John Grinder Positive Intention And ‘Parts’
A transcription of John Grinder discussing 'parts'
You’re asking ‘is there is a positive intention behind attempting to committing suicide?’ And my client Percy says, “No, I just want to be dead.” And you go, “what would you get if you had that or what is the intention of being dead?” Percy replies, “Oh to escape, this is an intolerable way to live?”
So there’s the “intention of intention”, now do you consider that a positive intention, “yeah I get to escape all this crap”… Good, there’s the positive intention, now you can work with it or you can work without it….. I have got to tell you a story, this will make you laugh.
So I get a phone call and I’m actually in Santa Cruz, where I work very hard to be anonymous by the way, I’m just this weird guy in a pickup truck, who rides horses and comes into town every once in a while because that’s the way I want it… So it’s more likely that Carmen and I will be recognized in Paris or in Sydney or London then it will be in Santa Cruz, and that’s just the way we keep it…
Anyway, surprisingly I get this call from this guy with a British accent, “Hey! I read your stuff and you do really weird stuff and I need weird stuff for my son.” 13 months ago he tried to commit suicide and he is 20 something years old… And I was surprised, the Man actually says “I don’t have a problem with him committing suicide if it’s really a choice but I have the impression that this is an act of desperation, he doesn’t have alternatives.” I said, “I can work with you.”
So I said, “what’s the present situation?” He said, “Well nobody has talked to him or seen him officially in about 10 months…” In the town where he lives there’s this small cottage on their property where Charlie [caller’s Son] has taken up residence. “And he keeps it locked and nobody has seen him but we heard him out there... we notice things disappear from the refrigerator in the morning and he’s obviously there during the day.”
So that’s the state of play, I go, “get me a key to the cottage” and it’s beautiful… You know the silhouette of the castle, the lighting, the thunder in Transylvania? It was one of those afternoons in Santa Cruz about 5 o’clock and it’s winter with heavy rainstorm, perfect setting.
So I take the key and I walk over and I put it in the door, and I pushed the door in hard. The floor is deep in beer cans, I mean months and months of drinking beer and tossing the cans. And I look into the room and there on the other side of the room, over in the corner, is this golem like figure with long lanky filthy hair and the place smelled gross.
The disfigured person asks me “who are you…” I go “Come here, you asked me who I am? My name doesn’t matter, I’m the guy who makes things happen… you couldn’t even kill yourself successfully, that’s how inept you have become… I’m going to make sure it works this time”, (laughter amongst the crowd after Grinder’s remark). And he’s starting to back up now…
And I told a metaphor which is kind of a pretty metaphor about a rainforest, and lianas and how the seed drops, and if it’s lucky its negative heliotropic which means it seeks darkness… Where’s the dark in the rainforest? The basin of one of these beautiful trees… when it achieves negative heliotropic tracking, it flips to positive heliotropism and starts to wind its way of the tree to the canopy 150 ft above where it will go through a flowering cycle and drop the next set of seeds and this is the cycle of life.
I told it very elaborately and very carefully marking my stuff… And I knew the kid was going to make it when after like 2 to 3 minutes when he was sitting there processing this metaphor. He goes, “There’s got to be a prayer in here somewhere.” So I said, “Charlie I’m coming back the same time tomorrow… decide how you want to end this and we’ll make it happen because I’m the guy who makes things happen…” And I walked out.
I came back the next day; no beer cans, clean hair, sitting and waiting for me. I walked up and he said “Before you say anything, I don’t want to die!” I went, “Yes you do, you’re just in denial” (Roaring laughter following this statement).
This is a provocative approach and I get direct access to the unconscious and I’m speaking truth from his point of view. It’s definite leverage… Think about this, anybody who’s split - and somebody who is attempting suicide unsuccessfully is definitely split - because part of them wants to die but part of them doesn’t. Obviously….
{Professor Grinder puts on character} “I just got the phone call, man I ran over here to tell you… finally after all this hard work, they’ve offered me the vice presidency in the company. You know how I can see this as the next brilliant step forward in my career, I’ve watched this develope over the years and it’s just beautiful I can see it… YEAH!”
