Man: But the two parts of the manic–depressive woman are in the same person. How do you reframe them to the same conclusion?

If you have sequential incongruity—somebody diets like crazy and then gains weight like crazy—that's actually only an incongruity at the level of content. At the formal level, the two parts are the same. Both are obsessions, and both of them show a loss of control. One is saying «I'll starve myself; the other is saying «I'm going to eat everything in sight.» At the content level, they are opposite, but at the formal level, they are exactly the same. Those people don't diet intelligently. They don't build up to a maintenance program slowly. It's always either crash diets or «pigging out.» If you offered them anorexia, they'd take it! The solution has to take the part that overeats and give it some other way of getting what it wants so that it goes back to eating in moderation. And the part that diets like crazy also has to be reframed, because otherwise when you reframe the eating part, the diet part will go «Ahhhh! Now is my chance!» and go crazy, and then you will get a backlash in the other direction.

After I've worked with the two states in someone with a sequential incongruity, I usually build a part whose job is to integrate these two states, or I set up some kind of unconscious program to lapse together the times when they operate. With the secretary, the times were six months, so I didn't want to do it that way because it would have taken years to get anywhere. I decided to do time distortion: I went into the past and set up a program for integration to begin five years earlier and have the date of integration be the date she was in my office.

It didn't take me long to do this, because anybody who is that dissociated is a great hypnotic subject. She would have to be, or she couldn't be so dissociated in the first place. I did a hypnotic induction and arrived in her past as someone else, some shrink she had seen five years ago. As that shrink I installed the integration program in her unconscious, and then had her create all the necessary alterations in her history so that she could conclude the integration spontaneously in my office, five years later. Sometimes in order to be able to work these things out, you have to create a lot of personal history.

Woman: I have a client who became amnesic for everything preceding an incident in which he «came to» and found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun, with a stick on the trigger to fire it. Now he's totally amnesic for his whole life prior to that time. As you might expect, he comes from a really awful family situation. He also has a lot of experience at dissociation, having been an alcoholic for a long time. Now he's a sober AA person.

I think you're talking about the same formal situation. What has he requested from therapy?

Woman: Well, his stated goal is to get his memory back.

That kind of goal reminds me of a kind of fairy tale from my childhood. When I was a little kid, my folks used to read me fairy tales at bedtime. I was the oldest of nine kids, and we used to have these big family storytimes that were really fun. It was a nice ritual.

One class of stories that my parents told used to drive me crazy. Some character would be walking along through the forest one day and suddenly he would meet a magical creature whose beard had gotten caught in a fallen tree. I could never figure out what kind of a magical creature would be stupid enough to get his beard caught in a fallen tree! The main character would save the magical creature, and the magical creature would say «You now have three wishes.» The person would always blow it. He'd immediately say «I want to be immensely wealthy.» Then the entire countryside would be destroyed and in ruins, and his family would be wiped out, because everything would be covered with gold.

That kind of story is a good metaphor about the need for the ecological protections we build into reframing. The character doesn't think about the secondary effects of his wish. He doesn't specify context or procedure; he just names a goal. Reaching the goal is much more disastrous than not having reached it at all. Consequently, the character always uses the second wish to reverse the ill effects of the first one. Then he says something like «I wish I had never met this creature.» And that uses up his third wish. So he blows all three wishes and ends up back at zero.

Often people's conscious requests in therapy are a lot like that. People ask for things without any appreciation of their own personal context, or the larger family context in which they are embedded. So one of the ways in which I might proceed in your position, would be to act naive. I might act as if I am taking his request seriously, and arrange for him to go back and recall just a few things.

First I would set up a strong amnesia anchor. Then I would induce a trance in which I was guaranteed that I could create amnesia if I requested it. Then I would have him stay dissociated so he could view things from his past externally, and not be kinesthetically involved. Then I would ask his unconscious to pick three incidents from his personal history; one pleasant, one not so pleasant, and one disastrous, to give him some idea of the range of experiences in his personal history. After he has observed those, I would arouse him, and ask him for his response. If he wanted to continue, then I could. If he didn't want to continue, I would re–induce the trance, create amnesia for those recovered pieces of information, and then proceed to setting new goals.

Once a therapist brought in a trainee who wanted me to use hypnosis to discover something about her past. She believed that her older brother and a friend had raped her when she was eleven years old. She wasn't certain this had actually happened, and she wanted to know whether it was true. My response was «What difference would it make to you if you knew?» She had no answer to that question—it had never occurred to her. You might consider asking your client that.

Janet: Well, I have asked him, and he says he wants to remember so that he doesn't have to feel so funny when he runs into somebody that he used to know and doesn't remember. I feel like he's set up a task that is impossible for himself, because he doesn't really want to know.

That would be my first guess, too. He has consciously asked to recover a memory, so that's the goal, but he also has good reasons not to remember.

Janet: He was also in a VA hospital for awhile. He's very proud that they used sodium pentathol on him and got nothing! They also used hypnosis on him and it was unsuccessful in helping him recover the past. All he can remember are very precise details of the day that he woke up looking into the barrel of the shotgun.

I would probably go for his meta–goals then. «You want to recover memory. For what purpose?» «So that when I meet people from my past I would know how to treat them.» «Oh, so what you really want is not to recover memory. You want a way of gracefully dealing with the situation of meeting people who claim to be from your past.» One way to get that outcome for him would be to teach him a little «fluff.» «Gosh, it's been so long! Where was it?» It's quite easy to teach him «fillers» that will gracefully elicit all the information he needs to respond appropriately.

Whenever there is a direct conflict on any level, you just jump up to the next level. You ask for the meta–outcome. «What will you gain from this? What purpose will this achieve for you?» Once you know this, you can offer alternatives that are much more elegant. He will soon give up his original request, because recovering his history will have no function for him anymore.

Janet: As far as I can tell, his family situation continues to be horrendous. I tried saying «Well, you can't remember anything, so why don't I just have your family tell you the good things that happened in your life?» His family couldn't come up with anything!