VALENCES AND VALENCE SHIFTERS

A lecture given on 7 September 1950

Anatomy of Identities

If in an engram Mama says "You’re different from what I am, you could never be like me," and Mama is a good cook, you will find this person not doing well with cookery. Such an engram could wipe all the household arts out of a woman.

The most sorrowful engram I ever ran into was an AA on Christmas Eve. This was a brutal one. This person couldn’t even start to come near a Christmas tree without going to pieces. He didn’t want anything to do with Christmas or any part of it. He was very peculiar about presents. If anybody tried to give him a present, he would say the social amenities of "Thank you very much. Oh, yes, I enjoy it a great deal," and then hastily throw it into a trunk to get it out of sight so that he wouldn’t run into it again. This peculiar behavior was occasioned by the very sad engram of a mutual AA where Papa was being very brutal. He got drunk and decided that he didn’t want any children around. He did this AA against protest, at the same time talking about Christmas. And then he said, "I’ve got a present for him," and thrust a needle right straight through the embryo. One thrust, one phrase. It really messed up that person’s life. Mama went to the doctor shortly afterwards and got herself patched up and the baby came through.

There can be a call- in on valences that says something on the order of "Why don’t you be like me?" or "Why don’t you be like your Uncle Oscar?" or "Why don’t you be like other children?" which puts this person into about 40 assorted children’s valences. On the other side, "You’re just like other children" commands him into other valences.

Bouncers, holders and denyers can also be connected with valences. "I can’t be myself" is a bouncer out of one’s own valence, "You’re always like your father" is a holder in a valence, and "No such person exists" would be a denyer.

I ran into this weird combination one time whereby someone had appeared with a certain name early in the prenatal period, and Papa and Mama were arguing about this person very violently. She was accusing him of being unfaithful and he was trying to throw a friend into the breach. And she said this person’s name (we’ll just make it Bill), "No such person exists as Bill." Of course this was all forgotten, but it was a favorite name of Papa’s so that when the child was born he named the child William. However, according to the engram there was no such person as Bill. That denyer kicked him out of his own valence all the time, and he used to sit around and say to himself, "Who am I?"

In fact, a person can always say "Who am I?" repeating his name several times, and get a wide separation from reality, but when he has got an engram along those lines and that name is included in an engram, he is going to restimulate the engram. So, the adventure of repeating one’s name many times gives some very odd experiences. That is why girls, for instance, start using their second name instead of their first name, and I think why a lot of them want to be married.

These valence commands are quite important. Usually you ask the person for a valence shifter and he will give you one. You could explain to a preclear what a valence shifter is, or simply recognize one as it goes by. The person is either getting the somatic or not, and actually getting down into the basic part of the track he will get into his own valence. These patients are always complicated by valence shifts.

Homosexuality is a valence shifter of enormous magnitude. The way to resolve such a case is to find the dramatization on the part of either parent which would, in your opinion, thoroughly shift valence to the opposite sex. Keep straightwiring this case and working it way down the track until you eventually find that dramatization, and it will be a powerful one. Right there is the exact pinpoint cause.

That is how important valence shifts are. You will find in most of these that are thoroughly shifted, the valence shifters compound so that you will have 15 varieties all adding up to the same thing. There are too many vectors pointing to the same conclusion. A person can have valence shifters to the right and to the left but they just throw him into an idling valence, unless you have one which concentrates 100 percent on "You are Father, you are Father, you are Father." It adds up in dozens of different ways, "You are a boy," "I am sorry you are a girl," and so on, which eventually winds up with a thorough shift over into a valence.

A transvestite who insists on wearing the clothes of the opposite sex has gotten a very large valence shifter thrown into the case. It hasn’t just been repeated once, it has been repeated over and over in many forms which eventually lead the person to the inevitable conclusion that the thing to do is to wear the clothes of the opposite sex. It does say that in essence. I found one case where the husband— whom one would never imagine thinking along that line because he was a strong, virile man— used to put on make- up and a woman’s lace nightgown during coitus, and his child was a transvestite.

One can get interesting or useful answers, but don’t use the file clerk to give you opinions. He is the worlds worst judge. The function of the "I" is the function of a judge. The function of a file clerk is the lowest order of court reporter. If you ask the file clerk for opinions, he goes chasing around trying to turn up all sorts of data, and a demon circuit can interpose where the file clerk should be. It only takes milliseconds for the file clerk to look something up, but those milliseconds of a distracted or confused file clerk give the demon circuit a chance to cut in.

