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The Double Bind: Recognising and correcting the Double Binds in adult communication

Ever since my late teens I have been fascinated in the field of personal development. The thing that I am fascinated in is that there should be a need for personal development in the first place. This suggests that for many people the family and school environments they were in during their childhood and teenage years lacked the necessary experiences, the necessary stimulus, for the development of exceptional learning strategies. In essence that is what personal development is all about; learning new ways to learn.

For many people the family and school environments were limiting and even abusive. Their innate desire to experience and learn about the world around them crushed by parents and teachers with the best of intentions. These are the people who seek out personal development books and courses with the hope that they will find the secret to improving their lives. It’s wonderful that people are looking to improve their lives and that there is a technology available to help them to do just that… of course I’m talking about Neuro-linguistic Programming. It’s great that we can improve the lives of adults after the fact… and we can do even better.

What can we do to give children the best start in life?  The answer is simple. We can give them exceptional models to emulate. This requires parents, teachers, childcare workers and all adults who interact with children in some capacity to understand the concept of the Double Bind.

In the 1950’s Gregory Bateson headed a team consisting of Don D Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland* to determine what the necessary conditions were for an individual to develop schizophrenia.   The Double Bind was the result of their research.   Their goal was to understand the process by which a person could develop schizophrenia so that they would have some way of formulating strategies for assisting people, diagnosed as schizophrenic, out of their mental traps.

* Bateson, Gregory. (1972).   Steps to an ecology of mind.   The University of Chicago Press.

Their focus, then, was the patient diagnosed as schizophrenic .   Schizophrenia is the extreme case.   What you are about to discover is that there are many behaviours that can result from unrelenting exposure to Double Binds.

The Double Bind is the origin of low self-esteem, poor relationships and learning difficulties.

The advantages of correcting Doubles Binds include, and are certainly not limited to,

•   Improved learning strategies
•   Greater interest in learning
•   Better relational skills
•   Creativity
•   Greater Emotional Intelligence
•   High self-esteem 
•   Assures mental health

An example of a Double Bind

A mother and daughter meet someone that the child has never met or who has had limited contact with and the stranger says to the daughter,

Hello, how are you?

The parent holds the belief that her daughter should be polite and respond in kind, and yet Choice is immanent in every single situation. If the parent overrides her daughter’s desire to communicate in a way that is appropriate for her, for example,

Say hello to Bill.

She is communicating to her daughter that her choice in that situation should be limited to her mother’s expectation to say what she wants her to say. That is an incongruent communication, that is, whatever the daughter wants to choose is irrelevant in this situation. The parent is expecting her daughter to ignore her own direct sensory experience in relation to the stranger which consequently encourages her to ignore her own unconscious signals about her own requirements for gathering information before she chooses to act. Requirements for personal safety, for example. She is learning to disassociate. In effect the parent is encouraging her daughter to neglect her ability to learn discernment.


The Double Bind is,


[Parent/adult] “You can learn.” [that is your experience as a human being]
“Doing the socially acceptable thing is right.”
“What I want in this context is right.”
“You will be rewarded if you behave as expected.”
“You will be rewarded for ignoring your own requirements in this context.”


“You must learn what I want you to learn in this context.”
“Attending to your own unconscious signals is wrong.”
“What you want in this context is wrong.”
“You will be punished in some way if you fail to perform as expected.”
“By doing what is expected of you, you must neglect what is important to you.”


[Child] “If I do as I am told then I must negate/neglect my own requirements and abilities.
If I do what I want I will be punished.”

“I will be punished for doing what is right for me,
and I will be rewared for doing what is expected of me
even though I will suffer the consequences of disassociation.”

“Either way I lose.”


This is just ONE of the ways adults impose Double Binds on children… with the best of intentions.

Click here to view the book at Lulu

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