No, I haven't yet, actually. My whole professional relationship is built on it. I go around the country insulting people, and they pay me money. It's weird!

Harvey: I want to give you some more of my list of functions to see if I understand this. To keep me from failing is one. Giving me play time is another. Those are functions, aren't they?

Sure.

Harvey: To get love from others.

To elicit a particular response, yes. Hopefully that part knows what it means by the nominalization «love.» You might have it be a little more specific. That's important.

Harvey: OK. I've got another one: To be a caring person.

That is a behavior, not a function. I'm going to teach all of you this information yet. You may not learn to build parts, but you're going to learn what a function is by the time you leave here! «To be» is a description. Listen to the phrase «to be or not to be.» When you make a statement»… to be something or other» it's a description of a behavior. «… to be angry. I want a part to make me be angry.» That isn't a function; that's just a description of a behavior. The part wants you to care about what or whom, where and why, and for what purpose? What is it going to get by having you be caring? What would happen if you weren't?

Harvey: The idea behind it is that I don't want to become like a machine.

That's the ultimate in humanistic psychology. «I don't want to be an android; therefore I'm going to act like this all the time. I'll hug everyone; that way I will not be a robot.» The point is that this part wants you to do something that constitutes «caring.» I have no idea what that means. Does that mean that you tell people honestly what they really ought to hear? Or does that mean that you touch everyone? What does it mean? Don't answer, because I don't care what the content is. I want you to know, and I want you to know what the function of that specific behavior is. It may be that that part wants you not to be an android, in which case all of this has nothing to do with being caring or not. You may go back inside and say «Have you ever thought about how much being 'caring' can be androidal? Let's have caring and not–caring; we'll alternate days. At least I'll be a different android.»

The question is «What is the part's function?» If the part's function is to keep you from being an android, then the question is «What does that mean?» Does it mean not having repetition in your behavior? Does it mean not doing all the things that Maslow said were bad? It's essential to find out what the part's function is.

Ray: This time I asked the question about function and the response was «I'm here to take care of you so you won't become like your father.»

Only a psychologist would say that. Ray: My father improvises on the piano.

Right. But that still isn't a function. You have to go a little bit further than that. If you were to be like your father was, improvising on the piano, then you would be what? There was something about the way your father improvised that some part of you thinks is negative in some fashion. He either made a fool of himself, or he did something else that some part of you didn't like, right? Now, what was that? Ray: He avoided interacting with people.

OK, so there's a part that wants you to have personal interaction with people. Good. Now all you have to do is build some way to have personal relationships with people into the way that you improvise on the piano. You have to define what «personal» means, because obviously it isn't singing songs. Maybe it means that you have to be able to play background music and have meaningful psychological conversations.

Woman: Is «to be taken care of a function or a behavior?

That is neither. It's so unspecified, it's nothing. «To be taken care of—how, specifically, … in what way? … by whom? …

Woman: Way back then is what I'm after, when I was in my original family.

You're going to build this part that's going to do something, right? What is it going to do?

Woman: It's going to let me be comfortable dancing in front of groups of people.

Let you dance? You've used the wrong reframing model, because there's obviously a part that stops you from doing this.

Woman: Yeah, I know. I knew that to begin with and—

But you thought you'd slide it in anyway. The point is that obviously there's going to be a part that isn't going to like this, because its job is to keep you from dancing in front of people. That part will have a very strong objection. So there's a part of you that objects, and its function is to have you «be taken care of.» Go inside and tell it «I don't have any idea what 'to be taken care of means. What specifically does that mean in experience?'

Woman: In my original family I had to do X, Y and Z to be taken care of.

OK. You had to take out the garbage in order to get a Twinkie, but I'm asking «What does that mean in your experience now?» What you've got now is so unspecified that I can't help you. It's like looking at somebody and saying «Noun, verb, adjective, noun.» There's no content in your sentence, so I can't even respond to it. It's just a little too formal. What you want to know from this part is «What do you do for me as a person now? " You have to go back to it and say «Look, I need to know in experiential terms what it is that you do for me as a person. You are obviously a part of me. I do not live with my parents anymore. I want to know what it is that you do for me, and how you are concerned about my dancing. If I dance around, what's going to happen that's so bad?»

You want both those questions answered. You want to know what that part's job is. «What do you do for me?» «I get you to be taken care of.» «How do you do it? What is it that you do?» You see, «being taken care of might mean that people hug you. Or it might mean that people feed you. Or perhaps it means that people are nice to you. You need to find out what that means in the land of experience. That is what counts in the end.

Dan: I want a part to fully access visual and auditory information that I take in. A part objects to reaccessing totally all visual and auditory information.

And I agree with it. What's its function, though? What does it do for you? What would happen if Dan actually had a part that could recall all visual and auditory information? People like that are called idiot savants, and they get put into mental hospitals. Idiot savants are completely dysfunctional; they can't operate at all as human beings. They are constantly aware of everything that ever happened to them. They can multiply great. They are whizzes at mathematics, but they can't function in the world of experience, because they have so much internal «downtime.»

When a part has a concern, take it into account and then redefine what the new part is going to do. Dan might redefine it as «I want to build a part that is going to make available some information about all the anchors that are occurring in a particular environment," or «I want to be able to visualize specific pages in a book I read once.» Whatever it is that you want to be able to do, specify it in experiential terms so that you know exactly what is going to happen, and so that the other parts of you know whether they are going to object or not. Then if they have objections, they'll be good ones.

Bill: I've got a function that I'm having a lot of trouble phrasing. The stuff that I'm getting says «Look, I want you to minimize the probability of being laughed at and treated with disdain. And I want to maximize the probability that you will at least be treated with respect, and hopefully even honored.»

OK. Well, that certainly is a rather extensive function. It doesn't Want you to make a fool of yourself.

Bill: OK. Is that a function?