by Julie Clayton, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate and freelance editor and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon: www.sacredwriting.com
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2007)

Have you ever wondered why you have to work so hard to get the things you want, when the things you don’t want in your life seem to occur and recur without any effort at all? Do you know that for many adults, our biggest secret fear is that we will be discovered to be a “fake,” to be less than we present ourselves to be? How is it that we can be so seemingly “successful” in many ways and yet we remain unsettled by feelings of inadequacy or by the events in our life experience that seem flawed?

We carry on wars within ourselves, inner contortions of conflict and fear: things from which we have been running away all our lives, or dreams that we’re always moving toward and never quite achieving. For some, life is an endless stream of personal crises, while for others life is mostly good, except for that occasional feeling that we’re not quite fulfilling our potential, or our embarrassing addiction to daytime soap operas.

But what if those nagging under-achievements or prevailing maelstroms were not a problem? What if what’s “wrong” is actually a positive by-product of an overzealous and outdated system for survival, and could easily be updated? What if we truly have all the resources we need to move from duality to wholeness?

Many of us are exiles from our childhood. In the moment of wounding our very survival is at stake, and how we adapt to survive the experience becomes trapped deep in our unconscious mind—not to traumatize us, but to preserve the learning. Courtesy of the reptilian brain (whose only concern is for creature-level safety and physical survival), our wounding becomes a survivable event, and hence we have no need to avoid future iterations. Our mammalian brain, next up on the brain food chain, adds strong emotions that support our well being. Our reptilian and mammalian systems together code our wounding as not only survivable, but as a prerequisite for survival. They’re just doing their job.

Neurologically speaking, inner conflict occurs when the frontal and pre-frontal human brain, which is a much more sophisticated driver for our experience, desires something that seemingly contradicts our reptilian brain’s functions. (We really do want to have a lasting intimate relationship, even though our four previous marriages lasted only two years each.) Neural patterns of long-term happiness and desire crash in to reptilian patterns of survival. Since survival is the number one impulse for staying alive, the outdated programming invariably reigns. The content of survival is perfect; it is the context that is misplaced or outdated.

Working with some fundamental yet powerful presuppositions, Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) delivers the good news: we are not broken! In fact, by understanding how the system works we can realize that there is a positive intention behind every behavior, no matter how incongruent it appears on the surface. This can be a challenging basis from which to function, especially if you’ve experienced some particularly malicious behavior. However, to continue the hypothetical example, let’s say that your wounding was around intimacy, then those “failed” marriages were actually the system’s best effort at keeping you safe and alive.

Just as importantly, it is useful and respectful to make a distinction between behavior and “self.” When we really get this, we stop judging others and even more so, stop judging ourselves. Sometimes, self-judgement has become inappropriately coded as a substitute for belonging, or other basic survival needs. For example, if a parent was overly critical we may have taken this on for ourselves as way of maintaining our place in the family system.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in its “pure” form is an awkward name for an elegant competence model of change that “rewires” the system. Unlike other models for change, NLP is more concerned with the context of our stuck patterns and less concerned with the content. Understanding how we create our experience is more useful than understanding why, because for every behavior, there is a discernable neurological pattern that occurs. We can track this pattern through the senses by “noticing:” where our eyes move, the language we use, our physiology, and our overarching patterns of relating to the world.

This noticing is part of the NLP “toolbox” that one can master as a client or a practitioner. However, the tools are just that—tools. What NLP really does, through updating and communication, is change our relationship to the events in our life. What’s wrong becomes part of a larger map of reality that is subsumed within what’s right. Our experience remains the same, but how we perceive it, the stories we tell ourselves, or the emotional charge, is all available for revision. Once revised, we have more choices, more resources, and more behavioral flexibility. It’s really that simple—and that effortless.

The damn choice between feeling innocent and being happy

by Volker Frank, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate. Volker supports organizations with strategic planning, organizational consulting and leadership coaching. Visit him at www.VolkerFrank.com
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2008)

When we think about issues of conscience, we quickly go into the large moral and political questions of our times, like a woman’s right to choose, fighting a good or evil war, economic exploitations, and so on. And yet, our conscience is hard at work every day supporting us with our choices and decisions having our best interest at heart. We know we’ve chosen “right” by the immediate sense of comfort – the signature signal from our conscience. Are we in line for happiness if we follow our conscience, if we are “good” and do the “right” things? Then where do the difficulties and suffering enter the picture? Is it that we are flawed and full of sin?

