Most couples have simply habituated to each other's behavior, and they cease to do anything new with each other. It's not that they are not capable of it, it's that they are so anchored into rigid patterns of interacting that they don't do anything new. Very rarely do I find any serious dysfunction between couples other than having habituated into rigid patterns.

Whenever there are rigid and repetitive patterns or responses that you want to interrupt, you can begin by anchoring something unpleasant or attention-getting, and fire that anchor whenever the pattern or response occurs.

With a couple I saw once, his whole experience in life was making constructed images of possibilities, and her function in life was responding to anything he said by making an eidetic image of something that was similar and talking about how it didn't work. So he would go "I want to make a skylight in the bedroom" and she would say "We were over at so and so's house and their skylight leaked." They never had any other kind of communication. There was nothing else!

I did therapy with these two in my living room. When I came in, I sat down and said "You know, I'm kind of a city kid and living out here in the country I've had some real surprises. Did you know that a rattlesnake came right through my living room, right here, yesterday? Right across the floor. It was the damndest thing." As I said that, I looked down at the floor just behind their chairs and slowly followed an imaginary snake with my eyes as it went across the floor.

Then the couple began to speak. Whenever they would start to argue, I would look down at the floor again and they would stop. I began to anchor their terror of snakes to having that conversation. After about an hour of doing that, they didn't have that conversation any more. It was too unpleasant, because after a while their feelings about snakes became associated with arguing. If you're going to talk to somebody and you know that there's even a possibility that you might need to interrupt them, you can set them up like that before you begin the session,

You can interrupt behaviorally like that, or you can interrupt with words "Oh wait a second! What—" Or you can look at their ankle and say "Are you allergic to bee stings?" That'll get their attention. "Stop! I just thought of something I have to remember to write down."

Anchoring is an amazing thing. You can anchor air and people will respond to it. Any good mime anchors air by his movements, defining objects and concepts in empty space. Recently I was teaching a sales course and somebody said "You always tell us to be flexible. What happens if you try a whole bunch of stuff, and someone responds to you really negatively?" I said "Well the first thing to do is move, and then point to where you were, and talk about how terrible that is,"

That's called dissociation. You can go in and try the "hard sell." When you see that they are responding negatively, you can step aside and say "Now, that kind of talk puts people off," and try something else.

Those of you who are interested in really becoming more generative, when you get tired of touching people's knees and forearms, understand that anchoring is one of the most universal and generalizable of all the things that we have ever done.

Once I was lecturing to two hundred and fifty fairly austere psychologists, being academic, talking about representational systems and books, and drawing equations. In the middle of my academic lecture I just walked up to the edge of the stage, looked up for a moment, and said "That's weird" and then continued. A little later I looked up and did it again: "Well, that's really weird." I did that a couple more times during my talk, and most of the people in the first four or five rows became fixated, staring at this spot on the ceiling. Then I moved over to the side, and talked right through to them. I could get arm levitation and other unconscious responses.

If people would notice that what they are doing is not working and do something new, then being in a couple would be a really interesting experience. Actually they need to do something even before that. They need to realize what outcome they want, and then notice whether or not they are getting it.

One thing that we have done with couples is to take away their ability to talk to each other. "You can’t talk to each other any more until I tell you to. If I catch you talking to each other, I'll give you warts." They have to generate new behavior, and they begin to become interesting to each other, if nothing else. Even if they keep the same patterns of behavior, at least they generate some new content. They have to learn new ways to elicit the responses that they want. He wants her to iron a shirt for him, so he comes in and walks up to her and gestures with his hands. So she goes out and gets a piece of bread and butters it for him and brings it back in, right? Now, in the past, when he'd say "Will you iron my shirt?" and she did something else, he would criticize her. "You never do what I want," and so on. Now when he gets the piece of bread, he can't criticize because he can't talk. In order for him to get what he wants, he's got to change his own behavior. So he tries again. He hands her the shirt... and she puts it on. He's got to keep coming up with new behaviors until he finds one that works. Then I can use that as an example. I can say "Look, even if you do it with words, if what you do doesn't work, try altering your own behavior.

As they learn to vary their behavior, they will be establishing new anchors. Only about half of them will be useful, but that still gives them a lot of new possibilities in their relationship.

The nice thing about family therapy is that people bring their anchors with them. If you have a child who is responding in a troublesome way, you can observe what he is responding to, because all the primary hypnotic relationships are there. When children have symptomatic behavior, their symptomatic behavior is always a response to something. Anyone's symptomatic behavior is a response to something, and the question is, what! If you can change what they are responding to, it's often much easier than changing their behavior. You don't always have to know what it is, but it's often very easy to tell. You have a "hyperactive" kid with his parents and for the first five minutes of the session he's not hyperactive. Then the father looks at the mother and says "What are you going to do about this kid?" When the kid immediately starts jumping around, it gives you a mild indication of what he's responding to. But you won't notice that if you're inside making pictures and talking to yourself about which drugs you are going to give him.

Man: What if you have a suicidal kid? How do you look for the stimulus for that? Always depressed, always sitting there—

Well, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, depression will fall into the pattern we already talked about. I wouldn't try family therapy, not until I'd taken care of the suicide part of it. I would try a question like "What resource would you need as a human being to know that you could go on living and have lots of happiness?" and then do what we did with Linda, the "change history" pattern.

