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Before describing this recipe, I want to say a few things about recipes in general. Some people find the idea of a recipe for personal change objectionable, and I'd like to touch on two of the major objections I have encountered.
Firstly, until recently, many approaches in the field of psychotherapy have typically maintained that one recipe can be used for all sorts of human problems. That is like saying that a given recipe will work equally well for a beef roast, a chocolate cake, or a tossed salad.
Others make the mistake of confusing the recipe with the result of using the recipe. You can't get much nourishment from the recipe itself, any more than you can find much shelter under the architectural plans for a comfortable home.
A recipe is only a set of instructions that tells you what to do in order to get a given result. If a recipe is followed carefully (and the appropriate ingredients are available) the result is dependable. Our world is filled with the satisfying results of recipes that work dependably, from cookbooks to computer manuals. All of science consists of detailed recipes that get specific results in specified contexts.
“The term science should not be given to anything but the aggregate of the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature."
– Paul Valery (6, p.41)
I am grateful to Paul Watzlawick for pointing out the crucial difference between descriptive language and injunctive language. Descriptive language is exemplified by psychiatry's DSM IV diagnostic manual. Over 700 pages describe the different kinds of disorders that people have, but not a single page tells what to do to resolve them! In contrast, injunctive language tells you what to do in order to have a particular experience. George Spencer Brown said it well:
“The taste of a cake, although literally indescribable, can be conveyed to a reader in the form of a set of injunctions called a recipe. Music is a similar art form; the composer does not even attempt to describe the set of sounds he has in mind, much less the set of feelings occasioned through them, but writes down a set of commands which, if they are obeyed by the reader, can result in a reproduction, to the reader, of the composer's original experience.” (4, p.77)
Frieda Fromm-Reichman once said, “People don't come to therapy for explanation; they come for experience.” A recipe is only a dependable way to create a specific experience.
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