Steve Andreas > Articles > Transforming an Uncertain/Ambiguous Quality

Follow-up Report

Now I want to offer you a follow-up that I got from a participant a week after she had worked on being healthy, which had been ambiguous for her:

“There would be pockets of time when I would be healthy, when I would eat really well and exercise regularly. But more often I wouldn't eat properly and I wouldn't get enough sleep, and I wouldn't be healthy. I tended to sit down at my computer and just work until I was absolutely starving and then I'd have to grab from whatever was in the fridge that only took five minutes to prepare. And then I wouldn't do any of the exercise either, because I'd be busy doing work, and I also wasn't sleeping enough.”

“So I revised those counterexamples to what I wanted instead. I took your advice of looking at the entire scope of the day. Instead of just the moment when 'I'm starving what do I about it?' looking at replanning my whole day. 'A healthy person eats regular meals, they make time for exercise, and preparing food.' And then I also looked at a span of a whole week and thought, 'Well, whether I do all the work in one hit, or whether or do it over a week, it's exactly the same. The work gets done, the outcome is the same, so why don't I just pepper in all these other things?' I also added in other resources of creativity and sensuality, so that cooking can be creative and sensual and more fun for me.”

“So all those counterexamples became healthy examples, and since then it's been fabulous! I'm on automatic pilot now with being healthier. Now when I hit 9:00, I realize I need to have breakfast. And then when I'm at the computer or doing something else, I now say to myself, 'OK, well I've done this for a couple of hours,' so I'll stop and say, 'OK, well I've gotta go prepare something.' Or I'll say 'OK, well let's go for a walk,' or I'll go play in the garden. It's just all automatic; it just happens. I don't have to really think about it. It's just like a clock goes on in me and says, 'OK, time to switch.' That never happened before, and it's lovely. I really like the idea of doing change work using that larger scope of time, rather than a single experience. That was incredibly helpful for me.”

I want to point out that previously she had imposed a rigid hierarchy on herself by continuing to work at the computer while ignoring her need for food—until she was “starving” and had to pay attention to it. Her resolution respects the natural heterarchy of her various different needs.

Now I want you to pair up and take turns practicing this process with each other. An ambiguous quality will usually have a fairly large number of counterexamples, so it is likely that there are some other important outcomes that have to be respected. That makes it more likely that there may be objections to transforming the counterexamples, and it may take a bit more change work to make it congruent.

I want you to work primarily by yourselves, but I still want you to be in pairs, in case one of you needs some assistance, and also to share experiences afterward. Those of you who are therapists might prefer to guide each other through this process: one of you can be a client with a troubling ambiguous quality, and one of you to be the change agent, and then switch.