The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming
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The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming

John Grinder

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eBook - ePub

The Origins Of Neuro Linguistic Programming

John Grinder

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About This Book

The Origins of NLP brings together the recollections and thoughts of some of the main protagonists from the very early days of NLP. In 1971 Richard Bandler and Frank Pucelik were students at Kresege College at the University of California Santa Cruz. They had a strong mutual interest in Gestalt Therapy, Frank because of his traumatic time in Vietnam and because he had been working with some disaffected and drug-addicted kids, and Richard because he had been working with Science and Behavior Books on transcribing and editing Fritz Perls' seminal work, The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness to Therapy. They started a local Gestalt group and ran 2-3 sessions a week collaborating and experimenting with the language of therapy. They started achieving some brilliant results but were having problems transferring their skills to others and so Richard invited one of their college professors, John Grinder, to observe what they were doing in order that he would, hopefully, be able to deconstruct what they were doing that was so effective. John was a professor of Linguistics and was instantly impressed with the work that they were doing. He was able to add more structure and in due course the three of them formalised what is now known as the Meta Model. NLP, or Meta as it was known then, was born.

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PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Lots of “Times,” Some Easy, Some Fun, Some Hard

R. Frank Pucelik
I graduated from high school in San Diego, California in 1963. Went to Community College and after three semesters quit. Not a good idea to quit college in 1965. Received my letter from Uncle Sam a few months later and joined the Navy before my 90 days were up. Did too well on the intelligence tests in boot camp and found myself assigned to Hospital Corpsman School directly from boot camp. Spent a wonderful year working in a military hospital and playing golf in Japan, my first duty station, after my abbreviated military medical school.
The Marine Corps needed medical corpsmen and I was transferred to the Marines in 1966. Went to infantry training back in San Diego where I also went to boot camp and Corps School, then off to the 2nd Battalion 9th Marine Regiment smack in the middle of the jungle in Southeast Asia. Not a fun year: spent 10 months in the jungle (I Corp) with a Marine Platoon and three months at a field medical hospital (A-Med) in Phu Bai, South Vietnam. When I left Vietnam I was stationed at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, California, which was also my home town, for the last seven months of my four-year military obligation. This seven months was a great gift to me. I was at home but not actually out of the military yet. Really needed this “halfway” time to try to get back to being a human. It helped a lot and served as a partial re-entry to human-hood.
So I spent four years doing my duty and then back to the college in San Diego I had quit before joining the military. This time around my attitude and desire were of a different caliber than the first time and I excelled at everything: perfect grades, took part in every activity, and a lot more golf. Married the sweetheart I had met in the military after the war, we gave birth to our son, and I went to work trying to get the war and my childhood out of me. I majored in psychology and political science. Not much progress on the self-healing during the two years I spent in college but learned a lot about several different psychological systems and had a lot of fun. In 1970 I transferred to the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) to finish my bachelor’s degrees in both psychology and politics.
So, here I was in hippy city, being fresh out of the military, and fresh out of a college dominated by military veteran students. Wow, what a shock. In those days UCSC was really academically difficult to get into and they were not accepting many kids. Only the best could get in. However, the UC system at that time was allowing a number of veterans “special admission” opportunities and so, there I was surrounded by the smartest kids I had ever seen. Most of them were four to six years younger than myself but incredibly well educated. Luckily I was a good talker and a reasonably self-assured character by this time, so I was able to cope and over time “kind of” fit in. Loved the university and was able to immerse myself more deeply in the process of finding out what was wrong with me and working hard to become someone even I could like and respect.
In mid or late 1971, I was doing peer counseling and teaching some younger students how to do Gestalt, which I had studied extensively at college in San Diego. I was also doing a lot of training for other peer counselors to do “talk downs” for students who had taken LSD and were having a “bad trip.” For me this was pretty easy stuff. Screaming and relatively violent clients were not much to deal with after being in Southeast Asia. My reputation was “the guy who could handle any counseling drug crisis,” and I liked the respect and reputation that went with it.
