NLPhilia Blog

(Note: When I was in my first Practitioner training back in 1997-1998, a friend of mine called me with a rather distressing problem. I did some work with her over the phone, and it was so effective I decided to write it down. It ended up in the form of this fairy tale. Many people have read it since then, and most of them report having had it affect them deeply. The images are quite powerful. Enjoy it.)

A long time ago I heard a story of a young woman. She was friendly and fair, and many people took advantage of her nature and mistreated her. This made her very unhappy, as it would, and she somehow came to believe that she deserved this.

One day, after yet another example of mistreatment, she went for a walk and got lost in her own thoughts when she found a large pit in the ground. Carefully she peered over the edge and into the blackness. “It has no bottom,” she thought to herself. “It goes on and on forever.” Deeper and deeper, her thoughts drifted… and the darkness of the pit seemed to call to her, call her name, invite her to lose herself in the pit. And she found that she felt nothing as she allowed her mind to drift into the dark of the pit, and that was better than the hurt. Before she knew it, dusk had fallen, and she wandered home.

She didn’t, at first, visit this pit every day… just now and then, she’d find herself there, staring into it, feeling nothing, numb. Soon enough, she learned to make her way there daily, then twice a day or more… until eventually she’d wake up in the morning and go directly to it, going home at the end of the day. It was much better, she thought, than spending the day hurting, and maybe she was right, I don’t know.

One morning she awoke and she was already standing by the pit. She had fallen asleep there the night before, staring into the dark. And she found that seemed to be all right. Because when she wasn’t there, she was thinking about being there.

Nobody else understood why she didn’t want to talk to them or do anything with them anymore… why, she hardly slept and sometimes didn’t even bathe, because she spent all her time somewhere they didn’t know. People tried to get her to stop… even tried making her stop, and then they went away. They just didn’t understand that the pit kept her from them so they couldn’t hurt her anymore. And the world began to pass her by.

Summer came, and she was walking toward her pit (for she had begun to think of it that way, as her pit), when out of the corner of her eye she saw movement, and heard a funny little noise coming from that movement. A small, joyous noise it was. She looked, and saw a butterfly alternately chasing and being chased by a puppy. What a sight! She stood there and watched the game for a bit, and soon heard an odd noise. Looking around, she saw nothing, and watched the game a bit more. She heard that odd noise again, and so did the puppy, because he looked right at her. She realized that the odd noise was her own laughter. And the puppy, inspired by its own ability to entertain, scampered over to her and licked her ankles. And she laughed at that too.

“I’d love to play with you,” she said, “but I have something to do.” And she walked on. The puppy tilted its head quizzically and then followed her. “No, don’t come. I can’t play with you now. Go on! Go home and play,” she said to the friendly little puppy. And she went on to her pit.

The next day, the little puppy was waiting in her path, with a happy grin on its face. So she played a bit of catch with it and again sent it on its way. Her face felt funny from smiling as she continued to her pit. And as she began to stare down into the darkness, visions of her new little friend flashed into her mind, and the darkness began to call to her louder than before. She could understand what it was saying.

The following day, her puppy (for she had begun to think of it that way, as her puppy) wasn’t waiting for her, and she was surprised to feel disappointment. She hoped something hadn’t happened to the sweet little thing. So she went back to town and wandered through the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her friend and muttering, “if I’d just go to my pit all this would go away. Yes, it’s just like before, the pit is my only friend.”

“Pit?!” she heard a creaking voice behind her ask. She turned, surprised and embarrassed, and saw a woman. Dressed in black, bent with age… but her eyes were those of an infant, wide and clear and warm.

“Yes… it’s mine… no one knows of it but me.” Thinking the woman may have seen the puppy, she asked “Have you by any chance…”

“Seen your pit? No. I’ve seen my own. I can tell by looking at you what kind it is. Dark and without a bottom it is, and it knows you by name, and calls to you it does, does it not.”

“You have one?” the girl asked.

“No more. It served me well for a time, yes it did, and I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own. I can smell you from here. You don’t bathe. You don’t sleep and you eat poor, because it calls you. You’re here, now, and not there, and it speaks your name still in your mind. Why be you here?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for something.” The old one had confused her. How did she know these things? “Are you going to tell me to stop going?”

“Hell, no, child, no. Go all you want. Live there if you so choose. Here, take this too.” From a fold of her old black robe, the old woman produced a small ball of perfectly clear crystal. “Pretty it is, and gets warm at times, so take it with you. Try not to look too deeply into it.”

