Sometimes a person is so self–anchored into a particular state that it's hard to get any changes. Jumping up and down, or doing any other behavior that is significantly different from her present state can loosen her up a bit.
Herb: When I first learned reframing in seminars, we would do each pattern in a half–hour or at most an hour. I have found in my practice that going through a pattern with a client sometimes takes several sessions.
Fine. That's not an unusual piece of feedback. I've heard that from others. Taking longer is a function of your familiarity and fluency with the sequencing, and also has a lot to do with your sensitivity to the needs of your clients. Sometimes reframing is such a major reorganization of the person that it appropriately takes three or four sessions to accomplish.
I claim that I can run through reframing with anybody in three minutes, but not if I involve her consciousness. So I assume that you asked the client's consciousness to detect the signals and offer reports. Without involving the person's consciousness, it takes me about one–tenth of the time to get the same changes. However, I do think that involving the client's consciousness is a desirable characteristic of this model, because it teaches your client to become autonomous after some period of time. She's been involved in a positive, participatory way at the conscious level in making these changes occur, so it will be easier for her to use the same process later on her own.
Reframing yourself is a fairly complex task. Reframing already involves a dissociation between the client's conscious mind and the part responsible for the problem behavior. If you reframe yourself, a third part of you has to be a programmer who keeps track of the process, which makes it a three–level task. If you successfully do reframing externally with others first, you can make the process of reframing automatic. Then reframing yourself is reduced to a two–level task, something that most people can cope with.
If you are a good hallucinator, you can also make it easier for yourself by seeing yourself over in the other chair. Then you ask yourself the questions and notice the responses that you get. That kind of explicit visual dissociation between the part of you that is client and the part of you that is acting as programmer can help you keep your behavior sorted.
Reframing yourself can also involve another problem. You will be using your own limitations to deal with those same limitations, which can lead to some blind alleys. As they say in Catch 22, «If you've got flies in your eyes, you can't see the flies in your eyes.» By reframing a number of other people who have different limitations than you do, you will gain flexibility in dealing with their limitations, and become better equipped to deal with your own.
In spite of the problems I've mentioned, I know a number of people who have reframed themselves and gotten very pervasive changes. If you do reframing successfully with other people for a month or so, you'll probably find yourself doing it for yourself anyway. If you are really eager for some personal changes, it will work for you.
Man: One of my clients is very verbal and conceptual, and he really wanted to follow the procedure, so I did it totally nonverbally and unconsciously with him.
Excellent. That is a really fine choice.
Man: Should the minimal cues that we get when we ask for a signal always be consistent throughout the whole procedure?
Yes. The only exception I can think of is when the signal you get at the beginning is very unpleasant. Then you want to adjust or change the signal right away, but keep the new signal consistent.
Jim: With one of my clients I didn't get anywhere with the first signal he detected—a kinesthetic feeling in his leg. I looked for another signal and got a very, very strong facial response.
My guess is that both signals were there to begin with, and that you could have used either one of them as a signal. You have to take into account your own degree of acuity, and also that your client may have idiosyncratic ways of approaching the process of reframing. Certain kinds of signals may seem more appropriate to a particular client, or to his parts.
Woman: Do you ever run into somebody who says «I can't come up with any new alternatives»?
Yes. In that case you can employ all of the «I don't know» techniques. «Well, good, if you did know, what would they be?» «Guess what they might be.» «Dream it tonight and let me know tomorrow.» «Think of someone who does behave effectively in that context. Now watch and listen to what she does.»
Most of you live under real time–space constraints; you only have an hour or so to see each client. If you get to the point where you are about to run out of time, and you are still at this step, then you can do several things. Send the client out in the world to find a real model. «Go find someone who knows how to behave effectively in this area. Watch and listen to what she does.» Milton Erickson used to do this a lot with his clients. If you know of a particular relevant book or movie that has an isomorphic situation, you can give her a homework assignment. Or you can have her ask some friend what she would do.
Programmed dreaming is another choice. «Go inside and ask the part of you that has been trying to come up with creative solutions if it will be responsible during dreaming tonight to develop alternative behaviors and display them in your dreams.» Get a «yes» response and then ask «Will the part of you that used to run pattern X take responsibility for selecting from those alternatives three or more ways that are better, and for employing them in the context where they belong?» Then the person goes off with programmed dreaming, has the dreams, and incorporates the behaviors. When she comes back in two weeks, she will be able to tell you what specific adjustments have occurred.
Jill: I've found that many people respond negatively to the word «responsibility» in step five. But if I say «Ask that part if it is willing to select from the alternatives?» then everything goes smoothly.
Excellent. Keep your outcome in mind, and use whatever words get you that outcome.
Skip: When you get to the ecological check and there is a signal, you check to find out if it's an objection. If it is truly an objection, I'm puzzled about why you don't just go back to step four instead of going all the way back to step two.
You can do that. Skip is proposing that if you get an ecological check objection, rather than giving the part that's objecting new ways to do what it is trying to do, you go back and find other alternatives for the first part which the second part won't object to. That's an excellent variation, and sometimes it will be better to do that—for instance, if the first part chooses alternatives such as suicide.
Man: A woman I was working with wanted to evaluate each of the three alternatives separately. It seemed OK to me, so she did that.
Fine. It's actually a bit more precise and explicit to do each alternative in turn, than it is to lump them together. Some people require a lot of precision when they process information. You've got to be very explicit with those people, and the chunks have to be smaller than the ones we typically use. In that case, the variation you used would be not only desirable, but perhaps necessary to accommodate that person's personal style.
Woman: I've always done the ecological check before the future–pace. Why do you have the future–pace first, when you may have changes or revisions in the new behaviors, and have to future–pace all over again?
You can do it that way, and often you can get by with it. But there is an important reason why we future–pace first. Future–pacing context–ualizes the behavior, testing it out in imagination. Parts may only realize that they have an objection when you future–pace and context–ualize the new behaviors. If you future–pace last, objections may emerge then, and you won't know that unless you're alert for signs of incongruence at that point.