The file clerk is a data- forwarding mechanism. He can select available engrams out of the big pile of engrams, and the somatic strip can then go through them. Additionally, he will give you yeses or noes on the content of any data which he has instantly in his possession at that moment. It is immediate because he has the engram on scan, right there.

If you ask him "Give me a number on this next question. How many earlier in the bank? (snap!)" he can say "Three." But this isn’t the whole preclean it is just a little mechanism by which the engrams come out of the files. He can read the track paths and give flashes of words out of the incident. For instance, you say, "Is the word fool in here? (snap!)"

And he will say, "Yes."

"All right, go to the word fool."

The file clerk is right there. He has got the whole file board up in front of him with full perceptics— sonic, visio, somatics and everything else— before "I," in the midst of the aberrative impact, gets it. It is a very simple mechanism, easily explained in this analogy: The attention units which are nearest to the standard bank are the least aberrated. This follows, then, that they would get better information quicker than "I." After a while, the whole mind can as one of its very minute functions give forth data like the file clerk does. A clear functions almost on a flash answer basis when he wants a specific piece of information because all of the attention units can drag this material up when wanted. But that is a minor function.

The file clerk is not very important. He is back of the data. All the data he can get his hands on is available to him. Sometimes he can’t get his hands on a lot of this engram data. But these are the attention units back of the mind, up against the standard bank, and they see all, know all, and think nothing.

"I" and the analyzer— the computing machinery and other things which in their high order of complexity make up the analytical mind— are affected by engrams, and the file clerk can fetch up one of these engrams and set it up there. He isn’t affected by this engram, but the instant it is there it throws its impact against "I," "I" cuts down and the analyzer starts to go anaten. Other things happen as well, but you have still got a file clerk awake and functioning back of this mechanism, although the computing machinery is no longer available to him. So, all you tell it to run is yes, no, number, word, name, holders, bouncers, denyers. He is the same order of being as "I." It’s as though a little fragment of "I" is in the back of the mind left free from aberration.

In front of the file clerk are the circuits, and they interpose between the file clerk and "I." As long as those circuits exist, answers from the file clerk can wander around and you can get demon answers and other things. But some part of the mind will always answer every question you give it with some reaction, even if the reaction is just no answer. There is some part of the mind responding.

Now, the circuitry portion of the mind, if it is up front and you have demons, is set up in such a way that when you ask for a flash, in comes the data. But what kind of data? Therefore you want to give your file clerk very rapid, brief questions with monosyllabic answers. I am not even sure that the file clerk has the power of observing whether or not a person is in his own valence, because it requires a much broader vista of observation.

The auditor, however, can tell whether or not a person is in his own valence with the greatest of ease. He just looks. He can tell whether or not the person is in an engram with the greatest of ease— his toes twitch! He can tell whether or not the person is in a grief discharge area— he heaves a sigh with his chest. These are fairly uniform manifestations.

Something I have seen as an error is that some auditors don’t allow the preclear enough time to move on the track. It only requires seconds, but remember that those seconds still have to intervene. If a person isn’t taking time to go up and down the track, he is not moving on the track. After reducing an engram, if a person throws his eyes open instantly on the command "Come up to present time," he is still stuck at that point, and the auditor had better say, "Just close your eyes. Now let’s go over the last phrase again. Give me a yes or a no, (snap!) holder?"

This is not running down the usefulness of the file clerk in any way. But he is sometimes misused, something like a child using a watch to drive in nails. In his sphere of activity he is enormously useful, but just as a carpenter must understand what to do with a plane, so must you understand what to do with a file clerk and a somatic strip. These tools are precision tools. They don’t vary from day to day or patient to patient.

The bulk of the trouble which any class has in studying Dianetics comes from their initial lack of satisfaction, according to their own eyes, with the precision character of the tools which they are using. But use these tools by rote for a short time and you will see how precise they are, and after you have discovered this, and established it to your own complete satisfaction, then you can go over the hills and far away. I am safe in saying that because you won’t.

Grief is a terrific suppressor. If you get too much grief on a case, early engrams are not going to come off.

