Explaining the Refined Method
by Ron Kurtz
There’s a couple of basic things to understand. One is the difference between reporting your present experience and reporting on the basis of what you remember. If the doctor pokes you somewhere and
Explaining the Refined Method
by Ron Kurtz
There’s a couple of basic things to understand. One is the difference between reporting your present experience and reporting on the basis of what you remember. If the doctor pokes you somewhere and asks, “What do you experience when I do this?”, he asking about present experience. If he asks, “How was your week?”, he’s asking for what you remember. The reports you give in those two cases can be thought of as representing two different selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self.
When you’re working with people, you want to know the truth about them. The clearest expression of that truth is in a person’s behavior. The person’s stories may not be all that accurate, but spontaneous behavior—reactions, habits and impulses—are true expressions of a person’s experiential self. Aristotle said, “You are what you habitually do.” Your habits are how you learned to interact with your environment. They operate automatically, without conscious thought. The express your beliefs about what kind of world you believe you’re in and who you are in that world. They limit and control what you can and cannot experience.
The riddle of experience vs. memory by Daniel Kahneman
So, if you want to understand someone, you’d do best by studying the person’s behavior. So, the essence of this method is this. The therapist will study the client’s behavior and make guesses about what kind of history might have created the need for that behavior, what kinds of beliefs make sense of that behavior, and finally, how might those beliefs limit and control what the client can and cannot experience.
Here’s a very simple example: There are people who have a habit of shrugging their shoulders a lot. An extreme example would include holding the arms close to the body, raising the forearms, and turning the palms upward. That’s a very common expression of, I’m not responsible. It says, It’s not my fault. I don’t know anything about it.
Suppose you ask someone, “How’d you like the movie?” Well, let’s say you ask the question in an email and they message back, “I liked it.” That would be quite different from asking them in person and them saying “I liked it.” But at the same time, shrugging their shoulders. The words say one thing and the shoulders are saying, “But not that much.” In the first case, you’re getting the story. In the second, you’re getting the experience.
Here’s another example: There are people who almost never look straight at you. They tilt their heads to one side or they turn it slightly away and they look at you from a slight angle. This is also a very common expression. It says, I don’t quite believe you. Or, I don’t quite trust you.
From habits like that, we can make some guesses about what environment made it useful and what kind of belief about self and world makes sense of it. And, most important, what kind of experiences does it create or prevent. For in the long run, we’re trying to help our clients have better, more nourishing experiences and fewer experiences that entail unnecessary suffering. We want to help our clients discover the beliefs that control their behavior and too change those beliefs where they do harm.
If you work this way with many different people over a number of years, you’ll build up a lot of experience with this kind of guessing and, as a result, you’ll become very good at understanding people. But, it’s not just guessing that does this, it’s what we do with our guesses that make this method unique. From the indicators we notice, we create “experiments’ that confirm or disconfirm our guesses. More about this later.
So, we have to “think backwards” about habits like these. What history makes sense of shrugging ones shoulders? If the person habitually has to express a need to minimize their responsibility, you can imagine a scenario where deflecting the blame was useful. Maybe there was a significant person who had a habit of trying to make the person feel guilty. (It happens!)
The method is based on the idea that the deepest beliefs—we call them core beliefs—are not usually conscious. They are implicit. They are implied by habitual behaviors. For the most part those behaviors were procedurally learned and have become generalized ways of being. A person’s habits tell us in this pantomimic way, what kind of world the person is imagining they’re living in.
The goal of working with someone is to enhance their well being and reduce their unnecessary suffering. Much suffering is the result of over-generalized core beliefs. The world is not the way the client is imagining it. For example: a person could be afraid of dogs. They have a core belief that all dogs are dangerous and can hurt you. Maybe they were bitten as a young child. That pers