Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 12

Behavioral recategorization

Whenever someone else categorizes you, or a problem or a relationship in a way that creates a problem for you both, you don’t have to accept that categorization, you can always offer a different one. Virginia Satir often used to point out to people that when others categorized them, or their relationship, they always had the choice whether to accept that or not, and if they didn’t like it, they could recategorize it. For years I have been collecting extraordinary examples of how people have successfully recategorized life-threatening situations.

An attendant in a mental hospital was grabbed from behind in a choke hold by a patient who was not only much stronger, but who had a lot of martial arts training. The attendant knew that struggling to release himself would be useless, so just as he began to lose consciousness, he reached up and lovingly stroked the patient’s arm around his neck. The patient stopped choking him because, as he said later, “That was just too weird, so I had to stop and figure out what was going on.”

A woman was walking down the street in a rough neighborhood late at night, when she noticed a man who seemed to be following her. She crossed the street, and he followed her. She speeded up her walking and he did, too. She was starting to get a little worried, so she turned around and walked up to him and said. “Excuse me, I’m feeling scared. Would you escort me home?” The man held out his arm and escorted her home. She found out later that he had gone on to attack another woman later that evening. (8, p. 251)

If someone can recategorize a relationship from murder into friendship, and attack into nurturance, surely we can transform our everyday problems when others categorize us in ways that we don’t like. When you find that your relationship “dance” with someone has become a struggle, it’s time to pause and explore how your relationship has become categorized, and decide whether you are satisfied with that, or whether you want to change it. Since anything can be recategorized, and many events can be categorized in wide variety of ways, the possibilities are far beyond what most of us imagine.