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Association and dissociation can be used together to make it easier for a person to step inside someone else's experience and walk a mile in his moccasins in order to understand that person's perspective.
The first step is to dissociate from our own perspective and then associate into another person's point of view. Seeing events from someone else's perspective provides powerful information for resolving difficulties. This information can be especially useful when it is combined with a third, more objective perspective that shows you and the other person together interacting and responding to each other. Below is an exercise titled Accessing Your Own Parenting Wisdom that teaches people how to do this with children. This is excerpted from the Parenting Positively chapter in Heart of the Mind (1989).
First find a comfortable, quiet place where you won't be disturbed for a few minutes. Take a moment to relax and get comfortable, so that it's even easier for you to benefit from this process.
Step 1. Think of a difficult situation with your child. Perhaps your child has been doing something that you haven't known how to handle, or that drives you up the wall. Are you worried or concerned about some aspect of your child? Perhaps you will select something your child does, or it might be something about your child's feelings. You will get the most value from doing this if you pick something that happens repeatedly.
Step 2. Run your movie of this situation from your own point of view. Re-experience the episode. Imagine you are going through this situation with your child again. Start at the beginning, looking out through your own eyes, re-experiencing what actually happened. Notice what information is available to you, how you feel, and what you see and hear. If you are someone who doesn't visualize, that's fine. You can just sense that you are re-experiencing this from your own point of view, and this method will work just as well. You may want to go through several examples of this situation.
Step 3. Re-experience this same situation again, but as your child. Run your movies of this situation from your child's position. Go back to the beginning of the same situation you re-experienced in Step 2. Stop your movie right before the situation started. Before you play the movie, this time look over at your child. Notice your child's posture, the way your child is moving, breathing, etc. Listen to the sound of your child's voice. Now step into your child. Take a moment to become your child. You are now moving like your child, seeing out of your child's eyes, and having your child's feelings. Let yourself take on this experience as you now let the movie of this situation go forward. If you're not sure you're really being your child, that's OK. Just let yourself do it, and notice what you can learn.
Take as much time as you need to go through this situation as your child, and notice what new information is available to you. Do you become aware of feelings your child may be having that you weren't aware of from your adult point of view? As your child, do you notice something your child wants or needs that you hadn't been aware of? What else do you learn by being your child? What sense do you get about what your child is experiencing in his or her own world, and how he or she is dealing with it?
What do you notice about your own behavior as you watch and listen from your child's position? Does your behavior seem different to you from this vantage point? For now, just take note of what you learn from doing this. If you notice that part of your own behavior seems very inappropriate from your child's position, you can be pleased that you got new and useful information. If you learn something about what your child may be feeling, you can be similarly pleased.
Step 4. Re-experience this situation as an observer. Run the same movies again, but this time from an outside position. Watch and listen to that experience from a point of view that is off to the side, allowing you to see both yourself and your child at the same time. Observe the experience as if you were watching a movie of someone else.
Notice what you learn from this position. Do you notice something about the way you and your child respond to each other? How do things look and sound to you as an outside observer? What do you see more clearly about yourself and about your child? (1989, pp. 8587)
In the transcript in Satir Step by Step, just after the son has said he'd like his father to be able to control his temper, Virginia asks the son, Do you know what it feels like to be angry? (1983, p. 36), and a little later, I was wondering if you know anything about what it feels like to get angry. (1983, p. 38) Both these interventions invite the son to step into his father's feelings in order to gain understanding of how the two of them are similar. Although this was typically a major intervention of Virginia's, there are only a few examples of it in the older (1974) transcript in Satir Step by Step. However, there are many examples in the more recent (1986) transcript in this book.
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