You have just learned how to take a single counterexample and trans-form it into an example. Previously you grouped counterexamples in order to find out what was common to all of them, and used this as a basis for adjusting the scope of your quality. Next I want you to combine grouping and transformation, in order to make your task easier and more efficient.
When you group similar counterexamples together, that makes it eas-ier to see what they have in common, and what sort of change would be useful in all of them. By grouping them together in your mind, you create a new category or generalization, and usually the worst example can serve as a sort of icon that represents all of them. Often the first one is the worst, because of the shock of its being so unexpected. Then when you do change work with the worst one, the change will usually generalize to the entire group. Occasionally it may be difficult to determine which is worst, and in that case you can pick any of the stronger ones.
For instance, let's say that when you group your counterexamples, you find that they all are times when you were overtired. Then you can ask,
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"What resource would allow me to be kind, even though I am overtired?"
and then do some change work with the worst one. When you transform that one, the changes will usually automatically generalize to the entire group, and that can save you a lot of work doing them one by one. Of course it's important to check to be sure that the change has actually gen-eralized to the others in the group. Sometimes you may need to transform several examples before the change will generalize to the whole group.
Whenever you group experiences in this way, it is because you notice similarities between them. But of course there will also be differences, and sometimes these differences will be more important to you than the simi-larities. Some experiences may be quite unique, and not similar to any of the others. Any change work that is directed toward a similarity will tend to generalize to the extent that you perceive similarity, and not generalize to experiences that you perceive as being significantly different.
So far we have been presupposing that we want a change to general-ize widely, and this is usually the case when we are changing a valued qual-ity of self-concept. But of course there are also times when you don't want a change to generalize too widely. A man's self-concept might include his ability to elicit loving sexual states in his wife, and if you accidentally gen-eralize this to others, that could result in a lot of difficulties! So it's always important to examine the change work that you are doing, and be sure that it generalizes only as far as will be useful—and that word "only" can be very useful in setting limits to generalization. "Of course this is only appro-priate with your wife."
Exercise 8-4 Grouping Counterexamples and Transforming the Worst
(trios, 2 0 minutes)Get into trios again, working silently by yourself, assisting each other as needed, and then share experiences.
1. Grouping. Examine your counterexamples, and determine what a group of them have in common.
2. Worst. Use these common elements as a basis for selecting the worst one.
3. Transformation. Do appropriate change work on this counterex-ample, being sure to include a congruence check: "Does any part of me have any objection to this change?"
4. Check generalization. Think of several other counterexamples from this group, and find out if they have already been transformed. If so, you are done; if not, cycle back to step 1 and transform another one—per-haps using a different resource—and again check for full generalization.
If you have more than one group of counterexamples, repeat this process with each group.
Do you have any questions or observations?
David: When I transformed one, all the rest flipped automatically, like dominoes. I know you said that they usually would, but it still surprised me.
Al: I took my counterexamples and slowed them all down so that I had more time to process the situation, and that made it possible for me to respond the way I want to.
So you added in a personal resource—in this case, a slower tempo—
that made it possible to transform them all into examples of your quality.
Ann: My quality is that I am a caring person. When I examined coun-terexamples where I was abrupt with someone, I realized that when I get in the position of being a "crusader," sometimes people would get depend-ent, and come at me and ask me questions, and sometimes I felt like I was dragging them around on my back. That's when I would get snappy with them, even when I still had caring in my heart. I decided that it was much better for both me and the other person to do what I can to give them a way to handle their own problems. So when I get in that situation, I could be able to turn it around and say, "How do you think you'd like to handle it?"
and give them some of the responsibility, instead of taking it all on myself.
Bob: I took out the worst example and transformed it. Then when I put it back in, I noticed that it was much more specific and detailed than my other examples, which were more vague and general. So I think I need to review my whole database and make them all more specific than they are now.
Sally: I found that my counterexamples fell into several groups, so I had to process a worst for each of them. Then I thought, "How could I use this in the future?" I imagined that I had some counterexamples in the fu-ture, even though I didn't know what they were. As I started to imagine some counterexamples to the quality, before I could even see what they were—boom—they transformed automatically.
Great. By doing the process several times, it became unconscious and automatic. Of course, there is always the possibility that some of your future counterexamples might be significantly different, and require a very differ-ent kind of resource or transformation than you used just now. In that case, the mechanism that you developed might not still work.
This strategy of grouping problem situations and making a general-ization about them before transforming them is something that is very use-ful for therapists, no matter what kind of change work they do. Beginning therapists often encounter the following situation: A client comes in with
Transforming Mistakes 131 a complaint, and they do some change work that the client is satisfied with.
Then the client brings up another complaint that seems remarkably similar to the first, and they do change work again. Then the client mentions another complaint, that looks very similar to the first two. This can go on for a very long time, and it's a good way to get bored with doing change work. If the client thinks of each of these problems as separate, and has not grouped them into a category, then you have to change them one at a time.
But if you ask the client about several experiences before doing any change work, you can create a category in their minds, and then you can change them all at once. "All these seem to me to be examples of feeling disappointed by women friends. Does that fit for you?" "Can you think of other examples of this kind of problem situation?" "Oh, so all of these are situations in which you felt small and inadequate to deal with a situation, but you had to anyway."
When you get a congruent response—especially one that signals, "Oh, yeah, I never thought about it that way!" that indicates that you have helped them create a new generalization. Then you can ask, "Which one was the worst?" And when they say, "Oh, this one was the worst!" and you change that one, all the others in that category will also change. Because in their mind the presupposition is established: "These are all the same, and this is the worst. So if it works for that one, it will work for all of them."
Summary
Counterexamples are extraordinarily important aspects of your self-concept. They strengthen the self-concept and make it more resilient, at the same time that they alert you to exceptions, and make you much more open and responsive to corrective feedback. Temporarily excluding counterex-amples, adjusting the scope of your quality, and recategorizing some appar-ent counterexamples as examples of another quality, are all useful ways to reorganize your experience.
Transforming counterexamples into examples is an even more elegant way to utilize them. Grouping counterexamples by similarity, and then trans-forming the worst one, provides a way to greatly simplify and speed up the work of transformation. The outline on the following page summarizes all that you have learned about integrating and transforming counterexamples.
Transforming counterexamples also provides a basis for learning how to take an element of self-concept that is ambiguous or negative, and trans-form it into something positive, a truly revolutionary change. But before we learn how to do that, I want to show how you can use all that you have learned so far to do something considerably simpler—building an entirely new quality of self-concept.