At first, this role seems like a relief, but after a few minutes of play, the terrible loneliness and purposelessness arise. If you can keep yourself moving fast enough, you won't notice it so much.

As practice for yourself, take the four physical stances I have described, hold them for just sixty seconds and see what happens to you. Since many people are unaccustomed to feeling their body reactions, you may find at first that you are so busy thinking you aren't feeling. Keep at it, and you will begin to have the internal feelings you've experienced so many times before. Then, the moment you are on your own two feet and are freely relaxed and able to move, you find your internal feeling changes.

It is my hunch that these ways of communicating are learned early in childhood. They represent the best the child can make out of what he sees and hears around him. As the child tries to make his way through the complicated and often-threatening world in which he finds himself, he uses one or another of these means of communicating. After enough use he can no longer distinguish his response from his feeling of worth or his personality.

Use of any of these four responses forges another ring in an individual's feeling of low self-worth or low pot [see Peoplemaking, by Virginia Satir]. Attitudes prevalent in our society also reinforce these ways of communicating — many of which are learned at our mother's knee.

"Don't impose; it's selfish to ask for things for yourself," reinforces placating.

"Don't let anyone put you down; don't be a coward," helps to reinforce blaming.

"Don't be so serious. Live it up! Who cares?" helps to reinforce distracting.

"Don't let anyone be smarter than you. Be smarter than everyone around you. Explain everything but don't experience it!" [helps to reinforce computing].

[Peoplemaking, Virginia Satir, pp. 63-72; Science and Behavior Books, 1972]

Finally, we would add to Satir's excellent description of each of these communication stances the syntactic correlates which we have found to accompany them:

Satir Category 1 — Placater

Use of qualifiers: if, only, just, even, etc. Use of subjunctive mood of verbs: could, would, etc. Mind Reading violations.

Satir Category 2 — Blamer

Use of universal quantifiers: all, every, any, each time, etc. Use of negative questions: Why don't you? How come you can't? etc. Cause-Effect violations.

Satir Category 3 — Computer (super-reasonable)

Deletion of experiencer noun argumements — the subject of active verbs as in / see — can be seen or the object of verbs wherein the object noun argument is the experiencer as in disturbs me — X is disturbing. Use of nouns without referential indices: it, one, people, etc. Use of nominalizations: frustration, stress, tension, etc.

Satir Category 4 — Distracter

This category, in our experience, is a rapid alternation of the first three; thus, the syntax which identifies it is a rapid alternation of the syntactic patterns of each of the three listed above. Also, the client displaying this category rarely uses pronouns in his responses which refer to parts of the therapist's sentences and questions.

(The Structure of Magic, II, John Grinder and Richard Bandler, p. 53; Science and Behavior Books, 1976)

One way to understand how these postures can be useful in your work is to realize that each of these patterns is useful in coping, given the appropriate context, but that no one of them is complete. Messages about self and context have, for example, been deleted by the placater. Understanding that each of these presents a choice, we, as people-helpers, are able to assist the people with whom we are working to have all of them as alternatives for response. Another way that we have found these Satir categories appropriate to use is that each of the postures represents a universal and frequently occurring pattern of incongruity.

As therapists committed to the profession of people-helping, we are daily faced with the task of responding to non-verbal languages. The problem with which we are faced, then, is how to understand the intricacies and complexities of the unspoken messages effectively enough to assist the person with whom we are working to change and grow. There are two ways which we have found most effective in coping with this difficulty: First, to simply ask what some particular, repetitive body movement, tonality, etc., is or what it looks like, or sounds like, or feels like to him. Secondly, we have found that very dramatic and effective therapy can be based solely on a judgment of match or mismatch, congruent or incongruent, with respect to the messages which we receive.[16]

Notice that neither of these choices requires the therapist to engage in Mind Reading. In the first case, he merely asks for a translation into words (the full Complex-Equivalence relationship), and, in the second case, he assigns no oral meaning to the non-verbal messages he is receiving, but simply decides whether or not the messages fit together. Following are several examples of these patterns, taken from the same transcript further on in the session.

Therapist: Yes, Marcie; and I'm wondering just how you would know when Dave is respecting you.

Marcie: Well, for one thing, he has to learn to pay attention to me; how can he respect me when he doesn't even pay attention to me? Like right now . . .

Therapist: Marcie, how do you know that Dave's not paying attention to you?

Marcie: See for yourself; this whole time, like always .. . I'm talking and he's looking at the floor.

Therapist: So, when you're talking and you see that Dave is not looking at you — then you know that he's not paying attention to you?

Marcie: Good; I see that you've got the picture.

Therapist: Well, I'm not so sure. I'd like you to ask Dave whether or not he was paying attention to you, OK?

Marcie: Yeah, OK. Dave, I would really like to know if you are paying attention to me. (As Marcie says this, she leans forward, with her left index finger extended in Dave's direction, her right hand on her hip, her tone of voice shrill and tight, her throat and neck muscles taut.)

Dave: Of course, Marcie, you know that. . .

Therapist: (interrupting Dave) Hold it a minute, Dave, (turning to Marcie) Marcie, I want to tell about some things I was just aware of when you asked Dave whether or not he was paying attention to you, OK? I had some difficulty understanding exactly what you were communicating. I heard the words which you used, but, somehow, the way that you moved your body, your left hand, and the tone of your voice that you used when you spoke didn't fit for me.

Marcie: Oh, yeah. Well, you're the one who wanted me to ask him. I already knew that he wasn't paying any attention.

Disregarding the patterns which we have already identified, you will notice that the therapist is using his senses — his input channels — to detect incongruity in Marcie's communication to Dave. Specifically, the words which he hears do not match her tone of voice nor her hand movements and positions. Without attempting to assign any meaning to these non-verbal cues, he simply presents them to Marcie and states that he had a difficult time understanding her communication. Consider what has happened here: The therapist detects Mind Reading and Complex Equivalence by Marcie:

not pay attention to me = not look at me when I'm talking