Stopping the Blame Game: Shifting Focus from the Past to the Present Sequence

When a client enters your office, they often present a list of historical grievances as if they are providing you with a map of the problem. They believe that by recounting the injuries of five years ago, they provide you with the data necessary to fix their present misery. You listen to a wife describe her husband’s infidelity from a decade prior, or a husband explain how his wife’s family interfered with their wedding. We recognize these narratives as a diversion from the immediate sequence of their struggle. If you allow the session to become a historical archive, you lose your leverage over the present interaction. Jay Haley taught us that the problem is the current sequence of behavior. Your task is to change that sequence, not to edit the history books.

The sequence is the observable chain of events happening in the room or in the home during the current week. You look for who speaks first, who interrupts, and how the other person responds to that interruption. We define the problem as a recurring loop where one action leads to another, and that second action triggers the first one again. When you identify this loop, you stop looking for the original cause in childhood or previous decades. I once worked with a family where the mother complained about her teenage son’s grades. She began every session with a list of his failures from middle school. I told her that his middle school performance was an antique, and I was only interested in how they argued about his homework last night at seven o’clock. By narrowing the focus to that thirty minute window, I could see the sequence clearly. The mother nagged, the son withdrew, the father intervened to defend the son, and the mother then attacked the father. That is the sequence we must change.

You must block the client when they try to move backward in time. You do this with a polite but firm interruption. You might say, I am sure that happened three years ago and it was difficult, but I want to know what happened at the breakfast table this morning. You are teaching them that the past is a closed set of data that cannot be modified. The present sequence is a live wire that you can redirect. We observe that clients feel a sense of relief when we refuse to join them in the historical mire. They have already discussed their history a thousand times without resolution. You offer them something different which is a focus on the immediate.

Every communication defines a relationship. When a client brings up the past, they are attempting to define the relationship as one of victim and perpetrator. You disrupt this by defining the relationship as a system of interacting parts. You act as the director of a play who is only interested in the current scene. If an actor tries to talk about their character’s backstory, you bring them back to the stage directions. We use our authority to limit the scope of the conversation. This limitation is not a kindness: it is a clinical necessity. I recall a case involving a corporate executive and his vice president. They spent twenty minutes debating a failed project from two years prior. I watched the executive lean forward and point his finger while the vice president slumped and looked at the floor. I interrupted them. I asked the executive to tell me exactly how he asked for the report this morning. I asked the vice president to describe the first thought he had when he heard that request. By focusing on the morning interaction, we discovered that the executive used a specific tone of voice that the vice president interpreted as a dismissal. The vice president then withheld information as a form of quiet protest. This was the sequence. It had nothing to do with two years ago and everything to do with the exchange of data in the current hour.

You observe the physical manifestations of the sequence. When the husband starts to recount a grievance, watch the wife’s hands. If she clenches the arm of the chair, you have found a trigger point in the current sequence. You do not ask her why her hands are clenching. You ask the husband to stop speaking and you ask the wife to describe the sensation of wanting to interrupt him in this moment. You are making the sequence conscious and visible. We do not care about the validity of the historical claim. We care about the function of the claim in the present power struggle. Suppose you are working with a couple where the wife feels neglected. She begins to talk about how her husband forgot their anniversary five years ago. You must stop her. You say, I am sure that hurt, but tell me about yesterday when he came home from work. You want to see the sequence of the homecoming. Did he walk past her? Did she greet him with a complaint? Did he go straight to the television? This sequence is the problem. If you change the homecoming sequence, the anniversary from five years ago loses its power to disrupt the present.

We prioritize the how over the why. Asking why a person behaves a certain way leads to excuses and historical justification. Asking how a person behaves leads to a description of the sequence. When you ask how, you are asking for the steps in the dance. I once saw a couple who argued about money. The husband would bring up a debt the wife incurred early in their marriage. This was his favorite weapon. I told him that the debt was a ghost and I did not talk to ghosts. I asked him to show me exactly how he looks at the bank statement on Friday night. I asked the wife to show me where she stands in the room when he does this. We discovered that he sat at the kitchen table while she stood behind him. This physical arrangement created a hierarchy that she resisted by becoming defensive. I had them switch places. I had the wife sit at the table with the statement and the husband stand across the room. By changing the physical sequence, the historical argument about debt became irrelevant.

