From The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neurolinguist’s Journal by Andrew T. Austin.
A short observation of a family can be persuasive. A parent speaks coldly, a child responds, and an observer feels they understand the problem. What is visible may be important, but it is not the whole history of how the family arrived there.
In the consultation behind “The Child” in The Rainbow Machine, the parents repeatedly referred to their son as “the child”. Their manner of speaking struck me as distancing, and I placed considerable responsibility for the difficulty on their communication. I remain interested in what I observed. I am less certain that my original allocation of blame was adequate.
Knowing the words is not knowing the whole history
I made notes during the consultation, so the exchanges that caught my attention were not simply invented afterwards. The problem is that accurate observation and complete explanation are different things. Knowing what somebody said does not tell us everything that produced the way they now speak.
A distancing expression can be relevant without being the original cause of a family’s difficulty. It may have developed within repeated conflict, exhaustion or a long period of feeling unable to cope. It can then become part of the pattern that maintains the difficulty, even if it did not begin it.
I do not have children. My joking claim to expertise in parenting rests on having avoided the most demanding test of that expertise. It is much easier to advise someone about communication for an hour than to live with the circumstances in which they must use that advice every day and night.
An assumption challenged by a novel
For a long time, my working assumption was that children began largely untroubled and acquired their problems through experience, especially within the family. Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin challenged how readily I could apply that assumption.
What caught my attention was the mother’s predicament: she experiences something disturbing in her relationship with her son while other people read the situation differently and suspect that she is the source of the problem. The power of the novel lies partly in the discomfort of deciding whose account to believe.
Fiction is not evidence that a particular child has a particular condition, and it should not be used to label children as bad. Its value here was to unsettle a confident framework. It made it harder for me to assume that an outside observer necessarily understands the parent’s experience better than the parent does.
What exhaustion taught me about certainty
A more ordinary experience also changed my thinking. We had an elderly Siamese cat in a small house. The cat was extremely vocal, including at night, and repeated interruptions to sleep became much more difficult than I had expected.
I began lying awake anticipating the next burst of noise. Sometimes the absence of noise became irritating because I was waiting for it; then I would fall asleep and be woken again. During one particularly difficult period, I was alarmed by the intensity of my anger and by thoughts of harming the animal.
The comparison with parenting is limited, but the lesson about my own capacity was real. I regarded myself as relatively calm and nonviolent, yet sustained fatigue produced reactions I did not like or expect. It made me consider what months of broken sleep, day-to-day responsibilities and little practical support might do to a parent.
Understanding exhaustion does not excuse harming a child. It helps identify a need for support before a situation becomes dangerous. The NHS advice on coping with a crying baby includes placing the baby safely in their cot and taking a brief break to calm down when overwhelmed. A health visitor or GP can help with persistent difficulty; urgent concerns about safety need immediate help.
Distance as a response that becomes a pattern
Emotional distance may sometimes begin as a way to contain an overwhelming reaction. A parent becomes less responsive or more guarded because reacting fully to everything feels unbearable. Over time, that protective response can become the ordinary style of the relationship.
This is a possible explanation to investigate, not something to assume from a detached tone. It does not remove the child’s need for care or make the child responsible for an adult’s actions. Children may present substantial challenges without intending to exhaust or hurt anyone.
The more useful inquiry concerns the interaction: what happens repeatedly, how each person responds, what pressures are present, and where support is missing. A strategy that looks unhelpful in the consulting room may once have solved an immediate problem, then continued after its costs grew.
It is possible to help a parent change their communication while also recognising what they have been living through. Those aims do not compete. Advice becomes more realistic when it addresses the conditions that make a different response difficult to sustain.
Look beyond the familiar NLP vocabulary
The language of family interactions deserves study beyond a small set of NLP patterns. Paul Watzlawick, Gregory Bateson and the writers associated with the Palo Alto tradition helped open questions about communication as a relationship, not simply a collection of individual sentences. R. D. Laing also influenced my interest in how a person’s experience is interpreted by others.
NLP can introduce useful distinctions, but being impressed by those distinctions does not mean one has acquired the whole field of linguistics or communication theory. Continued study is particularly important when a familiar model begins to explain every encounter too easily.
Literal, figurative and metaphorical language
One practical distinction I use concerns literal, figurative and metaphorical ways of speaking. These are tendencies to listen for, not fixed personality types or mutually exclusive scientific categories. A person can use all three, and metaphor itself is a form of figurative language in ordinary linguistic terminology.
A literal statement presents its wording as a direct description: the meeting begins at ten, or three items are missing. A figurative expression may communicate scale or intensity without offering a precise count: there are millions of things to do. A metaphor organises one situation through another image: the project is stuck, or a business is being launched.
Difficulties arise when the listener applies a different expectation from the speaker. A broad expression of frustration may be treated as a literal accusation. A literal statement may be interpreted as a coded implication. A metaphor may seem clear while each participant is imagining a different situation.
“I did not mean that” and “you said it”
Earlier in our relationship, my wife and I sometimes encountered this mismatch. I tended to speak figuratively; she tended to take my words more literally. I would say that I had not meant what she understood, and she would point out that I had nevertheless said it.
The exchange was useful because it exposed my contribution. Calling myself figurative did not make her responsible for interpreting me correctly. I needed to become more aware of what my words invited a listener to understand, and more willing to make my intended meaning explicit.
Metaphors need the same attention. Two business partners can agree that they are preparing for a launch while one imagines a rocket and the other a ship. The shared word may conceal different expectations about speed, preparation, movement and what happens next. Asking what the image involves can expose the difference before it becomes a practical dispute.
Questions that make an exchange clearer
In a family conversation, it can help to ask what a word refers to on this occasion. Does “always” describe every instance, or the speaker’s sense that a problem happens far too often? When someone says they feel pushed, what is happening between the people involved? What would the other person hear if the same concern were stated more directly?
These questions are useful only if asked with curiosity. Treating a distressed parent or child as an exercise in correcting language repeats the original problem of overlooking their circumstances. The aim is to understand the message, the relationship in which it is spoken and the practical change the family needs help to make.
More from The Rainbow Machine
Visit the Rainbow Machine article index for related writing on family interactions, language, identity and the limits of first impressions.