The daughter was an interesting combination of the parents. She thought her father was the bad person and her mother was the groovy person, so she always sided with her mother. However, she acted like her father.
The father's repeated complaint in the session was that the mother hadn't done a very good job of raising the daughter, because the daughter was so stubborn. At one time when he made this complaint, Virginia interrupted what was going on. She turned around and looked at the father and said «You're a man who has gotten ahead in your life. Is this true?»
«Yes.»
«Was all that you have, just given to you? Did your father own the bank and just say 'Here, you're president of the bank'?» «No, no. I worked my way up.» «So you have some tenacity, don't you?»
«Yes.»
«Well, there is a part of you that has allowed you to be able to get where you are, and to be a good banker. And sometimes you have to refuse people things that you would like to be able to give them, because you know if you did, something bad would happen later on.»
«Yes.»
«Well, there's a part of you that's been stubborn enough to really protect yourself in very important ways.»
«Well, yes. But, you know, you can't let this kind of thing get out of control.»
«Now I want you to turn and look at your daughter, and to realize beyond a doubt that you've taught her how to be stubborn and how to stand up for herself, and that that is something priceless. This gift that you've given to her is something that can't be bought, and it's something that may save her life. Imagine how valuable that will be when your daughter goes out on a date with a man who has bad intentions.»
I don't know if you begin to hear a pattern in this. Every experience in the world, and every behavior is appropriate, given some context, some frame.
There are two kinds of content reframing. I've given you an example of each. Can you tell the difference between them? Can you hear an essential difference between the two examples I just gave you?
Man: One changed the context, and one changed the meaning.
Yes, exactly. In the last example, Virginia changed the context. Being stubborn is judged to be bad in the context of the family. It becomes good in the context of banking and in the context of a man trying to take advantage of the daughter on a date.
Bilclass="underline" So you're really changing the context that the father uses to evaluate the daughter's behavior.
Right. Her behavior of being stubborn with him will no longer be seen as her fighting with him. It will be seen as a personal achievement: he has taught her to protect herself from men with bad intentions.
Bilclass="underline" So you switch contexts in imagination and get a different response «there," and then bring that response back to the present context. You get him to respond to what is not going on.
Well, he's already responding to «what is not going on.» You get him to respond to something different which is not going on. Most of the behavior that puzzles you about your clients is a demonstration that the majority of their context is internal, and you don't have access to it yet. When a husband says to his wife «I love you," and she says «You son of a bitch," that's a pretty good sign that she's operating out of a unique internal context. If you explore, you may find out that the last time a man said that to her, he then turned around, walked out the door, and never came back. A lot of your ability to establish and maintain rapport with your clients is your ability to appreciate that what looks and sounds and feels really weird and inappropriate to you, is simply a statement about your failure to appreciate the context from which that behavior is being generated.
Rather than imposing a new context, you can use the client's own resources to find a new context. Your client says «I want to stop X–ing.» You ask «Is there some place in your life where behavior X is useful and appropriate?» If the client answers «Yes, there are some places, but in other places X is just a disaster," then you know where that behavior belongs. You just contextualize that behavior, and substitute a new pattern of behavior in the contexts where X was a disaster.
If the client says «No, it's not appropriate anywhere," you can assist him in finding appropriate contexts by giving him specific representational system instructions. «See yourself performing that behavior and listen to it. … Now, where did that happen?»
«Oh, it happened in church. I stood up and yelled 'God dammit' and then they came and dragged me out.»
«All right. You know that standing up in the middle of a group of people in church and yelling 'God dammit' didn't work out very well for you, and you don't want that to happen again. Let's find a place where it would be useful for that behavior to happen. You can see and hear yourself doing it in church. Now I want you to change that background—the pews and the altar and the interior of the church—to something else. I want you to keep substituting other backgrounds for that same behavior, until you find one in which if you stood up and said 'God dammit!' every part of you would agree that that is an appropriate response, and you can see, by looking at the faces of the people around you, that others also consider it appropriate. As soon as you find a context like that, then go inside and ask the part of you that makes you stand up and yell 'God dammit' if it would be willing to be your primary resource in just that context.»
That's using a visual lead, of course. You have to tailor the search for a new context to the person's actual internal processes in terms of representational systems. For some people it would be more appropriate to search auditorily or kinesthetically.
Another way of approaching this more formally and more generally would be to do the following: identify a behavior that you want to change. I want all of you to pick a behavior in yourself that you don't like. You don't have to say anything out loud; just pick one… .
Now, rather than contacting the part that generates that behavior directly, just go inside and ask if any part of you whatsoever can figure out any situation in which you want to be capable of generating that exact same behavior… .
Now, go inside and ask the part of you that has you do that behavior if it would be willing to be the most important part of you in that situation, and to generate that behavior exquisitely and congruently only in that context… .
Those are variations on the theme of context reframing. All the reframing models that we use are based on some kind of content reframing. In the stubbornness example we left the meaning of the behavior the same and put it in a new context.
Now, what did we alter in the first example I gave of the woman and the footprints? … We left the context the same and changed the meaning of the behavior in that same context. Everything remained constant except what the behavior implied.
For another example, let's say that someone had a part of themselves that was greedy, and they believed it was bad to have a greedy part. One way to alter that would be to have him conceive of a context or situation in which being greedy would be very important—perhaps after an atomic war, or being greedy about learning new things. You can always come up with some change of context that will change the significance of the behavior.
Another choice is to find out what behavior they generate that they name «being greedy» and give the behavior itself a new name with a new meaning. «Greed» has negative connotations, but if you give the behavior another label with positive connotations, such as «being able to meet your needs," you can change the meaning of the behavior.