Jo: No, but it changed. It changed,
It doesn't matter at all.
Jo: It doesn't matter to me what you said, or how you said it, or whether you knew what I was talking about. Something that you said just changed it. Somehow I don't feel like I'm going to have to confront any more.
Boy, have you got a surprise coming.
Jo: Well, I mean not confront anymore about the kind of thing I've been talking about.
Oh, there are other things that you confront about. Well, you could just do it randomly! That's what I do. Then you don't have to worry about whether it works or not.
Jo: Well, if I get overcharged for something, or get poor service or something, I'd confront.
Is that a way to continue to get good service in a restaurant?
Jo: It's a good way to get good service a lot of places.
Let me ask you another question. I'm not really picking on you. You're just a good focal point to get other people unconsciously. Did it ever occur to you to make people in a restaurant feel so good, before they served you, that they'd have no alternative but to give you good service . . . ?
Jo: I don't understand. . . . Somehow I lost that somewhere.
It always amazes me that people go to a restaurant to have a human being wait on them, and then don't treat him like one. Having been a waiter, I can tell you that most of the people who go to a restaurant treat you very strangely. There are a few people who come in and make you feel good, and that compels you to spend more time near them — regardless of whether they tip more or less. There is something about being around somebody who is nice to you that's more attractive than being around somebody who isn't nice — or who isn't even acknowledging that you exist.
Have any of you pretended with a child that he doesn't exist? Most kids will freak. Imagine being a waiter and having a room full of people doing that to you. Then someone treats you like you're not a machine, but a human being, and makes you feel good. Who would you hang around with more? One way to get good service in a restaurant is to treat the waiter well first, so as to make him want to treat you well.
The other alternative is to coerce him and make him feel bad enough to give you what you wanted, and expected to get without having to go through all the trouble of being nasty about it. If you do that, not only do you have to pay your bill, but you have to taint your own experience as well. Most people never think about that. Why should they go to a restaurant and be nice to a waiter? They should get good service automatically.
People often think of marriage in that way, too. "You should have known that." "I shouldn't have to tell him; he should do it automatically." And if he doesn't, that means it's time to get angry, intense, and force him to do it. And even when you win, what do you win? High self–esteem?
Man: An opportunity for your spouse to get even.
I've had a lot of people do that to me. I decided to take it up, and deliberately start getting even ahead of time! How many people have to get "even" when you do something nice to them? I'm not asking about whether you are nasty or nice; that's Santa's job. The question I'm asking you is, "Have you ever considered being considerate ahead of time?"
Woman: Yes, my strategy for a restaurant is to ask the waitress what she suggests is the best on the menu, and she'll pick out a selection. I look at that and suggest that she could make sure that it's fine, and the steak's not too small. I also ask her name, and talk to her by name.
So, yes, you've considered being nice, and actually attempted it. Like everything else in the world, it doesn't always work. But how many of you never even considered it when things weren't going well, or before things weren't going well? Why would a waiter go all the way down to a restaurant every night to give someone bad service, when they make their living by tips? Did you ever stop and consider that, Jo?
Jo: Yes, I did.
And you confronted them?
Jo: Well, I considered it, but I wasn't able to be as pleasant as I thought I should be. I wasn't able to be very agreeable when I was really disgusted. I wasn't able to change how I acted.
"She should have done it first anyway," right? Then you wouldn't have had to be disgusted, and had difficulty changing that.
Jo: Well, that's the way it seemed then. It seems very different now.
Now let's back up to the beginning. When we first started talking, Jo wanted to be more competent at being unpleasant. If you really heard what she was saying, it was, "I want to be able to stand up for myself and grumble and gripe more thoroughly." Nobody in the room heard her say that when she first talked. If they had heard it, they would have tried to teach her how to be more nasty. Think what an "assertiveness" trainer would have done with that! I have a new name for assertiveness training. I call it "loneliness preparation."