Our decision-making processes are complex, mysterious and, from a right/wrong perspective, error-prone at best. There are so many conflicting values and beliefs pushing and pulling us that it is often preferable not to think about it too much. Could that contribute to the fact that lasting happiness is so elusive?

What if our conscience is not the moral barometer most of us were taught it is? What if it tells us little about good and bad, right and wrong? What happens when we look at it from the perspective of relationships and our sense of belonging? When a choice intensifies our sense of belonging, we feel good and innocent; when it threatens our sense of belonging, we feel bad and guilty.

The German psychologist, Bert Hellinger, offers us this new perspective. He developed a way to experience first-hand how powerfully our conscience rules our lives and choices together with an appreciation for the mixed results we are getting. His approach, Constellation work, also offers us the felt sense of what it’s like to re-choose for a different experience – a happier one if that’s what we desire. We can see the dynamics of conscience play out in three ways, which are well designed to support the strength of tribes, families and groups of all kinds.

1) Balancing giving and taking

Let’s consider two friends. When one of them helps the other, the helper experiences a sense of comfort and entitlement – signals from the good conscience. The one receiving the support experiences a sense of guilt and obligation. It’s the bad conscience nudging us to restore the balance. Now, many of us know people who love to help and give. They live in the comfort of innocence/giving and manage to avoid the guilty feelings of receiving. Unfortunately, the imbalance creates isolation. The people they treat so well, who are unable to reciprocate, withdraw from the helper after awhile. The helper ends up alone, often with a righteous anger about thanklessness that further supports the sense of innocence and good conscience.

2) Respecting membership

Our conscience tracks that all members of a tribe are fully acknowledged and included. In families, that means that everybody has the same inalienable right to belong. When somebody is excluded, the conscience creates a balancing movement, which compels another person to unknowingly represent and remember the excluded one. Take the example of Eric (name changed), who experienced exclusion and isolation at work. A Constellation revealed for him that he had identified with an uncle who died young. Because of the tremendous grief, the family stopped talking about the dead uncle and he became virtually forgotten (excluded). Out of love and following their conscience, new members of a family will do everything they can to restore the balance. In this case Eric attempted to “re-member” his excluded uncle by unconsciously recreating a similar kind of exclusion in his life. Eric has the comfort of innocence and a good conscience by doing the “right” thing, unaware that he is also accepting the suffering for himself. Knowing about the connection, Eric can consciously include his uncle as part of the family, fully step into his own life, and his rightful place at work.

3) Respecting order

In a tribe, those who come before have precedence over those who come later. When we respect seniority, we experience loyalty and pride, as we often do with teachers and mentors. When we don’t, we experience fear of retribution. This is an important dynamic between parents and children. When a child judges or dismisses a parent, the child, in effect, takes a stance of being “bigger,” which has a weakening effect. In Eric’s example, he interfered with the affairs of his grandparents by wanting to fix the exclusion through creating the same dynamic in his life. However, when he accepts and respects their choices without judgment, his conscious inclusion of his uncle strengthens him.

In our Western culture, we are essentially blind to these tribal dynamics and the ways our conscience guides our behavior and affects our quality of life. Constellations reveal these dynamics, which leads to new choices, away from the old suffering. It turns out that when we re-choose to step more fully into our lives, we often face temporary guilt feelings with the fear of exclusion. If we want to gain strength, personal weight and step into our own happiness, we must give up the comfort of our “good” conscience that comes with a blind sense of belonging and the feeling of innocence. It’s a tough spot, but hardly a choice

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2006)

All over the universe, or so it seems, human beings are famous for routinely experiencing what they most don’t want to have, and for not being able to experience that which they most really do want. As human beings, all of our most stuck patterns of experience, from the slightly embarrassing ones (I always end up watching more TV than I want), to the ones that are actively life-destroying (I just can’t help disrespecting all the people I’ve tried to be partners with) have their source in our brains’ ongoing efforts to keep us well and safe. For us at NLP Marin, this is the most remarkable and amazing thing about humans: that everything we do that doesn’t work is actually the consequence of our brains’ patterning to make sure that we are all OK—both ourselves and the people we care about. But then, how can it be that something so positively and beautifully intended—our natural patterning to be well and happy—can go so terribly, terribly wrong so much of the time?

