The three B’s: good, cheap and brief

What is the Fundación Retoño?

In 1985, I was a civil, property and family court judge. In family matters, the traditional intervention was deficient, destructive, and dealt mainly with adversarial proceedings. Practically no prevention was done; thousands of families passed through the court, and the court, governed by traditional procedure, devoted itself exclusively to highly destructive families, so that with the situations that showed a greater dose of mental health, not much could be done; and above all, fundamentally, the children were not listened to.

In 85, we decided to change things: I put together a small group of social workers who came very specially recommended by the systemic family therapists who had trained them; among them, I want to mention María Rosa Glasserman, who helped me set up that first team. We began working from two fundamental principles: 1) to work from health and 2) to listen to everyone, including the children. It should be stressed that these two points were very revolutionary in the world of the courts. Over the years, and with the valuable help of other systemic therapists such as Silvia Crescini, Dr Pedro Herscovici and Lino Guevara, we strove to create a model that met three characteristics: to be brief, cheap and good (the three B’s model, from the Spanish breve, barato y bueno), and ever briefer, ever cheaper and ever better. Being better never meant being more expensive or longer; that is what we did and what we continue to do today: we work permanently at improving the system of intervention.

In 92, we were ready to make a leap outward: not to reproduce the model, but, on the basis of the experience acquired in the court with a good number of families, to use a certain methodology and apply our principles in other institutions. In other words, we were in a position to teach a practice that was not classic couple or family therapy, but what Mara Selvini Palazzoli calls therapeutic interventions in non-therapeutic settings.

For that, we created the Fundación Retoño and began to give practice-centered courses, designed for people in contact with families in difficulty without being family therapists: I am thinking for example of family lawyers and family court judges. Little by little, we took in all those who, in one way or another, worked in the judicial system: psychologists, social workers or physicians. Later, we gave courses in mediation, in family law for non-lawyers; we were looking for the interdisciplinary, oriented toward practice, and as brief, cheap and good as possible. The work became more complex as we grew and, beyond the lack of financial resources, yesterday as today, we broadened our task, which includes courses in the provinces and abroad, some on specific themes such as violence, psychosis or adoption, integrating the legal perspective into the therapeutic intervention.

Moreover, with time, we consolidated an area to which we now attach great importance in the foundation’s overall activity: the orientation teams. These teams are made up of a social worker and a lawyer, joined some years ago by Lino Guevara. We receive families suffering from chronic problems or going through a crisis, over questions of drugs, violence, conflictual divorces that touch tangentially on legal aspects. We plan a brief intervention of three meetings, which does not claim to be a treatment but a different orientation, so that people can see new alternatives and set a process of change in motion.

In short, we are committed to designing a model that can be useful in various places, in order to apply these ideas and practices developed within the framework of the court. We think that the court can lend its technology to the foundation, and vice versa: for example, we installed a one-way mirror and we record on video in both places.

And how has this three B’s model evolved?

From the beginning, we chose to intervene within the framework of systemic epistemology. I believe that acquiring this perspective takes many years, not because the ideas are so complex, but because they are difficult to assimilate: they are thoughts that, very often, run against the current of the culture. We learn them over time, correcting ourselves constantly, in particular on basic questions such as focusing on health and not on illness, on resources and not on deficits. The temptation is to see the holes, what is missing, the deficiencies; I think it is under the influence of university training, that of psychologists as well as that of physicians and lawyers, that we tend to do that.

Over the years, we have been fairly uncompromising with ourselves; I believe we have made progress. We have shortened the interventions, so that, for example, I would say that today we can receive twice as many cases in the same time as in 85, when we received half as many; that is possible because we are currently more efficient.

What elements, in your view, generate this greater efficiency?

From the outset, we learned to focus; that is fundamental in order not to waste time. It was Silvia Crescini, an experienced and recognized family therapist, who guided us in this. Focusing does not mean that there is one problem that is the central problem, but concentrating on what people agree to have focused on.

