Man: Backing up one step, what if it doesn't help you select? You ask "Will you select from all these possibilities?" and it says "No, I won't."

You can say "Stupid, I'm offering you ways which are more effective than your present pattern and you're saying 'No'! What kind of a jerk are you?" I'm serious. That works really well. You get a response then! However, that's only one possible maneuver. There are lots of other maneuvers. "Oh, then you are entirely satisfied with all the wasted energy that is going on inside?" Use whatever maneuvers you have in your behavior that are appropriate at that point to get the response you want.

Woman: What kind of reports do you get about what happens when your new behavior occurs?

Usually people behave differently for a week before they notice it. Conscious minds are really limited. That's the report we get a lot. I used reframing with a woman who had a phobic response to, curiously enough, going over bridges, but only if they had water under them. She lived in New Orleans where there are a lot of bridges with water under them. There's one bridge in New Orleans called the Slidell Bridge, and she would always say "Especially the SLIDEell Bridge," accented that way. After I had done reframing with her, I said "Are you going to cross any bridges on the way home?" And she said "Yes, I'm going over the SliDELL bridge." That difference was enough of an indication for me that I knew that the reframing was going to work.

She was in that workshop for three days and never said a word. At the end of the workshop, I asked her about the work we had done on Friday. "You've been driving over bridges this weekend, and I want to know if you had any of that phobic response." She said "Oh, I really hadn't thought about it." A few days earlier she had been working on it as a problem. Two days later she was saying "Oh, yeah, they are just expressways over water." That's very, very close to the response that Tammy offered us yesterday. When Tammy fantasized doing it, she went "Well, it was driving across a bridge." It no longer had that incredible impact, that overwhelming kinesthetic response. People have the tendency not even to think about it. They have a tendency to discover it afterwards, which to me is really much hipper anyway than if they are surprised and delighted with it.

That same woman in New Orleans also said "Well, it's a really amazing thing. Actually I wasn't phobic of bridges!"

"If you weren't phobic of bridges, how come you freaked out when you got on them?"

"Because they go over water. You see, the whole thing had to do with almost drowning when I was a little kid; I was underneath a bridge, drowning."

"Do you have a swimming pool?"

"Now that you mention it, no."

"Do you swim very often?"

"I don't swim at all. I can't swim."

"Do you like showers or baths?"

"Showers"

She made a generalization somewhere in her past that said "Don't go near water; you'll drown." When that part noticed that she was going over a bridge, it said "Bridges go over water, and water's a good place to drown, so now is the time to be terrified."

We always have follow-ups. People come back or telephone, so we make sure that the changes they want did occur. Typically we have to ask for a report—which seems to me really appropriate. Change is the only constant in my experience and most of it occurs at the unconscious level. It's only with the advent of official humanistic psychotherapies and psychiatry that people pay conscious attention to change.

In Michigan, I worked on a phobia that a woman had. I didn't know what the content was at the time, but it turned out that she had a phobia of dogs. After we had done the work, she went to visit a friend who had a dog. What was really amusing to her as she walked in and saw the dog, was that the dog looked so much smaller. She said to her friend "My God! What happened to your dog? It's shrunk!"

Man: Dick's signal system gave a positive response that it received three new choices from his creative part. What if he got a negative?

It doesn't matter if you get a "yes" or "no." It only matters that you get one or the other. The "yes-no" signals are just to distract the conscious mind of the person you are working with. If you get a "no," then you offer it another way to go about it. "Then you go to your devious part and tell it to ally itself with your creative part and trick this part of you into having new choices." It doesn't matter how you do it.

I probably would have had him construct a creative part. I wouldn't have been satisfied that he had access to his creativity. I know there are lots of ways to accomplish the same thing. You can say "Do you know anyone else who is able to do this? I want you to review with vivid detail in picture and sound and feeling what they do, and then have this part of you consider those possibilities. "That's just a way of doing what we call "referential index shift."