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CENT PAPER No.3: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ‘WINDOWS MODEL' Copyright (c) Dr Jim Byrne, 2009 Introduction The Windows Model is the core model of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT). It is predicated on ‘frame theory', which suggests that all of our perceptions are interpretative, and that our interpretations are driven by habit-based ‘framings' of incoming stimuli, through our senses. The ‘frames' that we use to interpret incoming stimuli are nested sets of inferences, which are derived from past experience. Depending upon the negativity or positivity of the frame through which you are perceiving an incoming stimulus, you will produce a correspondingly negative or positive emotional/behavioural response. Around 22nd May 2009, I wrote a blog that made the following points: I have previously written about the image of our lives as being like living in a hut with four windows. Each window has a frame, embossed with a ‘philosophical perspective', which means we frame the "reality" we see through each window differently. The four "frames", which come from Zen insights, are: 1. Life is difficult (or suffering, or frustrating). 2. Life is without difficulty, provided we refrain from picking and choosing (between outcomes). (That is to say, it is not difficult if we simply accept that we got what we got!) 3. Life is both difficult and non-difficult (or frustrating and pleasurable; or painful and pleasurable) - in that it contains objectively difficult and objectively pleasurable bits. And: 4. Life is neither difficult nor non-difficult, in that "difficult" and "non-difficult (or pleasurable)" are just concepts; words; sounds in the air; and not "realities"! This is a helpful model because it prevents "the rush towards premature cognitive commitment". That is to say, to the extent that I keep reminding myself of these four "window frames", or "noble truths", I cannot engage in knee-jerk responses to life. I have to give up saying: "This is tish!" "That is great!" and so on. Because the idea that "This is tish!" - or "That is great!" - is a unitary view of the world. That is to say, it assumes there is a single "god's eye view" of life that can be determined by some individual to be absolutely true. And that seems never to be the case! There are always at least four ways to look at any situation - or four windows to look through. ~~~ Sometime later, I realized that Window No.4 is too relativistic, and therefore amoral. And I am very keen to ensure that psychotherapy takes account of the importance of social morality in all of its postulations and interventions. I therefore have changed Window No.4 to this: 4. Almost any suffering, or frustration, or difficulty, could always be a whole lot worse than it currently is. ~~~ And later still, I realized that this Four Windows model, which I arrived at intuitively, and used on myself to validate its efficacy: (a) Can easily be expanded to five windows, the fifth - a skylight - of which says this on the frame: "Some suffering, frustration or difficulty can be controlled, and some is very much beyond our control" And: (b) Is an expression of "frame theory". In October 2009, I wrote about how CENT is a system of ‘reframing' the adversities we experience in our lives.
When we look at a situation through a new frame, we get a new set of perceptions, emotions and behaviours. ~~~ Here is an illustration of ‘framing', using a Four Dogs model. I created this to clarify something about the ABC model, back in 2003. The ‘A' in REBT is a label for the Activating Event, or what happened to the client. I wanted to distinguish between the ‘external' or ‘situational' ‘A' and the ‘internal' or 'subjective' ‘A'. The distinction between the Situational A (or actual external stimulus) and the Phenomenal A (or how the individual experiences the external stimulus), is clearly shown in what follows: Distinguishing the A1 from the A2: When something happens outside of my head (the A1, or "objective" Activating Event), I create a personal, subjective interpretation of it (the A2, or "subjective" Activating Event). What I am pointing at here is the distinction, used by Locke and Kant, between the "thing-in-itself" and the "phenomenon" it creates in my mind. However, because language is so slippery, and especially abstract semantic language, I would like to try a thought experiment, which is both visual and symbolically-kinaesthetic, in order to more clearly distinguish what I am calling the A1 ("objective" Activating Event) and the A2 (or "perceptual" Activating Event). Imagine a clearing, roughly square, surrounded by a forest of trees, as shown in Figure 1 below. In the middle of the forest is a cluster of four dog kennels, facing north, south, east and west.