About this time I met a guy named Richard Bandler who was a lot like me. He didn’t seem to care about much and not much could bother him, especially crying, screaming college students. We fit together pretty well and we began doing Gestalt training groups together. We were doing two or three group training sessions a week and making some good pocket change in the process. After a few months of doing these groups together, Richard invited a new “hotshot” linguistics professor to come visit our groups to see if there were linguistic or other patterns he could observe from our behaviors and/or ideas that could help us be better than we already were. After three or four sessions with John Grinder (the new hotshot linguistics professor) observing our training groups and asking us questions about our language patterns and other patterns he had noticed, we knew we were on to something really special. In my opinion it was during these two or three Gestalt training group sessions that NLP/Meta was born. The excitement I felt during these early times with John and Richard became a driving force that never left me during the following six or so years that we spent together (actually it still hasn’t left me and I assume it never will).
For the first several months of our interactions it was just John, Richard, and myself, but we rapidly started adding group members. During John’s university classes and during Richard and my Gestalt training classes, we would find people we liked and/or people would come to us and ask to join the “study group” we had formed. So, we were off and running. In my opinion, this group of people were the “first generation” NLP folks. They included Joyce Michaelson, Trevelyan Houck, Marilyn Moskowitz, Jeff Paris, Lisa Chiara, Ilene McCloud, Ken Block, Terry Rooney, Jody Bruce, Bill Polansky, Devra Canter, and one more person who is choosing to stay anonymous. Also, there were a few people during these early years who were on the edge of what we were doing: Terry McClendon (who became much more connected and active later with Robert Dilts), Paul Carter (a close friend of Steven Gilligan and partner for several years), David Wick (head of Youth Services and good friend as well as excellent leader and student of NLP), Gary Merrill (a close friend of Judy DeLozier and was in many groups with the Meta kids), Michael Patton (without whose help and friendship I might not have ever graduated from UCSC – a good counselor and colleague at Youth Services), Peter Gaarn (also a powerful counselor at Youth Services), and Pat LeClair (Head Counselor at Youth Services who constantly supported our “innovative” work with the clients). During the first two years, the group of people named above were the ones primarily involved in the experimenting.
It was during these two years of experimenting that the Meta Model and other foundation models were formalized. We spent a lot of time copying the “great” therapists (sometimes in person, sometimes on video, and sometimes via manuscripts) to learn their language patterns and then formalize their “tricks” so we could use them equally well. We spent an incredible amount of time and energy, during all six years and all three generations, doing Gestalt sessions with each other on every conceivable problem we might have: family reconstructions with each other until everyone’s families had been analyzed and reconstructed many times for each of us; psychodrama from every possible perspective; parts parties by the hundreds (each practitioner with each member of the team); and dream therapy with every dream that could possibly have any significance for each of us, by each of us. Then, evaluating the patterns (verbal and non-verbal), refining the patterns as much as possible, then testing for quicker, better results. We kept practicing until we were pretty convinced that this particular technique or process could not be done better or faster.
We observed that the “masters” were often sloppy and inconsistent in their use of change behaviors and, by understanding the patterns they used and using them systematically, we believed we were faster and better than they were. We spent much of our time accumulating their “licks” and testing our competence on each other, with our friends, and with the clients several of us had while working with the Santa Cruz Counseling Center (Youth Services). It seemed obvious that in most cases the “masters” had learned their change patterns over many years of trial and error and actually didn’t know what pattern they were observing or what systematic behavior or language they were using to affect the change in the clients. We confirmed this many times when questioning the “masters” themselves. It also seemed that they relied on very few patterns and were not flexible. We now understood very clearly what was happening when a therapist was very effective with one client and completely ineffective with the next. The problems that clients had also had patterns and the “helpers” needed to be effective with the pattern the clients used to create their problem. It seemed to us that the “helpers” could not help the client if the client’s problem was not “rooted” in the pattern the “helper” could recognize and work with effectively. Today that sounds ridiculously simple but in 1973 this was quite a revelation for us.
