The prob­lem, I think, with cou­ples in trou­ble, or with indi­vid­u­als who are stuck, is that they lack a sense of the absurd.
Yet life, it you man­age to take a step back, is patently absurd.

Dar­bella and I were at a wed­ding this past week­end — the traf­fic was abysmal, and what should have been a 2.5 hour drive turned into 4.5. We arrived 10 min­utes late, a real excep­tion for us.

Any­way, we got there just as the Rec­tor was going to ask the groom the “Do you promise” questions.

This is what flowed out of the rector’s mouth: “Sam, do you promise to be Sally… no, that’s not right…”

The groom turned to the Rec­tor and said, “I don’t think so.” Then, slow head turn to the gath­ered crowd, and a sin­gle eye­brow lift.

The­atre of the absurd

I was prac­ti­cally on the floor. I had to think of dead kit­tens to stop from laugh­ing. All I could pic­ture was the Monty Python crew, and John Cleese as the groom. Eye­brow raised, he smiles, and is instantly dressed as the bride.

This is the absurd. And it’s right there, all the time.

A client told me a new ver­sion of an old story. She told me she’d been mar­ried for 12 years, had always squab­bled with her hus­band, that he was an artist and he has a volatile per­son­al­ity and quick­sil­ver tem­per. In the past, they’d made deci­sions together; lately, he’d been mak­ing deci­sions solo, and expected her to pick up the slack.

Swim­ming in the mess

The deci­sion that caused the present tur­moil hap­pened a while back, when said hus­band decided to buy what she described as “…a really, really ugly build­ing. We live in a pretty town. Why would he want to buy a really, really ugly build­ing?” He then rented the build­ing to a guy the woman didn’t like, and the ten­ant didn’t pay the rent on time. Some­how, going to col­lect the rent became the wife’s job.

Also, the pur­chase left them short of cash, so she was work­ing at a job she hated, to make ends meet.

She’d tried talk­ing with her hus­band and fight­ing with her hus­band, so he’d admit the error of his ways, col­lect his own rent, get seri­ous, smarten up. Nada. Months had passed and she con­tin­ued col­lect­ing the rent, doing the books for the build­ing, going off to this job she hated.

She was, she said, look­ing for help deal­ing with her anger about him, and her inabil­ity to change him. I said, “What would hap­pen if you sim­ply went on strike for a few months — you know, don’t col­lect the rent, don’t pay the bills, give him a month’s notice that you’re stop­ping, but stop?”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sug­gested this to clients. Stop. Sim­ply stop.

I then began a fun lit­tle coun­selling approach which I’m now going to share with you. Mil­ton Erickson​was a doc­tor who got inter­ested in hyp­no­sis, and used it to cure him­self (twice!) of paral­y­sis from polio. You can get the gist of his work from the book Uncom­mon Ther­apy, by Jay Haley​. Erick­son was quite sim­ply the best hyp­nother­a­pist ever. He never repeated an induc­tion. He just kept on invent­ing new ways.

Stack­ing a story

One approach he used was to stack sto­ries. Which is an approach I use all the time. In fact, I trained with one of Erickson’s stu­dents, who thought that “the stacked sto­ries approach” was the eas­i­est way to get a point across. He sug­gested that you needed to stack at least three sto­ries. By the time you got to the third, the lis­tener was so con­fused that the gist of the story went straight to their sub-conscious mind and changed their per­spec­tive almost instantly.

Erick­son would some­times go 5 or 6 lay­ers deeply; I find that 3 or 4 suf­fice. And by the way, I just used the tech­nique, describ­ing Erick­son, Erickson’s stu­dent, and now back to me. The pat­tern was, me — Erick­son — Erickson’s stu­dent — Erick­son — me. (A-B-C-B-A)

Which is what I did with my client. I told her about the cou­ple I ever worked with, and how they were stuck repeat­ing use­less behav­iours. I told her that I told them about the first female client I ever had, and how she had taught her daugh­ter to do laun­dry and her hus­band and sons to take respon­si­bil­ity for their lives by going on strike for 8 weeks — by refus­ing to do their laun­dry or cook their meals.

My client started to glaze over about half way through the story about the story about the daugh­ter and the woman’s hus­band. I fin­ished and stopped talk­ing. She sat there, star­ing ahead, into the mid­dle dis­tance. Sud­denly she looked up at me and started laugh­ing. She said, “I didn’t think it would be this easy. All I have to do is stop doing what I hate.” And I agreed.

A few days ear­lier I’d said a sim­i­lar thing to another client. She kept repeat­ing behav­iours that got her absolutely lousy results with the men in her life. I stacked a cou­ple of sto­ries, and know­ing that she’s a highly suc­cess­ful busi­ness per­son, ended with, “And have you ever met a guy at work that designs a project, a project that took him a long time, and imple­ments it, and every time he does, the com­pany loses money, but he keeps doing it because he has so much time invested in it, and the com­pany says, “Sure! Keep los­ing money! We know how hard you’ve worked to cre­ate this great plan that doesn’t work.”

She looked up and laughed and said, “Jeez! That’s what I’ve been doing with men all my life. If my sex life was my work life, I’d be on welfare.”

My client with the ugly build­ing decided to change her approach one month from now, after giv­ing warn­ing to her hus­band. My client with the “men” issues decided to cre­ate a new way of relat­ing to men. All because there was an absurd lit­tle story that caught their attention.

And here’s the story I told them, in sum­mary — you get what you put out.

You want to change a sit­u­a­tion, change it. If you’re stuck, unstick your­self. Erick­son under­stood that pat­terns, once repeated, take prece­dence over cre­ativ­ity, until you see that cre­ativ­ity (a new thought fol­lowed by a new action) is the only solu­tion to being stuck.

For you, for me, the answer lies in not­ing the pat­tern, not­ing our active or pas­sive par­tic­i­pa­tion, and “going on strike” from that which does not resolve the issue.

See what sto­ries you are telling your­self, sto­ries that keep you stuck repeat­ing old pat­terns, sto­ries that keep you from risk­ing being all you can be, sto­ries that keep you from fully engag­ing life and oth­ers. Then, tell your­self a new story. For a change.

And the three words? Get a Life. A new Life. Because it’s all an absurd story any­way. Might as well tell your­self a good one. Mil­ton Erick­son and all of his stu­dents would agree. So would the Monty Python guys. Me too.

I’ll bet you’re smil­ing. Absurd, eh?