From The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.
A therapy session has a recognisable script. There is a room, a professional manner, a person explaining a difficulty and another person asking questions. Both participants may know how to perform their roles remarkably well. What is less certain is whether performing those roles changes anything that matters outside the room.
The “Satan” chapter of The Rainbow Machine concerns an occasion when I dressed as the devil to work with a psychiatrist who wanted to address religious issues. It was a deliberately theatrical response. The wider question behind it is how to create an experience that changes a familiar pattern, rather than simply having another conversation within that pattern.
The ritual of being a therapist and being a client
Clothing, office decoration, vocabulary and manner all communicate expectations. A bookcase, a particular style of chair or an appropriately serious tone may reassure people that they have arrived at the right kind of appointment. The client also brings expectations about what to disclose, how to respond and what counts as cooperating.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a familiar setting. Predictability can be useful. My concern is what happens when the setting becomes self-validating: the session looks like therapy, both people perform it competently, and that performance becomes the evidence that useful work is taking place.
The question I began asking was what a later session was doing that earlier sessions had not done. That is a challenge to routine, not proof that a longer course of therapy is ineffective. Some difficulties require time, repeated practice and a stable relationship. The practitioner should still be able to explain the purpose of the work and how progress is being recognised.
An encounter that leaves an impression
Richard Bandler and Frank Farrelly influenced my interest in the emotional impact of an encounter. Work with them could be memorable in a way that a polite exchange of information was not. Their manner, timing and responses were part of the experience, not merely a delivery system for a set of questions.
A memorable experience can give someone new material to think with. It can also be memorable for the wrong reasons. Intensity, surprise and entertainment are not measures of therapeutic benefit. The relevant question is what the person can understand, do or respond to differently afterwards, and whether that difference is useful to them.
What ceremonial drama taught me about participation
Another influence came from my background in ceremonial magic and initiatory orders. I am referring to structured ceremonial drama, not hazing. In such settings, participants may enter a carefully arranged environment in which others know the script and the candidate has to discover their own part.
Lighting, sound, clothing and other sensory details contribute to the event. At certain points, the candidate must answer a question or make a choice without knowing the expected answer in advance. The interest lies in the response that actually emerges, which may differ from what the person imagined they would say.
I thought of these as moments of interruption or “shock”, in the sense of meeting an unfamiliar choice. That description should not be confused with a licence to frighten, overwhelm or humiliate someone. A ceremonial comparison is a way of thinking about participation and experience, not an evidence base for treating a clinical condition.
A costume shop close to home
At the time, a fancy-dress hire shop was only a short distance from my home, roughly a hundred yards. The book places it farther away. Having costumes close at hand made an unusual idea practical, and occasionally I used that opportunity in my work.
The devil costume fitted the religious theme of the psychiatrist’s concerns. It made the encounter difficult to absorb into an ordinary professional exchange. The useful subject here is the relationship between a chosen dramatic form and the person’s existing meanings. A costume has no therapeutic property on its own, and the same image could have a completely different effect on somebody else.
An argument conducted by clowns
A different occasion involved a family who came to my small basement flat. The parents’ antagonism was apparent as soon as they arrived. I was in my early twenties and felt the uncomfortable pull of being in a room with “mum and dad”, despite their being clients rather than my own parents.
My impression was that the father tried to control the exchange, the mother reacted to that control, and her response prompted more controlling behaviour. The sequence kept turning. The children appeared to be reacting to the atmosphere between their parents. That was my reading of the encounter, not a complete assessment of everything happening in the family.
I suggested that we get dressed up. We went to the nearby shop, hired clown costumes and conducted the session wearing them. I was surprised the parents agreed. Hiring the costumes from a small fixed fee was not a particularly effective business decision, but it changed what was happening in the room.
When the father returned to his familiar manner, the costume changed its effect. The hair moved as he spoke. At one point he removed the false nose and threw it across the room. The mother was also participating as a clown. The argument had acquired a visual form that neither person ordinarily brought to it.
Changing what can be remembered
The intended effect extended beyond the immediate novelty. A week later, how would they remember that exchange? They would have an image of themselves and each other arguing in clown costumes. That image could be recalled in later work and might loosen the authority of the familiar roles.
The aim was to introduce a different impression into an established relationship pattern. It was not a claim that costumes repaired the relationship in one session. I do not have a lasting-outcome account here that would justify such a claim. The anecdote illustrates an intention and an observed change in the interaction.
Humour in a family session also needs care. Shared amusement can be very different from making one person the joke. Where fear, coercion or abuse is present, treating it as an entertaining argument could conceal the problem. A creative intervention still needs consent, an understanding of the relationship and attention to how each participant experiences it.
Strategy beyond the next clever response
Strategic therapy interested me because it asks how a sequence of events might make change possible. A response can be surprising yet have a clear purpose. Conversely, a clever remark can produce a reaction while doing little to address the person’s problem.
Stories attributed to Milton Erickson often illustrate this difference. One account concerns initially increasing a client’s weight before working towards reduction, so that returning to the original weight supplied an experience of losing weight. It is a historical illustration of an indirect strategy, not dietary advice or a procedure to copy. Deliberately worsening a health concern is not justified by an interesting story.
My own use of costumes became less frequent as circumstances changed. Greater experience also gave me more ways to work through attitude, timing and language. The important resource was increasing the range of possible responses, rather than depending on a particular prop.
Professional appearance and professional responsibility
I remain sceptical of using a polished professional manner as the main measure of good work. In hospitals I saw actions that looked entirely routine to staff but concerned me because of their effect on the patient. A shared professional culture can make a practice less visible to the people who perform it.
The answer is not to discard responsibility along with convention. Respect, consent, competence and accountability matter whether the practitioner wears a suit or a costume. The question to ask of an unusual intervention is the same as the question to ask of an ordinary one: what is its purpose, what happened for the person, and what gives us reason to think it helped?
More from The Rainbow Machine
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