WHY WE DON’T ASK WHY

When it comes to the very idea of modeling, it did not begin with Bandler and Grinder. As I have noted in many other articles, books, and posts here on Neurons— Abraham Maslow began modeling self-actualizing people back in 1938. And there were others. For example, Fritz Perls thought about modeling as an intimate part of the work of therapy, specifically Gestalt Therapy. In his last book, a book that was finished two years after his death, the book that Richard Bandler transcribed from audio-tapes and films of Perls— The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness to Therapy (1973)— Fritz Perls wrote about finding the how.

In speaking about a client who had a headache, Perls said that people often present a headache— “... as one of their most annoying symptoms. They complain that their headaches bother them ...” In response, Perls described his approach.

“... we ask them to take more responsibility and less aspirin. We do this by asking them to discover through experiencing how they produce their headaches...” (The Gestalt Approach, 1973, p. 68)

That’s the heart of modeling— discovering how a person produces an experience. In order to do that, he then described more fully how to get into the experience to fully experience it and understand it (p. 68-70). In explaining this, he passionately argued against asking why and as emphatically urged them to ask about the how.

“The ‘why’ questions produce only pat answers, defensiveness, rationalizations, excuses, and the delusion that an event can be explained by a single cause. The why does not discriminate purpose, origin, or background. Under the mask of inquiry it has contributed perhaps more to human confusion than any other single word. Not so with ‘how.’ The how inquires into the structure of an event, and once the structure is clear all the whys are automatically answered. Once we have clarified the structure of the headache we can answer all the questions of he whys-guys ad libitum. ...” (Italic added)

If there’s any paragraph that succinctly summarizes why not to ask why and why to ask how, that is the paragraph. Then in typical Fritz Perls style, he adds a bit of humor to this subject.

“... if we spend our time looking for causes instead of structure we may as well give up the idea of therapy and join the group fo worrying grandmothers who attack their pray with such pointless questions as ‘Why did you catch that cold?’ ‘Why have you been so naughty/’” (1973, p. 77)

Then to add yet one more argument against asking why, he adds this: “The majority of questions the patient asks are seductions of the intellect, related to the notion that verbal explanations are a substitute for understanding.” (1973, p. 78)

Modeling is about coming to understand the structure of an experience and that means figuring out how the person is performing the experience. What is the person doing internally in the mind and/or externally with the body that is generating the person’s subjective experience? Modeling is the process of answering that question.

The idea of not asking why in NLP came from other sources that from the founders of NLP. It most directly came from Perls and from Satir; both emphasized the importance of the processes over history, source, and explanation. Knowing how something works informs us about what we can actually do to change things. That is something that the “why of explanation” or the “why of history” does not provide.

Now in contrast to those two why questions, there is another. And it is a very productive question. That is the “why of importance or value.” When you ask, “Why is that important to you?” you are looking for and probing into a person’s values and criteria. And that helps us to understand what the person is intending to achieve. So while this why helps us understand the person more fully, that is not the case with the why of explanation or history. Those why questions tend to evoke intellectualizing and archeological surveys.