Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Are you familiar with the "our song" phenomenon? During a period of time when you were with someone very special, you had a favorite song you listened to a lot. Now whenever you hear that song, you think of that person and feel those good feelings again. It works just like Pavlov and salivation. Most people have no idea how easy it is to link experiences in that way, or how quickly you can make it happen if you do it systematically.

I once saw a therapist create an agoraphobic in one session. This therapist was a nice, well–intentioned man who liked his patients. He had years of clinical training, but he had no idea what he was doing. His client came in with a specific phobia of heights. The therapist told this guy to close his eyes and think about heights, Urrp—the guy flushes and starts to tremble. "Now think of something that would reassure you." Ummn. Now think about heights. Urrp. "Now think about comfortably driving your car." Ummn. "Now think about heights." Urrp. . . . This guy ended up having phobic feelings about nearly everything in his life — what's often called agoraphobia. What the therapist did was brilliant, in a way. He changed his client's feelings by linking experiences. His choice of a feeling to generalize is not my idea of the best choice, however. He linked this man's feelings of panic to all the contexts that used to be reassuring in his life. You can use exactly the same process to take a good feeling and generalize it in the same way If that therapist had understood the process he was using, he could have turned it around.

I've seen the same thing happen in couple therapy. The wife starts complaining about something the husband did, and the therapist says, "Look at your husband while you say that. You've got to have eye contact." That will connect all those bad feelings to the sight of her husband's face, so that every time she looks at him, she'll have those bad feelings.

Virginia Satir uses the same process in family therapy, but she turns it around. She asks a couple about special times in their early courting days, and when they start glowing, then she has them look at each other. She might say something like, "And I want you to realize that this is the same person you fell so deeply in love with ten years ago." That connects an entirely different feeling — generally a much more useful one — to the spouse's face.

One couple that came to see me had been in therapy with someone else for some time, but they still fought. They used to fight all the time at home, but when they came to me, they only fought in the therapist's office. The therapist probably said something like, "Now I want you to save all your fights for our sessions together so I can observe how you do it."

I wanted to find out if fighting was linked to the therapist or his office, so I had them experiment. I found out that if they went to the therapist's office when he wasn't there, they didn't argue, but if he held a session at their home, they did argue. So I just told them not to see that therapist any more. It was a simple solution that saved them a lot of money and trouble.

One client of mine couldn't get angry, because he would immediately get extremely scared. You could say he had a phobia of being angry. It turned out that when he was a child, any time he got mad, his parents got furious and scared him into the middle of next week, so those two feelings got linked together. He was own and hadn't lived with his parents for fifteen years, but he still responded that way.

I came to the world of personal change from the world of mathematics and information science. Computer people typically don't want the things in their field to have anything to do with people. They refer to that as "getting your hands dirty." They like to work with shiny computers and wear white lab jackets. But I found out that there is no better representation of the way in which my mind works — especially in terms of limitations — than a computer. Trying to get a computer to do something — no matter how simple — is much like trying to get a person to do something.

Most of you have seen computer games. Even the simplest ones are quite difficult to program, because you have to use the very limited mechanisms the machine has for communication. When you instruct it to do something that it can do, your instruction has to be precisely organized in such a way that the information can be processed so that the computer can perform the task. Brains, like computers, are not "user–friendly." They do exactly what they're told to do, not what you want them to do. Then you get mad at them because they don't do what you meant to tell them to do!