Another important aspect was thinking about and learning to work in a network, that is, in connection with all the people involved in the matter, and even by summoning people likely to provide help. This notably increases efficiency and enormously reduces the cost of the intervention, makes it less costly for everyone. For the past two years, I have been intervening more and more in violence cases in a fairly atypical way, and for that, forming a small network helps enormously. I think we are coordinators of networks and of collective thinking rather than of “personalized” thinking, that is, centered on individual themes. More and more, I believe I am a constituent part of a network that already thinks autonomously: not autonomously from me, since I am part of it, but autonomously from each of its members.

Interventions in family violence

How do you apply this in situations of violence?

Over the past two years, since the adoption of the family violence law, we have been receiving many cases that fall under this problem. The formal legal procedure, in these cases, based on certain classic procedural premises, begins with a group and interactive psychodiagnosis carried out by an interdisciplinary team, but which, in reality, is nonetheless a diagnosis. We work less and less with diagnoses. The law has to impose it on me for me to feel obliged to make one; what we try to do is for people to get better, not worse, and the diagnosis is generally an unflattering photograph, it labels, and from there it becomes more difficult to encourage and stimulate people.

The legal format (like everything legal) rests on evidence, on the basis of which a ruling is handed down on a fact that has occurred. This apparatus aims at the handing down of a verdict that can be called reparative, although we know that reparation as such does not exist; in any case, it comes by other means.

In the family violence law, this scheme is present: the objective is to formulate a diagnosis on the basis of which the judge can decide that a person, or a whole family, should go into treatment, and also take protective measures, among them the removal from the home of the man who hits.

“San Salvador before… and after” (reframing the perception a population has of itself)

On this theme, I worked for a month in the Republic of El Salvador, a country whose small size allowed me to travel through it giving courses, in many cities, to psychologists, social workers and physicians who made up the interdisciplinary teams of the family courts. That experience was, for me, emotionally very powerful. The training was funded by the United States and took place after the signing of the peace accords. The material conditions were optimal; the dominant ideology was that of “eradicating” violence from El Salvador. The country was just emerging from a terrible civil war, men walked the streets with machetes. Very badly beaten women came to the family court, and it was serious. But what struck me most was the wretched idea that Salvadorans had of their own families, an ideology inherited, in my opinion, from the great country of the North (the United States).

What they saw were women very much attracted and seduced by machos; irresponsible macho breeders and scattered children… That was the vision the professionals had of the families of their own country, and it was from there that they drew up lapidary diagnoses; the “surgery” that came afterwards was obviously useless and only made official the situation of deterioration and disqualification.

The most remarkable thing is that these practitioners, from whom I learned a great deal, came from the family courts but had an earlier professional history in hospitals, private practices and various places; they were experts and, in those original settings, they had sometimes worked differently, trying to help people instead of “burying” them; they probably acted without specific epistemological preparation, simply with the healthy common sense that says: “this is a hospital, I have this patient and I am going to help him.” The difference is that in that case they did not have to prepare the evidence for a judge’s ruling.

“The tribe of schizoids” and self-denigration

It was interesting because all the papers I had brought for the course (they have very rigorous programs, everything must be duly documented), I had to throw in the bin: in reality, what had to be talked about was why and how they were “killing people” from the family courts, by dint of culture and by dint of kindness, with a disqualification that, in the last instance, fell back on themselves, since they, the professionals charged with the task of assistance, were also members of Salvadoran families and belonged to the culture they were unconsciously denigrating.

In the psychopathological terminology they were used to using, one word came up a lot: schizoid. And I wondered: how can it be that there are so many schizoids in this country? I then discovered that the indigenous people hold out their hand to greet you and remain stiff; so, for a psychologist, according to his studies, an indigenous person is a schizoid. One day, I told them: you have discovered the tribe of schizoids. These people of great human and professional quality laughed heartily as they became aware of what they were doing and, shortly afterwards, they were bringing in their own reports; we discovered what their psychodiagnoses were, they went up to the board and said: “Yes, doctor, this time we buried them.” And, from that intelligent self-criticism and with a lot of humor, they drew the grave. By dint of culture and kindness, I repeated, they had ended up killing people who were asking for their help: the mother had already disappeared, the father had gone off to Miami, they had dismembered the family.

