The heart of reframing is to make the distinction between the intention—in this case to protect her marriage, and the behavior—in this case overeating. Then you can find new, more acceptable, behaviors that satisfy the same intention.

One thing that people rarely understand is that people's symptoms work. As long as being fat worked and accomplished the intention, that part was going to keep her fat. When it had better ways of protecting her marriage, then it could allow her to lose the weight, which in fact she did without dieting.

Let's demonstrate now. Who wants to change?—secretly….

OK, Dick, we want you to keep any content to yourself, leaving the people here free simply to observe the process that we go through. Either Dick is doing something now which he doesn't have a choice about, a sort of compulsive behavior which he would rather replace with something else, or there is something he would rather do but he isn't able to do. Those are the two verbal ways of coding the world of possibility.

Dick: It's the first.

OK. If it's all right with you, let's give the code name X to the pattern of behavior you presently have which you would rather replace with something else more appropriate. And I assume that pattern X, in your conscious judgement, is not a good representation of you as a total adult organism. We've just identified the pattern, the thing the person wants to change. That is step one.

The next step is to establish communication with the part of Dick responsible for this pattern X that he wants to change.

Embedded in this context is a notion that I will state directly to him and that I want to point out to the rest of you as well. Dick, I have respect for the part of you that is responsible for pattern X occurring over and over again in your behavior. You got here. You're sitting here and you are successful in doing a lot of the things that you do in your life. I am convinced that the part of you that runs pattern X—even though you consciously don't appreciate it—is attempting to do something positive in your behalf. I will induce no changes until the part of you that is responsible for running X is satisfied that the changes are more appropriate for it, as well as for you as a total organism.

This only makes sense if you have a belief system that says "Look. If he had conscious control over this behavior, it would have changed already." So some part of him which is not conscious is running this pattern of behavior.

I can guarantee you that ninety-nine times out of a hundred when a person wants to make a change and they come to you for assistance, there's going to be a dissociation, a conflict, between their conscious desires and some unconscious set of programs. The unconscious is far more powerful. It knows far more about his needs than his conscious mind, and far more than I could ever possibly know from the outside. I ally myself immediately with the unconscious, and that's what I just finished doing. That's one way to accomplish that, verbally and explicitly: "Look, I'm not talking to your conscious mind. I'm talking to the part ofyou responsible for this pattern of behavior. It's going to run the show. I'm going to serve as its consultant."

Now how do you communicate with that part? If you had to go to the Federal Building in San Francisco and get someone to sign a paper, you'd be faced with a very complex task. Because out of the 450 people in that building, there's only one of them whom you need to get to. If you were to adopt the strategy of searching for the one person whose signature you need by stopping at the door and talking to the guard and asking if he'll sign it, and then moving down the hallway, office after office, searching for the person who is authorized to sign, you'd waste a great deal of time. It would be an inefficient strategy for you to use to get what you want in that bureaucratic setting. That's a really close metaphor for a lot of the work that therapists do.

Therapists have been trained to pay a great deal of attention to the conscious requests of their clients. Typically the conscious mind is the one that knows the least about what's going on in their behavior. The fact that a person would come into my office and say to me "I'm X-ing and I no longer want to do that; help me make a change," is a statement to me that he's already tried to make the change with all the resources that he can get to consciously and he's failed miserably. It seems as absurd as beginning with the guard and working your way through every office, for me to engage his conscious mind in a discussion of these possibilities. I want to go directly to the office where the person who can sign that paper is residing. I want to go directly to the part of Dick which is controlling his behavior at the unconscious level in this context.

I also make the assumption that the part of you that makes you X— even though you don't like that consciously—is doing something on your behalf, something that benefits you in some way. I don't know what that is, and from your response you consciously don't know what it is, because you want to stop it.

