NLPhilia Blog

I always want to know when a victim of assault and/or battery is in my Emergency Department. It’s not unheard-of for an assailant to come to a hospital to try to finish the job they started. One night, a nurse called me about a woman whose live-in boyfriend had tried to run her over with his car. He’d missed, but had caught her arm with a side mirror or something.

I went to her room to chat with her, mostly to find out how likely she thought it was that he’d show. I try my best to appear “soft on the outside, hard on the inside” with victims of domestic violence because I never know what sort of generalizations they’ve made about men. I want them to know that I’m no threat to them, but that if the guy shows up, I’ll definitely be a threat to him. I found out what I needed to know, but I didn’t leave. She had the look about her of someone who wanted to talk. So I let her.

Before I go any further, you should probably see something. I got the following image from a Web page of the State’s Attorney’s Office in Harford County, Maryland. It’s a decent visual representation of the pattern that couples follow when they do the domestic violence thing.

Essentially, things get tense over a period of time, then he beats her up. After he beats her up, he starts to think about what might happen if someone finds out, so he treats her really nice for a while. Then the whole thing starts over.

Now, this definitely isn’t politically correct, but I’ve never been accused of such atrocities as political correctness, so here we go: much of the time, when someone is a victim of a crime, it’s likely that they have participated in some way in their own victimization. That is not to say that they wanted it or asked for it or that it’s their fault in any way; it’s only to say that something they did, whether or not they realized it, contributed in some way to the problem. Most people will correct those behaviors if someone cares enough to point out the problem to them, and we NLPers know that if we interrupt a pattern it’s far more likely that we’ll get a different result.

I’ve never known a woman to say, “I stay with him because he beats me.” (There may be such women but I’ve never met one.) Usually they tell me they’re staying because they “have to”. What I think is unfortunate is when a woman does get up the courage (and other resources) required to leave the bum and then goes and hooks up with another guy who treats her the same way. It’s a pattern, and one that cries out for interruption.

The lady to whom I was speaking told me what had happened that evening, and then she told me he said he was sorry and that she was going to go back.

My first reaction was visceral. I won’t tell you what I thought, because I want this to be a reasonably friendly blog, but I imagine you can guess. But then I thought, you know, she’s talking to me about it, so she probably wants feedback.

There are three things I’ve observed about women who are in this “battered” pattern:

• They isolate each incident of battering within its own little time capsule, and therefore never notice the pattern;
• They have two distinct aspects of their personality — we might call them “parts” if we were so inclined — and each of those “parts” deals with one of the spokes on the above-referenced image; and
• They don’t have “boundaries”, i.e., they allow most anyone to treat them like a doormat.

So I said to her, “He said he was sorry.” I pointed to a spot in the air right in front of her.

“Yes”, she responded.

“I’m curious. Isn’t that what he said last time?” I pointed to a spot a little to my right, her left, of the spot I had just pointed to.

It took her a second or two, but she remembered. “Yeah.”

“What about the time before that?”

“Yeah, then too.”

“And the time before that?”

With each question I’m pointing to a little spot on a horizontal line in the air in front of me, farther and farther to her left. I didn’t have to ask very many times before her face got grim and her jaw set tight. I let it sink in for a couple of heartbeats, looked off to her left, and asked, “Just how long has this been going on?”

A little angrily, she said, “…A long time.” Then, after another pause, a little quieter: “Too long.”

“You know,” I said, “I’ve noticed something about women in that situation. I’ve noticed that they talk to themselves differently depending on how the guy is treating them.”

She looked at me quizzically.

“When he’s hurting them,”, I say, holding my left hand palm-up, “they’re saying to themselves, ‘If only I’d had dinner on the table on time’ or ‘If only I hadn’t spent money on that new pair of shoes’ or whatever.” She nodded in recognition. “And when he’s saying he’s sorry,” I continued, holding my right hand palm-up, “they’re saying to themselves, ‘Oh, he’s sorry, he bought me flowers, he really loves me, he’ll never do it again.'” She nodded again in recognition. “So over here (shaking my left hand) they’re blaming themselves, and over here (shaking my right hand) they’re blaming him.” Again she agreed.

Bringing my hands together, I said, “I have no idea why these two so rarely get together and talk this thing out.”

She got quiet, as you can well imagine, and very still. I waited until I saw some signs of remembering where she was, told her I’d be around if she needed anything, and took my leave.

A few months later, I saw her again. This time, she was visiting someone who was a patient. She had to remind me who she was because I didn’t recognize her. She looked really different. Happy. At peace. I asked her how things were going.

“Good,” she said. “Really, really good.”

“How’s the guy who tried to run you over?”

“I have no idea. I haven’t talked to him since that night.”

I had to smile. She looked so incredibly good when she said that.

“Are you with anyone now?” I asked.

“Yep!” A little perk in her tone and her facial expression.

“How does he treat you?”

“Good. Really, really good. Like a queen. I’ll never again be with a guy who hurts me.”

I couldn’t have felt better.

The American Psychological Association has a relatively recent article on lying, and it has an interesting perspective:

As humans, we are as much defined by our economy with the truth as we are by our cooperation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, say psychologists. Lying is a cognitive signal that people understand what others are thinking, the important cognitive milestone known as theory of mind.

Read more at Monitor on Psychology – Liar, liar, neurons fire

I just updated WordPress, the software with which this blog is created and maintained. It appears to have gone well. If you see a problem, please let me know.