I remember the case of a woman who had divorced. The husband had gone to Miami (there, it is very common for men to go off to work and then send a few dollars); he sent her money and visited his children from time to time, who lived with their mother, who had formed a new couple. The house where they lived adjoined the grandmother’s and that of a maternal aunt who lived with her husband. At that point, the mother dies. The man comes back from Miami and says he wants his children; the aunt, who had grown attached to these children and had none of her own, wants to keep them. A legal battle begins, at the end of which custody is granted to the aunt. From then on, the father disappears and the case ends. Going back over the file, in his statement, the father said this: “I don’t disagree with the children staying here; what I don’t agree with is that it should be the aunt who has them; but with the grandmother, I have always got along well…”

Reflecting on this case, I pointed out that it would have been beneficial to work on that relationship between the father and the grandmother and, while we were discussing it, one of the psychologists taking part in the debate stands up and says to me: “Doctor, I want to say something: I am the one who wrote that expert report. And I want to tell you that right now, in the end, the children are at the grandmother’s, and that in reality they never stopped being with her.”

“Rulings are dictated by life”

From there, we worked out the following premise, which spread throughout El Salvador: “Rulings are dictated by life, not by the judge. What we judges can do is help life, not oppose it.”

The Salvadoran experience was a great learning experience for me, because I made an anthropological journey by immersing myself in a different culture and, thanks to that, I realized that many courses on violence only exacerbate it, because they are conceived from another culture, from the culture of human rights, from academic parameters far removed from knowledge of the field, foreign to the cultural and social context in which these aggressive behaviors develop.

I then discovered that violence, like everything human, cannot be eradicated; it is as if, to eradicate a liver disease, you had to remove the organ because you cannot take out the disease: by “eradicating” violence, very often, you mutilate a part of the family.

Perhaps what had to be done with these families, remarkably affectionate, united by very rich informal networks that went well beyond dad and mom, was, first of all, to get to know them thoroughly, and thus discover that they had very important family values.

The second step consisted in steeping oneself in those values, becoming imbued with them and, through them, gaining access to the inside of that family and working from them.

This task took me a month and helped me a great deal to understand this type of situation, just as frequent in Argentina.

What are people’s real needs?

I began to realize that there were common patterns and so, improvising as I went along, I looked for new interventions that would take into account the context, the characteristics, the desires and the needs of the protagonists involved. In this respect, I am often confronted with a situation that can illustrate this point. Many women come to the court and say, for example, that they want to separate. Immediately, the judges, after examining the file, grant the request and expel these abusive husbands. From that moment begins the comedy of imbroglios that disorients my colleagues, because these women change their minds and defeat the judge’s action by allowing and facilitating their husband’s return to the marital home. The same thing, in El Salvador, took on comical connotations, because the judge would order the immediate removal of the men. To enforce it, you had to go with the police, because the man did not leave so easily; the problem is that if he was left at the door, the husband in question would try to get back in, would then argue with the police and would therefore find himself prosecuted for contempt, for which reason, in El Salvador, he could be put in prison; and in that way, at least for a time, the removal from the home was respected. What happened next is that the lady would bring him food and clothes. After two or three days, seeing that the man was not getting out, she would get angry with the judge and protest that her husband was still in prison. The complaints were endless, and everyone involved felt, in one way or another, frustrated and dissatisfied.

In Argentina, in another way, exactly the same thing happens; that is why, when you attend the meetings of the family courts, you often hear it said: “well, these women like being hit.” And there, frustration and cynicism meet.