The girl took her gift. She didn’t know how not to. And she went to her pit. She didn’t know how not to. And the closer she got to it, the more clearly it called to her. And the old woman’s words… what did she mean?

(I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own)

Closer still, feeling something warm in her pocket… the funny little ball. “Gets warm at times,” she said… and what else? Looking deeply into it? Pulling it out of her pocket, she looked at it. It was warm, a bit, and she could see herself… distorted reflection, she could still see that she looked not like herself. Her feet continued the familiar path, but her curiosity was caught by the reflection moving in the…

(Try not to look too deeply into it)

She saw the little puppy, grinning from inside the ball… then the two of them playing together the day before, and then the day before as it played tag with the butterfly. She saw other scenes, a dance she attended once… her first kiss, so long ago… the ball gave off a gentle, warmly colored glow as it showed scene after happy scene from her life… things she thought she’d forgotten about. The warm glow bathed her in the light, filled her it seemed, and she drew it closer to her eyes.

And it began to grow in her hands. And the feelings the light created inside grew and grew, filling her and swirling inside, seeming to burst out of her and enter elsewhere until she was bathed in a spinning, swirling, sparkling, brightly colored sphere, filled with joy, happiness, the light, scenes of happiness in her life on every side, inside. The more she felt it, the more powerful it got, and the more she could feel it, until she knew she’d burst with joy.

Throw it in, the old woman’s voice called from somewhere deep inside. Trust. Throw it in.

“Oh, no, I don’t want to! It’s so wonderful! I’ve never felt so wonderful!”

Trust.

Closing her eyes, she tossed the huge, glowing ball into the pit. For an instant, she saw the darkness engulf the beauty… but before she even had a chance to think, a bright and soundless flash of colored light from the pit caused her to breathe a deep breath… and she looked deep into…

The darkness was gone, swept away. The pit now seemed illuminated from within. She saw it wasn’t bottomless after all; it wasn’t even deep. She saw that climbing out of it would be an easy task. And the quiet… the quiet that one only notices after a sound one has gotten used to suddenly stops… like when the church bell in the center of town finishes ringing.

She felt different, very different. How easy it is, she thought, to walk away from what once held her captive. Now she knew what the old woman meant

(I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own)

when she said what she did. She’d fed it long after it deserved feeding. Fed it with her life force. But no more. She still felt the light.

As she ran back home, her puppy was waiting for her in its usual place. “Come home with me, little friend. Come home.” Her little friend scampered after her.

Over the following years, she occasionally wondered where the old woman came from and whatever became of that wound in the ground she used to pay so much attention to. She was far too busy with her life… with her dog who got big but never seemed to grow up, with her new friends, with the handsome men whose eye her smile caught in the marketplace… to concern herself with it too much.

And as she grew old, she could look back on her life, remembering delight in her children and grandchildren, her love, her friends and family. One day she wandered, curious, to where she had spent so much time so long ago. She was interested to notice how small it was. It had all but closed over long ago. And something in the center of the small scar in the earth caught the sunlight. She walked over… recognized… smiled to herself… gingerly bent over as much as her old bones would allow, picked up the shiny crystal, and placed it in her pocket.

She resolved that she’d go to town tomorrow. And she smiled again to herself.

Some recent conversations led me to do some Web browsing, and I found a couple of very interesting sites I want to share.

Eyes for Lies: The Human Lie Detector Blog:

Scientists have identified only 50 individuals who are able to spot deception with great accuracy after testing more than 15,000 people over several decades. Eyes for Lies is one of the 50 people.

This lady is able to detect lies 80% of the time, and she does a pretty good job of explaining how she does it. What she sees, hears, and feels, internal strategies she uses, and so on.

Truth About Deception: An Honest Look at Deception, Love and Romance

Discovering infidelity, or deception by a loved one, creates a lot of uncertainty. We try to help people work through their questions and concerns by providing a detailed look at deception, love and romance.

This site is slanted heavily toward deception within romantic relationships, but the information I’ve read there is applicable outside those as well. I particularly appreciate their article on how to get people to tell you the truth.

You just never know when an opportunity to take care of your kid is going to come along.

One of them for me was on a really hot day about fifteen summers ago. I was visiting a lady who lived a few miles from where I live, and I’d stopped on my way at a convenience store to get some ice cream. I really hate hot weather.

I was walking back to my vehicle and unwrapping the ice cream when I yanked a little too hard on the wrapper and I dropped the whole thing in the dirt. I was so mad at myself! I got in my truck and started the engine, giving myself a really hard time, yelling at myself for not taking more care, and began to pull back onto the street. Then in my head I heard a kid’s voice–my own voice from when I was a kid–say, “Why don’t you just buy him another one?”