So let's establish contact with that part officially. This is step two. It's already happened, but let's do it officially. Dick, do you know how to use words to talk to yourself on the inside? OK. What I'd like you to do is to go inside in a moment and ask a question. I'll tell you what the question is. Your job, after you've asked this question, is simply to attend to any changes you sense in your body sensations, any kinesthetic changes, any images, or any sounds that occur in response to the question. You don't have to try to influence this in any way. The part of you responsible for this pattern will make its needs known through one of those sensory channels. You just have to be sensitive to detect the response.

The question I would like you to ask is "Will the part of me responsible for pattern X communicate with me in consciousness?" And then simply notice what happens—any change of feelings, images, or sounds.

Your job out there, while Dick is doing this, is to observe him and always get the answer to the question I have him ask before he gives it to us. And you already have it. That's really typical. We talked the other day about meta-commenting as a choice in communication. This is one context in which I strongly recommend that you do not meta-comment, unless you simply want to shake somebody up. If you can always get the answer before your client does, you have a really powerful direct channel of communication to their unconscious, outside of their awareness, that allows you to do really powerful congruency checks. If the answer that you observe is different from the answer they get in their awareness, that's an important thing to know.

Dick, what was your experience after you asked the question?

Dick: Confusion.

OK. "Confusion" is a nominalization. It's not experience; it's a conscious judgement about experience. It's irrelevant to talk about his conscious judgements because he's already done the best he can with his conscious resources, and it hasn't worked. We need to work with experience. What was your experience that you labeled "confusion"? How did you know you were confused?

Dick: Flushing.

So you felt a flushing, a change in blood pressure. Was there a temperature change that went along with it, or a sense of pressure? Was it localized in some part of your body?

Dick: Some of both, mostly in my stomach.

In your stomach. OK, now that's a really elegant non-verbal response. In doing reframing we strongly recommend that you stay with primary representational systems: feelings, pictures, or sounds. Don't bother with words, because they are too subject to conscious interference. The beauty of a non-verbal kinesthetic signal such as this, is that it's considered involuntary. And you can test to be sure that it's involuntary. Dick, can you make that feeling of flushing happen consciously?

Dick: Maybe

Try….

Dick: No.

That's also a really good way to subjectively convince someone that they are communicating with a part of them that normally is not available to them at the conscious level. And of course most hypnosis and biofeedback is based on the principle that you can alter consciousness and gain access to parts of your nervous system and physiology which you normally don't have access to. The question was a "yes-no" question; the response was a kinesthetic change, a feeling change. Now, so far all we have is a response; we don't know whether it means "yes" or "no" and neither does Dick, consciously.

One of the ways people really get into trouble is that they play psychiatrist with their own parts without being qualified. They interpret the messages they get from their own parts. So they begin to feel something and they name it "fear," when it may be some form of excitement, or some kind of aliveness, or anything. By naming it and then acting as if that is the case, they misinterpret their own internal communication as easily as they misinterpret communication externally. We don't want to run that risk, and there's an easy way to be sure what that signal means.

Dick, first I'd like you to go inside and thank the part for the communication it gave you, so that you validate that part for communicating with you. Next, say to it "I would like very much to understand your communication. So that I don't misunderstand what you mean, if you are saying 'Yes, you are willing to communicate with me in consciousness,' please intensify the same signal that you gave me before—the flushing in the stomach. If you are saying 'No, you're not willing to communicate with me in consciousness,' reverse it and diminish the response."

As Dick does this and you are watching to get the answer before he gives it to us, realize that if the signal had been a picture we would have simply varied the amplitude of the signal. We could make it brighter for "yes" and darker for "no." If it had been a sound we could have asked for an increase in volume for "yes" and a decrease for "no." In this way you avoid the risk of consciously misinterpreting the meaning of various internal kinesthetic, visual, or auditory signals. It gives you a very clean channel of communication with the part of Dick that is responsible for the pattern of behavior he wants to change. And of course that's just the part that knows how to make the change.

