Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE Read online

  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.

  As soon as someone finds one of those places, he says, "Oh, I've changed. Let's go on now." It's so nonchalant. "How do you know you've changed?" "I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's different now." But Jo is still propelling forward on the new path. I've been testing her repeatedly. And she can't get back there to the other one now because it's too late.

  I do this simply by presupposing that what is getting in her way is worth having, and all I need to do is find out where to use it. So, I take the behavior Jo is uncomfortable about — confronting — and take that back to before she even thinks about confronting. The same forces that used to drive her to confront and be uncomfortable about it will now compel her into another behavior.

  What we have explored here with Jo is a common pattern in marriage. You want something from him, but he doesn't give it to you. So you feel bad. Then you tell him how bad you feel, hoping he'll be concerned enough to give it to you.

  There are times when you don't get what you want from someone else. But when you don't get what you want, feeling bad is extra! Did you ever think of that? First you don't get what you want, and then you have to feel bad for a long time because you didn't get it. And then you have to feel bad to try to get it again. If you feel good, then you can just go back to that person and say, "Hey, you. Do you want to do this for me?" If you do that with a cheerful tone of voice, you're much more likely to get it, and without any future repercussions.

  The greatest error of all is in thinking that the only way for you to feel good in certain situations is for someone else to behave in a certain way. "You must behave the way I want you to, so I can feel good, or I'm going to feel bad and stand around and make you feel bad too." When he is not there to behave in that way, then there's nobody to make you feel good. So you feel bad. When he comes back, you say, "You were not here to have these behaviors to make me feel good, so I want you to feel bad now. I want you to be here all the time. No more bowling; don't go away for the weekend and go fishing; don't go to college; don't go to seminars; be here all the time. I can go away because I have a good time when I do, but when I come home you have to be here to make me feel good. If you love me you will do what I want, because when you don't do it, I feel bad, because I love you." Bizarre, huh? But that's how it works. And in a way, it's true. You sit there by yourself and you do feel bad. "If that person were here doing this, I'd feel good. What the hell's the matter with him?" Of course, if he's there and he's not willing to do it, that's even worse! People seldom stop and say, "Hey, what's going to be important to someone else?" It's even rarer that someone asks himself, "What could I do that would make her want to do this for me?"

  If you feel inside you that when you don't get a certain amount of time from him, at the specified moment, then it's time to feel bad . . . and if you measure that bad feeling and you visualize him and connect that bad feeling with his face, then when he comes back and you see his face, you get to feel bad when he is there! That is amazing! Not only do you get to feel bad when he is not there; you also get to feel bad when he comes back! That doesn't sound like fun, does it? It's not fair to you to live that way.

  And if he feels guilty about being gone, and he pictures what it will be like to come back to you, he will connect the feeling of guilt to the sight of your face. Then when he comes back and sees you, he will feel guilty again, and he won't want to be there either. These are the meta–patterns of obligation. They are both based on one tremendous error: the idea that marriage is a personal debt.

  If you ask people what they want, they usually talk about wanting what they don't have, rather than what they already do have. They tend to ignore and take for granted what they already have and enjoy, and only notice what is missing.

  Married people don't usually feel lucky, the way they did when they first met. Imagine what it would be like if every time you see him you feel lucky. And if he isn't there at a time when you want him — because he is doing something you wish he wouldn't do, because you don't want to do it with him — you still feel lucky that your special person is there for you much of the time. And when he's doing something else, you feel lucky that's the only price you have to pay. That isn't a heavy cost, is it? If you can't have that, then personally, I don't think it's worth it.

  One thing that has always amazed me is that people are seldom nasty to strangers. You really have to know and love someone before you can treat her like dirt and really make her feel bad about small things. Few people will yell at a stranger about important things like crumbs on the breakfast table, but if you love her, it's OK.

  One family came in to see me and the husband was really nasty. He pointed to his wife and snarled, "She thinks a 14–year–old girl should stay out until 9:30 at night!"

  I looked him straight in the eye and said, "And you think that a 14–year–old girl should learn that men yell and scream at their wives, and make them feel bad!"

  It's an awful thing to get lost.

  Often a family will bring in a teenage daughter because there is something wrong with her; she enjoys sex and they can't get her to stop doing it. Talk about an idealistic, overwhelming, outrageous task: to get somebody to go back to being a virgin! The parents want you to convince their daughter that sex is not really pleasant, and that it is dangerous, and that if she enjoys it, it's going to influence her in a way that will make her feel bad for the rest of her life! Some therapists actually attempt that task, . . . and some even succeed.

  One father literally dragged his daughter in to me with her arm twisted up behind her back, shoved her into a chair, and growled "Siddown!"

  "Is anything wrong?" I asked.

  "The girl's a little whore!"