This meant that potentially we could find the patterns of many different great communicators and put them together into a package of skills that one practitioner could learn and use. During these early years we played with the patterns of Carlos Castaneda, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, John Lilly, and others. This, of course, allowed us to understand the most common misjudgment made in psychotherapy. We understood that any model provided by a school or style of psychotherapy was destined to fail more often than not. We also understood that it is the client’s model, or group of patterns, that is far more important for the therapist to respond to than the “helping” or “healthy” model the therapist brings to the session. Of course, it is therefore necessary for the therapist to adjust the therapy system to fit the client, not the client to fit the therapy. We spent some time taking the “healthy” models from the different systems of psychotherapy and carrying them out to their logical conclusion, as if they were a real or complete personality structure. What great fun it was to be a complete “Gestalt” person, or a total “Transactional Analysis” person, or a “Freudian” person (be careful with this one). This process helped us understand quickly the limits, incompleteness, and contradictions of the “systems” that were often the guiding principles of psychotherapy.
During this time the nature of my relationship with Richard slowly changed. Originally Richard and I were the dynamic duo. By the middle of 1973 (very possibly earlier in Richard’s mind), Richard and John had become the dynamic duo and I was (functionally) the “leader of the pack” of students. Some of the later students never quite accepted this role on my part but that was the way it was until the middle of 1976. I now think some of the later troops – like Robert Dilts, Stephen Gilligan, Jim Eicher, possibly Leslie Cameron, Judy DeLozier, David Gordon, and the rest – never knew how the “Meta people” got started. I never thought about it in those days. I never cared. We were having too much fun, learning a lot, and I was starting to feel like a “real” human being.
On one occasion when we were playing with dream therapy models, mixing Gestalt dream work with psychodrama and Virginia’s “parts parties,” John led me through the painful process of “living out” my recurring Vietnam nightmare. A long and frightening three or so hours, but John and the guys involved stayed with me and it changed me forever. I was finally able to finish some of the worst memories, guilt, and closed-off feelings that were bubbling out of me at the worst moments and in the worst way. Until that session, with John’s guidance, I believed that the craziness put in me by the jungle was there to stay. The transformations from that session with John have continued, in a good way, all my life.
The Meta people met John, Richard, and myself one or two times a week for three to five hours and worked without John and Richard two to four more times a week, often for four to six hours at a time (I was part of all of these groups). Several of us also worked together at Youth Services, and had classes and organizational groups together in the university.
It was during ’73 and ’74 that my emphasis was divided between learning patterns, working with the patterns we were learning at Youth Services in Santa Cruz, organizing experimentation meetings, working with the Meta people honing our skills, trying to finish with the war and the craziness that was the legacy of my childhood, and finishing my degree work at the university. John and Richard, of course, were key to my personal and professional development; John in a more direct manner and Richard as an attentive antagonist.
During late ‘73 and early ‘74 several key people joined the process. This was the time when Robert Dilts, Steve Gilligan, Jim Eicher, Leslie Cameron, David Gordon, and Judy DeLozier became involved. During ’74 and ’75 an incredible amount of our focus was given to the unconscious models, including Milton Erickson and others. We learned and experienced every trance phenomenon we could find or read about. We spend hundreds of hours working with each other and anyone else we could get to let us put them into “trance,” most of the time with their permission. We learned the process of “deep trance identification” where you become another person at the most basic level possible.
The idea was to learn from them as fast and as completely as possible. We “became” every person we could think of who had something “magic” to teach us. We had a hard time getting Steven to be Steven during this time and I spent a few strange days the first time Leslie was Virginia. Leslie and I were very close at the time, life partners, working partners, both on the NLP team and at Youth Services. When she became Virginia she was very polite and obviously did not know me. That is a very uncomfortable feeling when someone you know very well does not know who you are. I was very relieved a day later when Leslie was back in Leslie’s body.
Our merry band continued experimenting during ’75 through ’76, copying, experiencing personally, evaluating, testing, practicing, and refining everything we could find that we thought was worth learning. The models and techniques we were developing were becoming publicly known and people from the other side of the hill (San Jose, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Berkeley, and all points east from Santa Cruz) wanted to study our “discoveries.” Most of the Meta people were doing training programs of one kind or another. We had moved into informal teams. Leslie and I worked a lot together and focused on education and family systems....

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