Figure 1: Distinguishing the 'A1' (thing-in-itself) from the 'A2' (percept) Four men are walking towards the clearing, attracted by a particular sound. Above the dog kennels is a cluster of photo-sensors, which are designed to spot when any of the men enter the clearing. Inside each dog kennel is an Alsatian dog. All four dogs are identical - they are identical quads, from the same mother. Each dog has been trained to attack strange men. They are locked in their kennels by a sliding door, which will quickly open once a man has been detected by the photo-sensors above the kennels. Now, it just so happens that all four of the men arrive in the clearing at exactly the same moment, and their names are identical with the direction from which they arrived: Mr North, Mr South, Mr East and Mr West. These men are all the same height, size and weight. But these men have very different experiences of dogs. Mr North is a dog-trainer with the local police service. Mr South has a poodle at home, which he can just about manage to control. Mr East has an Alsatian at home, but a much smaller, tamer one than the one that is in the kennels up ahead. And Mr West would be terrified to be barked at by a poodle. As the four men step into the clearing, simultaneously, the photo-sensors open the four kennel doors, and the four identical Alsatian dogs charge towards their respective targets. DOES EACH MAN SEE AN IDENTICAL PHENOMENON? Of course not. Mr North will see something like an out-of-work challenge, but a relatively minor one. Mr South will be terrified of what he will see as a "looming savage", and a "serious threat". Mr East will see "some difficulty" in handling "a dog which is larger and angrier" than his own Alsatian, but it will seem like more of a "serious challenge" than a "threat". And poor old Mr West will be pooping himself, because he sees "life threatening mauling" and "serious pain" approaching him rapidly. These four subjective images are what I call A2's, or subjective phenomena, or subjective Activating Events. ~~~ The Windows Model of CENT is a way of drawing attention to the fact that you have already framed some stimulus in an unhelpful way, if you are suffering. And the five windows are designed to help you to ‘reframe' the original stimulus, so that you get a happier outcome. To produce a more empowering frame about having a dog charging towards you, for example, would entail analyzing your old narratives about dogs; including negative experiences of dogs; perhaps combined with some experiential experiments with dogs in the here and now; to try to ‘over-write' the old frame, and produce a new, updated, more scientific, adult narrative. ~~~ The therapeutic effects of Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT) stem from the fact
that a person who looks through a lens of one configuration (or tint) will not experience the same stimulus/response as a
person who looks through a lens differently configured (or tinted). ~~~ Later it occurred to me that the five ways of looking at any situation, using the Windows Model - like the crashing of my website, for example - is itself too simplistic. There are many more ways than five to look at any situation. This (further multiplication of perspectives) slows down the "decision making process" even more - and prevents that mad dash to "premature cognitive commitment" which says: "This is total tish! I can't stand this great adversity!" The next model that returned to me was Dr Edward De Bono's ‘Six Thinking Hats'. While I am sitting "in my hut" looking out through Window No.2 - which says: "Life is without difficulty, provided I avoid picking and choosing" - I can also ask myself "Which Thinking Hat am I wearing at the moment? And which Hat - or series of Hats - would be best to use in this situation, in order to optimize my solution to this present problem?" Edward De Bono created the Six Thinking Hats model because he considered that there are (at least) six discrete skills involved in thinking, which are: Collecting information (White Hat); Positive evaluation of information (Yellow Hat); Values and feelings (Red Hat); Creative thinking (Green Hat); Planning and organizing our thinking tasks (Blue Hat); and, finally: Critical judgement (Black Hat). (For more detail on this model, please check out this description: http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/sixhats.htm.) So as I sit looking out through Window No.2, in which "Life is without difficulty, provided I avoid picking and choosing (between having my website crash, or having my website succeed greatly)", I can also ask myself: "How could I plan my thinking about how to retrieve this situation?" (Blue Hat); and "What information do I need to collect in order to decide on a goal and a direction?" (White Hat). So partly I need to manage my emotions effectively, in the face of life's difficulties; but also I need to think clearly and effectively about how to plan and implement actions that will move me in positive directions in my life. ~~~ Over a number of weeks I kept looking at ways of responding
to adversity. Ways of framing our experience so we cope better with life's difficulties. So let's look at this
some more. If I then lie on the couch, and look up through the skylight window in the roof of the Mind Hut, I see through a frame that says: "There are certain things we can control, and certain things we can't control". Therefore, obviously, I accept the things I cannot change and change the things I can (because I can control them). So how am I? It also depends upon whether I am wearing the 'Black Hat'