  "I don't need a whore; what did you bring her here for?" That's an interruption if ever there was one! Those first lines are my favorites; you can really fry someone's brains with a line like that. Ask him one question after that, and he'll never be able to get back to where he was.

  "No, no! That's not what I'm talking about — "

  "Who is this girl?" "My daughter."

  "You made your daughter into a whore!!!"

  "No, no! You don't understand — "

  "And you brought her here to me How disgusting!"

  "No, no, no! You've got it all wrong."

  This man who came in snarling and yelling, is now pleading with me to understand him. He has totally switched from attacking his daughter to defending himself. Meanwhile, his daughter has been quietly cracking up. She thought that was wonderful.

  "Well, explain it to me then."

  "I just think all these terrible things are going to happen to her."

  "Well, if you teach her that profession, you're damn right!" "No, no, you see it's — "

  "Well, what is it you want me to do? What is it that you want?"

  Then he started describing all the things he wanted. When he finished, I said, "You brought her in here with her arm twisted up behind her back and threw her around. That's how prostitutes are treated; that's what you're training her to do."

  "Well, I want to force her to — "

  "Oh, 'force'—teach her that men control women by throwing them around, ordering them around, twisting their arms behind their back, forcing them to do things against their will. That's what pimps do. Then the only thing left to do is to charge money for it."

  "No, that's not what I'm doing. She's been sleeping with her boyfriend."

  "Did she charge him?"

  "No."

  "Does she love him?"

  "She's too young to love."

  "Didn't she love you when she was a little girl?" . . . The i
mage floats up from when she was a small child, sitting on daddy's knee. You can almost always get grumpy old men with that picture.

  "Let me ask you something. Look at your daughter. . . . Don't you want her to be able to feel love, and to enjoy sexual behavior? The morals of the world have changed, and you don't have to like that. But how would you like it if the only way she learned to interact with men was the way you brought her in that door a few minutes ago? And she waited until she was twenty–five and married somebody who beat her up, threw her around, abused her, and forced her to do things against her will."

  "But she may make a mistake, and it will hurt her."

  "That's possible. Two years from now that guy may drop her like a hot rock and go away. And when she feels bad and lonely . . . she'll have no one to go to, because she'll hate your guts. If she came to you, you'd just say, 'I told you so.' "

  "Even if she manages on her own in that time to go out and find somebody else and make a real relationship, when she has children of her own — your grandchildren — she'll never come and show them to you. Because she'll remember what you did, and she won't want her children to learn that. ... "

  Right now the father doesn't know what to think, so this is how you get him. You look him straight in the eye and say, "Isn't it more important that she learn to have loving relationships? . . . or should she learn to have the morals of any man that can force her around? That's what pimps do."

  Try to get out of that one. There's no way out. There's no way his brain could go back now and do what he did before. He couldn't act like a pimp. It doesn't matter if you force somebody to not do something or to do something, or if you force her to do something "good" or something "bad." The way in which you force her teaches her to be controlled in that way.

  The problem is, at that point he doesn't have anything else to do. He's stopped from doing what he used to do, but he doesn't have something else to do instead. I've got to give him something to do, like teach her the best way that's possible for a man to be with a woman. Because then if what his daughter has with this guy isn't good, she won't be satisfied with it. He was had then. You know what that means? He has to build a powerful positive

  relationship with his wife, and be nice to the other people in his family, and make his daughter feel good more with them than she does with this guy who's hanging around with her. How's that for a compulsion?

  And I never once said, "How do you feel about that? What are you feeling now? What are you aware of?" or "Repent," or "Go inside and ask yourself."

  People forget so easily what it is that they want. They go one step down the road to try to get it, and then get caught up in the way they're trying. They don't notice that the way they've chosen to get what they want doesn't work. When it doesn't work, they go to therapy to try to learn how to do it better. They haven't noticed that what they're trying to learn will give them exactly what they don't want.

  When something happens that you don't like, you can always say, "It's your fault; I'm going to destroy you." That was probably pretty useful out in the jungle. But consciousness has got to evolve to the point where you say, "I've got a brain. Let's back up a little bit, keep in mind what I want, and go for it."

  So every single time you feel bad about anything and you feel stuck, ... or especially right, ... or righteous, ... I hope there is a little voice inside your head that says, "You're getting what you deserve!" And if you feel that there's nothing you can do about it, you're right — until you go inside your brain and back up, back up, back up, so you can move forward and go for it in another way.

  V. Going For It

  In an attempt to understand why people do things, the field of psychotherapy has developed many models that they later found out simply weren't the case. However, many psychologists continue to hang on to them. We still have people who are looking for Ids and Egos, and they're as likely to find that as a "parent," a "child," or an "adult." I think that most psychologists must have watched too many horror movies when they were children. "You have a parent, an adult, and a child inside you that make you do things," It sounds like you need to be exorcised. People used to say, "The devil, made me do it." Now they say, "My parts made me do it."

