People who are depressive often share a strategy similar to that of the person described above; only the content of their feelings is different. All of their strategies end up in negative Ki which tends to create a self–fulfilling and reinforcing belief system, or strategy, that everything is negative. They can always validate this belief by tacking on a negative Ki to any particular ongoing experience. Therapists often have a difficult time helping depressives because it is hard to access resources for them. If you try to persuade them to think of a time they felt good, they may be able to remember the experience but end up feeling worse because they are unable to feel that way now. They may feel that they were once able to be happy but that it's all gone now. Typically, they will have a polarity response to any positive experience you attempt to access as a resource.
Their problem is not, of course, that they really don't have resources — everyone has experiences that can serve as resources, no matter what his personal history has been like. Nor is their problem the inability to access resources — anyone who can see, hear or feel can do that. The root of the trouble is in their strategy for responding to the given context — the therapeutic context, for instance when asked to make a decision about whether they have pleasant memories, or whether they have the ability to recall such memories. Some depressives will have a polarity response to qualitative (interpretive/judgemental) words but not to sensory specific description. For instance, if you ask them if they ever had a good, positive or happy experience, they will have a polarity response. If, on the other hand, you ask them if they can think of a time when they could see clearly, were breathing fully and regularly in their stomach, etc., no such polarity response occurs.
If you find that a person you are working with has a strong polarity response you can always utilize it by "playing polarity" with them. You can say, "You know … I don't think there's any hope at all for you .. . you have absolutely no resources or positive abilities that I can tell… You're a hopeless case . .." If the person has a polarity strategy, they will have to have a polarity response to this statement, too and come up with resources.
Another way to deal with these cases, of course, is to bypass the person's existing strategy by designing and installing a completely new strategy. You will generally want to do this covertly so the person will not have a chance to process the new strategy through their old strategy before it has been installed. You may also need to interrupt their existing strategy in order to install the new one (for information on how to do this see the Installation Section of this book).
Once one of the authors was working with a depressed person and encountered a strategy such that whenever the man tested his internal feelings – and found that they were positive, a voice would trigger in his head and say, "This can't last … I always end up feeling bad again eventually … so I might as well start feeling bad now …" The author redesigned the content of the strategy so the test and the verbalization were reversed, and installed it in place of the other strategy. With the new strategy, every time the person found himself feeling bad, he would say to himself, "This can't last … I'll end up feeling good again eventually … so I might as well start now …"
5.31 Well–Formedness Conditions for Artificial Design.
As we have stated, the goal of artificial design in strategy work is to create the strategies that will most efficiently and effectively secure a particular outcome. This requires that the programmer discover: 1) what kind of information (for both input and feedback purposes) needs to be gathered, and in which representational systems, in order to achieve the outcome; 2) what kind of tests, distinctions, generalizations and associations need to be made in the processing of that information; 3) what specific operations and outputs need to be elicited by the individual or organization in order to achieve the outcome; and 4) what is the most efficient and effective sequence in which all of these tests and operations should take place. When you are tailoring your design to a specific client, it will be necessary to find out which abilities and resources are already present within the client's repertoire of behavior, which are missing and which are needed. We have developed a set of four general well–formedness conditions for design to help you find what is present, missing or needed in your client's existing strategies, and which, if the conditions are met, will insure that the strategies you design will be efficient and effective:
1. THE STRATEGY MUST HAVE AN EXPLICIT REPRESENTATION OF THE DESIGNATED OUTCOME. If the strategy does not identify and get the specified outcome then it is useless.
The test phase of the TOTE, as discussed in Chapter II, requires that the organism compare a representation of where they are now with where they desire to be. For this an explicit representation of the outcome is essential. How many of you readers when you've tried to help someone make a decision or implement some new behavior, have asked questions like, "What do you want out of this interaction?" or "How will you know if you've (changed, made a good decision, etc.)?" or "Where are you trying to go with all of this?" and received answers like, "Well, I'd be happier," "I'd just feel differently," "Things would be better," or "Things wouldn't be the way they are now." None of these responses provide enough information from which to build an adequate strategy. It is no wonder that such persons have been unable to achieve their "goals."
When somebody simply says, "I would feel different," he has represented his desired outcome only in the kinesthetic channel and may not have any idea how things would look, sound or smell when change has taken place. Such a person doesn't have any way of devising operations utilizing these sensory modalities.
Choosing the sensory systems with which to represent the desired outcome is a crucial step in the design of any strategy. Sometimes a person may overspecify his outcome. A person, for instance, may construct a visual image of how he thinks his friends and family and associates should look and act in order for that individual to have secured his outcome. If the individual begins to carry out operations to make his friends, family and associates look and act that way, everybody involved may experience a great deal of discomfort and frustration — a so–called disappointment strategy. In some cases you will want to leave some aspects of the outcome unspecified until you have gathered more information. There are some aspects of particular outcomes that sometimes cannot or should not be decided ahead of time. In instances where this is the case, however, an explicit operation to get feedback and to gather information from which to build or modify a representation of the outcome should be included in the strategy. Implicit in this well–formedness condition, of course, is the requirement that the strategy secure the desired outcome it has represented.
2. ALL THREE MAJOR PRIMARY REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS (V, A and K) MUST BE INVOLVED IN THE STRATEGY SEQUENCE. Each of our representational systems is capable of gathering and processing information that is not available to the others. We can perceive and organize things visually that we cannot do kinesthetically or auditorily. We can sense and process things kinesthetically that we cannot do visually and auditorily and so on. This condition will insure that the resources of each system and therefore of the organism are at least potentially available.