“Roots of Marin NLP” Part I

by Carl Buchheit

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.

The Roots of Marin NLP—Part II:   The Essential Reframe

“From Intended Positive Outcomes to IPO’s”

By Carl Buchheit

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.

10 Delusions of Personal Growth Part III (Delusions 8-10)

By Carl Buchheit

To recap:

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.

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.

10 Delusions of Personal Growth Part II (Delusions 4-7)

By Carl Buchheit

To recap:

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.

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?

10 Delusions of Personal Growth  Part I (Delusions 1-3)

By Carl Buchheit

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.

When You Make Wonderful Changes and Feel Worse Than Ever.

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

One of our bedrock assertions at NLP Marin is that all human beings will be and do anything to make sure that their beliefs are true. Anything! We are meaning making beings. This is one of our specialties. Whatever we believe is true will be true, and whatever we believe things mean is what they will mean. Even better, to make sure that we are not wrong or crazy about this, we will have “good evidence” for everything, for every part of it. What we believe is so. No exceptions-except sometimes. I would like to explore one of those exceptional times in this and the next article or so.

We accomplish the amazing, perfect alignment of belief and “reality” through the local meaning-making magic of deletion, distortion, and generalization, and through the more non-local magic of using awareness to summon forth a whole world and, ultimately, a whole universe in all its parts. Put simply, we can make sure that things mean what they are supposed to mean precisely because we are just checking with ourselves-however other-than-consciously we might be doing that. We certainly get a lot of help from our families and the larger culture(s) in which we live, but we are basically just checking with ourselves, nevertheless. For example, if we “know” (believe) that an object is green, we will perceive a green object, which will then let us know that the object is green, around and around again in merry infinity of reality perception and perceived reality perfection. The famous 1948 illustration by M. C. Escher, below, says just about everything about this process.

“Drawing Hands”

It illustrates something called autopoesis, or self-creation. One hand is what we believe, and the other is the reality upon which those beliefs are based. Or, one hand is now, and the other is our future. I wonder if one hand knows what the other is doing? (I have to say, “The Secret” is a much better book title than “Autopoesis for Dummies,” but I am fond of the word nevertheless.)

It is usually a good and pleasant thing when our autopoetic processes work magic that generates positive experience. “I have done some nice work on myself. Things are better, and I feel better!” is a pretty wonderful and sensible statement. However, “Things are better, but I feel way worse,” is not pleasant at all. To generate strong negative feelings about having really positive results is a deeply confusing experience. But drive to not feel wrong or crazy means that we will endure any amount of perceived pain rather than-actually, instead of-experiencing that our bad feelings are not accurate reports about the reality of our world. As we grow and learn, as we come to trust and respect ourselves more and more, we may know full well that our negative, painful experience is completely wacky, shot through with contradiction and inconsistencies, but we will still make sure that it is “real and true.” This seems to make things even worse-sometimes a lot worse.

Not only are humans meaning-making specialists, we are stubborn about it! Our wonderfully automatic, unremitting meaning-making stubbornness allows us to both create and stabilize our worlds. This is an incredibly important function. It lets us be human. It lets us rely on having a stable self across time and within that wider world we’re pretty sure we’re supposed to be involved with. There’s a lot to be said for the stability afforded by all this stubborn certainty. (Marin-style NLP change-work is actually based on using our predictable patterning to make changes in our predictable patterning, but that is another article.)

But what happens when we just cannot get good changes to make good sense, when the good things that we know to be so are just too far from the bad experience we are feeling about them? What happens when the reality is so much better than the feelings that seem to be reporting on that reality-when our life experience is actually more positive than our belief systems can account for? This is very difficult territory. It is usually quite scary to be us when this happens.

I have worked with many clients who are caught in “the dilemma”-”My life is really great (or so I am told by people I trust), but my feelings about my life are still really, really, really bad – and this is sort of ruining my whole life, so it’s not so great anymore, only I know it is, except that, based on how it feels to be me, my life is still totally awful, which must mean that there is still something really wrong with me, which is making me feel worse, and about which I am sort of starting to freak out, except that everything is pretty much better, only I can’t feel it.”