You must be the most active person in the room. If you are passive, the clients will revert to their habitual patterns of blame. You are the one who decides what is relevant. We know that the client’s definition of the problem is usually part of the problem itself. If they say the problem is their history, and you agree, you have become part of their stuck system. You must reject their premise. You do this by being relentlessly focused on the current interaction. If a client says, My father always treated me this way, you say, Tell me how your husband is treating you right now as you say that. This brings the focus back to the room. It forces the client to deal with the person sitting three feet away from them rather than a memory.

I have found that the most effective way to map a sequence is to have the clients interact with each other rather than with you. You take a step back and watch them talk. You are looking for the point where the conversation breaks down. This is the point where the sequence becomes dysfunctional. You might see a husband make a joke and a wife roll her eyes. You stop them right there. You ask the wife to roll her eyes again, but this time, you ask her to do it ten times in a row. This is an Ericksonian technique of prescribing the symptom. By making the eye roll a deliberate task, you break its place in the automatic sequence. The husband cannot get angry at a deliberate task in the same way he gets angry at a spontaneous insult. You have introduced a new element into the sequence.

We look for the smallest unit of change. You do not need to change the entire history of a marriage to fix it. You only need to change one step in the sequence. If the sequence is A, B, C, and D, and you change B, the rest of the chain cannot follow its usual course. I once worked with a young man who was constantly criticized by his parents. The sequence was always the same: the parents gave advice, the son argued back, and the parents became more forceful. I told the son that the next time they gave him advice, he should simply take out a notebook and write down every word they said without responding. This changed the sequence. The parents did not know how to handle his silence and his note taking. The argument could not happen because the second step, the son arguing back, had been removed. The historical pattern of criticism was broken by a simple change in the immediate response.

You must maintain your position as the expert on the process. The clients are the experts on their own history, but their expertise has not helped them. You are the expert on how people interact in the present. You do not need to know about the wife’s relationship with her mother to see that she is currently dominating her husband. You do not need to know about the husband’s childhood trauma to see that he is currently using his silence as a weapon. We focus on what is happening in front of our eyes. This approach requires you to trust your observations over the client’s explanations. If a client’s explanation of their behavior contradicts what you see them doing in the room, you believe what you see.

I recall a couple who claimed they never argued, yet the tension between them was palpable. They spoke about their past with great pride, describing a decade of harmony. While they spoke, the husband was tapping his foot rapidly and the wife was picking at her cuticles. I did not ask them about their harmonious past. I asked them to notice their foot and their hands. I asked them what would happen if the foot tapping and the cuticle picking were the start of a fight that they were not having. This brought the suppressed sequence into the open. We discovered that their harmony was maintained by a sequence of mutual avoidance. By bringing the avoidance into the present moment, we could begin to change it.

We use the follow up session to see if the new sequence has held. You do not ask how they feel about the last session. You ask what happened on Tuesday when the old trigger occurred. You are looking for reports of specific behavioral changes. If they tell you they feel better but cannot describe a change in their interaction, you have not yet succeeded. A change in feeling is often temporary, but a change in sequence is structural. You are building a new structure of interaction. When you focus on the sequence, you are working on the architecture of the relationship. This is the difference between a practitioner who listens to stories and a practitioner who changes lives. You are not a listener: you are an interventionist. The present sequence is your field of play, and every move you make should be designed to disrupt the old patterns and establish new ones. The history of the problem is a distraction that keeps the clients locked in their current misery, and your refusal to engage with that history is the first step toward their liberation. We observe that the most successful interventions are those that remain grounded in the immediate, observable reality of the room. Your authority comes from your ability to see the sequence that the clients are too involved in to notice. By highlighting this sequence, you give them the opportunity to behave differently. This is the core of strategic work. We do not look back because there is nothing in the past that we can change, but the sequence of the next five minutes is entirely within our influence.

We change the sequence by manipulating the physical space where the interaction occurs. You do not ask the couple to discuss their feelings about a recurring argument. Instead, you instruct the husband to stand on a sturdy chair in the corner of the room while the wife sits on the floor at the opposite end. You tell them to continue their argument from these positions. I once worked with a couple where the wife used weeping to stop any criticism from her husband. I directed her to weep into a large plastic bucket while the husband timed her with a stopwatch. This change in the physical arrangement makes the habitual sequence of accusation and emotional retreat impossible to maintain. We observe that when you change the physical architecture of an encounter, the psychological content must adapt to the new structure. You are not looking for an emotional breakthrough. You are looking for a collapse of the old pattern.

