Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 7

Prior cause

Directing attention to causes that influenced a present event increases the scope of time into the past. Usually the scope of space will also change, providing additional information that may result in changing how you categorize and respond to an event. For instance, Stephen Covey writes:

I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly�some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene. Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people�s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run would like that and do nothing at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, �Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn�t control them a little more?

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, �Oh, you�re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don�t know what to think, and I guess they don�t know how to handle it either.

Suddenly I saw things differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn�t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man�s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely.... Everything changed in an instant. (24, pp. 30-31)

Reviewing a parent�s childhood learning experiences will often change how the children view their parents. This was a major part of Virginia Satir�s �Family Reconstruction� process� (11) in which a client would view a reenactment depicting their parent�s experiences of growing up. This often helped them gain a �new perspective� in which the parent�s unpleasant behavior was understood as their response to painful limitations in the parent�s past upbringing, rather than a response to the client, or to someone else in the present. Any exploration of the influence of past events on the present will enlarge the scope of experience in this way. Psychoanalysis can be understood as primarily using this one pattern of extending scope into the past.