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MY BROTHER THE NEUROLINGUISTIC PROGRAMMER, AND THE IDEA OF REFRAMING EVENTS
MY BROTHER CHANGED CAREERS a few years ago. Heād been a contractor, and at the time, I teased him about looking for indoor work. He did neurolinguistic programming training, he is now an NLP counselor. NLP is a way of working with the patterns of how we think and behave and feel, and of changing them if the change is useful. I am his only sibling and older sister, and needless to say, there were (are) many things about me that could use some changing. I came to resist anything that had the faintest hint of NLP. I even saidāback during pitching practice when I was throwing things at my exāthat I had spent years cultivating some of my personal failings and I intended to hold on to a few of them. I still held to this view when he tried to tell me what I needed to do was program in some happy thoughts to get over a broken heart. We were sitting in white plastic chairs on the front stoop of my house and I was to imagine in great detail happier events, things that gave me pleasure (like great sex, he said, something that evidently gave him great pleasure, but Iād just broken up with a lover . . . ). I was to put these memories on cue by imagining an event while, at the same time, pressing the tip of my index finger with my thumb, so that later all I had to do was press my index finger again to recall it. Every time hard thoughts or hurt came up, I was to press my fingers. I could do this with all my fingers, one great memory each. There is some science here in creating specific cues for memory, but I resisted this in spades.
The bottom line is that I couldnāt listen to my brother on the subject of NLP. I found myself getting short-tempered when he spoke of NLP to someone else, or tried to practice what he knew in my presence. This was resistance in me, not something applied to me by him, but I had a lot of trouble listening to, much less hearing, what my brother had to say for a long time.
Heād gotten considerably more subtle in his teaching techniques, and there came a moment when I had to listen to him. He saw a performance of the play that includes the introductory spider story and he said, āYour shaman friend did an amazing job of reframing that spider bite.ā
I asked what he meant.
My brother said, āHe didnāt change what happened, but he did change how you think about it. It wonāt ever be the same again. When you reframe something for somebody, they canāt ever think about it the same way again. Canāt go back.ā
A-ha. Three big ones.
1. The healer did change how I thought about what had been (until that reframe) just a huge and scary pain in the butt.
2. I could not think of it, could not even feel the pain at the time, without connecting to it what Spiderās plans for me might be. I wrote the play my brother saw out of Spiderās plans. I am writing this book out of Spiderās plans. Seven years later, Spiderās plans continue to be, for me, an active force in my creative life.
3. I realized that what I was doing sometimes in making Flannery OāConnorās āpassages by dragonsā was using stories in such a way that the experience recounted would come to have a larger meaning than the original story as it came to me from the community. Some stories were bigger than others. The drowning story (from the Mennonite community; see the previous chapter) became a lamentation for every parent who ever lost a child, including the biblical King David. Now, that is big and tremendously useful in the making of art with relevance in a community, but sometimes an individualās thinking (or a groupās thinking) about themselves or their experience can be changed and that is a different order of magnitude. I began to study the idea of reframing experience.*
The process of reframing is rather fashionable in some psychology circles, including NLP practitioners who take it as one of their basic commandments. I began to use this learning in my work. Sometimes, stories that are important in a community, stories that a community is still living with no matter how old or how awful the events, come in a collection of stories I am to write from for a play. They are the stories with the flashing neon arrows pointing at them. A story that shows up two or three times, or comes up in conversation more than once while I am in a place indicates that the story has life in that place, and is a story I probably should address.
Simply recounting a painful story just opens old wounds. To be about healing, I need to reframe it. What follows is my reframing of a couple of very hard stories.
The first comes from a small town in Mississippi. The story recounts the murder of a black man by a white man before the civil rights movement took hold there. The black man was a leader, a preacher, in his community. The white man never stood trial, and later was elected sheriff in the county. The project was created for and performed in the county/town where the killing happened and this story was included in the play. I donāt know about the church situation at the time of the killing, but now there is an active church on almost every other corner, I have never seen a small town so thoroughly churched, not to mention having an active church at every crossroads in the county. So I did the reframing in a context of Christian religious mythology. I am not changing the story itself. I go to a different frame and something different can happen out of the same events, the irony is that I go to a really different frame with this one, the Pearly Gates of Heaven for a confrontation between the dead man and his killer.
A: What Iām fixing to say aināt what the paper said.
B: What did the paper say?
A: You lookinā for what the paper said, you go read the paper.
B: Paper said they had a fight.
A: You know that much, you already read the paper.
B: So I did.
A: Wasnāt no fight.
B: Who says?
A (A silence):
B: What kind of witness are you that you wonāt say your name?
A: A live one.
B (A silence):
A: Iām the same color as the man thatās dead, and the fellow that shot him aināt that color and he is still alive. Maybe somebodyāll ask about this story and Iāll say my name when I tell it; maybe when the man that is still alive dies, Iāll tell it at his funeral. Maybe thatās how it will work. Maybe Iāll be preaching or something that Sunday morning,
B: I didnāt know you were a preacher.
