Re-Modelling NLP: Part Three:
“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.” Pascal
Many, if not most clients, seek therapy because of some kind of bad feeling. NLP offers a number of techniques for dealing with bad feelings. In this third part of my series on re-modelling NLP, I will concentrate on the area of feeling generally and specifically the area of conflicts and how we can use feelings to resolve difficult issues.
As with the previous articles, I am attempting to cover a great deal of territory to give an overview of my re-modelling of NLP as a whole. This means leaving out a lot of detail and supporting examples. Please take the time to consider the examples and do the exercises. In the last 5 - 10 years that I have been teaching my new material, I have done it experientially. This written form is good for the ideas but impossible to guarantee that the reader successfully experiences what is necessary to make the most of the new models. If you would like further clarification or examples for this or previous parts please contact me at the address at the end of the article and I will do my best to provide you with more. One good thing about developmental modelling is that there is always more.
First of all what do we mean by feeling? Feeling is a priority for many psychotherapies and is such an everyday word that we all assume that we know what someone means when they say they have a feeling. What exactly does the therapist mean when asking someone to get in touch with their feelings? Through modelling I have identified the following different types of feeling that we experience.
No.
Types of Feeling
Examples
1.
Sensory: Matter
“Feels hard”
“Feels soft”
2.
Sensory: Temperature
“Feels warm”
“Feels cold”
3.
Sensory: Texture
“Feels rough”
“Feels smooth”
4.
Sensory: Perceptual
“Feel out of balance”
“Feel unsettled”
5.
Behavioural
“Feeling for my keys”
“Feeling my way in the dark”
6.
Emotional
“Feel happy”
“Feel sad”
7.
Evaluative
“Feel good”
“Feel scared”
8.
Cognitive
“Feel it is going to rain”
9.
Gestalt
“Feel Happy”
“Feel at one with the world”
10.
Secondary Processing
“Feels right”
“Feels wrong”
Any one of these ten can be "felt". They are all useful for some things but clearly very different. We also use the word feeling as a metaphor. Using these distinctions can clarify miscommunications. Without these distinctions modelling feelings can only be at best a crude approximation, at worst totally misleading.
A major source of bad feeling comes from conflicts of various kinds and one of the early NLP books, ‘Structure of Magic, Vol. II’ dealt with this area.
“More specifically, the strategy for working with incongruities involves three phases:
1. Identifying the client's incongruencies;
2. Sorting the client's incongruencies;
3. Integrating the client's incongruencies.
These three phases are, of course, a fiction, as are all models. It sometimes happens that the phases do not occur in their full form, or, frequently, they will not be sharply distinguishable, but will flow into one another. They have proven to be, as is demanded of any model, a useful way both of organising our own experiences in therapy and in teaching others to do the same.
In short, the therapist has the task of assisting the client in learning to use his conflicting parts of incongruencies as resources - of assisting the client to become congruent.” Magic II, Page 45
And then:
“The term incongruent, then, applies to a situation in which the person communicating is presenting a set of messages carried by his output channels which do not match, are not compatible - this person is said to be incongruent. Other people's experience of an incongruent person is confusion, saying that he doesn't know what he really wants, is inconsistent, untrustworthy, indecisive.
The terms congruent and incongruent may be applied to messages presented by a person's output channels as well as to the persons themselves. Thus, if messages carried by two output systems are incompatible, do not fit, do not match, they are incongruent; if they fit, they are congruent.” Magic II, Page 46
When we identify anything we make use of equivalences (see previous article) and what we understand by incongruence will dictate what we are looking for and listening to and what sense we make of our client’s behaviour. Bandler and Grinder fail to specify how compatibility is decided. “Compatible with what?” When we appreciate organisation in levels then in an example such as when we want to eat fish and chips and at the same time want to only have a salad these appear to be incompatible with each other. However they are compatible with our desires as a whole person. This has a major impact on subsequent sorting and integrating.
Bandler and Grinder made the assumption that people have parts. If we assume that incongruities are the result of different parts then we are not modelling but instead are imposing a model. The imposition of this idea of parts has been popular as it is easy to connect with at first. It is only when you question the working of the part and its relationship to the whole that the term presents difficulties. Part certainly doesn’t mean a separate part like an arm or leg that can be removed. I will return to this issue later in the article.
Bandler and Grinder went on to recommend sorting incongruities in terms of parts and then polarities.
“The most common sorting of a client's incongruities is a sorting into two parts - we distinguish this situation with a special name. When a client's incongruent paramessages are sorted into two parts for therapeutic work, we call these two parts polarities. Very dramatic therapeutic work and profound and lasting change can be achieved by a therapist and clients through polarities.
