Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Now let's back up to the beginning. When we first started talking, Jo wanted to be more competent at being unpleasant. If you really heard what she was saying, it was, "I want to be able to stand up for myself and grumble and gripe more thoroughly." Nobody in the room heard her say that when she first talked. If they had heard it, they would have tried to teach her how to be more nasty. Think what an "assertiveness" trainer would have done with that! I have a new name for assertiveness training. I call it "loneliness preparation."

In contrast, I ask questions to learn how to have someone else's limitations. If I can learn how it works, then I can change it any way I want, and it will still work, but differently. You can't make a valid judgement about a process unless you know what it is, and you can't realty know what it is unless you try it.

So I thought, "OK, Jo can't grumble and gripe. Where is it that she can't, because I want to learn how to not do it there?" I started asking her questions: "When do you do it?" "What is its purpose?" "Who do you do it with?" My questions go backwards in time. Starting with the problem, I backed up the process she goes through. When I backed her up far enough, she got to the place before she grumbled and griped, and before she even felt any inclination to do it. That is the place where she can go around it. If she takes the next step, the "problem" starts happening. But if she steps over to the side, she can go somewhere else that she likes better.

Jo goes into a restaurant, sits down, gets bad service, feels horrible, confronts the waitress, gets good service later and still feels bad. I asked, "Did it ever occur to you when you go into a restaurant and discover who your waitress is, to make her feel good?" She said, "I can't do that after I feel bad," and she's probably right. OK, why not do it right away all the time whenever you go into a restaurant, so you never get a chance to feet bad? That question directs her attention to an earlier time, when it's easy to do something different, and it also gives her something very specific to do differently.

Here's one you've all done. You come home feeling realty good. As you walk in the front door you see the living room is a mess, or someone forgot to take out the garbage, or you see that something else equally absolutely essential to your happiness is awry. You get angry inside, and frustrated; you suppress it and try to not feel angry and frustrated, but it doesn't work. So you go into therapy and you say, "I don't want to yell at my wife." "Why do you yell at your wife?" "Because I get frustrated and angry." Most clinicians will say, "Let it all out; express yourself; yell and scream at your wife." And to the wife they'll say, "Isn't it all right if he yells and screams at you? Can't you let him be himself?" You do your thing, and he'll do his ... separately. That's nuts,

What most clinicians don't think about is that when he walks in the door and sees that mess, he first manages to get to the state where he's angry and frustrated, and then he tries to stop himself from getting angry and frustrated. The other thing they forget is what he's frying to accomplish by stopping himself from yelling at her in the first place: he's trying to get things to be pleasant. Well, why not go for it directly? Why not have the front door send him off into such pleasant thoughts about what he can do with his wife that he goes through the living room too fast to care about noticing anything else!

Whenever I say, "How about doing something before you feel so bad?" the client always looks stunned. It doesn't occur to him to back up. He always thinks that the only way he can make himself happy is to do what he wants exactly at the moment that he wants it. Is that the only way? It must be. The universe doesn't go backwards. Time won't go backwards. Light won't go backwards. But your mind can go backwards.

Typically clients will either not understand what I said at all, or will say, "I can't just do that!" It sounds too easy. So I found out I had to make them do it. They couldn't back up themselves, because they couldn't stop going where they were going. So I learned to ask them questions that would force them to go backwards, Often they fight me tooth and nail. They'll try to answer one question, and I insist that they answer another one to back them up another step.

When I get to the right point with a client, I ask a question that moves sideways and forward, and he goes forward again in the new direction. After that he can't stop going in the new direction. He's as stuck that way as the other, but he doesn't care because he likes being stuck that way. It works just like a spring: you compress it, and when you pull the lever over and release it, it flicks forward again.