When a preclear can run a death in his own valence, you can get the grief of that death off. Sometimes grief doesn’t come off merely because the auditor doesn’t get the preclear into his own valence. The ordinary course of human affairs is to have the preclear outside himself at that moment of grief. It is a great mechanical displacer of the individual. It automatically shifts valence without a command. Run over it once and the person may still be out of valence; twice, the preclear may still be out of valence; three times, four, and all of a sudden he goes into valence and turns on the grief.

A terrific somatic all by itself can kick a person out of valence even if there is no valence shifter present. He will maybe run the first part of the somatic, then it kicks in and out of valence he goes. You have to run it several times, then run him in the other valences. Don’t worry too much about getting the person into his own valence before you let him talk. Let him scream as Papa or yell as Mama or do anything he wants to do. Let him weep somebody else’s tears (as they do prenatally), and eventually take enough attention off the two sides of the incident so that you can get him into his own valence in order to run it.

A tough somatic or a tough grief charge will be an automatic mechanical skid out. The valence mechanism existed before language existed.

You will find dogs out of their own valence. There is many a dog in his master’s valence and the dog looks exactly like his master.

These mechanisms didn’t suddenly get invented by the person who invented English. They existed as native mechanisms of the mind, and then English, verbs, language— French, German or Dutch, it didn’t matter— really complicated them.

The primary mission is, How do you avoid pain? A person will try to get out of a painful engram, regardless of what happens. That is an ordinary mechanism. He sort of bounces off the pain itself, but it doesn’t have to be a bouncer. Sometimes he will bounce out of valence because of the pain. He will do the same thing with grief. He will bounce off the grief charge alone and skid out of valence.

So you start running this material while he is out of valence, and you can run it and run it and run it, and all of a sudden he will move into his own valence. When that occurs he will have tears. Of course, he may be in the valence of somebody else who was crying. If so, you run him through that until he cries off this other person’s tears and then you recheck to find out if he is in his own valence. Of course, if he can see himself, he is not in his own valence.

If, when the auditor asks "Where’s Papa?" the preclear replies, "I don’t know, there’s me and there’s Mama, I don’t know where Papa is," of course he is in Papa’s valence. Now he can get around to where he is sitting up on top of the clock, too, out of all valences. The type of phrase that has a tendency to slide a person out of valence is "If that had been you, you would have been killed," or "You would have been killed if you had been there," or "If that boy had been you, you would have been killed."

It is extremely important to get off grief. Don’t bypass that point of Standard Procedure.

The number of clears is going to be established by the number of people who have enough push to go on toward the target, because people are going to get about halfway between normal and clear, and they will feel so good that they will tend to slow down and stop, or get latched up in a manic someplace and decide they feel wonderful.

A case is open when the major grief discharges are off the case and a basic area engram has been run and reduced. A case is way open when you have got conception out of it.

Getting a person’s case open has nothing to do with getting him in his own valence all the way up and down the track. You can sweat over this for a long time, but getting a case open can be succinctly stated just in these phrases: With standard auditing the case can go on and be run, and finally become a very good release and then a clear. If you have established that the person is not permanently latched up on the track or messed up in some direction or another, you have established that this case will run with minimal trouble.

I have seen somebody run for 150 hours out of his own valence. I have seen another case run for 480 hours out of his own valence, and he was still reducing somatics. He was getting to a point where the anaten was so heavy on the case and so poorly shed that if he went back 24 hours he would get yawns on somebody saying hello. But he was eventually swapped over into his own valence, and the case came out all right. It sometimes takes a lot of auditing.

You can only be sure all the chronic somatics are gone when an erasure of the bank has taken place. But if a case hands out a basic area engram that reduces, and you get off yawns, that case will run. You will know this case is moving freely on the track and that a reasonable amount of sentient, rational auditing will take care of it and keep it going. That is where you know a case is definitely open.

There is usually an attendant resurgence on the opening of a case. If the case can be run with a standard line of auditing, that case is definitely open and will attain a release.

If a person is worried about his case, nobody has hit the right computation on it yet, and as a result basic personality is shoving material around and protesting. Somebody may have even gotten engrams off basic area and then some new computations came up.

