Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

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.

And the client would be out looking for another therapist because that therapist needed glasses. He had absolutely no perspective at all. He couldn't see eye to eye with him at all!

And they would both be right, of course.

Now, is there anyone here who hasn't yet identified the pattern that we're talking about? Because it really was the beginning point for us.

Woman: Ah, in the last dialogue the client was using visual words like "look, see, show, focus, perspective." And the therapist was using feeling words like "grasp, handle, feel, smooth, rough."