A therapeutic relationship begins before either person explains the problem. A room, a jacket, an introduction and a familiar professional manner can tell someone what kind of meeting this will be. If they have already sat through many unsuccessful meetings, they may arrive knowing exactly how to endure another one.
That was the question beneath my encounter with a young offender: how could I avoid becoming one more adult performing a role he already knew? The event became “Seeing Red” in The Rainbow Machine. Its most memorable detail was a raw chicken. Its more useful subject is the relationship between expectation, improvisation and the way practitioners turn untidy encounters into convincing stories.
The office that was a basement flat
The young man arrived with his mother and a social worker. In print, the setting was described as my office. That word suggested a degree of professional organisation that the actual place did not possess. I was living in a one-room basement flat in the city centre, a place we called the bunker. There was a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom and a bed that folded into the wall.
I was connected with local housing, welfare and healthcare networks, which brought a varied stream of referrals. That social context mattered. This was not a purpose-built clinic with a carefully arranged consulting room. It was the space I had available, and it was also my home. Calling it an office made the account more respectable while removing information that helps explain what happened.
The chicken was there for an equally ordinary reason. I had bought food earlier that day, had very little refrigerator space and no freezer, and intended to cook it later. It had ended up beneath my chair. It was not a therapeutic prop selected in advance. The distinction is essential because an incidental object can become, in the retelling, evidence of a brilliantly planned intervention.
A meeting the young man already knew how to attend
A young person repeatedly referred to adults may become highly practised at the referral process. There are introductions, warnings, explanations, promises and questions whose answers seem already decided. Teachers, social workers, police officers and other professionals have different responsibilities, but the recipient may experience their meetings as variations on a recognisable script.
For this appointment I wore a jacket and tie. That presentation was aimed largely at the accompanying adults. Once they had left, I removed the tie and changed my manner. In the historical encounter I also produced cigarettes and used an unexpected question about veal. These details disrupted the formal meeting the young man appeared to expect.
They should not be mistaken for a recommended way of working with children. Offering cigarettes, deliberately provoking anger or using humiliation introduces obvious problems. The point worth examining is the expectation I was trying to interrupt: another adult would take the authoritative position, and he would occupy the familiar position of the troublesome child. A different relationship needed to be possible, but novelty by itself does not establish that a relationship is helpful.
The chicken and the danger of copying the spectacle
During the encounter I provoked the young man into anger, brought out the raw chicken and he struck it. I recorded the episode and subsequently had him watch himself. Those are the striking events around which the story formed. They are also the details most likely to eclipse everything else.
A reader can easily convert an unusual event into a recipe: create an emotional reaction, introduce something absurd and confront the person with a recording. That would be a poor reading of the encounter. There was no prearranged chicken procedure. I was responding to what happened, using what was available, and feeling considerably less certain than the polished narrative suggests.
Nor does the anecdote establish a general method for anger or offending behaviour. A memorable scene is not an outcome measure. It does not tell us how often a similar attempt would help, how someone else would experience it, or what happened outside the room over subsequent months. Those questions cannot be answered by the unusual nature of the event itself.
Utilisation includes uncertainty
In hypnosis, utilisation refers to working with what a person and situation provide. The useful emphasis is responsiveness. A practitioner notices what is happening and adapts, rather than insisting that the encounter follow a predetermined sequence. Yet utilisation can become a flattering label attached afterwards to whatever the practitioner happened to do.
There is an important difference between recognising an opportunity and knowing in advance that an action will succeed. I knew something about the kind of interaction I wanted to establish. I did not know every move I would make. I was anxious too. Removing that uncertainty from the story creates a character who appears permanently composed, inventive and in control.
That fictional degree of control can miseducate practitioners. They may assume competent work feels effortless, that every response must be immediate, or that hesitation signals failure. In reality, noticing uncertainty can be part of doing the work responsibly. It leaves room to reconsider, seek advice, change direction or recognise that an intervention is beyond one’s competence.
Why case accounts become tidier than life
Publication requires selection. Speech is edited, repetitions disappear and events are arranged so the reader can follow them. A few seconds of confused interaction can occupy a carefully reasoned paragraph. It resembles a detailed account of a boxing match: the commentary identifies movements and decisions that the participants may not have consciously formulated as they happened.
Dialogue creates another distortion. Characters in a television drama are often more articulate than people are in ordinary life. They exchange complete, meaningful lines at exactly the right moment. Case accounts can acquire the same quality. The substance may be recognisable while the rhythm, hesitation and confusion of the actual conversation have disappeared.
This does not mean that every edited account is dishonest. It means that the reader needs to distinguish the event from its literary organisation. The author also has a responsibility to notice when organisation has created a misleading impression. My discomfort with “Seeing Red” comes largely from that gap: the event occurred, but its presentation made my circumstances and certainty look different from what they were.
The relationship is the part to examine
The transferable question is what kind of relationship a person believes they are entering. What does the setting imply? Which role has the referral assigned them? What have earlier encounters taught them to expect? What might they need to know before they can disagree, ask for a pause or describe what is actually happening?
These questions do not require theatrical provocation. They require attention to the assumptions already in the room. A practitioner can explain the purpose of a meeting, acknowledge earlier disappointments and make the person’s choices explicit. They can ask how their manner is being received instead of assuming that professionalism, informality or humour automatically creates trust.
When a case seems to demonstrate an exceptionally clever practitioner, it is worth looking again for the ordinary circumstances, the uncertainty and the other person’s experience. Those details often teach more than the spectacular moment. In “Seeing Red”, the raw chicken catches the eye. The harder work is recognising the script that both people brought into the room.
Part of The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.