Woman: That's particularly true of children.

Right. Your parents all built one of those in you. It's part of how you got here. Think of all the people who didn't make it to this seminar.

Let me back up and run through the whole thing again quickly. I made a statement at the beginning that one thing I noticed about therapy is that most of what people are doing is building parts. That's about eighty percent of what many therapists actually do. If that's true, then why is building parts so prevalent? Building parts is often inappropriate. I don't think everybody needs a «parent," a «child," and an «adult," but I think some people do. The question is «Who's going to need a part?» and then «What, specifically are they going to need?» What kinds of familiar contexts occur where people need parts? (Someone walks very noisily across the room.)

How about a part that gets someone to pay attention to sensory experience when they walk across the room, and to notice that they are making a tremendous amount of noise? We just had a demonstration of that need. That would be an exquisite part for some people to have. Perhaps in some situations lacking that part won't be detrimental. However, if you don't have a part that pays attention to how people are responding to you, there may be a lot of people who act as if they don't like your behavior, and you won't have any way of noticing that or changing that. There are many, many people in therapy who have that particular problem. They don't have any friends, and they don't deserve any. How many of you have had clients like that? You may tell them that somebody out there is going to like them, but deep down inside you don't like them. Often the problem is that they really have no way of knowing how people respond to them. That would be a really prime example of where it's appropriate to build a part. Where else are you going to need to build a part?

Woman: In couple relationships, you might need a part that would negotiate with your partner.

You get on the borderline there when you talk about having a part that carries on the negotiations. What are the rest of the parts doing in the meantime? I want to know what the outcome of installing this part would be.

Let me give you an example. A couple came to see me because they both had stupid behaviors that fired off automatically and prevented them from talking about what they wanted to discuss. I just picked one of them and installed an interrupter part. The new part did something that captured the attention of both of them, and interrupted the stupid behavior long enough that they could go back and talk about what they wanted to talk about. I don't know what you have in mind, but that's one thing that I've done.

Woman: You could install a part to tell reality from hallucination.

Now that would be a hell of a good part! Someday I may try building one of those. Later on this year I'm going to a state mental hospital to train the staff. This hospital's main function is to «warehouse» the patients that nobody really knows what to do with. A very interesting person has just taken over control of this hospital through an odd set of circumstances. The only thing that I intend to teach when I go back there is how to use this model to build a part that makes distinctions between what is shared reality and what isn't. Many psychotics do not have a part to do that.

Man: Many psychiatrists do not have a part to do that when working with those people.

Many do not have it at all, as far as I can tell! The only difference is that they have other psychiatrists who share their reality, so they at least have a shared reality. I make lots of jokes about the way humanistic psychologists treat each other when they get together. They have many social rituals that did not exist when I worked at the Rand Corporation. People at Rand didn't come into the office in the morning, hold each other's hands, and look meaningfully into each other's eyes for five and a half minutes.

When somebody at Rand sees somebody else do that, they go «Urrrhhh! Weird.» The people in humanistic psychology circles think the people at Rand are cold and insensitive and inhuman. Well, those are both psychotic realities, and I'm not sure which one is crazier. And if you start talking about shared realities, the people at Rand have more people to share theirs with.

You really have a choice only if you can go from one reality to another, and you can also have a perspective on the process of what's going on. It's really absurd that a humanistic psychologist who is hired to teach at Rand Corporation doesn't alter his behavior. Think about how often that happens. If someone who has all the TA jargon goes to a gestalt institute, he'll get wiped out by the gestalt therapist, because gestalt people can yell, and most TA people can't. In that context, as far as I'm concerned, the inability to adjust to the shared reality is a demonstration of psychosis. Qualitatively it's not different. You just don't get put away.

Let's say you're a gestalt therapist or a TA therapist or an analyst or whatever your gig is—even a Neuro–Linguistic Programmer. Tomorrow morning you wake up and go down to some bar where all the guys are. You say «You know, I was working on strategies this morning with a client, and I was watching his accessing cues — " They say «What?» So you say «Well, you know, I studied with Bandler and Grinder. We watch the movement of people's eyes and we know how they are thinking.» They say «Sure you do.» «Oh, yeah, and then I elicited a response and I touched him, and then I associated it with this other memory simply by touching him.» They would think you're pretty weird.

What you have to remember is that reality is contextual. Here we can talk about that and everyone nods meaningfully. You have all become a part of my psychotic reality. I have built a part in you so that I am no longer crazy.

If we had a psychotic, one of the things we could do is get the psychotic to have everybody else see his hallucination, and then we could call it «religion» or «politics.» The point is that realities are defined structures.

In some situations you need to build a part, and you can build a part in any situation. Who in here needs a part? Does anybody in here need a part? What do you want? What is the part going to do?

Teri: It would keep me at a certain weight.

You want a part to keep you at a certain weight. That certainly is a well–defined one. Who else?

Man: I want a part that enables me to see clearly with binocularity, without glasses.

It's a possibility.

Woman: I'd like a part that would be creative with metaphors.

I want you all to notice something. I'm now going to comment on group process. I asked people to define an outcome, and people were having lots of trouble. Just now I said «Who in here wants a part?» and listen to how well–defined the outcomes are! Remember that when you work with people.

Man: I want a part to remind me at regular and frequent intervals that I know what I'm doing most of the time.

All right. If you have to have one like that.

Jill: I want a part to let me know what I do know how to do.

What's the outcome of that? That's not an outcome. That's a process. This is the first slip–up we've had here. I want to know exactly what this part is supposed to do. You might get yourself a part to remind you of a catalog of your therapeutic skills, or to remind you to have variety in your behavior. That would be specific. What do you want?

Jill: I want a part that will move me on to something different after I'm convinced that I've already done one thing successfully.

OK. You could have a part that says «OK. You've done reframing; you know the standard model. You're hot at that and that would work here, but let's do it differently this time and have some fun.» Do you want that one? Or do you want a part that after you have successfully done reframing says «OK, it worked» so that you don't go ahead and use another model to cure the same problem that's already been cured?