In contrast, I ask questions to learn how to have someone else's limitations. If I can learn how it works, then I can change it any way I want, and it will still work, but differently. You can't make a valid judgement about a process unless you know what it is, and you can't realty know what it is unless you try it.
So I thought, "OK, Jo can't grumble and gripe. Where is it that she can't, because I want to learn how to not do it there?" I started asking her questions: "When do you do it?" "What is its purpose?" "Who do you do it with?" My questions go backwards in time. Starting with the problem, I backed up the process she goes through. When I backed her up far enough, she got to the place before she grumbled and griped, and before she even felt any inclination to do it. That is the place where she can go around it. If she takes the next step, the "problem" starts happening. But if she steps over to the side, she can go somewhere else that she likes better.
Jo goes into a restaurant, sits down, gets bad service, feels horrible, confronts the waitress, gets good service later and still feels bad. I asked, "Did it ever occur to you when you go into a restaurant and discover who your waitress is, to make her feel good?" She said, "I can't do that after I feel bad," and she's probably right. OK, why not do it right away all the time whenever you go into a restaurant, so you never get a chance to feet bad? That question directs her attention to an earlier time, when it's easy to do something different, and it also gives her something very specific to do differently.
Here's one you've all done. You come home feeling realty good. As you walk in the front door you see the living room is a mess, or someone forgot to take out the garbage, or you see that something else equally absolutely essential to your happiness is awry. You get angry inside, and frustrated; you suppress it and try to not feel angry and frustrated, but it doesn't work. So you go into therapy and you say, "I don't want to yell at my wife." "Why do you yell at your wife?" "Because I get frustrated and angry." Most clinicians will say, "Let it all out; express yourself; yell and scream at your wife." And to the wife they'll say, "Isn't it all right if he yells and screams at you? Can't you let him be himself?" You do your thing, and he'll do his ... separately. That's nuts,
What most clinicians don't think about is that when he walks in the door and sees that mess, he first manages to get to the state where he's angry and frustrated, and then he tries to stop himself from getting angry and frustrated. The other thing they forget is what he's frying to accomplish by stopping himself from yelling at her in the first place: he's trying to get things to be pleasant. Well, why not go for it directly? Why not have the front door send him off into such pleasant thoughts about what he can do with his wife that he goes through the living room too fast to care about noticing anything else!
Whenever I say, "How about doing something before you feel so bad?" the client always looks stunned. It doesn't occur to him to back up. He always thinks that the only way he can make himself happy is to do what he wants exactly at the moment that he wants it. Is that the only way? It must be. The universe doesn't go backwards. Time won't go backwards. Light won't go backwards. But your mind can go backwards.
Typically clients will either not understand what I said at all, or will say, "I can't just do that!" It sounds too easy. So I found out I had to make them do it. They couldn't back up themselves, because they couldn't stop going where they were going. So I learned to ask them questions that would force them to go backwards, Often they fight me tooth and nail. They'll try to answer one question, and I insist that they answer another one to back them up another step.
When I get to the right point with a client, I ask a question that moves sideways and forward, and he goes forward again in the new direction. After that he can't stop going in the new direction. He's as stuck that way as the other, but he doesn't care because he likes being stuck that way. It works just like a spring: you compress it, and when you pull the lever over and release it, it flicks forward again.
As soon as someone finds one of those places, he says, "Oh, I've changed. Let's go on now." It's so nonchalant. "How do you know you've changed?" "I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's different now." But Jo is still propelling forward on the new path. I've been testing her repeatedly. And she can't get back there to the other one now because it's too late.
I do this simply by presupposing that what is getting in her way is worth having, and all I need to do is find out where to use it. So, I take the behavior Jo is uncomfortable about — confronting — and take that back to before she even thinks about confronting. The same forces that used to drive her to confront and be uncomfortable about it will now compel her into another behavior.