Yipes!

Some examples: a client with millions of dollars (much of it in gold!) and several very different businesses, but with the experience that it could (would!) all disappear instantly, including the gold-not in an economic downturn, but literally instantly. The more success this person created, which was a lot, the more terror they developed. I worked with someone whose relationship (primary, significant other relationship) developed into everything they wanted, yet they were certain that somehow, some way, something could instantly (again, that word) undo all of their remarkable accomplishments, in terms of being able to give and receive love. Another client developed superb success in the context of their job, along with all the acknowledgement and corporate trappings that mark this kind of success, but this person’s feelings were those of someone constantly at the very edge of being humiliated and fired. (Again, the experience was that this could happen at any instant.) One more example: a client who worked creatively to revise a serious writer’s block, who then had several published books to their credit, and whose feelings were, nevertheless, those of someone who would never be able to write or express themselves in any way. Also, again, there was a certainty that all of their books could simply be “taken away, instantly.”

There is an excruciating good news/bad news dilemma (a situation in which someone must choose one of two or more unsatisfactory alternatives) in the experience of these people. One of two things just has to be hugely in error: either they are really wrong about the observable realities of their lives, or they are hugely wrong about themselves-about the reliability of their mean-making about self at the deepest levels. Those of us still struggling for the success these people had created might think, “What a great problem to have,” but which would you choose to be “wrong” about-your ability to accurately know yourself, or your ability to accurately know your world?

This crazy-making dilemma presents a serious ecology problem-an unwanted consequence of otherwise wonderful growth and change-that is a challenge for the practitioner and the client both. The problem is, “How do we work with ourselves and others so that lives don’t improve faster or farther than identity can explain, or so that our identity updates keep adequate pace with our life improvements?” My experience is that, using our Marin-style NLP, we can do marvelous change work that actually works, but that if we don’t sufficiently and properly revise a certain belief, then there is nothing but trouble.

This really problematic belief is as simple as it is devastating:

“The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.”

Best, Carl

How is it that some people can sit and watch someone get hurt, or even die and not lift a finger to help? How could those folks in the sweat lodge not notice that someone was in real trouble

Not having been there, I don’t know the exact circumstances. But I do know what kind of atmosphere can create a situation like that. Whether or not what I’m going to describe has anything to do with current news events, the patterns are worth all of us understanding in case we find ourselves, or someone we know, in a similar situation

Let’s start with some basics. Human beings need hope. With hope, we will endure almost anything. When we lose hope, we give up. Humans also have a need to feel that they belong. It is hard wired into us. When we feel like we belong to a group, we become very loyal to that group. When we are aligned with the group we feel good. When we go against the group we actually feel like we are doing something wrong. We feel guilty. So it is natural not only to seek out people who give us hope and make us feel that we belong, but also to be intensely loyal to that group.

Powerful leaders use these innate needs of humans to create a loyal following. They offer hope–hope that you can have it all; hope that you can be rich, successful, in love, beautiful, happy, etc. What they offer seems possible, really possible. So you open yourself up to have some hope.

The next step of powerful leaders is to remove fear. They encourage folks to face their fears and demonstrate how you can’t trust it. There are a variety of ways to do this. The basic idea is that they push you through your fear, your doubt, and your logic and have you come out in a better place. After a few times, you begin to doubt your fear and trust the leader just a bit more. You start to want them to push. The eventual goal is for you to trust the leader more than you trust your own feelings.

Once you are in the system, you don’t even realize that you are losing trust in yourself. You may even be thinking that you are having a great experience. You most likely feel like you are doing some important personal growth work and, you are. Learning to face your fears is a critical life skill. It only becomes a problem when you associate the good feeling of facing your fear with the leader and not yourself.

The experience of facing your fear and coming out in a good place is compelling. The experience of having witnesses while you do this is even better, and when you witness others, then a group bonding happens. At this point you have both hope and a sense of belonging.

