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.