  "Well, you're just saying this because your 'parent' is talking.

  "No I'm not; she's all the way back in New Jersey!"

  Transactional Analysis is a device for separating behaviors into three parts — a little like multiple personality, except TA is supposed to be a cure. If you're really advanced, you get to have nine parts, because each of the first three parts has a parent, adult, and child inside of them] I never liked TA because only the child got to have any fun, and only the adult could be reasonable. Everyone has to have exactly the same parts, so there's no room for any individuality. TA is also a segregated society: my adult can't talk to your child, it can only talk to your adult. Why can't my child talk to your parent? It doesn't seem lair. But boy, can you convince people of that. How many of you bought that idea? Somebody explained it to you, and you thought, "Oh, yeah." Not everybody in the world has a parent, adult, and child that argue with each other. You won't find much of that in Tahiti. You have to go to a therapist to learn to have those problems.

  How many of you have a "critical parent" voice inside you that berates you and tries to coerce you into doing things? If somebody suggests to you that there's a voice inside you that criticizes you all the time, and you start listening for it, guess what? You can install one. One interesting thing you can do is to agree with that critical voice, over and over again, until you drive it crazy. Another thing you can do is to change its location. Find out what happens if you hear that same voice coining out of your left big toe, . . . That change in location certainly changes the impact of that voice, doesn't it?

  However, keep in mind that your critical voice could be right about what it's saying. Maybe you ought to listen to what it says, instead of just feeling bad. I'd like to show you what you can do with a critical voice that makes you feel bad; who has a nice loud one?

  Fred: I've got one all the time.

  Good. Can you hear it now?

  Fred: Yes, it's criticizing me for speaking up.

  Great. Ask if it will tell you what it wants for you that is positive, and listen to what it answers. Does that voice want you to be protected in some way? Does it want you to be more competent? There are many possibilities.

  Fred: It wants me to succeed; it criticizes me when I stick my neck out.

  OK, I assume that you agree with its intention. You want to succeed, too, right? Fred: Yes. Sure.

  Ask that voice if it believes it has good information that would be useful for you to have and understand. . . . Fred: It says, "Of course."

  Since it has good information, ask that voice if it would be willing to try changing the way it talks to you, if that would make it easier for you to listen and understand, so that you could succeed better. . . .

  Fred: It's skeptical, but it's willing to try.

  Good. Now, Fred, I want to ask you to think of ways that voice could be different, so that you would listen to it better. For instance, if it used a different voice tone that was soft and friendly, would you be more apt to pay close attention to it? Would it help if that voice gave you specific helpful instructions about what to do next, rather than criticize what you've already done?

  Fred: I've thought of a couple of things it could do differently.

  Good. Ask the voice if it would be willing to try those out, to find out if you actually do listen better if it talks to you differently. . . .

  Fred: It's willing.

  Tell it to go ahead and try it out. . . .

  Fred: That's amazing. It's doing it, and it's not a "critical parent" any more. It's more like a friendly helper now. It's a pleasure to listen to it.

  Sure. Who wants to listen to a voice that yells and criticizes? Real parents should try this technique too, when they want their kids to listen to them. If you use a nice tonality
, children will listen to you. They may not agree with what you say, but at least they'll hear it. This procedure is something we've been calling "Refraining," and it's the basis for a set of negotiation skills that are useful in family therapy and business, as well as inside your own brain. If you want to learn more about it, read the book Reframing. The point I want to make here is that Fred's voice had forgotten its outcome until I reminded it. It wanted to motivate him to succeed, but all it was actually accomplishing was to make him feel bad.

  While the women's liberation movement has had much positive impact, in some ways it has done the same thing. The original goal was to motivate people to change the way they think about and treat women. Women got educated about what kinds of behaviors are sexist. Now when someone else makes a sexist remark, you have to feel bad! It doesn't strike me as progress that now the "liberated" people have to feel bad when someone else uses a sexist word! What kind of liberation is that? That's just like being a kid, and when someone called you "stupid" or "ugly," it was time to feel bad and cry. People used to use sexist words and nobody noticed; now when they use those words, it's time to groan. Some liberation! Now you have a new set of reasons to feel bad. I used to go around to night clubs and pick out women who would react that way. "There's a good one. Watch this. I can make her feel terrible." "Hi chick." "Arragon!"

  If you don't want people to use sexist language, it makes better sense to make them feel bad when they do it. That's a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, . . . and a lot more liberated, too.

  One thing I like to do is go after women when they make sexist remarks.

  A woman will say, "Well, the girls in the office — "

  "How old are they?"

  "Huh? They're in their 30V