One of the really important reasons this is still happening for us humans is that, courtesy of creative evolution, we all have more than one brain, and each of them has a different set of instructions and descriptions about what well-being really is. A simplistic but still decent analogy is the issue of “legacy” hardware and software that plagues the computer world. Computer designers and engineers are forever faced with the job of providing their end-users with better tools (more elegance, reliability and functionality, for example) while still making sure that all of the old software can still work with and through the newer hardware designs.

Mother Nature has had a similar task with us humans: how to add functionality, adaptability, and ease-of-use without disinheriting everything that came before, in terms of our neurobiology. The result is that nature always builds new brain components and functions on top of (literally, on top of) whatever the processes of interactive evolution have already perfected across eons of time. As a result of this rather conservative approach to designing our hardware and inner software, all of us have a least four brains, and each of the four seems to have its own orientation, goals, and success indicators.

Courtesy of the neurophysiologists and their new and amazing brain investigation technologies (scanners of various kinds), we can observe our four different brains at work.

The First Brain

First and oldest is the brain with the most seniority—our Reptile Brain. It is not much changed in function from that of the average garden lizard. It is responsible for the basics of physical survival—heart beat, blood pressure, respiration, etc. (An old neuroscientist joke says that the Reptile Brain is responsible for the “4 F’s”—Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing…..and reproduction.)

The Second Brain

The Old Mammal Brain. A later development that is on top of around the Reptile, our Old Mammal Brain adds in a wonderful capacity to generate strong emotions, and to use these emotions to promote creature-level safety and well being. The additions of greater emotional range give the creature that has them even stronger drivers to move toward or away from conditions and experiences that will affect overall survival.

Note: At NLP Marin, we refer to the First and Second Brains, collectively, as our Critter Brain. It is not human, and it does not operate with truly human criteria. It has no attention to things like happiness, fulfillment, justice, truth or beauty. It works to fulfill the Four F’s, and that’s about it.

The Third Brain

Our third brain is our Primate neurology. It occupies a large part of the top and back of the inside of our heads. The Primate brain is very sophisticated, with a wonderful capacity to understand the realities and rules of community—the so-called primate dominance dynamics. Compared with us humans, however, the Primate brain lacks much inertest in or capacity to make meaning about abstractions, values, and long periods of time. It is the brain of a remarkable ape, but an ape that is not concerned with 20 year plans about anything.

The Fourth Brain—the Human Brain

This is the newest and most human part of us, neurologically speaking—our frontal and pre-frontal lobes. These are the reasons we have foreheads that are vertical instead of slanted. This Fourth Brain, especially their pre-frontal aspects (located immediately on the other side of our foreheads) are where the “I-ness” of us resides. If life damages part of our motor cortex or a speech center, farther back in our heads, then we may have impaired movement or speech, but we are still “us.” Damage to the pre-frontals, however, changes who we are and how we create meaning in the world. Moreover, there are some who say that our pre-frontal lobes are one of our main connections into whatever it is that we are part of in terms of non-physical reality.

All of four brains are operating constantly. They rely on each other and usually coordinate themselves magnificently. There are a few bugs in the interfaces, however, and these bits of bad programming can cause us huge difficulties as humans.

Some of the biggest bugs in our multiple brains

Bug #1

The main driver for the Critter Brain is fear, with the goal of survival, and with no attention to changing anything that has already become associated with this experience of survival. In complete contrast, the main driver for the Human Brain is love, with goals of learning and, basically, nothing but change. Consequence: our Human is always imagining things being different and better, while our Critter simultaneously values it all staying the same, especially if we are not dead yet (see Bug #3, below).

Bug #2

The Critter Brain does not deal in time, at least not in Human time. The Critter does a truly good job of being here now. For the Critter, there is meal time and nap time, but not a life-time. Consequence: the Critter will happily run hugely unproductive or damaging patterning forever. For the Critter, forever is just for-now.