You use reframing to change the meaning of the behavior without attempting to change the behavior itself. If a mother complains that her teenage son is rebellious because he constantly checks her location, you reframe this as a sign of his intense devotion. You tell the mother that her son is so concerned for her safety that he cannot attend to his own life until he knows she is secure. We then use a paradoxical directive by instructing the son to check on his mother exactly six times every evening for the next four days. By making the spontaneous behavior a directed chore, you move it from the realm of emotional impulse into the realm of scheduled labor. The son soon finds the checking burdensome because it is no longer his own idea. The mother begins to view the behavior as a symptom of the son’s anxiety rather than a personal insult. You have successfully moved the problem from a battle of wills to a matter of inconvenient service.

When you encounter resistance, you do not push against the client. We know that direct confrontation only strengthens the existing sequence. You use the resistance to fuel the change. I worked with a man who insisted that his depression was more powerful than any intervention I could offer. I did not disagree with him. I told him that his depression was indeed so formidable that he must not try to feel better yet because his system could not handle the sudden shock of happiness. I gave him a “go slow” injunction. I instructed him to spend exactly one hour every morning sitting in a hard wooden chair, feeling as miserable as he possibly could. This is the use of the paradox. When you command the client to have the symptom, they can only keep the symptom by obeying you. If they refuse to feel miserable, they have dropped the symptom to disobey you. In either case, you have gained control of the sequence.

You employ the ordeal to make the symptom more troublesome to keep than it is to give up. Jay Haley emphasized that a symptom must be more painful than the effort required to change. You design an ordeal that is good for the client but also annoying or difficult to perform. A woman who suffers from night terrors and uses those moments to demand attention from her husband is directed to get out of bed and polish all the silver in the house every time she wakes up in a fright. She must not return to bed until every spoon is gleaming. We are not interested in the origin of her fears. We are interested in making her current behavior a laborious task. Within two weeks, her body will prefer uninterrupted sleep to the chore of polishing silver in the middle of the night. You have introduced a new consequence into the sequence that makes the old behavior non-functional.

In every dysfunctional sequence, we see a confused hierarchy. You must restore the functional order by aligning the power structures. If a child is controlling the parents through temper tantrums, the sequence usually involves the child screaming, the mother pleading, and the father withdrawing. You change this by instructing the father to take the child to a separate room and hold the door shut until the child is quiet, while the mother prepares a meal that she and the father will eat together without the child. This re-establishes the parental alliance. I remember a case where a grandmother was undermining a mother’s discipline. I directed the mother to ask the grandmother for advice on a trivial matter, such as the best way to organize a pantry, while keeping the grandmother entirely out of the room during any moments of discipline. By giving the grandmother high status in a non-essential area, we satisfied her need for influence while removing her from the site of the conflict.

You use metaphorical communication when the direct approach is too threatening for the system. If a man is unable to discuss his physical impotence, you talk to him about his struggle to grow a garden in poor soil. You ask him about the timing of the planting and the quality of the fertilizer. You do not mention his physical problem once. I once worked with a corporate executive who could not delegate authority to his staff. I spent the entire session talking to him about how a conductor leads a large orchestra without playing a single instrument. We discussed the baton and the way the conductor must trust the violinists to do their jobs. He went back to his office and changed his management style without us ever discussing his subordinates. We speak to the pattern of the problem rather than the content of the problem.

You manage the follow-up session as a diagnostic tool for compliance. When the clients return, you do not ask how they feel or if they had a good week. You ask if they completed the specific task you assigned. If they say they did not do it, you do not express disappointment or frustration. You assume there was a sound reason they were not ready to change yet. You tell them that perhaps the task was too easy for them, or that you moved too quickly, and you give them a more difficult or more complex version of the same task. This maintains your position as the director of the change process. If they did complete the task, you do not praise them. You simply observe the results and move to the next stage of the sequence. We are looking for a change in the organization of the family, not a change in their opinion of us.

You use the power of the secret to shift coalitions within a family. In some sequences, the problem is maintained by a hidden alliance, such as a child and a mother teaming up against the father. You change this by prescribing a new secret. You tell the father and the mother to plan a surprise for their children that they must not reveal for one full week. This creates a private alliance between the parents that excludes the children. This structural change corrects the hierarchy and forces the children back into their proper place. The sequence of the secret replaces the sequence of the conflict. We recognize that the goal is not insight but a change in the observable behavior. You are successful when the sequence that brought them into the room is no longer occurring. We base our success on the disappearance of the symptom and the reorganization of the system. The client’s understanding of why the change occurred is secondary to the fact that the change is stable.