From assimilating the culture to intervention oriented toward change and learning: “what kills is indifference”

The question, it seems to me, is to discover what is going on in that other culture that we find hard to interpret. For that, I created a simple introspective method, to assess whether violence was really the worst thing that could happen to a human being, and whether we were not, in a certain way, worse than the violent. At the end of this experience, I came to the conclusion that with violence one generally causes injuries, sometimes serious ones, but that with indifference, “one kills.”

The middle class has a very large dose of indifference, with which “we kill” our wives, our employees and many people; thus, in general, many divorces come about through progressive apathy. Women complain more about this offhandedness of their husbands than about violence itself. I began to think that if we can take off our white coat, or whatever uniform we wear, then, perhaps, the world of the violent will seem to us more understandable and more human than the dehumanized world of the indifferent.

Going deeper, my second reflection would be this: let us remember how many times violence was done to us in our lives without our reacting; thus perhaps we will better understand “that lady” whom we reject, even more than the violent man, simply because she does not react. If we go back over the situations in which we did not react to violence, and the pretexts we found to justify our conduct, we will realize that our excuses closely resemble those put forward by this woman we disqualify.

This exercise, which must be done permanently, allows us to understand our own culture, through which we look at this lady with a certain hostility, because she does not obey as regards respect for human rights over her own person and because, toward the other, the one who commits the aggression, she does not conform to the rules as regards respect for human rights in her action toward others.

The third reflection concerns the construction of the most appropriate intervention. For that, the first step is to look for a way to positively reframe this family; to do so, you have to know what stage of growth it is at, at what precise moment of the family life cycle, whether it is going through a crisis specific to the circumstances, a move, a particular circumstance, and thus put ourselves in their shoes to work out a strategy in which we can be included in that process. In other words, to know them, to understand their actions within the framework in which they occur and, from that context, to generate a connotation appropriate to the family process, in which violence is included, and help them through that passage so that it becomes unnecessary, whether the couple is seen together or its members separately.

This strategy led us to adopt certain intervention techniques: for example, asking women who consult for abuse how much they loved and how much they love this man. We do this so that these people see that they have the right to have positive feelings, that we have not condemned them in advance, that it is not a sin, even if this man has hurt them. We also connote to them how much they have taken care of him, and that there is nothing wrong with that; what is not right is to overprotect him, to spoil him.

And from that starting point, you begin to build the reformulation, the alternative narrative…

That’s right. What I learned from Milton Erickson has served me a great deal: for example, observing how the lady contributed to generating this situation, and what she has learned in her life, so as to be able to integrate myself into her process. It is easier when you manage to generate a current of empathy.

A second moment is when the redefinition more or less reaches consensus and it becomes possible for it to be accepted in one way or another; then a joint construction begins, with a more optimistic vision of the future and, simultaneously, the work with the clients’ support network. In general, I tell them that their problem is simple but that it has to be solved with precision, that we must not make mistakes and that, if we conduct the process correctly, they will be happier; I never say how (because in fact I don’t know); what I do know is that they will have a better future, and that the problem is easy because they have solved so many others before that they will solve this one in the same way. Generally, without my quite knowing why, people agree: they go along with this type of definition of the situation.

Your intervention is a perfect “Ericksonian” orientation toward the future, surely accompanied by a calm tone of voice, by hypnotic attitudes that those of us who know and teach these techniques call “the package” in which the message we want to convey is “wrapped.” For example, when you spoke of generating states involving a certain degree of confusion: this Ericksonian maneuver is very useful for increasing the client’s permeability to what positively orients his action.

Indeed. Moreover, to create interventions with greater impact, it is also important to be able to count on people who help us think about the future, who love and support this battered woman who consults me, and not on witnesses who come to confirm or refute evidence or supposed truths, within the classic interactional framework of the courts.

Structure, characteristics and illustrative cases of the sessions

The sessions normally last thirty or forty minutes, and the process does not exceed three or four meetings. I propose to make not a genogram properly speaking, but a kind of “affectogram,” by asking the following question: who do you watch the soap opera with, who do you share certain moments of the day with? We then note down the answers, and it is these two or three people mentioned who usually come to reflect with us and talk about the affection they have for one another.