“BUT I have to move to Chicago and I have to leave Brighton behind… leave behind all my friends. What’s the price of friendship? Is it worth sacrificing this group of people for my bank account and go to Chicago, a crazy place over there with gangsters and stuff. Help me, help me…”
Now, an untutored friend will attempt to help, and what will such an untutored friend do? It doesn’t matter what he does because he’ll just do the opposite, if the friend says, “Take the job man, you can see how brilliant this move is for your career!” His response, “My friends blah blah blah...” Or you flip it over and go, “Listen you can’t buy friendship like we have here, screw that! You’re with me so stay with me…” What will the client say? “But you don’t see the opportunity blah blah blah…”
Notice the representational sorting… kinesthetic (stay here), visual (see the brilliance of this move, I’ve watched this develop). Whatever part you take, you are driving them for balance purposes to the other part. That means with a suicidal person you go, “Dude, we can make this better… we can make a good life.” That’s criminal! That’s criminal, you will drive them into another suicide attempt.
All this came about because the one place where you get this intention of the intention, where you get a “no” to the first intention question; “Is there a positive intention behind you trying to commit suicide?” “No”… “Is there a positive intention to desire to be dead?” “Yes”. Cool we can work with that, and in the case I’m thinking about I made a deal. I said to him, “If you carry out mind structures without question, unless either it’s unethical or it calls into question to your health and safety, you can refuse. There are no other grounds for refusal…”
So I set up really strong leverage positions which Erickson (Milton Erickson) is very famous for this kind of leverage. So now I could give him a series of tasks. And now he could discover a world which was implicit but never expressed.
So we made a deal, “If in 3 months you still make a judgment that it’s not worth living, I’ll help you finish this, that’s what I originally came here to do. I just came here to make sure you die and now you want to live (Laughter among crowd)… It’s a real pain in the ass… I get paid by the hour so I’ll do it (sarcasm in his statement)”.
{Audience: Question} How can you test them?
{Professor Grinder: Replies} Test what?
{Audience: Questions Grinder’s method} Well is this proven with the balance of your work?
{Professor Grinder: Humorously answers} It’s only a life (laughter in the crowd), I know what you’ll drive people to if you take the upside.
{Audience: Questions} How do you know?
{Professor Grinder: Replies} By the cases which have happened with the conventional therapists. A lot of cases, and there are a significant amount of cases when you go back and reconstruct the outcome and that’s exactly what happened. So since I’m playing this part, you have got to play that part. Does it always work? Well it has so far but I’ve done a lot of other things… This is not a standalone piece; this is a piece for as he said (points to audience member who pointed out a statement) in leverage, “Now I got leverage!” What I do with it is not my confidence but yeah this is the first move I would make.
{Audience: Curiosity} When you walked out did you know he was going to be okay?
{Professor Grinder: Clarifies} Oh yeah they are always responsive, I came here to make sure he died (reverse psychology), so I pushed him into the direction I wanted him to go.
{Audience: Question} So if someone was trying to lose weight, you could then say “Surely you want to be fat?” Is that what you’re saying?
{Professor Grinder} You could and it would be very interesting to provoke because you’ll see the unconscious come out. If you say that, you’ll actually see a state shift and see the signals of the unconscious because that is what’s going on.
What Erickson used to do when he’d say “… you come back here in exactly one week and I want you to have gained 4 pounds exactly…” If you review his cases, the person came back and they weighed either 4 pounds more exactly, not three or five – four. Or nothing happened and the “nothing happened” was very rare. What’s the point in time to gain 4 pounds?
{Audience: Answer} Choice?
{Professor Grinder: Response} The presupposition that they have a choice.
{Professor Grinder} Does this make sense? This is a standalone piece to get leverage, what you do afterwards varies.
{Audience: Restatement of question} So you’re trying to highlight that they have a choice?
{Professor Grinder: Response} Absolutely, by gaining 4 pounds they demonstrate they have choice, by losing 4 pounds they demonstrate they have no choice. By doing nothing they’re totally blocked now, and you have got to get them in a high performance stake to break up the blockade to get things moving and get the signal set up.
There has been for years, I think most of Tad James’s (NLP Master Practitioner/Coach) work, says “stay away from that crazy thing that Grinder invented on six step reframing because it is an inherently dissociative process and it creates parts that fragment your personality”.
My response to Tad and his group is, look, every time you open your mouth, that’s true… every time you open your mouth, none of that exists, and if you can’t make a distinction between using distinctions for the purpose of leverage or purposes of making a leverage position, then I think you need to take up a new profession, because every time you open your mouth you’re doing this.
Parts are extremely useful as a leverage position until you start to believe in them, then you’re lost. These are distinctions which we make on the fly, to create leverage positions. With a long lever you can move anything if you get the right leverage. And we tie a knot around our handkerchief every time we make one of these. That’s why every disassociation implies a responsibility to reintegrate. That’s why every time you do parts work, you make sure at the end, the person doesn’t believe he has these things, you take that away, it’s not helpful.
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