Bug #3

The Critter has only one success indicator it uses to know if it is doing a good job for us. The Critter cannot actually speak, but this one success indicator comes down to a simple question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, then the Critter gives itself full marks, gold stars, and many thumbs up for doing a great job. The Human who is sort of riding along on top might be in life agony—doing their third failed business or fourth alcoholic marriage, for example, and the Critter will regard this as continuing a high-quality outcome. After all, these difficult or tragic experiences are no trouble for the Critter. It values a heart that beats; it has no attention to whether or not that heart is open or closed in more non-physical terms.

Whether our heart is open or closed, for example, is well above the Critter Brain’s pay grade. It does not know how to make meaning at this level. It can only create associations, and if a “broken heart” becomes associated with not-having-died, then the Critter will value “broken-heartedness” highly, and it will promote and foment the experience throughout the Human’s life. The more the Human tries to change things, the more the Critter operates to set them back to original conditions, to the ones with the most “survival value”—the experiences that we learned to survive and that, unfortunately for us humans, our Critter Brains then associated with continued survival. And because the Critter Brain is the one that generates most emotions, it knows how to create the feelings within us that will allow it get its way. Bug #3 is a serious bug indeed.

About thirty years ago, the founders of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) invented a description for their then newly synthesizing discipline, a new way of understanding and changing human experience. They described NLP as “the study of the structure of human experience and human excellence.” The important word here is “structure.” NLP is a terrifically good toolbox for helping us to understand how we create and maintain our experience as humans. The question that usually gets a session of NLP-based change work rolling is, “What would you like?” NLP change work is designed to locate and revise just exactly those kinds of Critter/Human communication problems that generate almost all of our unwanted experiences, the ones that go in the unwanted-yet-impossible-to-stop-or change category.

And working with the NLP toolbox promotes Critter/Human coordination and harmony. Our goal is to have what we want, based on our most truly human desires and standards, and to do so in actual present time. Neuro-Linguistic Programming can do this superbly well because it speaks English (or another language) to the Human Brain, but it speaks to the Critter Brain in the programming language of creature neurology, which is a language not of words, but of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes. It’s like plugging a keyboard into the Critter wiring. When we reprogram or re-pattern the Critter in its own programming language, it accepts updates easily and, if desired, permanently.

In fact, at NLP Marin, we describe NLP as “a toolbox to help our creature neurology to better support our most human and spiritual goals.”

© 2006 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

- The “Evening with Carl” event series

For our first “Evenings with Carl” event we invited the students and friends of NLP Marin to a insightful presentation on the topic. We are sorry that we could not accommodate all of you who wanted to come. The evening was a great success and we offer you these audio recordings so you can find out what Carl is paying attention to when it comes to the concept of free will. Thank you for all your interest.

Carl Buchheit is the co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Listen to the first part of the evening (70 min)

Listen to the second part of the evening (55 min)

Read the article…

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2008)

Most of us are mostly inclined to assume that most of our actions and decisions, or at least most of our more private and intimate choices, are the result of some kind of free will process.  Or, if we can no longer convince ourselves of this, we at least want to assume that it is our inner patterning for making meaning and selecting behavioral options that is the source of most of what we decide and do.

One of the main presuppositions of NLP is, “Choice is better than no choice.”  We routinely assert that one of the objectives of good training in NLP is to expand the experience of having more choices on our “maps of reality.”  However, there are many other points of view, some of them quite elegant and compelling, which argue that this “free choice” frame is illusory and counter to the experience of happiness and well-being.

What interests me are some of the alternatives to Bert Hellinger’s immensely convenient concept/creation that we usually call “The Family Soul.”  Within Hellinger’s frame, descendents in families seek to take possession of the pain of ancestors because of motivation that is mainly based in three things: the emotion of love; the desire to assert innocence; and the need to avoid or deny guilt.  At NLP Marin, we have developed some remarkable ways to utilize family constellations, to reveal and revise the beautifully intended but pointless transgenerational suffering that flows naturally from these three primary needs.