Moreover, I relieve the client, once again, of guilt, by expressing myself in the following way: “There is nothing wrong with loving this man you have lived with for ten years, even if he hits you; this person you have lived with for so long must have good sides.”

And in general, they answer: “Yes, he is a good father…”, and another type of narrative begins, in which other, more encouraging, more positive facts unfold.

Is it always like that? Because one has the impression that by connoting the positive aspects, in your vast experience, it would be confirmed that they are good fathers, or that they have positive interests or qualities…

They see it that way.

You work on perception beyond what you see, you immerse yourself in their culture. Something that is not only Ericksonian, but also proper to the anthropological vision of Gregory Bateson, which has inspired and inspires so many pioneers of systemic clinical work, and all of us who work in the field of family therapy.

Exactly, I work like an anthropologist. I do not judge in any way what I perceive. I ask: “Is he good-looking? Yes. Is he a womanizer? Yes, he is a womanizer.” But, quite obviously, she doesn’t care.

The case of the move: from confrontation to cooperation

For example, I am currently seeing a charming lady, a beautiful woman who has fought hard for her children. She has a partner, whom she loves. We have had two meetings: at the first, she came alone; at the second, accompanied by a friend. The conclusion we drew from these conversations is that what she really wanted was to move house. She said that where they lived, the husband had very easy access to other women and that, moreover, his own family covered for him, whereas she was an outsider. She said she didn’t care that he hit her and that he had other women; what she wanted was to move. Her position seemed intelligent to me. Once the thought is consolidated to the point of becoming a solid foothold in itself and of being able to be shared by others, it is very easy, working with the network, to bring in the other, in such a way that he is no longer the accused, but someone who comes forward to cooperate.

The husband comes as a collaborator, or he doesn’t come. It even happens that he learns from his wife that there are proceedings under way, that he is spoken well of there, and that he then presents himself before me spontaneously. Generally, he first unburdens himself, proclaims his innocence. But I, as long as it has been previously established in the collective perception, treat him as someone who has come to help.

And how do you work with him?

For example, I tell him: “You know that your wife is so intelligent that what she wants is to move, and that moreover she wants to do it with you.”

And that is the theme we work on. Sometimes, as in this case, he does not come alone, but directly with her; but who brought him? The lady. I did not send him a court summons. Doing so has never given me results. It is someone from the network, sometimes she herself, sometimes the sister, or else I am told: “I am a neighbor, I run into the husband at the supermarket. Since I get along well with him, if you like, doctor, I’ll tell him to come; but give me a ‘little note’ so he knows that what I tell him is true, and that way I’ll bring him to you.”

The document in question simply states that proceedings are under way before such and such a court and that the judge will receive him on such a day at such a time. It is an informal piece of paper, which is not delivered by a bailiff, but by the sister, the sister-in-law, someone from the network. And that, yes, that gives me results. Obviously, he comes knowing that he is in a bad position, and moreover it is a court; but, shortly afterwards, that fades into the background: he comes to help with a task, which may be divorcing, taking care of the children, moving house, solving an alcohol problem or anything else. But it is always a constructive objective.

And what is the complementary process you conduct with the woman?

How to avoid victimizing the victim

To begin with, the woman must have the absolute certainty that the love and care she has invested in this man over the past fifteen years are not something degrading that excommunicates her. Because if I excommunicate her from the height of the law, if only by my gaze, she will believe she is losing her identity, since her identity, as her mother told her, is bound up with the task of taking care of men.

