APPENDIX B - MISCELLANEOUS PATTERNS 0
FORGIVENESS 1 Elements Of Forgiveness 3
An Experiment 3 Transcript 5 Other Objections 8 Self—Forgiveness 10
Summary 11 The Forgiveness Pattern 13
RESOLVING GRIEF 16 REIMPRINTING WITH DIVINE INTERVENTION 20
Robert Dilts' description of Beliefs: 21
YOUR STRUCTURE OF THOUGHT 23 THE DECISION DESTROYER 24
Forgiveness
by Steve Andreas
A great deal of therapeutic effort goes into struggling with anger and resentment, because this "unfinished business" causes so much difficulty— both for the person who has it and for other family members, friends, and associates. All of us can think of people who spend much of their time preoccupied with old hurts and injuries, interfering with their ongoing relationships and preventing them from getting on with their lives. How often have you wished that there were a quick and easy way to help a someone give up this preoccupation with the dead past and refocus on present and future living?
In a fascinating and elegant videotape made in 1986 (6), family therapist Virginia Satir demonstrated that it is possible to resolve long-lasting resentment quickly. Linda, the 39-year-old client, started with great anger and resentment toward her mother. But at the end of the 80-minute session she feels only love and compassion, and says, "I think you're right that I won't ever be able to look at my mother in the same way again. I feel clearer, and much more loving. I'm in love with everyone in the room." In a three-year follow-up interview, Linda goes into great detail about how well she got along with her mother after the session. At one point she says, "In fact, I felt like I was her best friend, which was r e a l l y something I would never ever have said before."
Some might be tempted to dismiss this as only a single case, that it was a result of Virginia's consummate skill, impossible for ordinary therapists to
emulate, or that Virginia got lucky, and that Linda was an easy client. But although Linda was cooperative, she was a very tough client, as a careful review of the videotape or the verbatim transcript (1) will show. At one point Virginia says to Linda, "One of the things I sense about you is you have a highly-developed ability to stand firm on things." (How's that for a reframe of being "stubborn"?)
Another way to think about this session is that Virginia showed us that it is possible to deal with a client's long-standing resentment in a very short time, and then go on to wonder, "What are the crucial elements in her work that could be discovered, tested, and taught to others?"
About nine years ago, my wife Connirae and I, along with participants in an advanced seminar, discovered the essential components in the process of reaching forgiveness, and developed a pattern, or experiential recipe, for teaching clients how to do this.
© 2003, NLP Comprehensive Appendix B - Page 1
Recipes
Before describing this recipe, I want to say a few things about recipes in general. Some people find the idea of a recipe for personal change objectionable, and I'd like to touch on two of the major objections I have encountered.
Firstly, until recently, many approaches in the field of psychotherapy have typically
maintained that one recipe can be used for all sorts of human problems. That is like saying that a given recipe will work equally well for a beef roast, a chocolate cake, or a tossed salad.
Others make the mistake of confusing the recipe with the result of using the recipe. You can't get much nourishment from the recipe itself, any more than you can find much shelter under the architectural plans for a comfortable home.
A recipe is only a set of instructions that tells you what to do in order to get a given result.
If a recipe is followed carefully (and the appropriate ingredients are available) the result is dependable. Our world is filled with the satisfying results of recipes that work dependably, from cookbooks to computer manuals. All of science and technology consists of detailed recipes that get specific results in specified contexts.
"The term science should not be given to anything but the aggregate of the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature." Paul Valery (7, p.41)
I am grateful to Paul Watzlawick for pointing out the crucial difference between descriptive language and injunctive language. Descriptive language is exemplified by psychiatry's DSM IV diagnostic manual. Over 700 pages describe the different kinds of disorders that people have, but not a single page tells what to do to resolve them! In contrast, injunctive language tells you what to do in order to have a particular experience.
George Spencer Brown said it well:
"The taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to a reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. Music is a similar art form; the composer does
not even attempt to describe the set of sounds he has in mind, much less the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands which, if they are obeyed by the reader, can result in a reproduction, to the reader, of the composer's original
experience. " (4, p. 77)
Frieda Fromm—Reichman once said, "People don't come to therapy for explanation; they come for experience." A recipe is only a dependable way to create a specific experience.
©2003, NLP Comprehensive PO Box 927
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Appendix B - Page 2
NLP Comprehensive Participant Notes