Whereas Bert Hellinger’s model of transgenerational suffering involves descendant’s seeking to locate and heal the unresolved pain of ancestors, there is another viewpoint that maintains just the opposite.  This concept is usually summarized as “cellular memory.”  Within this frame of “cellular memory,” the unresolved problems of the ancestors ask the following generations to find solutions.  ‘Souvenir albums’ containing memories of unsurvived trauma and unresolved loss are handed down from one generation to the next for this purpose.  In this way, perhaps, our “creature consciousness” seeks to perfect its relationship with a threatening and dangerous physical universe.  Or, perhaps, the “preconscious collective” of our hominid ancestors demands that it’s future expression – in our time, in our lives – prepare a future paradise or promised land, in which pain, loss and death will threaten no more.

Still another point of view, this one popularized by several noted interpreters of “A Course In Miracles,” maintains that time is a “vast illusion.”  Within this point of view, which is vastly difficult to comprehend adequately, all of our experience – both physical and non-physical, both in time and beyond time – is an entrancing replay of events and choices that were determined at the moment of creation (of the universe).

So, considered in these very broad terms, some of our options seem to be: 1) we voluntarily suffer for our ancestors in an unworkable effort to correct their pain, so that this pain will not be able to reach us in time.  This is the Hellinger description based on the emotion of love.  2) That it is not love, but fear that directs us to recapitulate family suffering–generation upon generation.  Within this frame, DNA has direct control over our choices; it compels present conformity with past family calamity.  3) Everything is predetermined until we wake up from the trance of time and non-time altogether.  (It is important to note that within this frame, the process of dying and the experience of death do not actually help us understand anything more about what’s really going on.  In this frame life is an illusion and death doesn’t help.)

So, do we actually have free will or not?  As practitioners and teachers of NLP, all we can know for sure is that the only really important question is “What would you like?”

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

Listen to the full presentation…

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in 2008

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

7. That now is the only time there is.

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

When we act to improve our lives by defeating some aspect of ourselves (for example, “an old, unwanted behavior pattern,” or a recurring issue of “self-sabotage”) who is it, exactly, who wins?

One of the most enduring and unfortunate delusions to come out of the personal growth movement (especially the “monster power growth” version of it) is the idea that we all contain a “strong self” that can be trained to compel the subjugation of our “weak self.” It is completely understandable that almost all of us develop this impression. Human beings have been trying to make meaning out of their internal conflicts, their affinity with the light or dark sides of things, with their distresses related to virtue and guilt, for tens of thousands of years—long before the invention of the personal growth weekend seminar, as far as we know.

The easiest way to allow personal change and growth is to include—not to exclude or defeat—whatever it is that is not working in our lives. We can recognize that unwanted patterns of behavior are simply old solutions that have unwittingly outlasted their usefulness. Actually, when we go beyond this—when we seek to actively respect whatever it is that seems to be causing us the most pain and frustration—the experience of including and changing even long-standing patterns becomes safe, fun, and rewarding. Our old patterns are much more available for easy, comfortable change when we do not fight against them. In fact, when they are respected properly, we find that old, unwanted behaviors usually seek to change themselves. It’s as if they want to catch up with the rest of us, and that makes for a wonderful, and defeat-free, reunion.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

Everything in the Universe is coordinated to move and change along paths of least resistance. Everything—electrons, inter-galactic clouds of hydrogen gas, white mice, and melting ice. There are no exceptions. So, it is curious and weird that, for humans, the words “taking the path of least resistance” are usually tossed out as in insult. Now, we are all getting gradually better about this. One is rarely congratulated about the pointlessness and intensity of one’s struggle any more. Still, who do we think we are, anyway?

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

Some of the saddest words are, “At least I respect myself enough to despise myself.” Proper self-regard is always the most courteous way to be in life and the universe. It invites the best for and from others. Too little self-respect provokes other humans to want to withdraw their care and support. They can’t help but feel this at some level. It is an ancient instinct in our hunter-gatherer DNA, a not-quite-knowing designed to protect the well-being of the whole troupe. The instinct can be overridden, and it often is, but to do this requires some energy and work. Proper self-respect is never costly or inconvenient for anyone. And, it is hardly ever fatal.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

Almost all of western psychotherapy seeks, in one way or another, to separate clients from their parents. This movement is in exactly the wrong direction. If we want to know what would come out of the mix if we put our parents into a giant blender and then hit the frappè button, the answer is—we would exist. We are exactly, precisely that combination.