I remember the case of a lady, deputy head of a school, who told me that her mother had taught her that “a man, you have to follow him, even into the mud.” If she is told that all that is false because a professional has written a book that says the opposite, or because the United Nations lays down such and such a norm, the woman may think: and what have I done with the last thirty-five years of my life? And from there, she feels ashamed. If, to that, we add the explanation of the cycle theory, so that she gets to know the cycle of the honeymoon, of violence, of reconciliation, and so on, we will come, ourselves, to the conclusion that this person does not respond correctly to the standard norms. The paradox is that once we have finished relieving her of responsibility, we ask her for responsible acts. For me, the theory of the cycles of violence is not made for responsible human beings…

I start from a magnanimous and sincere acceptance of what the woman has done up to that moment, so that together we can then find a partially new, more unprecedented path.

It is interesting to work in a network because there, you can keep yourself as a rather conservative coordinator; the neighbors, the sisters come and say: “that guy, he should be killed.” In reality, that is what they have been telling her for twenty-five years without result; so we reflect aloud: “Well, killing him wouldn’t be bad, but she has taken such good care of him… And you, have you ever killed a baby? No? Killed a child? No? And you, you want to throw him in the bin after having taken such good care of him?” “No, doctor, I don’t want to throw him in the bin,” they answer me.

So I make it clear to them that what she wants is to go on taking care of him, but differently. The situation can also be redefined in the following way: “You are an extraordinary mom, and perhaps your husband should be moved up to the next grade.” That is how I would put it with this teacher or another. Language is fundamental. It must adapt to each person.

Coercive control and the sultan’s throne

Speaking of language, I was very impressed by something you said at the launch of a book on family violence. It dealt with the hold exerted by the aggressor, and you said: the hold exerted on the practitioner by the people who come asking for help.

That is perhaps the part that raises the most doubts in me. I carry out a kind of counter-hold; that is to say, I believe that, in many cases of violence, there is a kind of colonization of the victim’s center of obedience by the subject who exerts the violence, and this center of obedience I call the sultan’s throne (because they are generally womanizing men).

There is a sultan on the throne; in other words, the lady has made wonders of her life, but her center of obedience is colonized, and so she suddenly starts speaking in a language (I have traces of it in many videos) that hypnotizes the practitioner. At first, I didn’t quite understand what was going on; then I realized that in reality the man with violent behavior was inducing me, through the lady, to prevent me from thinking, to neutralize me, because he provoked in me a state of immobility. He made me feel disarmed.

As violence often leaves you: without reaction, paralyzed and ashamed of being so…

Of course, as if you had lost the capacity to act and to think. So I would reflect: but how is this possible? This lady comes to consult, but she speaks, she acts in such a way that after a while, either I hit her or I fall fast asleep. She was hypnotizing me without realizing it, but I thought that the one doing it was the aggressor, through her. So I had to react to that, by telling her for example: “if we go on like this, I can’t think properly”…

The network is a great help, because by creating several poles of attraction, it makes the brain work much faster; but in face-to-face meetings, alone with the victim, it happened to me. So, thanks to these personal experiences, I discovered that, in certain cases, I could have a healthy influence by getting out of the hypnotic situation: by standing up, by beginning to turn, to walk around the person and by saying things like: “Really, what I don’t know is whether you come here because you want to ask me for a suggestion or a piece of advice; I don’t quite understand what you want…” In short, I would lead the lady into confusion, so that afterwards I could regain control and thus dethrone the sultan.

The case of the Thousand and One Nights and the importance of self-esteem

I remember another lady, from whom I also learned a great deal; at that time, I was leaving for Cuba, then for El Salvador. This middle-class widow, who had two sons, two young men, had set up house with a man. She owned her apartment, and this man, who had had seven women before her, had for some time been insisting that she accept cohabitation with another woman, that is to say, there would be two ladies in her own home. He generally exerted a lot of violence on her; he even had a revolver.

When she arrived at the court, she had left her home with her children, taken part of her belongings and fled. The fact that I had to leave for Cuba exacerbated my tendency to shorten processes. The cheap and the brief also activate ideas; that is why I try to shorten the time frames as much as possible.

