You can call that intervention «trade feelings» if you like. You can call it a change of strategy. You can call it anchoring. You can call it lots of things, but one useful way to think about it is as reframing. In this particular kind of reframing the stimulus in the world doesn't actually change, but its meaning changes. You can use this kind of reframing any time you decide that the stimulus for a problem behavior doesn't really need to change—that there's nothing inherently bad about it.

The other choice, of course, would have been to attack the rest of the family and get them all to shape up and not leave footprints. This woman's mother tried that; it didn't work very well.

If people have a sensory experience that they don't like, what they don't like is their response to it. One way of changing the response is to understand that the response itself is not based on what's going on in sensory experience. If you change what the experience means to them, their response will change.

What we know about the woman who kept everything clean is that she engages some strategy that allows her to decide when it's time to feel bad. She doesn't feel bad on vacations, or in a restaurant. My guess is that when she walks into somebody else's house and it's messy, she doesn't feel bad, because her response has to do with ownership. Her home is her territory; she only feels bad within certain limits. She may not consider the garage or the backyard to be in her territory. Some people keep their houses spotless, but they don't consider their children's rooms to be part of the house, so they don't feel bad about them when they're dirty.

These are all people, of course, who use negative motivation strategies. As they walk into the kitchen and see dirty dishes everywhere, they go «Ugh!» In order to make the bad feeling go away, they have to wash all the dishes. Then they can stand back and go «Ahhhh!» When they walk into a clean hotel room, they don't go «Ahhh!» because it's not theirs. So there's some kind of a decision strategy at work.