or the 'Yellow Hat' in evaluating the difficulties of the week. (See the description of the Six Thinking Hats, here). Why is this important? Because those difficulties that I have had in my life have had some good and some bad
consequences. ~~~ Let's go back to the five windows and review them: (a) In the first place, before we go into the Mind Hut, and consciously think about our circumstances, we are already looking through a frame, or a set of frames, involving a network of linked inferences. If we are distressed, then we need to be aware that we are looking through a "distressing frame". For example, we may be suffering some serious setbacks and frustrations, and telling ourselves (or ‘framing it') that: This should not be happening. When we go into the Mind Hut, and look out through Window No.1, we are reminded that life is unavoidably difficult much of the time. So why are we whining about our currently difficulties, in a world which tends to be pretty reliably difficult much of the time. (b) Secondly, when we look through Window No.1, and we say "Life is suffering",
we also remind ourselves that this not permanent. Life's difficulties do not continue all of the time! Life is
difficult much of the time, because of environmental stressors, and because of our finite internal resources for coping with
those stressors. Life is difficult when we try to cheat, or indulge in other vices; but life is often very sweet when
we try to be grateful, compassionate, accepting, and so on. In other words, when we indulge our virtues. 5. "Some suffering can be controlled and some cannot". If we lie on the couch and look up through the skylight, the frame on the skylight window prompts us to ask: ‘Can my current frustration, difficulty, suffering, etc, be controlled, or not. If it can be controlled, make a plan to control it, and get into action to change it. If it cannot be changed, then we had better accept it with equanimity, peacefully, and realistically. ~~~ Imagine you are emotionally disturbed by a practical problem in your life. Instead of asking yourself whether
you are looking at this in a rational or irrational way, imagine you are in your 'Mind Hut' and looking out through Window
1. Through this window you see your problem in the frame of 'Life is difficult'. How does that change things?
Isn't it the case that, since life is difficult, your problem seems a bit less disturbing, since you were probably holding
it in the frame of 'this should not be so difficult'. But if life is difficult, then why should you be exempt?
Why should you not have your fair share of difficulties and problems? In that moment, your problem becomes lighter. Finally, if you lie on the couch in the Mind Hut, and look up through the skylight of "Certain problems can be controlled and others can not", you will be able to decide if this is one of those problems you had better accept, or should you make a plan to change it? Once you accept that a particular problem cannot be controlled, you achieve the relief of giving up trying to control the uncontrollable. On the other hand, if it does seem to be controllable, you need to put the white hat on and ask yourself, What information do I need to collect in order to optimize my chances of being able to control this problem? ~~ You might now be wondering how frames compare with scripts and schemas. Frames, schemas (or schemata) and scripts are all terms used in cognitive science and cognitive psychology to describe the format of stored experiences in long term memory. (MacLachlan and Reid, 1994[1]; Eysenck and Keane, 2000[2]). As in any area of academic study, there are different paradigms (or camps and groupings) with different understandings. For examples: For Eysenck and Keane (2000): "The term schema is used to refer to well integrated chunks of knowledge about the world, events, people, and actions. Scripts and frames are relatively specific kinds of schemas. Scripts deal with knowledge about events and consequences of events. Thus, for example, Schank and Abelson (1977)[3] referred to a restaurant script, which contains information about the usual sequence of events involved in going to a restaurant to have a meal. In contrast, frames deal with knowledge about the properties of objects and locations". (Page 352). Needless to say, I do not agree with this distinction, as I see frames, scripts and schemas as attempts to explain what is going on in the mind of an individual when they use their past experience to comprehend and respond to their current environmental stimuli. They are all 'narrative elements' or 'forms of story'. I am also a therapist first and an academic second, and so my aim in life is to identify strategies and perspectives that help to change the world of the client, and not just to understand it. Frames seem to me to have certain advantages over scripts and schemas in helping to direct the mind of the client towards possibilities of changing perspectives. One student who piloted my procrastination programme (which is based on frame theory), said he found the use of frames particularly helpful as they clarified for him that he had control over his perceptions, and that he could change his behaviour by changing the frames through which he was looking at his