A: Iām not. But maybe Iām going to be that Sunday morning, and Iām gonna preach a sermon about how this fellow dies. Heās such a fine old fellow, he dies at home in his bed and everybody just cries and cries, and his soul rises up out of his body and heads for Judgment. And he gets on up toward the Pearly Gates, and he sees somebody sitting there outside of them. The Pearly Gates got steps like the courthouse and this fellow sees somebody sitting on the steps up to the Pearly Gates. Gates are closed. He canāt see inside of them. And this aināt what he expects, see, he expects the Heavenly Hosts to be out there throwing a welcoming party. Bar-b-que. Fish fry. Thatās what he done when he run for sheriff. You hear what I said I might preach?
B: Yes. But the paper named Pen Bascomeās killer.
A: And this fellow gets up closer and he sees it is a man sitting on the steps, gets a good look at him and recognizes him, says, āPen Bascome! Well!ā This aināt who he expected, aināt who he wanted, but heās gonna make the best of it. āIām mighty glad to see you. I owe you a big apology. Iāve been mighty sorry for a long time that gun I was holding went off when it did.
A: And Pen Bascome says, āThat gun didnāt just go off.ā And this fellow says, āWell, ok, I shot it, but you were holding that big stick like you were going to hit me with it.ā And Pen Bascome says, āI didnāt have no stick.ā The fellow says, āWeād been arguing about a tree that was down, who was going to get the boards out of it.ā And Pen Bascome says, āI donāt remember no argument. I donāt even remember no tree down. I remember you come onto my property. I remember you didnāt like a black man owning property. Didnāt want a black man getting ahead.ā The fellow says, āPen Bascome, we played together as children, what are you doing sitting here on the steps to the Pearly Gates?ā And Pen Bascome says, āThatās what you said then, we played together as children; you remember what else you said?ā The fellow says, āI probably said something about the good times we had.ā And Pen Bascome says, āMaybe you should remember a little harder. You said we played together as children and I told you then I was probably going to have to kill you . . .ā And then you pulled that gun on me and you shot it. Ran into town yelling about a tree down and how I threatened you in an argument over who got the boards and you killed me in self-defense.
B: Thatās the story that was in the paper, about the tree and the argument.
A: Listen: This is important. Pen Bascome, he says,
āI never threatened you. I never had the chance.ā B: You know that to be true?
A: Iām preaching it in my sermon arenāt I? And what happens then is that Pen Bascome gets up from where heās sitting, and he turns around and walks up the steps to the Gate, and the Gate opens for him like it knows heās there, and this fellow gets a little peek inside and it looks like the best place heās ever seen. And Pen Bascome stops right in the Gate and turns and says to this fellow, āMay the Lord have mercy on your soul.ā And he goes on through the Gate and the Gate closes behind him and Pen Bascome is gone. And the fellow is standing there looking, wondering what comes next, whereās Saint Peter? And the Pearly Gates kind of dissolve in front of him, and there is another set of gates, but theyāre not near so pretty and whatās on the other side is not so pretty either, but these are the gates that open in front of him. This wasnāt what he thought would happen at the Judgment. He thought heād get to explain himself, sit down with Saint Peter and talk man to man, and admit, yes, he done some wrong when he was younger but it was what the South was like and heād made up for it after the boycott, when he gave a black man a decent job. And Saint Peter would slap him on the back and say he knew about things like that, heād been a good old boy himself one time, and everything would be fine. Might have to spend a little time in jail in Heaven but this was eternity, whatās a few months or even years in eternity? But he hadnāt even seen Saint Peter. Heād just seen Pen Bascome, or maybe Pen Bascome was Saint Peter, or was his Saint Peter or something like that. Maybe the people you killed were the ones who sat in Judgment. If that was true, he needed to let his brother know. His brother had killed more folks than he had: DONāT DIE, he needed to tell him. It isnāt what you think it is gonna be. All this would be something to think about in the endless time that stretched in front of him in the place that wasnāt Heaven.
B: You done with that sermon?
A: I am. Amen.
Now, justice was not done in the place the story came from or, for that matter, in this world. I canāt fix that, I can only acknowledge it. What the reframing offers is the possibility of another kind of justice. And just as important, what the black community in that place knows as truth finally got told in a public way.
Here is a second example of a reframing. This is a personal reframing, the turn happens for/with one individual, the mother in the story.
(A mother and her daughter are present onstage. The daughter can talk to the audience and her mother; the mother talks only to her daughter. The mother is preparing a plate of food with modern conveniences.)
DAUGHTER (To the audience): Some wounds donāt heal. Not ever, no matter what you do. My mother has a few of those.
MOTHER: Visible scars are important.
DAUGHTER (To the audience): She was very young when her mother died, and her father married again. He married the hardest woman I ever knew. It was years later when I met her, and my mother was a grown woman, married with a daughter of her own. Me.
MOTHER: Hate is a bitter pill, but a big enough dose will keep you alive a long time.
DAUGHTER (To the audience): Mother fixes her food. Carries it a quarter of a mile down the road to her because she canāt cook for herself anymore.
MOTHER: Poorhouse wonāt have her but I canāt let her starve. I donāt know why, except Jesus tells me to turn the other cheek. When she married Daddy, she knew he had a child, but after she started having children of her own, she didnāt want me there. She went crazy. She tried to kill me. More than once.
DAUGHTER (To her mother): Thatās a terrible thing to say.
MOTHER: Itās why ...