Our broadband connection to the flow of life—the cable sockets themselves, so to speak—happens to be them. Not personally, necessarily, but certainly energetically, the sockets are where they are. We can deny this, but then we have to live on dial-up. When we deny parents, we deny ourselves and cut ourselves off from the sources of strength in life. This never has a good effect. If our parents are dangerous, crazy, or lethally boring, it is probably a good idea to stay away from them physically, but this is not the same as disrespecting them.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

As it turns out, this seems to be exactly what all of us humans value doing more than anything else. We are—all of us—driven to make sure that we experience some version of the tragedies and unresolved losses of the family members who came before us. As long as we experience their pain, or something closely like it, we have hope to provide our families with a better past, which, it follows very [il]logically, will allow us to experience a better present and future for ourselves. This is complicated business, and highly seductive. When our pain now signals us that we are on track toward past and future happiness, we go into a deep, deep trance of secure and loving family salvation. As crazy as this sounds, this is what we do, and are pretty much screwed until we start to catch on. Messing up our own life is never a good way to show respect for anyone.

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

The future is not a perfected or improved past. Our experiences as human beings, whatever this involves in the moment, always represent the very best life solutions that our systems have been able to achieve. We all deal with utterly mysterious and painful inherited patterns, which we then combine with the bafflingly elusive meanings and beliefs we invent for ourselves. However huge the resulting mess might seem to be, it is truly the most creative, positive, and loving solution we could find for ourselves (and for everyone else who was involved) at the time that the unwanted patterning became hyper-stabilized and hard to change. Truly, we are all doing the best we can with what we have, and with what we had.

7. That now is the only time there is.

Being present in the present is wonderful and useful. It’s an indispensable art, an essential part of changing our relationship with ourselves and with life itself. However, for humans who live in time/space, the future and past are real too. Properly created, a good future activates our choosing of it, so that it comes into manifestation against a supportive backdrop called the past. There is no substitute for having a good relationship with our future and our past. After all now, we are now our future’s past, are we not?

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

Our brain’s main function is to filter out everything that doesn’t fit its own ideas about what fits with its ideas. Consequently, it is always very busy not noticing things. However, the good result of this is that it provides us with a stable, more-or-less predictable world in which to live.

To make the experience of being human even more fun, the older, most reliable parts of our brains—our creature brains, which don’t even know that they are parts of human beings—have only one important success indicator, one way to tell if they are doing a good job. This part of the brain doesn’t think, analyze, create, synthesize or talk. It is simply there to establish and maintain associations between this and that. It doesn’t care what this and that are, as long as the associations are intact. Thus, it does not care about the content of our human experience; it only cares that that content (the associations between this and that) do not change. Consequently, its most important success indicator is the answer to the question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, it knows to keep on with whatever it has been doing. If this happens to involve our being miserable in life, at the human level, that is not its problem, nor even its concern.

Our brain is not supposed to care how we feel. We are supposed to care how we feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

Most really wonderful, positive change can eventually lead to feeling bad again. There are some beautiful ways of working with this unfortunate aspect of being human, so that it is not actually always true good change leads to feeling bad. However, for most of us, learning to allow wonderful change to stay positive takes a little practice. This is what we call “the ecology of personal growth.” It is quite an art form, and an extremely valuable thing to learn.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

Everything we think and feel affects all the space, all the time. We really do have this kind of huge effect. Having power like this is never a bad thing. Learning to recognize and use this power is a many lifetimes’ respectfully creative journey. Overall, this is pretty good news.

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in 2008

Part the First

Marin-style NLP has always been something that is difficult to characterize, especially when it comes to explaining how it is different. It has much in common with conventional NLP, yet it is tremendously not-like-that at the same time. So, from time to time I would like to share a little with you about where our forms of this wonderful work come from.

Their foundation is solidly in the amazing work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s. After all, even one of our Holographic NLP-level presuppositions is: “No matter how cosmic it gets, it’s still all V’s, A’s and K’s.” We never get too far away from this awareness, and when we do we return to it pretty quickly.

