In linguistics there’s a distinction called nominalization. Nominalization is where you take a process and you describe it as if it’s an event or a thing. In this way you utterly confuse those around you, and yourself—unless you remember that it is a representation rather than experience. This can have positive uses. If you happen to be a government, you can talk about nominalizations like “national security” and you can get people to worry about those words. Our president just went to Egypt and changed the word “imperative” to the word “desirable” and suddenly we’re friends with Egypt again. All he did was change a word. That’s word magic.
The word “resistance” is also a nominalization. It’s describing a process as a thing without talking about how it works. The earnest, concerned, authentic therapist in the last dialogue would describe the client as being callous and insensitive, so totally out of touch with his feelings that he could not communicate effectively with him. That client was really resistant.
And the client would be out looking for another therapist because that therapist needed glasses. He had absolutely no perspective at all. He couldn’t see eye to eye with him at all!
And they would both be right, of course.
Authors of "Frogs into Princes", Richard Bandler & John Grinder
Now, is there anyone here who hasn’t yet identified the pattern that we’re talking about? Because it really was the beginning point for us. Woman: Ah, in the last dialogue the client was using visual words like “look, see, show, focus, perspective.” And the therapist was using feeling words like “grasp, handle, feel, smooth, rough.”
Right. And there are also some people who use mostly auditory words: “I hear what you’re saying,”"That rings a bell,”"I can resonate with that,” etc. What we noticed is that different people actually think differently, and that these differences correspond to the three principal senses: vision, hearing, and feeling—which we call kinesthetics.
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