This process gives you an excellent opportunity to practice seeing what are traditionally called hypnotic responses. One of Milton Erickson's more useful definitions of deep trance is "a limited focus of attention inward." That's exactly what we asked Dick to do here—to limit his focus of attention to a signal which is internally generated. And the corresponding changes in the texture of his skin, breathing, skin color, lip size, etc., are all characteristic of what official hypnotists call trance phenomena.

Dick, rejoin us back here. What happened?

Dick: I had the feelings.

So the feelings intensified. You got a verification. We now have communication with the part; we have a "yes-no" signal. We can now ask that particular part any question and get an unambiguous "yes-no" answer. We have an internal channel of communication that Dick is running himself. We're not doing it. We're simply consulting with him about the next step. He now has established an internal channel of communication which allows him to communicate unambiguously with the part of him responsible for the pattern he wants to change. That's all you need. You can do anything at this point.

Step three is to distinguish between pattern X and the intention of the part that is responsible for the pattern. Dick, this part of you which is responding to you at the unconscious level has a certain intention it's trying to carry out for you. The way it's going about it is not acceptable to you at the conscious level. Now we're going to work with that part, through your channel of communication, to offer it better ways to accomplish what it's trying to do. When it has better ways than the way it goes about it now, you can have what you want consciously and this part can continue to take care of you in the way it wants to.

I want you to go inside again and ask a question. After the question, be sensitive to the signal system you have. Go inside and ask that part "Would you be willing to let me know in consciousness what you are trying to do for me by this pattern X?" Then you wait for a "yes-no" signal…. (Dick smiles broadly.)

I just said to ask "yes-no"; I didn't say "Give me the information." If you were attending, you noticed that something fairly dramatic happened. He asked for a "yes-no" answer. He got the "yes-no" signal and he also got information about the intention in consciousness.

Dick: Which pleased me.

Which pleased him and surprised him. Therapy is over at this point. There is now a conscious appreciation of what this part—that has been running pattern X—has been trying to do for him at the unconscious level. Dick, you didn't know what it was trying to do before, did you?

Dick: No, but I got a clue to it while you were talking, before l went down in. I got a feeling that it—

Part of our problem doing demonstrations is that after two days with you we have such good rapport with your unconscious there's a tendency for you to do it too fast.

So now he has a conscious understanding of the intention of this part of him that has been running X. Dick, is it true that you would like a part of you to have the responsibility of taking care of you in that way, even though the specific method it uses is not acceptable to you? You may not like the way that it goes about accomplishing pattern X, but do you agree that the intention is something you want to have a part do for you as a person?

Dick: Yes.

Now there is congruency between the intention of the unconscious part and the appreciation of the conscious.

That means it's time for step number four: to create some new alternatives to the pattern X that are more successful in accomplishing the intention, and that still allow consciousness to have exactly what it wants. What we're going to do is hold the intention—the outcome— constant, and vary the ways of achieving that outcome until we find some better ways of achieving it, ways that do not come into conflict with other parts of Dick.

Dick, do you have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part?

Dick: Humpf!

The creative part hops out! "Hi! Here I am. What do you want?" I hope you all appreciate the sense in which I said before that multiple personality is an evolutionary step. So you do have a part of yourself that you consider your creative part.

Dick: Oh, yes.

I want you to go inside and ask your creative part if it would be willing to undertake the following task. Let me explain it first before you do it. Ask it to go at the unconscious level to the part that runs pattern X, and find out what that part is trying to do for you. Then have it begin to create alternative ways by which this part of you can accomplish this intention. It will create 10,20, or 1000 ways to get that outcome, and it's to be quite irresponsible in this. It simply is to generate a lot of possible ways for you to get the outcome, without trying to evaluate which ones would really work. Now, out of that multitude of things that it will offer, the part of you that's running pattern X will evaluate which of those ways it believes are more effective than pattern X in getting what it's been trying to get for you. It is to select at least three ways that it believes will work at least as effectively as, and hopefully more effectively than, the pattern of behavior it's been using up to now to accomplish that intention. Does that make sense to you?

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