Play with your movie of the pleasant experience just to experience how changing its properties affects its meaning. If it is close to you, move it away and notice if it changes the strength of the pleasant feeling. If it is in color, make it black & white. Turn it into a cartoon. How do these adjustments affect the feeling of the experience? Changing the structure of your movies is one way of changing their meaning, and the responses you have to the them.
Certain combinations of qualities, such as close, colored, bright, no border, and so on, provide a way of encoding and differentiating concepts such as real – unreal, past – future, important – trivial, and so on. We also use these symbolic codes for identifying emotions such as “fear” and “courage” and for distinguishing between different states, such as “procrastinating” or “going for it”. Knowing how the person structures a particular experience means that they can deliberately change the meaning of that experience by manipulating its qualities so that it resembles something more desirable.
These attributes also turn up in the metaphors we use. Consider the following statements:
“This way of thinking has a bright future.”
“That’s music to my ears.”
“He came down heavy like a ton of bricks.”
“Something smells fishy about her proposal.”
“That leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.”
These metaphorical sayings often give us a glimpse of the way the speaker’s has constructed the pictures, sounds, feelings, and so on, into a coherent story. Although some of these metaphorical sayings are clichés, they often provide a literal description of the person’s model of the world.
Exercise 4.1: Qualities of the movie
This exercise helps the PWS become aware of the particular way they imagine their story or movie. People tend to take this for granted, and assume that everyone does this in the same way. They do not. What people do in their minds is idiosyncratic.
You are going to ask the PWS to imagine two different experiences of speaking to another person: in one they imagine themselves blocking, in the other they are speaking fluently. If they need help in bringing the picture to conscious awareness, you could, for example, ask them to describe the other person, male or female, what they are wearing, and so on. Then they are going to compare these two images to find the significant differences. Refer to Figure 4.2 for a list of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic qualities. Overview
Associate into a time when you were fluent noting your visual, auditory and kinesthetic experience.
Associate into a time of blocking and note your visual, auditory and kinesthetic experience of this experience.
Make a note of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic qualities of both experiences and compare and contrast them.
Practice changing the qualities of the blocking image to resemble the fluency image.
Play with editing your own movies.
Recall a recent time when you were very fluent. Imagine yourself back there in that state of fluency. Be looking out of your eyes, seeing what is around you, including the other people. Hear all the sounds around you and be aware of how it feels being totally fluent now. If you are talking to yourself, notice the qualities of your voice.
“See what you saw then. Hear the sounds you heard at that time and feel the feelings you felt.”
When they can do this for states of fluency, have them do the same thing for blocking. If they have a strong emotional reaction, tell them not to get too bound up with it, and remind them that this is in their imagination, and that they can change out of this state whenever they want to.
“See what you saw then. Hear the sounds you heard at that time and feel the feelings you felt.”
Compare and contrast these two experiences. Make a note of the visual qualities. Write these down side-by-side on a piece of paper. Use Figure 4.2 as a guide. After listing the visual qualities, list the key auditory and the key kinesthetic qualities. There should be some differences between the two lists. Which appear to be the key differences? Which qualities tell you that one movie is about fluency, and the other about blocking?
Practice changing the qualities of the blocking image so that it resembles the fluency image. Now choose one of the main differences in visual, and lead the PWS to change that visual quality of the Blocking image to be like the visual quality of the Fluency picture. For example, if the location and distance is markedly different, direct the PWS to move the picture of the blocking experience into the same location as the fluent experience. Then you can either have them move things back to how they were, or they can add further adjustments to any of the other key qualities of the Blocking experience into the same qualities of the Fluency experience.
Have them play with “editing” their movie as they experiment with the qualities to develop a more suitable experience for the formerly blocking experience.
Exercise 4.2: Type of movie
Another way of finding out the type of difference between the two kinds of movies is to ask your PWS client about the general qualities of their movies.
Just take a moment to relax as though you are in a cinema, and you are going to watch a movie of a time when you were blocking. As you observe the movie, notice:
What kind of movie is it (in terms of genre, or what it looks like)? Is this movie typical of the movies you run in your mind when you block?
Now run a movie of a similar kind of interaction but where you don’t block. What kind of movie is that, in terms of qualities, or genre, theme, and so on?
What happens in the movies of you blocking or stuttering? How does it start? What happens next? How does it finish?
How do you feel as you watch yourself in that