What we have explored here with Jo is a common pattern in marriage. You want something from him, but he doesn't give it to you. So you feel bad. Then you tell him how bad you feel, hoping he'll be concerned enough to give it to you.
There are times when you don't get what you want from someone else. But when you don't get what you want, feeling bad is extra! Did you ever think of that? First you don't get what you want, and then you have to feel bad for a long time because you didn't get it. And then you have to feel bad to try to get it again. If you feel good, then you can just go back to that person and say, "Hey, you. Do you want to do this for me?" If you do that with a cheerful tone of voice, you're much more likely to get it, and without any future repercussions.
The greatest error of all is in thinking that the only way for you to feel good in certain situations is for someone else to behave in a certain way. "You must behave the way I want you to, so I can feel good, or I'm going to feel bad and stand around and make you feel bad too." When he is not there to behave in that way, then there's nobody to make you feel good. So you feel bad. When he comes back, you say, "You were not here to have these behaviors to make me feel good, so I want you to feel bad now. I want you to be here all the time. No more bowling; don't go away for the weekend and go fishing; don't go to college; don't go to seminars; be here all the time. I can go away because I have a good time when I do, but when I come home you have to be here to make me feel good. If you love me you will do what I want, because when you don't do it, I feel bad, because I love you." Bizarre, huh? But that's how it works. And in a way, it's true. You sit there by yourself and you do feel bad. "If that person were here doing this, I'd feel good. What the hell's the matter with him?" Of course, if he's there and he's not willing to do it, that's even worse! People seldom stop and say, "Hey, what's going to be important to someone else?" It's even rarer that someone asks himself, "What could I do that would make her want to do this for me?"
If you feel inside you that when you don't get a certain amount of time from him, at the specified moment, then it's time to feel bad . . . and if you measure that bad feeling and you visualize him and connect that bad feeling with his face, then when he comes back and you see his face, you get to feel bad when he is there! That is amazing! Not only do you get to feel bad when he is not there; you also get to feel bad when he comes back! That doesn't sound like fun, does it? It's not fair to you to live that way.
And if he feels guilty about being gone, and he pictures what it will be like to come back to you, he will connect the feeling of guilt to the sight of your face. Then when he comes back and sees you, he will feel guilty again, and he won't want to be there either. These are the meta–patterns of obligation. They are both based on one tremendous error: the idea that marriage is a personal debt.
If you ask people what they want, they usually talk about wanting what they don't have, rather than what they already do have. They tend to ignore and take for granted what they already have and enjoy, and only notice what is missing.
Married people don't usually feel lucky, the way they did when they first met. Imagine what it would be like if every time you see him you feel lucky. And if he isn't there at a time when you want him — because he is doing something you wish he wouldn't do, because you don't want to do it with him — you still feel lucky that your special person is there for you much of the time. And when he's doing something else, you feel lucky that's the only price you have to pay. That isn't a heavy cost, is it? If you can't have that, then personally, I don't think it's worth it.
One thing that has always amazed me is that people are seldom nasty to strangers. You really have to know and love someone before you can treat her like dirt and really make her feel bad about small things. Few people will yell at a stranger about important things like crumbs on the breakfast table, but if you love her, it's OK.
One family came in to see me and the husband was really nasty. He pointed to his wife and snarled, "She thinks a 14–year–old girl should stay out until 9:30 at night!"
I looked him straight in the eye and said, "And you think that a 14–year–old girl should learn that men yell and scream at their wives, and make them feel bad!"
It's an awful thing to get lost.
Often a family will bring in a teenage daughter because there is something wrong with her; she enjoys sex and they can't get her to stop doing it. Talk about an idealistic, overwhelming, outrageous task: to get somebody to go back to being a virgin! The parents want you to convince their daughter that sex is not really pleasant, and that it is dangerous, and that if she enjoys it, it's going to influence her in a way that will make her feel bad for the rest of her life! Some therapists actually attempt that task, . . . and some even succeed.
