saying that to make me feel better!”
Of course he was trying to make her feel better—nothing wrong with that, as far as I could see. But she distorted into a hostile act his attempt to make peace. So I leaned over and said: “Yeah, he’s really bad that way. Imagine wanting to make the woman he loves feel good.” For a moment, they were both stunned. Then they laughed and started to talk to each other in a much nicer way.
Generalization. The third mechanism is generalization—the process by which a person takes one or two experiences and decides that this is the way all things are meant to be, all the time.
Generalization is useful as a tool in learning. If we cut ourselves when we are careless with a sharp implement, we generalize to the extent that we believe “all” sharp instruments are capable of injuring us, so we treat them with respect. We have learned over many hundreds of thousands of years to stay alive by applying generalization.
Generalization, as has already been mentioned, is the mechanism by which people all over the planet know how to open doors, simply because they’ve generalized information out of one or two formative experiences, but generalization is also at the root of many problems. When I was still at school, teachers believed we left-handers should be forced to write with our right hands. Their method of instruction was to patrol our desks and whack us with rulers when they found us writing with the “wrong” hand.
Later, I got to do more things my way. As a person who was still left-handed, I reversed all the doors in my house to make things easier for myself. Everywhere else, the front door opened inward. Mine opened outward; it just felt better that way.
However, friends of mine would come along, try to get in, then say, “Hey, your door’s jammed.” I’d come along, open it the other way, and then next time they came along, the same thing would happen. Their motor programs just couldn’t cope with an exception to their generalization about the way doors “should” be.
Generalization can have serious consequences on people’s lives when they fail to undo generalizations that no longer work. Someone who was mistreated as a child may decide that all men (or women) or all authority figures are to be feared and disliked. A person who experiences several failed relationships may decide that love is for losers and withdraw into a lonely existence. Sexual dysfunction among some men persists because they believe a single incident will necessarily apply to all physical encounters.
Basically, generalization occurs when someone applies a single rule to all situations that resemble the one in which the original rule was formulated. The context has been altered from “one” to “all,” from “sometimes” to “always.”
Understanding this mechanism gives us insight into much behavior that otherwise seems strange or even bizarre. If we recognize that the rule makes sense in the appropriate context, we can start to help people restore the behavior to the situation or situations in which it originated, or help to create new and more appropriate behaviors. Based on this NLP approach, we can say, at some level, that all behavior has positive intent.
Freedom can only start to come when we restore information to an impoverished map. Once we begin to explore how each individual reality is constructed, we open ourselves and others to a whole range of options and opportunities. Rather than trying to take away people’s discomfort or unwanted responses—to make people “not have” depression or anxiety or an eating disorder— we create new choices for them in the belief that, when they have more and better choices than before, they will make them on a more consistent basis.
Exercise: Identifying Your Sensory Preferences
You can do this exercise with a partner or by yourself. If you are alone, it helps greatly to speak out loud, possibly into a voice recorder so you can review your experiences later.
1 Imagine as clearly as you can a walk along a beach. It can be a beach you know or an entirely imaginary one. Your goal is to describe in as much detail as you can the experience, cycling through each of your five senses. First, describe everything you see—the color of the sky and the ocean, the seagulls in the air, the white foam flying into the air as waves crash against the black rocks, the colorful clothes of children playing in the sand, and so on. Then move to another sense—hearing, for example—and describe everything you can hear, from the sound of your feet on the beach to a ship’s horn in the distance. Continue until you have completed your description in all five senses.
2 Now, review your description and notice whether it was easier to make pictures, hear sounds, or feel sensations, such as the temperature of the air against the skin. Was it easy to imagine the smell of salt in the air, or the taste of a hot dog bought from an oceanfront stand? One of these senses will dominate. This is your sensory preference.
Note: Having a preference for one sensory modality does not mean you do not use the other senses, or that you use your preferred modality in all situations. We all tend to use all senses in processing information, but some are used to a greater or lesser degree.
The Gentle Art of Casting Spells
I USED THE TERM “INCANTATIONS” in The Structure of Magic I to describe the use of language in change-work for a very good reason. Words—as occultists, philosophers, psychologists, and writers know all too well—have magical effects. When I invite clients to “sit for a spell,” the ambiguity is deliberate. I want them to begin to be open to the possibility of change—and to the fact that the change may seem magical; often, it is.
One important aspect to helping people change is making sure they feel you understand their problem, then to move them as quickly as possible from their problem state to the solution you have prepared for them. Words are the primary means by which you can help create this kind of change.
Watching Virginia Satir work, I noticed that she tended to reflect her clients’ sensory predicates—those words and phrases that signify which of the five senses is dominant at the time of speaking.
Someone might say: “I just feel everything’s getting on top of me and I can’t move forward or back. I just don’t see a way through this.” She would reply: “I feel the weight of your problems is stopping you from finding your direction, and the best route you can take isn’t clear yet…”
She did this intuitively and achieved really close connections with her clients.
On the other hand, I often observed therapists who had no concept of the sensory preferences of their clients and just spoke the same way to everybody they met. In response to “I’m weighed down by all my problems,” a less enlightened therapist might respond, “Well, you need to listen to what I’m saying so you can see some light at the end of the tunnel.” These therapists were talking a different language from their clients, and their clients felt as if they were somehow not being listened to or understood.
Couples sometimes end up in trouble by not recognizing these differences. One person—the visual partner—might express love in the form of gifts and flowers, but the other—the auditory partner—still feels neglected because the words “I love you” are never actually spoken out loud.
Once you have successfully matched the other person’s preferred sensory system, you can begin to lead them in new directions, to increase their ability to process effectively and make enduring change. We do not want the subject to stay stuck in one processing mode; this lack of flexibility landed the person in trouble in the first place.
One of my objections to the Montessori method was just this. Originally, when a kinesthetic child was identified, he was taught only by kinesthetic methods. Likewise, visual children were taught only visually, and auditory children were taught strictly by auditory methods, thereby stunting their growth and possibilities. They were stuck on one channel, whereas real learning involves crossing into other sensory channels to optimize an