We recommend the sorting of incongruities into polarities as an excellent therapeutic technique and one which will allow the therapist to make sense out of the client's behaviour. We make effective polarity work a prerequisite for therapists before instructing them in working with more than two of the client's identifiable parts at one time. In our description of Phases 2 and 3, we will focus on the two-parts situation - the polarity case; the remarks we make are also applicable to work in which more than two parts are being handled simultaneously. At the end of the sections on Phases 2 and 3, we will discuss more specifically working with more than two parts at a time.” Page 62
I used this approach for many years and found great value in it. I also found some major limitations and useful additions as a result of my re-modelling in this area. The result has been a change in the three phases of identifying, sorting and integrating. I will now give an overview of these changes.
It is nearly 20 years since I started using NLP ideas, skills and techniques. My previous training included linguistics, family therapy and Gestalt. I took immediately to the meta-model and to the patterns outlined in Magic I and II and Changing with Families. The identification of incongruence and conflicts utilising Satir categories was very useful for me in integrating different areas of therapy.
In Magic II there are a number of ways of sorting and working with incongruity. When I later attended training in NLP these weren't included. Instead one technique, the Visual Squash or Conflict Resolution technique, was all that was used.
Traditional NLP Visual Squash Technique:
There a now a few variations in this technique. The basic pattern is as follows:
1. Identify incongruence or conflict and separate into parts
2. Place one part on each hand and develop a full sensory representation (picture,
sound and feeling)
3. ‘Chunk up’ to identify the positive intention
4. For each side develop an appreciation of the intention of the other side and of the
benefit of integration
5. Establish an agreement to integrate
6. Bring the hands together and integrate
7. Test the integration (the result of the visual squashing together). Re-do if required
8. Bring back into the body and future pace
I used this technique for years and taught it to many people. This technique was often used in association with "Parts". I gradually became aware that the "resolution" which clients attained sometimes didn't last very long. I checked this out with colleagues and other trainers, and those that had followed up on their clients reported similar results.
An insight which I had was stimulated by the brain hemisphere distinction in Magic II together with a detailed study of a number of examples of conflict resolution. This insight only occurred when I changed from using ‘Parts’ to ‘Directions’ as a way of describing polarities. My realisation was that two different types of conflicts were occurring.
The assumption in Magic II is that different messages, if they are not compatible, are incongruent and that incongruence is a bad thing. Once this assumption is accepted then it's a straight forward implication that incongruence should be changed to congruence. For example, if I want to go out for a meal tonight and I'd also like to stay in and rest then this would be considered incongruence in the old NLP model. If I assume that human beings are single channel processors, that they can only think or feel one thing at a time, then this is correct. I totally disagree with this. I can have many "desires" at any single time - we all do. We get used to usually only choosing one of them and this can give the illusion of only one thing. If we have difficulty choosing then this is often considered to be a conflict and requiring resolution. Because there is uncertainty and indecision this can become associated with incongruence.
Below I have provided a summary representation of Consistency, Congruence, Dilemmas and Conflicts.
1. Consistency:
a. Between
Matter-Space-Time
Levels
b. Across
Areas
2. Congruence:
Types and Levels
3. Dilemma:
Same overall direction
Two or more alternatives
4. Conflicts:
Two opposing directions
There are then two different types of conflict. I have named them dilemma and conflict. A dilemma is where there is more than one option for going in one direction, e.g., Indian food or Chinese food tonight? A conflict is when there are two directions, e.g., go out for meal or save money. The crucial difference is that in a dilemma all options will get you what you want at a higher level. With conflicts the more you go for one, the less you get of the other.
In my experience conflicts occur consistently between issues of development and issues of safety. These are two crucial concerns for our survival. We constantly need to develop, even more so now that the world is changing so quickly. We also need to stay safe as we develop. Development is more often processed by the conscious mind and is often linguistic and visual as it is about ideas and achievement. Safety is often an unconscious check and is experienced as a feeling.
These two patterns require different interventions. The visual squash, or ‘conflict resolution', ironically is ideal for dilemmas but not for conflicts. This technique "chunks" them up to a level of sameness and therefore brings them back together. With this accomplished the client can then proceed more easily.
A conflict involves issues regarding safety and development and thus can be masked by using the visual squash technique because the two issues are not of the same type. When they are chunked up to 'sameness' the feeling of conflict is masked but is not resolved and so will re-occur later. For example, if you take any conflict like getting your tax returns done or watching TV and chunk both up until you connect with ‘a oneness with the universe’ you will find that you no longer feel the conflict. The need to sort the tax return out hasn’t gone away. The conflicting issue is still there whether you are feeling or not. That is why it will surface as soon as you come back down to earth. There is clearly a danger in inducing a drug type high feeling instead of tackling r...
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