Then, they add the consequences of giving up. They tell you that if you back down from what scares you, you’ve failed yourself and missed out on something wonderful. They teach you that the only reason you won’t succeed is if you “give up” on yourself. Within this frame, all difficulties you are having with the leader or the organization are because you are being scared. And, the way through that fear is to hang in there a little longer, until you come out on the good side.

This combination of hope, belonging and attitude that “the only way to succeed is to keep pushing forward with this group” is a powerful structure. Stepping out, leaving the group often feels like being cast out or ripped away from the only good in your life. The equation is now: being in the group equals hope and belonging, and being out of the group equals letting my fear win and giving up on myself. Since most of the time when we join these groups, we are in some kind of transition and often do not have a strong support system outside of the group. Going against the group means starting all over and this is extremely hard.

So, you are in this group where you have great hope. You are growing and you feel like you belong. The leader often asks you to do things that are scary or hard, and you always feel better when you do them. This time, it’s sitting in a sweat lodge. It will be uncomfortable, hot and humid, but really nothing to worry about. By the time you are a couple of hours into it, you are in a completely different state. The group pressure to push through this new challenge is quite high. And, you trust that the leader really knows what they are doing. That is the key. Once we hand over authority, humans tend not to take initiative. They leave it to the one in charge. They trust their leaders to do what is best and they don’t trust themselves to override the leader.

Now, we have a huge problem. If the leader isn’t paying attention or is unwilling to act, people can get hurt. People can die. And the ones that live will have a lot of emotional damage to deal with. It will be especially hard because from the outside we can’t even begin to imagine how the others could have witnessed someone in dyer need and not done anything. And, they can’t even explain it themselves. That transfer of their inner authority to the leader happened so subtly they never saw it happen. If we had asked any of them while they were still a part of the group, they would have denied any problems because for them there weren’t any problems. They had hope and they belonged. They had all they needed.

A good leader will do many of the same things that the dangerous leaders will do. Determining the difference isn’t exactly easy. A good teacher will have many ways to challenge you and many things you can learn from them. The main difference will be in their intent. The good leaders are focused on what is best for you, not what is best for them. The false leaders will put themselves first. A true leader, teacher, mentor, will continually hand the reigns back to you. Or refuse to take the reigns when you attempt to hand them over. They will push you, but they will make sure that you don’t begin to blindly follow them. They will not promise you more than they will deliver. Often they will not promise anything, they will simply show you what might be possible. A true teacher understands that their ultimate goal is to help the student outgrow the teacher.

The damage done by false leaders can be very deep. It can not be measured in dollars lost or time spent. These people gradually take away our sense of who we really are, and recovering from that takes time, patience and often some professional help. The shame people feel when they have followed a false leader is immense.

It is very important that we all understand that this really can happen to any of us. Many people have had an experience of following a false leader. The duration of time that we followed varies. It is, however, very common. Unless you understand the combination of factors that create such a following, you are likely to follow a few false leaders on your path.

A leader’s job is to create a compelling experience, one that encourages you to push yourself out of your comfort zone. They will provide an opportunity to feel like you belong and motivate you to keep going. When a leader considers themselves to be more of an authority on your life or your feelings than you are, it’s time to stop following.

If you’ve been there, or are there now, take some time to think about how you got there. Be gentle with yourself about your experiences. There really were good things within that experience and it’s OK to take the good and leave the rest. Most importantly, you are not the only one who this has happened to. You are not alone.

I think that most of us have walked at least a few steps down this type of path and spent a little time with someone who crossed the line a bit too often. When and how we came to terms with it is an individual process. But before we get too excited about the cases that make the news, maybe we need to check out the cases within our own lives and let that serve as a reminder to us to trust ourselves a bit more and be willing to speak out when something seems wrong. A good leader will appreciate that you are speaking out.

By Carl Camou

Founder of Life Re-Solutions and friend of NLP Marin