The lady in question began to tell me the facts, and it was absolutely fascinating, because she was telling me what had happened with the seven previous women. After half an hour, I was completely spellbound by the story, so I told her: “You know that you fascinate me with your account, but now I no longer know what to think, I can’t help you, because what I want is for you to go on with your story.” And while speaking, I was thinking at the same time: this reminds me a lot of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. So I went on: “This way, it won’t work; don’t tell me any more.”

But the lady went on talking to me, in a slow, soft, pleasant voice… and I was delighted for her to continue; but in the end, I said: “No, stop, that’s enough.”

I began to walk around her and started a counter-induction; when I realized that I could now tell her something, and that I had really reached what I call the center of obedience, I gave her the following instruction: “If you want me to help you, come tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning with a lawyer, with your cousin, with your brother-in-law, and I will tell you what you must do.”

The next day, at 7:30, she was there; I did the same work again and told her: “Now, in the same way you did to leave, you are going to go back home” (it should be noted that she had spied on her partner’s comings and goings in order to be able to leave). And I went on: “But now, you must go on taking care of him: you are going to find him a hotel worthy of him and you will pay him a month in advance.”

This woman had internalized that she had to take care of people, of little wounded animals, of anything. I asked her to choose an expensive hotel, because in that way I was integrating her sense of sacrifice. Then I added: “Then you go back home, you pack his suitcase. When he arrives, you go down, you console him, you take him to the hotel… Now I am leaving for Cuba, but you must call me.”

I never say “you must call me to tell me how it went”; I always say “you must call me to tell me how well it went.” The next day, shortly before I left on my trip, I received a card in which she told me that in fifteen minutes she had learned more than in her previous forty-five years. She also telephoned my secretary asking her to tell me that everything was fine.

A few months later, she came back and told me that she didn’t want to waste my time, but that she needed one more consultation. It seems that the man in question came by from time to time and that she advised him; so she asked me: “Is that wrong?” “No,” I answered her, “it’s good, you go on taking care of him, advising him; only, always do it in public places, never let him in.”

She answered that that was exactly what she was doing and that she was glad I confirmed that it was right, because everyone was telling her not to do it. She was an intelligent woman. She left and never came back.

This type of experience, added to what I learned during my stay with those Salvadoran families and professionals, gave rise in me to the strong conviction that the procedure chosen was the right one, because it was brief, effective and inexpensive.

On this subject, a lawyer training at the foundation made the following remark to me: to think that people spend years in therapy over minor matters, and this woman, broken, comes and sorts out her life in two or three sessions. And she added, correcting herself: well, it’s not that she sorts out her whole life, but she feels valued and can then decide to undertake the actions that suit her best to improve her situation, and that in a very short time.

Personally, I work a great deal on the self-esteem of the people who consult me; I emphasize their physical beauty, their figure, their friendliness, so that they come to positive conclusions about themselves and do not fall back into earlier states in which they considered themselves a fiasco.

And in the cases where she has not yet decided whether she is going to separate or change her couple, the doors remain open to her, because she has been recognized as a person and she can come back whenever she wishes to take up the subject again. In general, they do so with complete peace of mind, because I never tell them “you are a sinner because you are breaking the human rights convention”; I accept their past, their circumstances, their personal characteristics and their own needs.

Final reflections

Fundamentally, you do not victimize the victim. You avoid the ideological discussion and you stick to what the clients actually present to you. From that place, respectful of the values and of what the client really wants, you build, from her language, an Ericksonian intervention that produces a small modification allowing her to get better. Over your years of work, you must have seen an enormous number of people with this type of problem; you have surely done follow-ups. What conclusions do you draw from your casuistry?

I am very satisfied to have found an approach that I have only clearly perceived in recent years, and which can still be greatly refined. In fact, every day, I realize how it can be improved. The results, for the moment and through the follow-ups, are optimal.

I have eighty cases (2) fully completed and recorded on video, and as many others being edited.

As regards violence, it is important to integrate it as proper to humankind and to think that it cannot be eradicated: it is part of human feelings and, consequently, of the lives of men and women.