One of the techniques that was a thread thru most of the development process was the use of therapeutic metaphor. We learned to use therapeutic metaphors embedded in a story. However a therapeutic metaphor can be fashioned in a psychodrama or in still picture form as in an icon.
Our most commonly used metaphor was patterned after Dr Erickson's use of an isomorphic metaphor woven amongst the many stories he would tell his clients. An isomorphic metaphor is a story where the sequence of events of the metaphor match the sequence of events of a person's problem.
The therapeutic part comes in when an additional resource is strategically placed in the metaphor which directs the person to a different result. Many experiments were done using anchoring and metaphor in trance, and thru this evolved the understanding of submodalities which was later refined into the swish technique.
The understanding of tautologies was also a pattern we experimented with. The main way we dealt with tautologies was to search out both ends of the loop and do a change history on each end of the loop. For example I could be happy if I stop smoking and would stop smoking, if I was happy. This is not a recommended approach as systematic as it was. It was too long and arduous a task.
The very early beginnings of the six step reframing model could almost be thought as a send up of the parts' party model. It began something like this. Each individual was given a quantity of ten parts and also a meta part to supervise the decision making process. The ten parts of the individual were made up of characters which they designated themselves. Very similar to the part in Virginia Satir's parts' party model.
The meta person or the meta part would facilitate the interaction or the negotiations between the parts to get a specific outcome. Later on the idea of ten parts was dropped altogether and a person could have no parts, or one part or two parts and it was open ended.
Robert Dilts was attending quite a few of these groups at this time. Robert was a fourth year student at Santa Cruz and was known as a good trance subject. Robert is a keen observer and his creative talents in writing and drawing were called upon numerous times in the NLP development years. Virginia Satir would also drop in from time to time to have a look at what John and Richard were doing in regards to anchoring and hypnosis techniques.
One refined model that was developed in 1976 was a six step and two part reframing model to apply to simultaneous and sequential behaviours respectively.
Other techniques that were developed were the use of synesthesia overlaps in representational systems. A synesthesia is the blending of the senses. Each representation in one sense has a corresponding representation in another sense. For example, heat in the feeling sense leads to warm colors in the visual sense. When we speak of synesthesia overlaps we are talking about a bridge that enables you to take any content and be able to experience it in a multiple of senses. Synesthesia overlaps are represented in language by phrases such as a warm color, or a bright sound or a loud shirt.
Chapter Twenty Six. Taking It To The Road
By late 1976, individuals who had been attending Richard and John's workshops for the last three or four years began presenting their own workshops, using the techniques that they had learned from both Richard and John. Two of these individuals, Steve and Paul, were conducting elementary hypnosis workshops. Byron Lewis and I (Byron wrote Magic Demystified with Frank) were conducting Gestalt, NLP and hypnosis workshops. That association stopped because Byron got a job. Then in 1976, Robert Dilts and I formed a partnership and began teaching rudimentary NLP groups in Santa Cruz.
Another person with a refreshing approach was David Gordon, whose field of expertise was therapeutic metaphor. His book Therapeutic Metaphors was prepared as he was going thru his Masters Degree program in San Francisco. Richard supervised him in the development of his thesis on therapeutic metaphor and David later not only presented it as a thesis but then put it in book form which Richard later published under Meta Publications.
Richard and John were calling up university faculties right and left throughout the country, and organizing venues to promote their latest techniques the meta model, representational systems and anchoring.
They were what you would call, booked out solid. Something like ninety-nine out of one hundred workshop participants signed up for another workshop after a program they conducted in Las Vegas. Their humorous approach to psychotherapy and their ability to utilize existing contexts elicited comments such as this is the best show in town.
However it was not until Leslie and Judith started presenting workshops did they really start getting a following of women. Richard and John had the adaptive skills, however the era of the feminist was not ready for the male dominance and the sometimes sexist Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Leslie also gave them the Virginia Satir caring approach that was very different to the detached hurry up and humorous approach. Leslie was good and solid and appealed to those content people who needed to walk thru everything before they feel they have learned. She and Judith appealed to many people who could not grasp the subtleness of John and Richard's presentation.
Everybody was on the road. Robert and I began teaching throughout the US in 1977 and developing introductory and intermediate NLP workshops. Our first workshop on the road was promoted by Steve Stevens, now Steve Andreas in Boulder Colorado. Our rule was never to teach the same workshop in the same way. We taught simulated television game shows called "guess my rep system" and "groovy deal therapy", a precursor to six step reframing. We had a great time, however our creativity was not always looked upon as genius by some of our sponsors.
David started an association with Maribeth Anderson. After several trips to visit and study with Milton Erickson they wrote two books together, the most well known being Phoenix.
Paul and Steve began a successful partnership that lasted several years. They also followed the road of Milton Erickson and refined and developed a teaching model of hypnosis throughout the United States and set up an Ericksonian Hypnosis Institute in Europe. Steve was very much into modelling Milton.
Milton mentioned that he taught seminars almost every day because it helped him forget the pain that he experienced. He was confined to a wheelchair and would do pain control exercises on himself every morning for a few hours before he taught.
Steve wanted to model Milton so he confined himself to a wheelchair and this was his mode of transportation from class to class at the university. When he found out about this, Milton was very unimpressed by his protege's behaviour, fearing that Steve would develop some of Milton's chronic symptoms. After this Steve limited himself to modelling the gross postures of Milton as well as his numerous communications patterns and therapeutic intervention styles.
Chapter Twenty Seven. NLP Volume One