I originally created this post on 11/15/09 for my previous blog:
Story #1:
Sandy has been with her husband for over 20 years. Her husband has beat her, kicked her out of her home, threatened her family, cheated on her, and a whole bunch of other stuff. When Sandy's father was alive he would suffer a great deal, because of this situation. Every time Sandy got kicked out of her house, she would go live with dad. This went on for many, many years. When her father died, Sandy had to find a new person to "rescue" her. Her has now taken his father's role, and this cycle continues until today. The thing is that the older brother continues to save her, but after a bit of time, Sandy decides to go back to her hubby that beats her. This doesn't deter the brother, because he is always there to help her when she is in need. After all, he is helping her by constantly rescuing her.
Story #2:
John is very anxious. He's been anxious for years. He continuously tries to "plan" for any unexpected events in the future by constantly playing out in his head how he will handle himself if bad situations happen in the future. Every time he feels anxious he starts this pattern over and over again. He's continued this pattern for years, but the anxiety remains. He can't ever seem to play enough cenarios in his mind that will allow him to feel totally prepared, calm and confident. These situations intrigue me. These situations fascinate the hell out of me. What's interesting in the above examples is that these people have developed strategies to deal with the problem, yet the actual strategies that they developed actually perpetuate the ploblem and limit the change from occuring? Crazy shit.
How can someone get so lost in a pattern of behavior but not be able to notice the results that the behavior is producing?
While I don't think knowing the reason matter very much in the context of the solution I'm going to present here, I do have my suspisions as to why people can get stuck in these negative patterns of behavior. From an NLP perspecive, people continue a pattern, because it provides some type of hidden benefit. It is more pleasureable to keep the problem than to change it. This is called secondary gain.
Another reason a person might continue a pattern that's producing negative results is their inability to go meta to the pattern. Another way of thinking about this is that the pattern is so ingrained that it is hard to think of it as a pattern of behavior. Instead of the pattern being a pattern of behavior, it is now just the way things are (read: a complex equivalence).
The advantage a person has when visiting a coach is that the coach will probably be out of the cybernetic loop of the pattern. So if the coach is trained to look for the pattern instead of the content of what's going on, he/she will be able to map it in terms of loops of behavior.
Paul Watzlawick deals with these issues and more in a brilliant book called Change. I have extracted many of the principles from Paul's book and added some of my own in order to in an attempt to provide a solution for dealing with situations when the attempted solution is the problem. Enjoy:
1) Figure out the action the person has taken in order to solve the problem to figure out how they've tried to solve it
2) Know that the mere act of attempting to solve something presuposes that there is a problem
3) Develop an intervention that will change the loop of how they try to solve the problem
4) Make sure that the intervention is something behavioral rather than cognitive.
That's the basis of Paul's model as I understand it. I also like to add the following:
5) Make keeping the problem more painful than getting rid of it
6) Make letting go of the problem more pleasurable than keeping it
Cool stuff. So from reading this article, how would you deal with the scenarios above?
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