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I myself have to plead guilty to spending more time with those callers I find most enjoyable to talk to, and mostly these are the ones I feel I can be most effective with. But every once in a while when I have an especially unpleasant caller on the line I have to remind myself that it is precisely these callers who need my love the most. To be able to help them, though, I have to be able to find something in them to love.

2

The same thing applies to being asked questions. We are much less likely to answer a question when we sense that the person asking it disapproves of us. We get the sense that our answer "will be taken down in writing and may later used as evidence against us."

In the frustration we as volunteers often feel with callers' persistence in refusing to take the simple steps that would clearly (at least to us it is clear!) make their lives better, we often feel compelled to find the caller wrong, to disapprove of him/her. In doing this, we are simply doing the same thing that everybody else in the caller's life does, and the response we get is what many psychotherapists call "resistance." Resistance, in this case, means simply that the caller is not about to let someone else change her into the sort of person they want her to be.

It takes much more finesse to be able to find the caller right, to approve of her, and yet at the same time to point out that a particular behavior is not very useful to her in being the sort of person she wants to be. Approving of the caller as a person does not mean one has to approve of every one of her actions. The distinction can be difficult, but is very powerful.

Matching the Caller's Criteria

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Sad though it may seem, our most cherished values and beliefs will have no impact on a person who does not share them. To be effective, we need to work from the caller's values, beliefs, and priorities. How can we discover these? Simple. All we have to do is listen to the caller and he will tell us. Often he won't even realize that he's giving information about himself because he assumes that everyone has these values.

"I don't want to ... because they'll think I'm stupid," gives you information that the caller values being thought well of by others. When you answer "What does it matter what people think?" you are responding out of your own value system, and all that you will accomplish is frustration on both sides. ("This person doesn't understand.")

"I don't want to just keep making the same mistake over and over again."  "I'd wind up spending my whole life in a dead-end job that would never get me anywhere."  "I'm afraid I'd make him angry/unhappy/discouraged/etc."  "I couldn't just abandon my own child, no matter what trouble he gets into."  "Don't people realize that that's rude?"  "She'd never trust me again if I did that."  "I can't just let them get away with it."  All these statements give information about the speakers' values.

It is not essential that you pretend to share the callers' beliefs and values. It is only essential that you acknowledge them, and use them to get leverage. You can say things like, "So you want to make enough money to be somebody that matters."  "But it would seem rather inconsiderate to ..."  "So as far as you're concerned, all women are cunts."  "The way to make a good impression would be ..."  Often the caller doesn't even realize that you haven't actually agreed with him.

Rapport

4

Rapport is different from trust, it is different from being understood. But it tends to foster both of these.

Over the phone, the only body language we have available for establishing rapport is voice tone and -- most especially -- tempo. These are extremely important. My voice tone and tempo when talking to someone in the military is very different from when I'm talking to caller X and this is very different from when I'm talking to caller Y. When Y was in really bad shape a couple years ago, I used to talk baby talk back to her (as my supervisor can testify!) and stutter a little bit myself. If you do this and it feels strained, then you are not in rapport. I managed to find that place within myself where it felt comfortable and natural to talk baby talk and stutter, where I wasn't even aware that I was doing it (until I caught the look on my supervisor's face while she was listening!)

Rapport has to do with the vocabulary you use, with your whole style of speech. It has to do with values, priorities, beliefs. It means being in the same world with your caller. It leads your caller to think, "This guy understands what I'm talking about. This guy knows what I'm about."

I hear new volunteers trying to do reflective listening. They've learned the words to use, but they haven't learned how to say them with rapport, or how to wait for the right moment to say them, and so they sound wooden and patronizing.

Rapport has to be mutual, or it's not rapport. If caller Z is shouting at me and I'm shouting back, this may or may not be rapport; if it is then a moment will come when I can naturally lower my volume and she will automatically follow my lead.

Giving callers The Answer doesn't work

5

I have to acknowledge, though, that there are times when rapport is not what you want (aside from those times when you're just trying to get rid of a caller). Some callers may respond well to an authoritarian attitude, or perhaps the attitude of an all-wise expert. For instance, when I visit my doctor what I want is not so much rapport as a sense that she knows what she is talking about. Behavioral therapists, at least in my observation, have no skills at rapport and still achieve some degree of success. As we know, Freud strongly discouraged rapport for psychoanalysis by sitting out of sight of his patients. (The psychoanalyst Mardi Horowitz has compared this to sensory deprivation.)

6

The discouraging truth is that telling other people what to do just doesn't work. Several rigorously conducted studies have shown, for instance, that all the popular forms of addiction treatment simply do not work: the control groups in these studies, who were given no therapy, showed markedly higher rates of recovery than the treated groups. The coping techniques used by the people in these control groups were undoubtedly fewer and cruder than those taught by the therapists, but they found these on their own. (I learned about this from Stanton Peele, who has written numerous books on addictions. I should point out, though, that he is considered anathema by most of the addiction-treatment establishment.) [1993 note: In fairness, I feel the need to refer to an opposing, and perhaps equally controversial, point of view on alcoholism. See Under The Influence by Dr. James R. Milam and Katherine Ketcham, Bantam Books 1981.]