Our presupposition is that any human being who comes and says "Help! I need help" has already tried with all their conscious resources, and failed utterly. However, we also presuppose that somewhere in their personal history they have had some set of experiences which can serve as a resource for helping them get exactly what they want in this particular situation. We believe that people have the resources that they need, but they have them unconsciously, and they are not organized in the appropriate context. It's not that a guy can't be confident and assertive at work, it's that he isn't. He may be perfectly confident and assertive on the golf course. All we need to do is to take that resource and put it where he needs it. He has the resource that he needs to be confident and assertive in his business on the golf course, but he has never made that transfer, that connection. Those are dissociated parts of himself. Anchoring, and the integration that occurs with anchoring, will give you a tool to collapse dissociations, so that the person has access to the resource in the context that they need it.

Man: Are there situations where that's not true and the therapist needs to give the person a—

No, I don't know of any.

I'd like to mention something that is relevant for your own learning. There's a phenomenon in the field of psychotherapy which does not seem to occur in some of the other fields that I have worked in. When I teach somebody how to do something and demonstrate that it works, they usually ask me where it won't work or what you do about something else. So when I demonstrate how you can work with people who are bothered by images from their past, you ask "When won't it work?"

Now, the interesting thing about that pattern of behavior is that if what I've demonstrated is something that you'd like to be able to do, you might as well spend your time learning it. There are lots and lots of things that we cannot do. If you can program yourself to look for things that will be useful for you and learn those, instead of trying to find out where what we are presenting to you falls apart, you'll find out where it falls apart, I guarantee you. If you use it congruently you will find lots of places that it won't work. And when it doesn't work, I suggest you do something else.

Now to answer your question. The limiting case is a person who has had very, very little real world experience. We had a client who had been locked up for twelve years in his parents' house and had only left the house to see a psychiatrist three times a week, and had been on tranquilizers from age twelve to twenty-two. He didn't have much personal history. However, he had twelve years of television experience, and that constituted enough of a resource that we were able to begin to generate what he needed.

Let me reinterpret the question. If you ask a client "How would you like to be?" and they congruently say "I don't know what I want. I really don't. I don't know what resource I would have needed back then," what do you do? You can ask them to guess. Or you can say "Well, if you knew, what would it be?" "Well, if you don't know, lie to me. Make it up." "Do you know anyone who knows how to do this?" "How would you feel if you did know? What would you look like? What would your voice sound like?" As soon as you get a response, you can anchor it. You can literally construct personal resources.

For most of the people who come to you, and for all of you sitting here, your personal history is a set of limitations on your experience and behavior in the present. Anchoring, and the construction of new possibilities using anchoring, can literally convert your personal history from a set of limitations to a set of resources.

Another way to answer the question is that if a person hasn't had the direct experience they need as a resource, they have some representation of what it could be, even though it may be other people's behavior. That is, there is a representation within them which they label "other people's behavior" that they don't allow themselves to have. However, it is a representation that's in them. If you can access it fully, you can anchor it. You can do it directly or covertly. "Well, I can't see the images that you are looking at right now, your representation of this friend of yours who knows how to do this, so would you pretend to be that friend to give me an idea of what we are working toward?" "Display that behavior for me so that I can get an idea about how Joe would act." "Show me how you wouldn't act. "Then anchor it as they do it. That's now a piece of behavior that is as real as any other behavior.

Or you can make them do it. When people tell you "Well, gee, I could never be like that," it's not necessarily true. We had a woman that came in and told us that it was impossible for her to say what she wanted and to assert herself. She couldn't get people's attention. And she was an assertiveness trainer, too, which is interesting. She couldn't go to a regular therapist because it would ruin her reputation. So we told her to wait a second, we were going to go discuss it, and we went out in the living room and read magazines for about two and a half hours until she came flying angrily out of the office "If you don't get back in here, blah blah blah." If you are flexible enough in your behavior, you can elicit what you want right there on the spot. We made the assumption, the presupposition, that this woman knew how to get somebody's attention if a proper context were supplied. We supplied the proper context; she made the move. We just anchored it, and then transferred it to other contexts where she wanted it.

There's a huge advantage to doing it this way. We don't have to decide before we start working with somebody how many parts they have and what the parts do. I think the Michigan TA model is up to nine specific parts: critical parent, natural child, adult, little professor, etc. At theoretical conventions they argue about how many parts a person should have. That's how the TA trainers and therapists instruct themselves about how to organize another person's experience. None of my clients have a "parent," "child" and "adult," except the ones that come from a TA therapist. And then they actually have them.

With anchoring, you don't have to decide before you begin the session what the legitimate categories of human experience or communication are going to be. You can simply accept whatever comes up without understanding the meaning of any of it. I don't know what X and Y were for Linda, but I know that I can operate at the process level, without ever knowing the content, and assist her in changing. You don't have to decide beforehand how many parts you are going to allow that person to have. You don't have to demand that your clients be flexible enough to reorganize their experience into your categories. You simply accept whatever is offered, anchor it, and utilize it.

Woman: Do you always anchor the negative feeling? Because that's already in her repertoire.

We don't always do anything. It's often useful to anchor the response a person doesn't want, and there are several ways to use it. You've all had the experience of beginning to work with a client on a particular problem—especially children, because children are so fluid in their consciousness—and suddenly you discover you are doing something else. The initial anchor that I established stabilized the thing we were going to work on, so we can always go back to it. If I had wanted to go back and find out where it came from in Linda's personal history, that anchor would have given me an excellent way to do it.

In gestalt therapy if a client is troubled by a feeling, the therapist will say "Intensify the feeling, stay with the feeling, exaggerate it! Go back through time... and what do you see now?" The therapist is stabilizing one part of the person's experience, namely the kinesthetic component, the feelings that person has. And they are saying "Keep those constant, and then let them lead you back in your own personal history to a full, all-system representation of what we are working on." By using an anchor you can always get back to the same set of kinesthetic responses that you began with, and thereby easily stabilize what you are working on. That's one use.

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