6.3 Interrupting Strategies.

Installing a new strategy requires that you make it as available in context as an existing one. As we said at the beginning of the chapter, this can generally be accomplished with ease through timing — firing of the anchor(s) you have established for the new sequence at the appropriate time in the existing sequence — or by conditioning the new sequence via repeated rehearsal. If the new strategy you have designed is sufficiently adaptive it should reinforce and perpetuate itself naturally.

Sometimes, however, the existing strategy will have a particularly well-beaten path and will be unusually ingrained. If the outcome of the strategy interferes with what you are attempting to accomplish and is producing behaviors that are counterproductive to the achievement of the meta-outcomes of the client (such as the depressive strategies we discussed in the design chapter), it will be to the client's benefit for you to interrupt the existing strategy.

There are three basic ways to interrupt a strategy: (1) through overload, (2) by diversion and (3) by "spinning out" the strategy.

6.31 Interruption By Overload.

Overloading occurs when more information is being poured into a strategy or strategy step than it can handle. Overloading happens naturally in many everyday experiences — for example, when a person in a noisy place "can't hear himself think," or when a person feels so good (or bad) that he doesn't know what to do or say (this is often called "being overcome by emotion"). Other natural interruptions are situations like being overwhelmed by beauty or practically "knocked out" by some smell or fragrance.

The behavioral result of overloading, as with any of the interruption phenomena, is that person's strategy is stopped from completing its cycle. When a strategy is interrupted completely, the individual is left without a next step in behavior (in a sort of behavioral "limbo," or what is sometimes known as "somnambulistic trance" —see Patterns II) and is prone to jump for whatever next step is offered to him by the situation. That is, they display a strong tendency to respond to whatever anchor for response is provided by the situation. This is a phenomenon that you can easily take advantage of to install a strategy, if you time your anchors right.

Occasionally you may want to interrupt an existing strategy simply to stop its ongoing negative outcomes. As one of the authors was preparing to leave his house to board a plane for a week long trip, the phone rang. When the author answered it, an extremely worried and frantic voice came through the receiver, pleading with him to help a deeply depressed relative who was on the verge of suicide. It was impossible for the author to postpone his trip to work with the phone caller's relative, so he quickly told her to bring the suicidal relative to the airport and gate he would be departing from. He would see what he could do. They arrived just as he was preparing to board the plane. Left without time to attempt anything then, the author simply reached out, grabbed the relative's wrist, and squeezing it as hard as he could, made an extremely animated and contorted face and yelled at the top of his lungs, "Everything that you do this week has to come through this channel." He then released her wrist and boarded the plane. The rationale was that the simultaneous multi-sensory overload was sure to interrupt any ongoing strategy. Upon returning the following week and working finally with the depressive relative, the author was told how she had remained around the house all week, entertaining no thoughts of suicide. All she could remember experiencing, in fact, was a sustained visual image in her mind's eye of the face the author had made at the airport.

6.32 Interruption by Diversion.

A strategy is diverted when a particular input shifts the representational sequence away from the ongoing strategy. A person who is lost in thought, for instance, will be interrupted when some noise or movement draws his attention to his external environment. The stimulus does not overload the person's strategy; it instead overrides the ongoing sequence, drawing the person's behavior to some other locus. Often, after such an interruption, the person who was formerly lost in thought may have a difficult time reaccessing the strategy he was in and may even forget what he was thinking about. Diverting someone's attention so that it breaks his concentration or stops him from completing some particular behavior, has been employed as an effective interruption technique throughout the ages.

Stopping or blocking a person's accessing cues is an extremely direct and powerful way of interrupting his ongoing strategy. Strategies may be interrupted and diverted by waving or moving your hands in front of someone's face and knocking away their eye position cues. Having a depressed client sit up straight, hold his head up high, take a full breath in the chest, throw his shoulders back, open his eyes wide and smile, is one of the most rapid and effective ways of drawing a depressive out of a negative state. The typical depressive posture probably does more to elicit and perpetuate the depressed state than any other element. The posture is generally slumped and hunched over, eyes and head oriented downward to produce full kinesthetic access — it's no wonder that he isn't able to see or talk himself out of his problems. As we pointed out earlier, there tends to be an inverse relationship between the internal and external focusing of the same representational system — the more you are talking to yourself in your head, the less you can hear what's going on around you, and so on. For the depressed, then, who spend most of their time focused on internal kinesthetics, tactile awareness, especially through physical exercise and sports, will be an extremely effective diversion. To interrupt someone who is depressed, have him do something, no matter how meaningless the activity may seem.

A therapist once told the authors about an emergency call she received from a person who was very depressed and contemplating suicide. At the time of the call, however, the therapist was involved in a critical intervention with another client, one she could not abandon. Out of desperation, the therapist in a firm and congruent voice told the caller that she was to go out immediately, take a bicycle ride for at least 20 minutes and was to call the therapist again when she returned. The therapist's reasoning was that this would keep the person occupied so that she wouldn't harm herself, until the therapist had finished with the other client and could turn her full attention toward helping the caller. Much to the therapist's surprise, when the potential suicide called back, the crisis had passed. The bike ride, the caller said, had been just what she needed to break the depression. Prior to the ride she hadn't been out of her house for days because she'd been feeling bad. She said that she now realized how that had only contributed to her negative state. She still needed to work on a number of problems she faced, but the bike ride had averted a crisis.