world. As opposed to Eysenck and Keane, I like Eric Lunzer's description of Frame Theory (in Lunzer, 1989[4]): "The concept of cognitive frames and their role in the interpretation of experience is one which was first evolved within the context of artificial intelligence theory as a way of accounting for the fact that a finite system like the brain can recognize an infinite variety of situations by assigning each new complex to some familiar category, which already incorporates a necessary structure and an equally necessary flexibility. The construct has been fruitfully applied to the interpretation of visual scenes, which change in lawful ways as a function of movements of the viewer and the object (Minsky, 1968[5], 1975[6]), and to the interpretation of spoken and written discourse (Rumelhart and Ortony, 1977[7]; Schank and Abelson, 1977). A frame is a network of related elements (which can be thought of as ideas), which has the added characteristic that not only the elements but also the links among them are distinctive and defined. If you have a frame, you know what goes with what, and also how". When Lunzer says our frames allow us to know what goes with what, and how, he is not implying that our frames are ‘accurate representations of reality'. However, for me, they are results of our subjective and socialized experiences, which means they exist within some social ideology, and are ‘relative takes' rather than ‘absolute facts'. One of the implications of frames is that they are clusters of inferences, at many different levels - subordinate and superordinate. When a frame is triggered - e.g. ‘I don't like that person looking at me in this way in a public library' - a whole host of superordinate frames is apparently simultaneously triggered - such as ‘People should not use intrusive eye contact with strangers'; ‘People who look at me like that mean to harm me'; and so on. According to Lunzer, we do not unpack the cluster of inferences. We simply respond on the basis of our perceptual take indicated in the trigger frame. In REBT a great deal of effort is put into trying to unpack those clusters of frames - in the process known as ‘inference chaining'. And in CBT in general, there is a similar process called ‘the vertical arrow technique', whereby the therapist keeps trying to find out: "What's underneath that inference; and under the next one; and under that...". By contrast, in CENT we do not do any unnecessary unpacking of clusters of inferences. We find the activating frame and get the client to reverse it. If appropriate we also encourage the client to develop a positive frame that impacts the same area of the old negative frame. We then encourage the client to overlearn the reversed-negative frame, and any appropriate new positive frame, with the understanding that in the future, when presented with the problem stimulus - e.g. a stranger stares at them in a public place - the reversed-negative frame (and any new positive frame substitute) will now be activated. We therefore do not spend time looking for ‘the most noxious' inference in the client's problematic cluster of frames. (For an illustration of reversing negative frames, and developing positive frames, see my Procrastination Programme, here). The technical justification for the CENT approach is that, in our daily functioning "...wherever possible, we operate with unanalyzed chunks of information"[8], and that process often works very well to produce good results, and when it produces bad results, the linkage between the stimulus and response is still ‘impressively reliable (even though inaccurate)'. Since this kind of link is so reliable, why unpack the unnecessary? We encourage our clients to learn new frames, and over time we assume that those frames will attract to themselves increasingly clustered relevant networks of frames. In time, the client will have a new cluster of (more positive) frames related to the old, problematical stimulus, and will therefore, automatically, respond with a more functional response. ~~~ To reference this paper in a publication please use the following citation: Byrne, J. (2009c) An introduction to the 'Windows Model' of CENT. CENT Paper No.3. Hebden Bridge: The Institute for CENT Studies. ~~~ Applying the Windows Model If you want to get some practice in applying the Windows Model, and seeing how I have applied it, then please take a look at my Happiness Blog, at http://www.abc-counselling.com/id143.html. Alternatively, you could contact me for a coaching session on applying the Windows Model to your life. Dr Jim Byrne ABC Coaching and Counselling Services Email: Jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com Telephone: 01422 847 882 (from inside the UK), or 44 1422 847 882 (from outside the UK). ~~~ [1] Lunzer, E. (1989) Cognitive development: Learning and the mechanisms of change. In: Patricia Murphy and Bob Moon (eds) Developments in Learning and Assessment. London: Hodder and Stoughton, in association with the Open University. Pages 29-30. [2] MacLachlan, G. and Reid, I. (1994) Framing and Interpretations. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Pages 10-14. ~~~ Why not post this to your social network(s), with this button:
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This instinctual urge to create narrative accounts of our perceptions is probably the root source of science, religion and neurosis. Dr Jim Byrne, November 2009.