I stopped, right at the edge of the parking lot, and paid attention to what was going on in my head. I was a lot more angry than the situation warranted, I realized, so I went into my head and heard a little boy crying like he’d lost everything in the world.

Twenty or so years back my thoughts drifted to a park or something of the sort… it was a really hot day, and I was munching on some ice cream, when I heard that little boy crying his heart out. He must’ve been all of three years old. He’d dropped his ice cream in the dirt, and he really had lost everything in the world as far as he was concerned right at that moment. And his father was there, giving him a really hard time, yelling at him for not taking more care, and leading him back to their car, and I muttered to myself, “Why doesn’t his dad just buy him another one?”

I put the old truck back into its parking place and went into the store, where I bought him another one. He stopped crying and he’s felt a lot better ever since. And me… I don’t know that I’ve ever had better ice cream.

An acolyte asked his master, “Master, what must I learn to become enlightened?”

His master asked in return, “Look around you; what do you see?”

“All around me is the orderliness of the monastery. We eat at certain times, we meditate at certain times and in certain ways, we do the work required when it is time and in the required ways. All is order here.”

The master said, “The first lesson you must learn is that order is an illusion. To look closely and see order is merely your perception. When you step back and look at the larger picture, you will see all is chaos.”

The student went away and meditated on this. The following day, he returned to his master and told him that he saw all truly was chaos.

“The next lesson, then,” the master said, “is that chaos is an illusion. From your new perspective, indeed it seems that there is no governing principle, but when you step back and look at the bigger picture, you will see patterns… that there really is order.”

The student went away and meditated on this as well. The next week, he returned to his master and told him that he saw all truly was in order after all.

“Excellent!” the old master said, and smiled. “Now, the next lesson you must learn is that order is an illusion…”

I first learned about congruence from Frank Farrelly.

While I’d learned how to do it from my NLP trainings with John and Kathleen LaValle and Doug O’Brien, Frank was the guy who really taught me what it meant. From his book, Provocative Therapy:

One thing in my mind was very clear: that radical congruence, if held constant, was very helpful to patients in interviews; that I could not only laugh at patients without detriment to them but even with help to them; that laughter towards patients was not inevitably “demeaning their dignity”. I also felt very freed up in interviews. I wasn’t “grinding my gears” and my responses towards clients weren’t going in one direction while my thoughts, reactions and feelings were going in another.

Now, that isn’t to say I laugh at my patients. I certainly laugh if they say something I find funny, but in my line of work that’s rather a rarity. I do, however, respond to them honestly.

• Very recently, a man’s wife died at my hospital, and he was understandably distraught. As he kissed her for the last time and told her that he loved her, I choked. I had to walk away. Some would have said I was “unprofessional” for letting my feelings show like that. I disagree. (Fortunately for me, so does my manager, and so do the ICU nurses.)
• Some time back, a woman on our psychiatric unit was dismantling the furniture in her room. She was upset about something and the staff were afraid to go in and get her. I went to the door and saw her surrounded by drawers. “Move them away from you, please,” I asked. She asked why I wanted her to do that. I said, “To be honest, you’re scaring me a little. I’m afraid you might use one of them to try to hurt me.” She looked at me, maybe a little wide-eyed, and moved them away from her. She then accompanied me to the “Quiet Room” without a problem.
• Typically, if I have to restrain someone, I’m not pleased about it. I understand how frightened they must be and I treat them the way I’d want to be treated if I’d placed myself in their position. I approach such events with the attitude described in stanza 31 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell’s translation):
  

  Weapons are the tools of violence;
  all decent men detest them.

  Weapons are the tools of fear;
  a decent man will avoid them
  except in the direst necessity
  and, if compelled, will use them
  only with the utmost restraint.
  Peace is his highest value.
  If the peace has been shattered,
  how can he be content?
  His enemies are not demons,
  but human beings like himself.
  He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
  Nor does he rejoice in victory.
  How could he rejoice in victory
  and delight in the slaughter of men?

  He enters a battle gravely,
  with sorrow and with great compassion,
  as if he were attending a funeral.

One of the things I keep in mind is that, because I intend to remain congruent in that way, I have to decide what response I want to have in such situations. My NLP skills permit me to do that. I can decide what’s important to me in a given situation and resolve to behave consistently with that.