I have to admit to personally finding the passivity of some of our more chronic chronics totally infuriating. Trying to get anywhere with them is like trying to push a bowl of jello, or run through a swamp, or reason with a goldfish. But step into their world for a moment. A world where they are committed to Kekela [a local psychiatric ward], then discharged, then to the State Hospital, then told to go to the Day Hospital, then to Vocational Rehabilitation, et-endless-cetera. How could somebody be pushed around this much and not be passive?

I want to give these chronics a good strong shove to force them not to be passive. But the contradiction involved in doing this is obvious.

Blame looks backwards, responsibility looks forwards

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I have to deal with what she wants, not what I think she should need. And what she wants is for someone to agree with her that she's right and her ex-husband is wrong. Or, more precisely, to be told that it's okay to feel the way she feels about it. And, on a deeper level, she needs me to help her feel that she's still worthwhile as a woman despite having been dumped for someone younger and prettier. It will take me about an hour to deal with all that, and then she will be satisfied and she may finally say, "I just wish I could stop thinking about it." If she does, then I can take her through the Swish Pattern.

Or we may not reach that point. It may be important to her to go on being miserable, and I will respect that. It's her choice, even though she may never acknowledge it as a choice.

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Many counselors and therapists have the objective of teaching people to be responsible for their own lives, but wind up instead teaching people to blame themselves. It's not the same thing, although to some the difference may be subtle. Blame looks backward, responsiblity looks forward.

To teach responsibility in one phone call is a bit ambitious, to say the least. With a depressed caller, I am satisfied if I can help her stop blaming herself. To do this, I will be on her side. Shocking as it may seem, I do not consider it my job to be supportive of my caller's psychiatrist, social worker, husband, or even the staff or volunteers here. She is my client and it is my job to be on her side.

Being on her side, however, does not necessarily mean that I am going to agree with every stupid unreasonable thing she says. It does mean acknowledging that her needs and feelings are just as legitimate as those of the other people in her life, and that ultimately she is entitled to make up her own mind even when her decision conflicts with what she is told by people who are supposed to be experts.

The Power of Asking Questions as an Intervention

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If a psychotherapist learns nothing else from going through a good NLP training (and admittedly not all of them are good), at least she can have first-hand experience that dramatic change need not be slow, and never needs to be painful. When someone says "Learning is always painful," one can immediately conclude certain things about the mechanisms this person uses to learn by. The most important thing such a person can learn is new, more efficient ways of learning.

11

A chronic caller once said to me, "If anyone else were to ask me the sort of questions you ask, I'd freeze up and my mind would go blank." Having thus been given the opportunity to teach her something more, I asked another question: "So what makes it different with me?" After a long pause, she said, "At least you have sense enough to keep your trap shut until I know what the answer is."

You can learn about using questions effectively by reading Plato's dialogues. However Socrates could never have got away with asking all the silly questions he did if he had not had rapport with his students.

Dealing with Anger

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I think the classical NLP approach for dealing with someone who is angry is what NLP calls "pacing and leading" --- if one gets in sync with the other person and matches their mood, then one can more easily lead them to another state.

Mostly I am not comfortable matching someone else's anger (probably because my own capability for anger scares me). I have seen others do it successfully, and of course there are lots of examples of this sort of scene in cinema and on television. I've sometimes done it with women, but I don't actually get angry but simply match their voice pattern (tone, loudness, cadence) in a way that gradually starts becoming an affectionate, flirtatious teasing until I can finally get the other person to laugh. In my experience, it takes a lot of sensitivity to know when this approach is going to work. I've had it backfire on me a number of times.

If I am going to make a meta-comment at all, I let my own voice have some of the caller's intensity and say something like "You must have been really pissed off when that happened." But more often my way of acknowledging a caller's anger is by saying something like "Well, that was a hell of an inconsiderate thing for them to do!" thus acknowledging that it was reasonable for the caller to have become angry.

The next thing step (of course!) is to be on the caller's side. When a caller is very angry is not the moment to suggest that they look at things more objectively or try to see the other person's point of view.

Then I look for the hurt that is behind the caller's anger and acknowledge that hurt. ("It must have felt terrible to be treated like that. What did you do?")

It seems that what I do next is to find ways of helping the caller feel in control. One main reason for anger (in the cases we deal with at least) seems to be a feeling of helplessness, of having no power in the situation. ("I didn't do anything. There was nothing I could do. I just stared at him and then walked away and sat in my office and cried for a while.")

And, after all, it doesn't make any sense to be angry about a situation if one is in control of it.

Finally, and most important, I realize that what is ultimately involved in the caller's hurt is self-esteem --- the event in question has made the caller feel worthless. And so I find ways of restoring that self-esteem.

Often an important part of this is helping the caller realize that the other person's actions are simply a reflection of that other person, not a reflection on the caller. For instance, someone might be angry at not being invited to a party. In my opinion, on some level the caller interprets this as meaning "I'm not worthy of being invited to parties." My objective is to change this so the caller interprets the other person's behavior as meaning that that person is a real bitch/ungrateful/ disloyal, whatever. (I'm on the caller's side and I'm shockingly willing to trash other people in the caller's life. The time for a more objective viewpoint is later. And, strangely enough, for some reason it often seems easier to forgive another person after one has been totally unrestrained in condemning them.)

Anger: Part 2