Although it is based in the NLP of the 1970s (what Robert Dilts calls “1st generation NLP), Marin NLP is not about techniques and procedures for techniques. Marin NLP is greatly filtered through my (Carl’s) experience of Dr. Jonathan Rice. Jonathan was my main teacher. He was the only one of Richard and John’s early students to be a credentialed therapist and Ph.D. psychologist. Jonathan added 1970s NLP into the work he was already doing with his clients in his practice in Carmel, just down the road from Santa Cruz. He studied with and stayed around John and Richard not because of their great charm, but because he watched them get results with people that were beyond what he knew how to do. However, Jonathan did not throw away his training and experience as a psychologist.

“Jonathan-style NLP” is heavy on attention to hypnotic language, elegant use of the outcome frame, and close calibration of physiology—especially!!—physiology. Jonathan was determined to teach himself to use Richard and John’s remarkable discoveries about accessing cues to observe and understand the structure of his own clients’ experience. Jonathan never stopped refining and extending this part of the NLP model. For example, the “what stops you” question is something we owe in great part to Jonathan’s persistence and creativity. In the earliest day’s, “what stops you?” was asked for information about content (as in, “Just ask the question and write down what they say”), not for the representational physiology of unconscious safety patterning. “What are the V’s and A’s that are making the K’s?” is Jonathan’s question also. (He didn’t remember saying it, but he thought it was a great one when I brought it up, years later.)

“Jonathan-style NLP” is also something that is usually done seated, not standing, and it expects the practitioner to improvise and constantly adapt, so that no two sessions are identical, and the techniques, if they can be called that, are generally hidden in the flow of life-revising rapport. Moreover, the practitioner seeks to serve the client, not to impress him or her with the practitioner’s amazing personal power. This should all be instantly and hugely recognizable to our NLP Marin students.

I spent years switched with Jonathan. Anyone who knows Jon can sense this in me, any time I am teaching or working with clients. I am greatly indebted to him.
Part Two

The Essential Reframe
“From Intended Positive Outcomes to IPO’s”

In the spring of 1979, when I first encountered the very new field of knowledge called NLP, I was immensely relieved to find within it a wonderful “presupposition” about human experience:

“All behavior has an intended positive outcome,”
(which was/is also stated as)
“Behind every behavior is an intended positive outcome.”

From here in 2008, almost thirty years later, I don’t remember if this statement about intended positives was formalized yet, as a presupposition, or even if “The Presuppositions of NLP” existed in codified form. I heard that the idea seemed to come from John and Richard’s exploration of the work of Virginia Satir, and I remember thinking, “Virginia Satir, whoever you are…way to go!”

All by itself, this one line about intended positives was enough to make it worth my while to learn a lot more about NLP. It directly condensed an entire worldview into seven or eight words. Even better, the idea gave all of us human beings credit for knowing what we are doing—even though our lives are so often so weirdly sad and compellingly hopeless. The presupposition resonated persistently with a thought that had appeared in my mind, elastic and sticky, some years before: “Being human is not a fallen condition!”

For years, I had been becoming increasingly cranky with a variety of “growth” methods and “spiritual” movements in which the main order of business was “purification” of some sort. It was as if the short-format version of these schools was, “Welcome to physical reality. Big mistake! Now, here’s how to recover and become worthy of something better.” There was something so intrinsically and intensely disrespectful about this that I really couldn’t help but think, “That has got to be nuts.”

During this time, I was also still voraciously consuming the work of Jane Roberts and her co-conspirator, the channeled entity, Seth. Jane’s writing was about “the eternal validity of the soul,” but what came through equally strongly was the intense “validity” of physical experience. Years before, Seth/Jane had flattened me with the line, “Within your physical atoms, the origins of all consciousness still sing.” Jane often wrote about the amazing creativity that goes into the achievement of being “securely couched” in physical reality. Since that’s pretty much where I happened to be noticing myself securely couched at the time, I thought that was great.

