Let me ask you another question. When you come home in the evening and your house is locked, which hand do you use to actually open the door? ... Watch the hands.

People have always tried to turn body language into a content vocabulary, as if holding your head back meant that you were reserved and crossing your legs meant that you were closed. But body language doesn't work like words work; it works differently. Eye movements and body movements will give you information about process.

The proper domain, in our opinion, of professional communicators is process. If you indulge in content, you are going to unavoidably impose part of your belief and value system on the people you communicate with.

The kinds of problems that people have, usually have nothing to do with content; they have to do with the structure, the form of how they organize their experience. Once you begin to understand that, therapy becomes a lot easier. You don't have to listen to the content; you only have to find out how the process works, which is really much simpler.

There's an important pattern that we'd like to talk about next. If I'm your client and you ask me "Well, how did it go this week?" and I respond to you by going (sighs heavily, head down, low tonality) "Ah, everything worked just great this week. (sighing, shaking head "no," slight sneer) No problems." Now, the laughter indicates that there are a number of people here who recognize that there is some unusual communication being offered. The name that we have adopted for that is incongruity. What I offer you in my voice tone, my body movements, and my head movements does not match my words. Now, what responses do you have to that as professional communicators? What choices do you have to respond to that situation?

Woman: If I knew you really well, I'd say "I don't believe you. "Or I might say "Well, you don't look very happy because things are going well."

So you would meta-comment on the discrepancy that you've been able to perceive, and confront the person with it. Does anybody else have other ways of responding?

Man: I would try to help you express both messages, maybe exaggerate the non-verbal components....

OK, the gestalt technique: amplify the non-verbal message until it accesses the appropriate experience, right? OK, that's another choice. Does everybody understand the choices we're talking about so far? Our job is choice. The notion of incongruity is a choice point which is going to be repetitive in your experience if you are in the business of communication. It makes sense for you to have a varied repertoire, a range of possible responses, and to understand—I hope at the unconscious level rather than consciously—what the outcome will be when you select one of these maneuvers or techniques.

Meta-commenting is one choice, and I think it's a good choice. However, it is only one choice. When I watch and listen to therapists communicate, I often notice that that's the only choice that a lot of them have when presented with incongruity—that the people who are in the business of choice don't have any. You want to have a lot of choices in responding to incongruity. You want to have the choice of exaggerating the non-verbal, or of calling them a liar and attacking them, or of ignoring it, or of simply mirroring back and saying incongruently "I'm so glad!" (shaking head and sneering)

Or you can "short-circuit" them by reversing the verbal and nonverbal messages: "That's too bad" (smiling and nodding head). The response you get to that is fascinating, because most people have no idea what they verbalized." Either they will enter a confusion state, or they will begin to explicitly verbalize the message that was previously non-verbal. It's almost as if they take all the conscious material and make it unconscious and vice-versa.

Or you might choose to respond with an appropriate metaphor: "That reminds me of a story my grandfather O'Mara told me once. He was Irish himself, but he told about this Baltic country that he had spent some time in as a youth when he was traveling in Europe—poor, destitute, but nevertheless out having experience. And the duke that ruled this little principality—this was before the Second World War, when there were a lot of small countries—had a problem. The Minister of the Interior did not have good communication with the Minister of the Exterior. And so some of the things that the Minister of the Exterior could see needed to be attended to in order for a judicious trade arrangement to be made with other entities—other neighboring, surrounding people—came into conflict somehow with some of the needs that the Minister of the Interior felt..."

Now how do people learn to be incongruent? Think of a young child who comes home and hands a piece of homework to his parents. The parents look at the homework and the father says (scowling face and shaking head "no," with harsh tonality) "Oh, I'm so glad you brought that home, son!" What does the kid do? Does he lean forward and meta-comment? "Gee, Dad! I hear you say you're glad, but I notice..." Not if you're a kid. One thing that children do is to become hyperactive. One hemisphere is registering the visual input and the tonal input, and the other hemisphere is registering the words and their digital meaning, and they don't fit. They don't fit maximally where the two hemispheres overlap maximally in kinesthetic representation. If you ever watch a hyperactive kid, the trigger for hyperactivity will be incongruity, and it will begin here at the midline of the torso, and then diffuse out to all kinds of other behavior.

Let me ask you to do something now. I want you to raise your right hand…. Did anybody notice any incongruity?

Man: You raised your left hand.

I raised my left hand. So did many people out there! Some of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your right hand. Some of you didn't notice which hand I lifted. The point is that when you were all children, you had to find a way of coping with incongruity. Typically what people do is to distort their experience so that it is congruent. Is there anyone in here that actually heard me say "Raise your left hand"? Many of you raised your left hand. Some of you raised your left hand and probably thought you raised your right hand. If you didn't notice the incongruity, you somehow deleted the relationship between your own kinesthetic experience and my words, in order to make your experience coherent.

If there are mixed messages arriving, one way to resolve the difficulty is to literally shut one of the dimensions—the verbal input, the tonal input, the body movements, the touch, or the visual input— out of consciousness. And you can predict that the hyperactive child who shuts the right hemisphere out of consciousness—it's still operating, of course, it's just out of awareness—will later be persecuted by visual images: dead babies floating out of hot dogs in the air above the psychiatrist's desk. The ones who cut off the kinesthetics will feel insects crawling all over them, and that will really bug them. And they will tell you that. That is a straight quote from a schizophrenic. The ones that cut off the auditory portion are going to hear voices coming out of the wall plugs, because literally they are giving up consciousness of that whole system and the information that is available to them through that system, as a way of defending themselves in the face of repeated incongruity.

In this country, when we have gone into mental hospitals we have discovered that the majority of the hallucinations are auditory, because people in this culture do not pay much attention to the auditory system. In other cultures, hallucinations will tend to cluster in other representational systems.

Woman: I'd like you to comment some more because I stumbled into some of this out of talking with people about hallucinatory phenomena.