Psych Central News is finally helping the rest of the world catch up to a little something NLPers have known for bloody ages:

A NIMH-funded research study discovers a behavioral therapy program designed to treat children diagnosed with social phobia helped them overcome more of their symptoms than the antidepressant fluoxetine (Prozac). The study is published in the December 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Go to Psych Central and read more of Therapy More Effective than Medication for Kids with Social Phobia.

A couple of years ago, I was blessed with a fine opportunity. I got to watch a master manipulator work his magic. And since he was being observed by way of a digitally-recorded surveillance camera, I got to play it back in slow motion and really pick it apart.

The manipulator was a little boy, and his victim was his mother. The kid threw a fit when we told him we had to take a blood sample. When he became combative, even threatening the staff with a handy everyday item that most people — including the dipstick that was monitoring him — would not think of as a weapon, I had to get involved.

After we held the little guy down and got the blood we needed, we left the room; his mother remained to pet him and tell him what a good little boy he was. As I walked out of the room, I was thinking, “In a few years hell be too big for her to placate, and then hes going to hurt her… and badly.” I’ve seen it too many times… the little kid is in charge of the entire household.

Its my habit, when we have to “throw down” with a patient and it’s in front of a camera, to go back and review the recording. I get to critique myself and the rest of the staff, finding out what went well and what needs to change. As I was reviewing this one, something inspired me to keep watching, and then to slow the playback waaay down. I got it down to about one-tenth normal speed and watched the kid jerk his mother around like a marionette.

He’s lying on his back on the stretcher, and she bends over him to hug him. He grabs her shirt sleeves in his hands and pulls her toward him… and at the same time, he’s pushing her away with his knees and shins. When she finally responds to the push by standing upright, he reaches at her with his arms, but makes tiny “shoo” motions with his hands, and he allows his legs to fall, open, to the bed.

She once again bends down to hug him, and he puts his arms straight up on either side of her head. She can feel his arms on the sides of her head and neck, but not the back of her neck and her shoulders. This is a rejection, so she again rights herself, and he reaches up to her face with both hands. He barely strokes her hair and then pushes her head back and away. When she stands all the way up, he beckons to her again, and when she does not immediately respond, he falls limp to the stretcher… poor, helpless, defenseless one.

She bites at this hook, and as she bends to hug him, he reaches up toward her, but just before it becomes an embrace, he falls limp again. With her holding on to him, though, this time it is not a come-on; its a put-off.

Back and forth, back and forth, double-bind, bait-and-switch.

All this took place within, perhaps, five or six seconds time. Much of it I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t slowed down the recording.

One of the most important economic lessons I learned in college was that of the law of supply and demand. The professor used porn as a great example. During a lecture on business ethics, she posed questions to the class: Should it be legal? Is it ethical to produce it? Opinions varied widely, but she closed the discussion with, “If there were no demand, there would be no supply.”

That law (among others) figures in to the world’s oldest profession, too. Why does she sell her body? Well, because people buy it, that’s why.

Now there’s a brothel in Prague that’s combined the two and leveraged modern technology to meat the kneads (sorry, I had to do it) of both markets at the same time:

…Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

OK, OK… free sex in Prague. Are you wondering what this has to do with us in the context of NLP? Not a whole lot, but one thing caught my attention:

Visitors to Big Sister start at the electronic menu, which provides each woman’s age, height, working name and the languages she speaks.

The cops in my area tell me that most of the Johns around here only want to know how much she costs and if she still has most of her teeth. The guys in Prague actually sort hookers based on the languages they speak.

Here’s some cool research on subliminals:

Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.

However, some subliminal messages may have an opposite effect than expected. For example, exposing people to a subliminal image of a national flag moderates rather than intensifies their political attitudes.

Go check out the rest of The Influence of Subliminal Messages at Psych Central News.

Someone at work found this fun graphic, which is a demonstration of a phenomenon discovered by Ridley Stroop several decades ago:

The University of Washington has an interactive demo of the Stroop Effect which will show you your difference in mental processing time. I didn’t find it that difficult, but there was almost eight seconds’ difference between the first and second sets.

Psych Central News writes about some interesting research showing a link between being depressed and a lack of olfactory sensitivity:

Can’t smell the roses? Maybe you’re depressed, say researchers from Tel Aviv University. Scientists recently linked depression to a biological mechanism that affects the olfactory glands.

It might explain why some women, without realizing it, wear too much perfume.

I used to know a woman who was rather severely depressed (she had good reason!) and she’d leave a scent trail one could follow for several minutes. She used a lot of perfume. When someone mentioned it to her, she was surprised; she really had no idea.

I wonder how this might affect the way I approach people who tell me they want help with depression. Maybe I’ll make sure to add in some hallucinated “aromatherapy” during the session.

Randy Cassingham of This Is True fame blogs a great article on the real-world differences between experiencing something and knowing about something.

Well, no wonder I’ve struggled so long trying to figure it out and explain it; why I couldn’t explain it has perplexed me for some time. I think Dan is right: that’s impossible. All I know is that many Premium subscribers absolutely love it, and say things like Belinda did — it’s a life “essential” — or liked Daniel, who “savors” it. Or like Dan: he’ll read it for life (his or mine, I guess: whichever comes first!)

Read Randy’s Mystery Solved. And if you don’t already get his newsletters, start with This Is True, collections of strange-but-true stories like:

• A man sued his doctor because he survived his cancer longer than the doctor predicted.
• Two robbers were in the process of their crime when one changed his mind and arrested the other.
• A woman had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer when he died so he could still “help” in the kitchen.
• Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

(I’ve been a Premium subscriber for several years and have appreciated every issue.)