Sometimes, people don’t know how to take me. They assume there’s something else going on. Incongruence seems to be the norm, I guess. My girlfriend told me, early on in our relationship, that she felt like I was looking into her rather than at her. I wasn’t. I was looking at her, and she’d gotten used to everyone else looking at the pretty, perky, sunshiny persona she exudes so well. And I still have to deal with her responding to stuff I didn’t say, simply because she seems to assume I “really meant” something other than what I actually said.

I think my favorite example is the time a supervisor at the hospital tried to bully me. It was the way he got things done, and it tended to work with pretty much everyone. He wanted me to do something for him, and I was willing to do it for him (he wasn’t my supervisor), but he took on the “pushing people around” affect with me. In a completely congruent fashion, I responded to him as if he’d instead asked me for a tremendous favor. He tranced for a split second, and then he responded to me as if I’d just agreed to do him a tremendous favor. And the funny thing is, he never tried to bully me again. If I recall correctly, he didn’t bully anyone when I was around. Not that he thought about it and decided against it or anything… more like it never even occurred to him.

Anyway, congruence is a powerful thing, and I’m exceeding grateful to Frank for having opened it up for me. I enjoyed my Provocative Therapy training and highly recommend it to anyone. I also enjoyed the meal I shared with him and with Doug O’Brien; it was a ball. If you ever get the chance, go see Frank in action.

I love today’s Dilbert comic. It contains a wonderful set of instructions for emptying one’s mind.
NOTE: Updated a bad link.

Another article I wrote for Persuasion 101, this one from 2003:

Sometimes you’ll be faced with the task of persuading someone who is being, shall we say, unreasonable. Their emotions have gotten the best of them, perhaps, or maybe they just don’t like what you represent to them for whatever reason. I know what it’s like to be there. I work in a hospital and spend most of my “persuasion time” in either the locked Psychiatric Unit or the Emergency Department. You don’t get more “unreasonable” than some of the patients I’ve seen.

I’m a lazy persuader. I tend to realize that most of what people know about communicating is intuitive and natural, so I have learned to pay attention to my own other-than-conscious signals and trust them. Your unconscious can keep track of much more information than you think.

The psych nurses called me to help them with a man who was very angry with them for reasons that only he knew. When I got there, he was sitting (which is a good thing, generally speaking, for an angry person to be doing when you’re in front of them) and ranting to himself. The charge nurse stood aside and waited for me to say some magic words. (She’d seen me work before.) I listened for a bit and then opened my mouth to say something I thought was particularly persuasive, and I received a little nudge from the back of my mind. It went something like this here:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!

So I did.

I listened for a little while longer, got some more information, thought to myself, OK, it’s time to talk now, opened my mouth to say something I thought would be even more persuasive than the first thing, and there was that, um, still, calm, gentle voice again:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!

OK, OK, so I shut up and listened some more while he ranted. Then he gave me what I thought was a truly important bit of information, and I was glad I had paid attention to my unconscious urgings to be quiet. With that key information, I again went to open my mouth to say something powerfully persuasive, and you’ll never guess…

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!!

Now, I consider myself an intelligent fellow, and I can take a subtle hint. So I shut up for good. I sat and listened, just as I had before, making the little facial expressions and nods and grunts that demonstrated I was honestly listening to what he had to say. And within a minute or so he calmed down. And then he realized he was out of line.

The truth is, that’s all he needed. Someone to hear him out, to take in what he was saying without trying to convince him he was mistaken. The more he talked, them more I listened, the more he talked himself out of what he was saying. And I didn’t have to say a thing.

Because, you see, inside every “unreasonable” person, there’s a calm and peaceful person who’d rather be in charge.

This lifehack.org article should be required reading for every person trying out for American Idol. It would certainly save Simon Cowell a lot of grief. Did you ever ask yourself, while watching the first few episodes of each season, why in the name of all that is holy doesn’t that guy know he sucks?! Scott H. Young suggests:

Most people won’t tell you what they think of you. And if they do want to slide you some honesty, it is usually wrapped in a sugar coating.

In other words, they lie to spare the wannabe next-American-Idol some hurt feelings.

And when you’re asking your friends and loved ones for feedback, guess what they’re doing.

Probably never occurred to you. 🙂

My favorite idea from the whole batch of sixteen:

Say Thanks – Some companies pay consultants millions of dollars to come by and show them how they are doing a bad job. At least some people will do it for free. Thank them so you don’t have to pay heavy consultant bills later.

I have to tell you, I’m already really good at responding to abuse criticism, but this article came just in time to reinforce things for me. I read it just before going to work yesterday, and at work I took an undeserved load of crap from a doctor who thought I was the person he needed to be mad at.