a rapid rate is a rule that if what you do doesn't work, do something else. If you are an engineer and you get the rocket all set up, and you push the button and it doesn't lift up, you alter your behavior to find out what you need to do to make certain changes to overcome gravity.
However, in the field of psychotherapy, if you encounter a situation where the rocket doesn't go off, it has a special name; it's called having a "resistant client." You take the fact that what you do doesn't work and you blame it on the client. That relieves you of the responsibility of having to change your behavior. Or if you are slightly more humanistic about it, you "share in the guilt of the failure" or say he "wasn't ready."
Another problem is that the field of psychotherapy keeps developing the same things over and over and over again. What Fritz did and what Virginia does has been done before. The concepts that are used in Transactional Analysis (TA)—"redecision" for example—are available in Freud's work. The interesting thing is that in psychotherapy the knowledge doesn't get transferred.
When humans learned to read and write and to communicate to one another somewhat, that knowledge began to speed up the rate of development. If we teach someone electronics, we train them in all the things that have already been discovered so that they can go on and discover new things.
What happens in psychotherapy, however, is that we send people to school instead. And when they come out of school, then they have to learn to do therapy. Not only do they have to learn to do therapy, but there's no way to learn to do therapy. So what we do is we give them clients, and we call what they do "private practice" so they can practice privately.
In linguistics there's a distinction called nominalization. Nominalization is where you take a process and you describe it as if it's an event or a thing. In this way you utterly confuse those around you, and yourself—unless you remember that it is a representation rather than experience. This can have positive uses. If you happen to be a government, you can talk about nominalizations like "national security" and you can get people to worry about those words. Our president just went to Egypt and changed the word "imperative" to the word "desirable" and suddenly we're friends with Egypt again. All he did was change a word. That's word magic.
The word "resistance" is also a nominalization. It's describing a process as a thing without talking about how it works. The earnest, concerned, authentic therapist in the last dialogue would describe the client as being callous and insensitive, so totally out of touch with his feelings that he could not communicate effectively with him. That client was really resistant.