You manage the conclusion of the strategic intervention with the same precision you applied to the initial directive. We do not view termination as a long emotional goodbye. We view it as the final move in a game of chess. When the symptom has vanished and the hierarchy has been restored, you must withdraw your influence before the system becomes dependent on you. If you stay too long, you become part of the sequence you are trying to break. You become the third point in a rigid triangle that prevents the other two parties from dealing with each other directly. We observe this when the practitioner has become a crutch for the family. You must make yourself unnecessary by emphasizing that the change occurred because of the clients’ own actions, even if those actions were merely following your paradoxical instructions.

Predicting a relapse is one of the most effective ways to ensure the change persists. You tell the client that you are concerned they might revert to the old behavior too quickly. For example, if a husband and wife have stopped their nightly three hour arguments about domestic chores, you might tell them that you are worried they are becoming too cooperative. You suggest that they should schedule a small, ten minute argument on Tuesday evening at seven o’clock. By prescribing the relapse, you put them in a double bind. If they argue, they are following your instruction, which means they are no longer out of control. If they do not argue, they are proving they have control over the sequence. This places you in absolute charge of the potential failure.

You can also use the technique of pretending to have the symptom. This is a strategy Chloe Madanes developed. You ask a child who is having temper tantrums to pretend to have a tantrum while the parents pretend to help him. This changes the sequence from a spontaneous outburst of anger to a cooperative play. I once used this with a professional man who suffered from debilitating anxiety before board meetings. I instructed him to enter his office ten minutes before the meeting and pretend to have a panic attack. He had to act out the shaking hands and the rapid breathing. By making the symptom a deliberate performance, he gained a sense of mastery over the involuntary physical response. The sequence of being overcome by anxiety was replaced by the sequence of performing anxiety on command.

I once worked with a manager who complained that his staff was incompetent and lazy. The sequence always followed the same pattern: he would give a vague instruction, the staff would make a mistake, and he would spend three hours correcting it while shouting about their lack of skill. I instructed the manager to become even more incompetent than his staff. He was required to make deliberate mistakes in his own reports that the staff would have to catch. This forced the subordinates into a superior position where they had to be the competent ones to protect the department. The manager had to follow the sequence of asking for their help to find his errors. Within three weeks, the staff worked diligently to prove they were smarter than their boss. The manager became the grateful and quiet recipient of their professional expertise.

In an organizational setting, you must often address the hierarchy before you can change the sequence of blame. If a supervisor is being bypassed by her own manager, the supervisor will often take her frustration out on the entry level employees. You do not talk about her feelings of being ignored. You restructure the communication sequence. You instruct the manager that he may only speak to the entry level employees through the supervisor for one month. If an employee approaches the manager directly, the manager must remain mute and point toward the supervisor’s office. This physical directive restores the proper chain of command. We find that once the hierarchical structure is clear, the middle manager no longer feels the need to attack her subordinates to prove her own authority.

When a client is too resistant to direct or paradoxical interventions, you can use a metaphorical task. You assign a task that has nothing to do with the problem but shares the same sequence of behavior. I worked with a man who was unable to make a decision about whether to marry his girlfriend of seven years. He was stuck in a sequence of obsessive weighing of pros and cons. I instructed him to go to a local hardware store and buy three different types of light bulbs. He had to install each one in his living room for exactly two days and observe the light. He was not allowed to choose his favorite until he had tried all three. This task forced him to practice the sequence of making a commitment to a choice and living with it.

You must monitor the follow up sessions for any signs that the system is trying to pull you back into the old sequence. If a client brings up a new problem that seems remarkably similar to the old one, you must treat it as a test of your resolve. You do not start a new round of circular analysis. You apply the same structural logic. If the hierarchy was the issue in the first problem, it is likely the issue in the second one. We maintain our position as the director of the change until the end. Terminate the work when the clients are bored with your presence. Boredom is a sign that the drama of the old sequence has been replaced by the routine of a functioning system.

We recognize that a system is healthy when it can resolve its own sequences without external interference. You know your work is finished when the client describes a potential conflict and then explains how they handled it using the new pattern before you could offer a suggestion. At this point, you do not ask how they feel about the success. You agree the problem is gone and suggest that further meetings are unnecessary. The finality of your strategic withdrawal confirms the reality of their change. We consider the case closed when the new sequence is the most efficient way for the system to function. The client’s response to the absence of the symptom is the final indicator of structural stability. We look for the moment when the clients no longer look to you for validation but instead look to each other for instruction. This transition from dependence to autonomy is the ultimate goal.