But you can expect a cyclic increase in general tone. It is a curve which starts at normal for a little while, then the person gets badly restimulated, and maybe his tone will drop somewhat. This is usually the course. It will go badly down and then up and down, and then all of a sudden you will get up above normal and you will get a good resurgence, and then it may bog, and for two days the case stays very badly bogged before rising way up again. It is an undulant curve trending upwards. Somatics kick in, somatics kick out. Sometimes somebody is working one part of the chain that knocks another one into restimulation, and so forth. But it is a consistent increase, and if you take the overall period of week by week and measure it, you will find out that the tone of any one week is better than the tone of any past week.

Your preclear continually discourages you about this because he has always got to get that next engram. What you have already knocked out of him isn’t important. It is a very race- horsey sort of impatience. He has got to get going. It is the new engram that is important. Sometimes you have to slow a person down and say something like "Hey, how did you feel on August the tenth?" and he may have a hard time remembering it because a lot of this data has been clipped, and the sorrows of August the tenth were simply locks on earlier material. Don’t ask him what happened, he can tell you that clearly enough, but how did he feel?

And he will say, "Oh, yes, I was depressed and I remember beating my wife up in the morning and I was treated for sinusitis and operated on for appendicitis that night. Yes, I felt horrible. Life was not worth living. Now I feel fine. How about going after that newest AA we just found?"

So, it can be very discouraging to the auditor. It is second only to the type of discouragement you get when you have turned off somebody’s migraine headache on Straightwire and then he says, "You know, I knew that Bromo- Seltzer would help me." I give you a word of caution, don’t get angry at that point.

Even though a person is returned on the track, over 50 percent of his analytical mind is working. He has to use language to express himself, but it is only at the time when he is returned directly to and is sitting right on an engram that he will use its phrases. Don’t ever bait anyone with this. That sort of thing can set up a dwindling spiral on a person and depress his morale, because what is being postulated at him is that he talks and thinks out of nothing but engrams, which is not true. This is the dirtiest trick that can be pulled.

The reason husband- wife teams fail is because they get into arguments on this sort of thing. He runs off an engram, and then she, maybe, is anxious to prove to him that he has dramatized it many times, and that that was the source of all their fights. One of the answers that can be given to them is to give them a surprised look and say, "Bad Dianetic manners."

There is another thing that sets in. It is a matter of self- determinism. When a group is operating as a group, particularly when it has been introduced to confusion, it has a tendency to some degree to act as a group rather than as individuals, which is very bad. It shouldn’t work this way. People ought to act as individuals in a self- determined way.

So, it is a very shabby trick. It is aimed toward cutting down a person’s self- determinism. It will cut down his power. It is one of the most powerful mechanisms you could possibly line up against a person in order to render him unimportant.

We have been engaged here in training. Most of the talk which I have heard has unfortunately been on the subject of treating. I have heard many more worries about one’s own case than I have heard people worrying about others’ cases, which is a very bad symptom. Cases are not important enough to hold up training. But it is also true that one can’t really make a good auditor until he has gotten up to a point where he has had some tension taken off his own case. If he can advance his own case far enough, he gets into pretty good shape and his auditing curve rises well up. If you get a good, solid release on the person and he is going on ahead to clear, the quality of the auditing starts into a stellar role compared to the rest of it.

In a Dianetics organization we have got what cures inefficiency if we can only keep on employing it. Instead of looking to anyone or anything on the subject of your own case, how about taking an opposite viewpoint, and starting to worry about other people’s cases to the point of getting in there with your two bare hands and tearing the case apart and resolving it. That would be a very sentient maneuver. Furthermore, you should make plans to speed up your own case state.

In practice, somebody comes in from Fresno, but when he returns and is now confronted with a lot of auditing, he looks at it with horror because he realizes he isn’t going to be audited. However, it has a solution. What you do is just sit down and train somebody. And when you have trained five, six, eight people, you let them work on the old master, and you will finally get one who can really hold a case down. But you will have to be aware of the bear trap of picking a weak one who won’t push. That is a danger. That is a pattycake mechanism with which a case will remain static. Pick the toughie.

I have seen a case hang fire for eight consecutive months of being audited a minimum of four hours a week, which, when walked into by a person of comparable force to the person who was being audited, started resolving like wildfire. If you want to be clear then steer wide of tacit consent and that tendency to pick a weak auditor.

That method of having to train up somebody is the way that I got as far as I got, that is the way most of the people initially associated with Dianetics had to do it, and until such time as there are lots of auditors, we will have to go on doing it that way.