Once had a client who came in and sat down said "Nothing ever works with me. There's nothing you can do that will ever work and I know this already." And I said "All right, I'm going to do something that will make you stay in that chair." I opened my desk drawer and took out a piece of paper. I wrote on it, and folded up the piece of paper. Then I looked at him and said "Now, you feel so heavy you feel compelled to stay in that chair, and everything you try to do will be in vain, because every motion you make will keep you in that chair." The guy immediately stood straight up. I opened the piece of paper and showed it to him. The paper said "You are standing now."
"There was nothing profoundly important about what I did. However, it convinced him that I could make him do things. In his case, that was very useful, That's very rare. Most people don't need to be convinced of that. If you create a contest in which whatever response you want from a client is appropriate, it will occur naturally.
A funny thing happened years ago. 1 had a student who failed at everything. He was a compulsive failer. I soon discovered that if I defined a particular success as the most likely failure, he could go in and succeed with people, and then come out and say "Well, it didn't work." His client would change, and the student would never notice it! I would tell him that the most likely way to fail with this person was to have X happen. I made sure X was a change that would be very useful to the client. He would work with the client and "fail" every time with precision. He succeeded consistently at failing in exactly the way that I specified.
Any rigidity in behavior allows you to do things like that. The ones I'm describing are outlandish rigidities. But if you think about your clients, most of their rigidities are fairly outlandish, too. It is only a question of establishing a context in which their natural responses are the ones that will lead them where they want to go.
There's an old gestalt technique to use when the client says "There's no way in the world that I can think of anything that would be helpful." You look at her and say "You're right. You could never do it. You are an absolute failure; you could never think of anything that would be helpful, not even the smallest thing." Typically she will then respond "Well, there is this one little thing." That's part of the natural polarity response of many people.
Some people, however, will respond in the opposite way. I once saw a gestalt therapist work with a client who said "I don't know what to do." The gestalt therapist said "Well, guess." The person said "I don't know. I'm a lousy guesser." And the therapist said "You can never guess anything that's appropriate." The client's face began to droop and she looked pathetic. If you use that gestalt technique with someone who responds congruently, you will only convince her that she is a failure. If you notice her response, you can utilize it to lead her where she wants to go. So you need to notice what kind of response you are getting, and vary your behavior in order to get the response you want.
When you do reframing using nonverbal yes/ no signals, you don't need to worry what response you get, because it doesn't matter whether you get a "yes" or a "no" response. Whatever response you get on any step of reframing simply tells you what to do next. If you tell her to get new choices, and she gets them but the choices are not good enough, that only means she needs to go back and get more.
If she keeps doing it and she can't get ones that will work, then have her redefine the context. If you had her go to her creative part that manifests dreams and dream up new ways, and those ways aren't good enough, then have her go to "the brain center that creates all devious behavior." You can make up anything. Act as if it is real, and it will be.
There are thousands of people in this country today who have a "parent," a "child," and an "adult" in their behavior. They weren't always that way, but they are now. The only clients I ever saw with those behaviors were ones who had been in Transactional Analysis. That is not a criticism of TA. It's a compliment about the flexibility of humanity to create anything, as long as someone else acts as if it's real.
The TA therapists who have come to me for private help always had difficulty with their parts. They couldn't do adult things and have childlike fun doing them, because those are separated in their psy–chotheology. That's a byproduct of their belief system and their psychotherapy.
It seems to me that rather than having a gestalt topdog and underdog that fight, a psychoanalytic unconscious that tortures you wantonly, or a TA parent and child that don't mix very well, or any other aspect of your personality that leads to limitations, you should make up a psychotherapy for each client in which all the parts flexibly generate choices for coping. I want you to have choices. The parts that I make up for you are creative parts that can do anything. I make up an unconscious that is concerned and caring and willing to work on your behalf, because I don't want parts of you that have limitations. You are too good at doing that already.
If any of you want to know more about how to do reframing in a different way, read Frogs into Princes. In the last chapter of that book we do reframing with someone as a demonstration and answer a lot of questions. We also have a book Reframing: The Transformation of Meaning that presents several models of reframing in great detail.
You don't need to put someone into a formal trance in order to do reframing. However, it can be fun as a variation. The basic steps of reframing can also be done in the context of a normal conversation. The only difference is that you need to be more observant to notice the responses you are getting. In a normal conversation you can get the same unconscious responses, but they usually go by more quickly and that makes them harder to notice.
Let me tell you a funny little story that's an example of how you can reframe someone in a normal conversation. Last year I was visiting a friend in Southern California. I was in a liquor store buying a couple of bottles of champagne for a party we were going to have at his house.
In the liquor store I noticed a little old alcoholic woman. It's quite easy for me to pick out an alcoholic by muscle tonus, skin tone, posture, and breathing, even when she's not loaded. I'm sure all of you who have spent time noticing the difference between alcoholics and non–alcoholics also find it easy to make that distinction. She was short, and although she looked ancient, my guess is she was actually about 65. I nodded to her and smiled and went about my business. I knew the woman behind the cash register, and we made a couple of joking remarks to each other and laughed. This little old lady also laughed and made some comment which was actually pretty funny, and I laughed too.
The old lady turned to me as I was leaving and said "You don't happen to be going up the hill by the Post Office, do you?" I said "I'd be delighted to give you a lift home. I'll wait outside in my car."
She came out, got in the car, and we started driving. As she sat on the seat next to me, she was wringing her hands and looking over at me furtively. It was obvious to me that somehow I'd tapped something inside of her. Finally she said "Why do you drink?"
I did my best to keep from laughing, because she was obviously wondering why she drank but making a referential index shift. I said "Well, personally, I drink for taste. I drink very fine wines, and I drink champagnes. I don't particularly like the taste of whiskey, so I don't drink whiskey, and I drink beer when I'm at the beach and it's hot." And then I said "But that's not really the question you want to ask me. The question you want to ask me is 'Why do you drink?' " That was such a good match for her experience that she burst into tears.