So, we might begin to imagine my dismay as I discovered that much of the NLP world, which I would come to regard as the place where “they” do conventional NLP, didn’t take the frame of intended positives all that seriously. It was more like, “Behind every behavior there is an intended positive outcome, except for…(except for when the person’s life is too awful…except for when they had really cruel parents…except for when they were misdiagnosed in the second grade…except for when, surely, they have nothing to do with what’s gone so wrong…except for, essentially, they are—surely—the victim, not the source, of their experience”) Out of this kind of nonsense have come “change patterns” that are beyond ugly, “techniques” with names like “Belief Crusher” and “Parts Annihilator,” and so on, and on, in the ceaseless, in-bred plague of “techniques” that is what NLP is for most of the world.

I have purposefully made a completely hardball interpretation of Intended Positive Outcomes the foundation of our Marin-style NLP. I have even extended the presupposition just a little: “All behavior, and all experiences, have intended positive outcomes—no exceptions, ever.” For me, this presupposition is the essential reframe that NLP offers the world. It is an important and powerful assertion. It is far more important than telling people about cybernetic this-and-that, for example. It is the idea that sets us apart.

Because it preserves our proper dignity as conscious beings, by requiring respect for the legacy of our personal ecology, the hardball IPO frame (somewhere I began to abbreviate Intended Positive Outcomes into the acronym IPO’s) hugely eases the experience and processes of change. It allows us all to begin from where we are, without having to pour energy into fighting where we’ve already been.

By adhering to the universal validity of IPO’s, we have been able grow the unique expression that is NLP, Marin-style. Our forms of NLP, so fundamentally rooted in the amazing work of Bandler, Grinder, Robert Dilts, Jonathan Rice, and many wonderful others, yet so completely different in tone, are able to further the soul’s fulfillment without dishonoring the life’s intentions. And that is just the beginning of the story.
Listen to Carl telling the story in more details (70 min)

Question:
I really enjoyed the last newsletter “When Reality Gets Ahead of Identity – When You Make Wonderful Changes and Feel Worse Than Ever”, the question comes out of that article … at the very end you wrote, “We don’t want the changes in clients’ lives to get too far out ahead of their beliefs…

Carl:
Not of their beliefs … of their identity.

Question:
So, basically I have two questions:
1. How did change happen if something wasn’t happening with the beliefs already?
2. Then how do you pace that?  How do you make sure those two are happening in a way that doesn’t cause all kinds of trouble?

Carl:
OK.  The changes happen anyway because of really, really, really good work.  So, the client has that foundational belief, one form of it or another. The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe, or, the most lonely thing I can do is experience being loved and wanted, or one of those.  That kind of foundational limitation reaches so widely and so deeply into just about every other belief, every other decision, every other experience—all of the rest of the person’s life across time.  It has tendrils that reach into everything.

If we could grab hold of that belief, let’s say we had some kind of special little clamp or tool, and we could pull that belief up out of the person’s system, in accordance with what they wanted, we would probably rip the whole system apart in the course of doing it.  So, what I do is find ways to revise the behavior and capability…out-picturing the experience of the quality of the person’s life in terms of their relationships or their job or their work, and still allow that other belief to be there.

It’s essential for their safety that they feel so unsafe.

At a certain point then, we finally reach a point where something has to give. Either they have to undo everything they’ve accomplished that’s so positive and so useful (in terms of quality of life and accomplishment), or we just have to revise the belief that says the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.

There is such devotional patterning in that belief…“If I can’t be safe with you,” (whoever the child’s consciousness is speaking to), “If I can’t be safe with you, I will not be safe anywhere, ever, I promise”.  Now, that always corresponds with a childhood experience, an experience in the house that is beyond imagining in terms of its threat and its danger, and its damage.  I mean just extraordinary ugliness.  When those two go together, the more ugly it is, the more devoted and pure the love will be.  That then produces the belief ‘the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe’, and the assertion ‘the most loving thing I can do is never assume that I am safe’.

In fact, in the course of writing that article, I noticed that we have to be pretty good at getting someone out in front of that belief, so identity gets in front of the belief.  I had just recently done a number of sessions with people who are so stuck there. Their lives are so good and they are so freaked, because they’re lives are so good, and they can’t get that to make sense.

So part two [of the article] will be unpacking ‘the worst belief in the world’ – the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.

That one’s so much fun to adjust because, of course the safer the person gets, the more in danger they become.

Best, Carl

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (4 min)

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin