Teleclass Transcript Cloe Madanes & Mark Peysha
07/07/10
MP: All right. Welcome to the teleclass, everyone. Today we'll be talking about the Tahnee film and we are very excited about to be talking about some of the fundamental core principles of Strategic Intervention and this is exciting because in my opinion, this is the stuff that makes the biggest difference in the way that you approach a problem and communication as well as what you actually do to solve a problem or to overcome a challenge. In the next few minutes, we will be talking about the key principles laid out in the intervention, which are the concept of life stages, safe problems versus quality problems, the crazy eight, and the triad, and how these elements are interrelated, and then we will go into a mega-strategy that is not mentioned in the film but which is a huge part of the film and an enormous part of our work which is the pretend strategy. And at the end of the call, we’ll obviously have time for questions.
So let's start off with one of the crucial concepts to grasp, but this is the concept of life stages. In Strategic Intervention, we are always looking for solutions, which are the quickest, but also the most lasting, the most holistic solutions that you can create. And there is a reason why Strategic Interventions that you get to see in the films aren’t the kind of changes where you know so on get to pump up and then they lose their fizzle and then things backslides again and you know they’re back where they started and that is because Strategic Intervention is based on not only the making changes that last but continue to develop and grow to the point that they affect other people who weren’t even in the intervention and the reason is that our solutions guide people in the direction of growth and contribution. Growth and contribution are the laws of the universe. You either are growing or you’re starting to die and you either are contributing to others and you have to contribute to others in order to be part of a healthy relationship and ecosystem. And that’s on the level of nature as well as on the level of society. So, most solutions are in essence solutions that get people to grow to another level of awareness, development, or skill. The people who experience a Strategic Intervention don’t backslide for that reason, because they have grown to another level of being a person and to another level of mastery over a skill and another level of problem solving or another level of relationship. And the change always becomes part of a growth pattern which continues and therefore is reinforced.
Now, the concept of life stages is that our lives are made up of a sequence of stages. You can also think of them as kind of juncture points or transition points to different levels of development and one of the easiest examples to understand is the transition that young people have from living with their parents at home and going to school and then suddenly they move out, live or start living on their own and they take a direction in their careers. So that’s a huge, obviously huge rite of passage. It is one of the biggest leaps that people ever take in our culture and it is a huge change and it is a scary change. It involves letting go of things that are certain and tested that have your entire life and then suddenly trying things that you never tried before. It is also one of the times of greatest opportunity and risk in life. The years between ages sixteen and twenty-four really tend to influence your life for the next twenty years. Life stages involve major transitions and in our calculation there are usually three to four major priorities involved in any life stage. So basically, for instance, with young people, if they’re leaving home, the priorities are: 1: to leave home in a good way and disentangle from their parents while creating new relationships with peers. The second priority would be to venture into work and get some basic independence skills living on your own, and 3: to set on a forward thinking path such as finding a career or finding a mentor or a form of education or a relationship or all of those.
If a young person is tackling these three big-ticket items then they are really doing pretty well in their life stage. The other problems kind of come and go, we always have challenges but those are details in terms of the life stage. Often when someone is having some major problems, what you will find is that they are having trouble making the transition from one life stage to another. The reason that life stages are so useful and important to an interventionist is that if you understand the stage that someone is going through, you quickly understand the most important issues and obstacles they are facing, the biggest questions they are stumped with, the biggest uncertainties and dilemmas that they have and it becomes very clear to you what the person needs in order to move forward.
So in the film, when Tahnee stood up, and said that she was depressed, then Tony took her through a process of understanding her triad, her needs, her crazy eight, and he came to focus on her relationship problems, which were her fears of commitment and the other worries that she had about the dilemmas in relation to her relationship. The reason that Tony came to work on those problems instead of other problems and to guide her on relationship issues and trusting men was that he saw that whatever emotional problems Tahnee was going through, it was she needed to make the transition and growth to the next phase of life, which for her was to have a committed relationship. If she didn’t make that transition, she’d be stuck in this kind of fearful depressed state. And so, by the way, it doesn’t mean that everyone has got ten life stages. We don’t mean that everyone has to get married at twenty-five or have kids and then they live, you know, that kind of thing. You’d have to determine whatever path you need for your life, but whatever that path is, you do need to grow and contribute. That is part of your path. So, when people are moving forward in their life stages, you know these stages actually do require a lot of effort and focus because it’s truly self-development. You’re stretching yourself. It is getting your brain and your body and your emotional skills to another level. For instance, from being an eighteen-year-old living at home in high school, senior high school, to being a twenty-two and a committed couple, living in your own apartment and working, that is a huge change.
So, in the difficulty of making this transition, people often develop fears or obstacles or they get stuck in a dilemma of how to move forward. In Tahnee’s case, she had been betrayed by a boyfriend in the past who was untrustworthy and she was unwilling to take a risk of giving her current boyfriend her full commitment. And when people get stuck, they develop what we call “safe problems.”
Let’s talk about the differences between a safe problem and a quality problem. A quality problem is related to your advancement or your development. So for instance, how to move out of your parents’ house is a quality problem. What career direction to take is a quality problem. How do I move to the next level of my relationship and get married or whatever it should be – that’s a quality problem. The problem is that quality problems are scary and they feel unfamiliar. You’re moving into unfamiliar territory. They require a great deal of self-confidence and momentum to tackle them. And a safe problem, on the other hand, is a problem, behavior, or pattern that may be holding someone back, but which is strictly speaking is under the person’s control. So safe problems involve emotional management issues like anxiety, fear, unfamiliarity, depression, disappointment, and basically they involve not having the confidence to take the risks or not having a vision to move forward, or not wanting to move forward because you don’t know how you’re going to do it or even having a vision but not being able to take action.
CM: Yes, and the crazy eight can actually be seen as a safe problem because for example was Tahnee when she alternates between anger and sadness or anger and depression, those are very familiar emotions to her. She’s been doing them for years so she knows that she will go from one to another and it is familiar, it is comfortable, it feels like it is just like her, but actually, for those of you who are listening and are therapists, this is the kind of patient in therapy that is a nightmare and that is one of the reasons that I like to show Tahnee because she is the kind of patient that therapists are very familiar with. As a therapist, they are able to move the person, usually most therapists from sadness to anger, and then the therapist is surprised when they move back from anger to sadness and it seems like that the therapist is fluctuating between the two emotions together with the patient and neither of them seem to be able to get unstuck. So in a sense, even though this patient is a nightmare because they just alternate from one emotion to another and don’t get better, it is very good financially for therapists because they can support the therapist for a long time. Here you have the difficult person like this very often it is a woman who is going through the crazy eight, she is working, she is intelligent, she is attractive, she is verbal, and she doesn’t solve her problem, so she will stay in therapy forever. But of course Tony is just masterful at dealing with a person like this very quickly unstuck from this pattern of alternating between the emotions.
So one other thing that I want to say in relation to the life stages is in terms of a mega-strategy. Often the goal of the Strategic Intervention or the goal of coaching is to move the person, to help the person move from one life stage to another. And so often you know that when a person consults with you, you can see immediately that they are stuck in one stage and they need to move to the next so you know exactly what you have to do. You have to help them to move to the next stage in their life development. So even when people present something else as a problem, often the real problem is that they are stuck in one stage of their life.
Another thing that I wanted to add here about the life stages and the importance of this age group from about age of sixteen to twenty-four, more or less, is that it is usually the time when the young person begins to realize that ultimately as they grow stronger and older, the parents will grow weaker and ultimately they will have to take care of the parents and this is a huge transition. Human beings are practically the only creature that actually takes care of their parents. The only exceptions in the animal kingdom that I’m familiar with are the penguins and the storks. Penguins and storks actually feed older animals as they get old and cannot hunt for themselves. They would actually put food in their mouths. The penguins will actually dive in the water and grab a fish and give it to the older penguins and they are interesting to watch. But these are the only two exceptions. So for human beings, this is what we normally do and it is a huge transition from being taken care of by one’s parents to taking care of one’s parents. It is at this age the older adolescent or the young adult when there is the first inkling that ultimately this is what is going to happen because this is a stage when young people become taller than the parent, more competent than the parent in many ways, they are learning things in school that the parents never learned and they know how to do things that the parents will never know. As their intelligence and their competence grows the most acute during this stage, this is often when the parents begin to decline and when they can envision that they will go into old age. So this is huge in terms of the parents being able to help the young person instead of getting them stuck at this stage. That is why it is so important for the parent to encourage the greater competence of the young person, even to the point of asking the young person for help. And by help I don’t mean doing the dishes or taking out the garbage. I mean real advice, real help in learning something new, in advising the parent of something about their life that is why I often think that the children of the most competent parents, the most successful parents, are often the most messed up, the most conflicted, the ones that have the most problems, because it is so hard to have a parent that is totally competent and never needs anything. So it is important for parents to need something from the young person and of course, this is represented in art in a better way than anybody could describe.
There’s a film that is one of my favorite films and I used to teach from and I used to show the last scene in the film to my audience. The film is East of Eden and it’s based on a novel by John Steinbeck. The main actors are James Dean and Julie Harris. I used to teach from this to show, to illustrate the difficulties of the adolescent dilemma. So, the story, and I’ll tell it to you briefly is that there is a man who has farm and he has two sons and apparently, he was married to a “bad woman” that left. It was not clear in the film whether she is a drug addict or a prostitute or what but she abandons the family so the man raises the two sons by himself and one son is the “good son,” the favorite of the father and he’s the one that helps the father with the farm and does everything right. The other son is James Dean, who seems to never be able to do anything right. Somehow everything he does turns out badly and no matter how he tries to help the father, he doesn’t seem to be able to get across to him and he’s never appreciated or recognized. And so, at one point in time, the father gets very upset because James Dean has done something to contact the mother, and so the older son gets upset and runs away which affects the father and the father has a stroke.
And so, in the scene – it’s the crucial scene I think in the movie and is the one that I like to show – the father is lying in bed with a stroke and he appears to be dying. He doesn’t seem to be conscious. A nurse comes into the room and she behaves in a very annoying way, she makes a lot of noise, she talks about how she needs coffee and where can she find coffee, she’s chattering away, and then she leaves. And then Julie Harris, who plays James Dean’s girlfriend, comes into the room and she stands next to the bed of the father, who doesn’t show any signs of seeing her or hearing her but she says, “Please, please, you have to help your son. Have him help you. Show him that you need him. Please, have him do something for you otherwise he will never grow to become an adult. Please let him help you.” And the father doesn’t move, doesn’t show any sign that he heard, and she leaves the room. Then James Dean comes in and stands awkwardly by the door and the father moves a finger signaling him to come closer to the bed. So James Dean bends down very close to the father’s face and the father says, “That woman, the nurse, I can’t stand her. Get rid of her. You, help me.” And so the film ends with James Dean pulling up the chair, and sitting next to the father as the camera moves out and it is the end of the film while he’s sitting there ready to help the father. So this is an extraordinary dramatization of the young person’s need to make that transition where they are the competent one.
So, I remember one time that Mark and I were visiting at Tony’s house and Tony said to us, “You won’t believe what I did the whole day yesterday! I spent hours with Jairek teaching me how to do a photo slide show on the computer,” and he showed us the show. It was great. But Tony said, “I never find to have time to do this, but I just wanted Jairek to teach me.” So it is the same concept. It was very moving to me that Tony was sensitive to the idea of having his son teach him something.
MP: Yes, definitely. You know that is so powerful also it is the way for the young person to move into growth and contribution in terms of their needs in relation to the parents. It helps reconcile when teenagers are so critical of their parents in adolescence that they’re finding all of their faults and all the things they do differently went wrong. So this is the way that they move to being able to understand their parents’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. In this case it is understanding that have to pitch in, that they help. They are becoming stronger. They are becoming sharper and they can take that position of being a helper.
CM: Exactly.
MP: So, I’d like to add something about the crazy eight. It is very important in terms of understanding it. In my view, when someone is stuck in their development and they develop a dilemma or an obstacle or a fear that is stopping them from moving on, that blockage attracts a lot of psychic emotional energy where they are basically stuck on it. They are fulminating, they are thinking about wanting to get through it, they are reacting to it, and in my opinion that is where the crazy eight develops. You have someone like Tahnee, for instance, who was betrayed by her boyfriend, and she didn’t know if she could trust men. The crazy orders developed around that issue of commitment. So it’s, “I can’t do it, I can’t trust him,” and then goes into self-pity and doubt. And then it is the anger, aggression and so that uncertainty, the vacillation around usually I think it’s something that hasn’t been resolved. That is the crazy eight.
So Tony teaches them with the crazy eight there are two ways that people resolve it. One way you can picture yourself as an arrow going downward, which is when people try to self-medicate just to manage the emotions of the crazy eight. So, that is for instance your food or alcohol or anything that basically changes your state to get out of it. And then, so the crazy eight has two loops on it, you picture it that way, one of them has got to with more anger and frustration and being active, and wanting to get things done, wanting to do something, be vigilant, check things out, be forceful, be a warrior. And then this flips over to the other loop, which is self-pity, more relaxed, looser, more disappointed, letting go, you know grieving. So people often take the low road to dealing with the crazy eight, which could be eating, drinking, taking a risk type activity which completely changes your state and that’s like the low road. The upper road is actually to resolve that problem and to move to the next stage, to resolve that dilemma.
So when you observe the crazy eight in yourself or in someone else where you are starting to go back and forth about something, you have to just think that there is an unanswered question, there is a doubt here, there is a hesitation in you or in the other person that is preventing them from actually moving on to the next stage, and that is where you want to focus.
CM: Exactly. Mark, let’s describe the triad a little bit.
MP: Yeah, great. So, if you remember, the triad is made up of three things: your physiology, your focus, and your language patterns and the combination of these three account for your emotional experience. The triad is really an intervention tool. It is a way of breaking down big problems in a way that makes it very clear what is in your control and what is not. So, Tahnee has a safe problem of not being able to stop crying lately in her word, beating herself up about her life, getting tense and then going through the crazy eight about the prospect of being in a committed relationship, and then getting depressed and using her depression to get things to be done her way in her relationships. And when everyone is possessed by a pattern of stopping them, the triad is a good way to break up that quality problem into component pieces. So in Tahnee’s case, Tony pointed out that in order for her to feel depressed, Tahnee actually needs to put herself in a certain physiology, assume a certain focus, and certain language patterns.
CM: And it is not just language but the meaning that is given to the language.
MP: Yes, and how she communicates it. So the key is that Tahnee does not dispute the three parts of the triad are within her conscious control. There are people who will actually dispute that. Through the demonstration that Tony takes her through, she gets that it is impossible to be depressed without consciously and deliberately assuming the triad of depression. So when Tahnee recognizes the conscious, deliberate parts of her depression, the question then is why does she put herself into depression? And the answer is because the depression is meeting her needs.
Tony then guided Tahnee to be deliberate about how she managed her triad and how he found another example for her and you know, in this case he picked up that he used a transformational metaphor here. Tahnee had said that she had been putting herself in depression and saying that she can’t put her past behind her and Tony basically had her take a very pleasurable experience from her past, which was a sexual feeling of pleasure, and he put that sensation of pleasure right in front of her. He basically instructed her on how to manage her triad so that she could deliberately give herself pleasure rather than pain and thus meet her needs. So that is the power of the triad.
CM: Yes, and the crucial part of the intervention is when Tony helps her to realize that if she can change her state in a few seconds from a state of total depression, she said she was like an eight on depression, to a state of happiness and euphoria, if she can do that for a few seconds it means that she can do that always, so it is always under her control. This is so important to point out to the people you are working with, to point out to them that when they can change their state, even if it is just for a few seconds or couple of minutes, it means that they can always change their state. Their state is under their control. This is a fundamental principle of Strategic Intervention. Other approaches believe that people are sort of driven by their state, by their emotions, by their physiology. We don’t believe that. We believe that it is all under your control and you can change it and we demonstrate that you can change it. That is why Tony loves to make this kind of intervention. It is such a dramatic demonstration of change in a few seconds.
MP: Exactly. You know if you think of the three illness of the triad – physiology, focus and language –each of those are individually conscious and deliberate and under your control and that makes clear to the person, okay, so what else is there that isn’t under your control? Those three are under your control. What is not under your control and you break down the safe problem, which is usually – you know the truth is that behind these safe problem is usually a crisis of confidence and a problem of managing your state, and then the person once he realized the parts of himself that they have deliberate conscious control and how that conscious control is related to the state that is supposedly unconscious then it takes them in a position of empowerment where they realize, you know, “Yeah, I’m doing this thing.”
So in Tahnee’s case, Tony seemed pretty confident that Tahnee knew how to proceed next. So in the actual intervention, he didn’t take her through the quality problem and the life stage that was ahead of her. He attacked straight and so forth but you know, whenever anyone is guided into a new development or stage, there is a lot of fears and timidity, and so by breaking through, she was able to address the real problems and the real quality challenge that she had ahead of her that is why she broke through it makes so many changes.
Now, Cloe has a very powerful strategy called the Pretend Strategy and Tony actually uses the pretend strategy in this film as well. This Pretend Strategy gets people to that point where they are able to rehearse and put themselves in a position of solving problems.
CM: Yes. But I want to say to add one more thing about the Tahnee film that really struck me. It is at the end, in the follow up, when Tahnee says to Tony about her marriage being so happy, she says, “I make everyday a party.” It shows, that statement shows, that she totally was able to take control of herself and of the relationship, so she had a very happy marriage. Now Tahnee has a baby and she continues to be very happy with her marriage and with the baby. So what happens is if you help someone to navigate a difficult stage like the leaving home stage and to be able to create a couple and a career and so on, then you increase enormously the chances that they will be able to navigate the next stage happily, and that’s what Tahnee did. She not only was able to have a great relationship with her boyfriend who became her husband, but they were both very successful in business, they had their baby and were parenting successfully.
MP: Yes, so they sort of not, they got it sink and they sort of navigating the life stages in a great conscious and deliberate way and therefore they were able to jump into parenthood without any further marital crisis.
CM: Yes. So a different technique that I use that sounds a bit complicated but is really quite simple is the Pretend Strategy. The idea is that if you are pretending a behavior, then you are not really experiencing that behavior. So, if you are pretending to be depressed, you can’t really be depressed because you are pretending. If you are pretending to have a headache, you can’t really have a headache. You are pretending the headache. It is very interesting because some people really need to have an experience in order to use that experience in a relationship and other people can just lie about it. For example, some wives who don’t want to have sex actually bring on a headache so that they can say, “Not tonight dear, I have a headache.” Other wives just say, “I have a headache,” when they don’t actually. They don’t really need to have the real headache, it’s just an excuse. So it is very interesting how you can play with metaphors that attribute focus and also meaning to a physiological state.
So let me explain what the pretend strategy is. Let’s say for example that you have a child who has bad stomachaches that don’t seem to have a medical cause and where the parents are worried and all over the child because of the stomach aches, so the child gets a lot of benefits from having stomachaches, a lot of positive attention from the family, from the parents. This positive attention is what Freud called the secondary gain of the symptom, the stomach ache being the symptom and the primary gain being, according to Freud, to express something that was repressed. The secondary gain, according to Freud, is the gain of the attention that the child gets because of the symptom.
In Strategic Intervention, what Freud called the secondary gain, we’ll consider to be the primary gain. When the child has a stomachache and gets a lot of attention, that is what the child gains. That is the primary benefit of the symptoms. One thing that I like to do is to ask a child in front of the parents to pretend to have a stomachache. So he is to hold his stomach and say, “My tummy hurts,” or something like that. The beauty of this is that even when you have a shy child that doesn’t really want to pretend, you can behave as if they did. So you say, “Oh, by the expression on your face I can tell that you are pretending to have a stomachache. That is really good. You’re a good actor.” So then the next step is that you ask the parents to hold the child, to comfort him, to do all the things that they do for the real stomachaches, but to do them for the pretend stomachache. Then you direct them to do this at home. For example, you might say, everyday, first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, or perhaps even also when the child comes home from school, they are all to do this little scene. The family gathers together. The child pretends to have a stomachache. The parents comfort the child. And so what happens is that the pretend stomachaches replace the real stomachaches. The real stomachaches are no longer necessary because they have been replaced by the pretend stomachaches. So the child gets the same gain from pretending that he did from the real stomachaches.
So in many ways, this is similar to what Tony did with Tahnee in the sense of changing the state and it is a variation that is difficult to resist because you define any behavior on the part of the child as the pretending. But I have done this with a whole age range. For example, in one case I had a sixty-year-old man who was depressed and the beginning of his depression coincided with his children leaving home when the wife went back to school and she had become actually a marriage and family therapist. And then the husband became depressed and he became like her patient. So, at a time when they were finding that they didn’t have that much in common, their interaction was not that great. She had a new career, all of a sudden they were united as therapist and patient, so she was very concerned about her husband’s depression and constantly asking him how he was feeling and trying to help him. The husband was an accountant who, because of the depression, had totally neglected his work to the point of not taking care of his clients and not even doing his own taxes, so this worried the wife very much. So we asked the husband to pretend to be depressed and to do it in such a way that the wife would not know whether he was really depressed or just pretending to be depressed. So this of course, changed the whole interaction. She became annoyed and irritated because she didn’t like the idea of not knowing whether he was really depressed or just pretending. So this lead her to take a much stronger stance and actually demand that the husband do his work, otherwise she said she would do their taxes herself, which would mean a huge financial loss for the family. So, he came out of his depression and got to do his work.
So there are many variations, many different ways that you can do this. Another way that you can use this is that you can have people in the family change roles. So, for example is if you have an adult child who is depressed, you can ask him to exchange roles for the father and for the father to be depressed instead of the child so the child has some time to do something else in his life.
MP: Wow! So that is a way to shift the roles between them. So, just to back up there is a couple of concrete ways that you can use this then. One is the way that Tony used, which is to have someone deliberately act out something that they have seen as being out of their control and then together you study how it is done and you model it and then it implicitly puts it under the person’s control. This is kind of the triad. If you do a triad analysis of any behavior, you’ll find there are three components which are deliberate and therefore it is a behavior that can be modified, the meaning of it can be changed and you can point out that the ingredients of the uncontrollable behavior are actually totally controllable. Now, what you are talking about it is using it in a relationship where you have got two different people and you are asking someone to make the so-called symptom or uncontrolled behavior a pretend behavior. And does that take away some of the danger like in the example you talked about, the wife was buying into the depression and treating him very gently and letting him have the upper hand and so if he was next to a pretend then she perceived it that way.
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