Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
There is a slightly paradoxical element to the classic, "Getting to Yes": Although most of the focus is placed on re-framing the relationship of the parties to one of cooperative problem solving, there is nonetheless an underlying thread of threat. The specific manifestation of this element is what the authors call "BATNA", an acronym for "Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement". The system in "Getting to Yes" is not the vapid "can't we all just get along" mentality in which "win-win" is little more than a gloss for "everyone loses for peace at any price." It is instead built on each party unilaterally assessing her worst-case-scenario and then working to improve on that. Perhaps, then, the simplest way to parse "Getting to Yes" that the negotiator balances the representations of what each party hopes for, the "best case scenario" of each party, with valid representations of worst case scenario for each party.
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We expect so much these days. But imagine pre-radio days. Take your mind back before the free transmission of passive consumer entertainment into the home. How did people pass the time? Crafts, games. Are painting and writing and other such pastimes remnants of pre-telecom consumerist society?
There are experiences that overstimulate, to the detriment of the organism. Where people might formerly have developed their craft or talent or skill, instead they will consume. Instead of getting a scratch game going in the sand lot, the sand lot is now a 7-11 and the guys will be watching a game on the tube.
And we call it progress.
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Often you will hear people attempt to dismiss a disagreement by announcing, "We're only arguing semantics." Don't let them get away with it.
If there is a substantive disagreement which is confused by the use of a word being used in different senses then adopt new labels to sort out the various positions and continue on to resolve the conflict.
If there is substantive agreement which is confused by use of disparate labels for the same ostensible phenomena, then agree on a label and on the phenomena and continue on to either cement the agreement of diagnose any pertinent but not properly addressed disagreement.
In the latter case, substantive agreement with a mis-match of labels, the tendency to dismiss the matter is understandable. "We agree in substance but are using different labels," is to say conflict is resolved if we agree to the legitimate use of each others labels or find an agreed to alternative label.
But there are at least two dangers to summarily dismiss the matter on grounds of "semantics," first, labels are not passive things affixed to items; the choice of labels will greatly influence the choice and even the available choices related to that item, conceptually, cognitively. So it really is important to achieve agreement on substance and labels.
But the second danger of dismissing a case of mis-matching labels for substantive agreement is more pernicious: the act of dismissing matters on semantic grounds is itself sufficiently ambiguous, and where there is a matter of substantive disagreement under cover of the same label allowing your interlocutor to brush off the matter as one of semantics is to effectively allow that person to leave the field, to invalidate the disagreement, to continue with their acts unabated.
Assuming the issue is important, then allowing another to deflect efforts to pursue a persuasive line of thinking on the grounds that the disagreement is one of semantics is not an acceptable alternative.
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One of the mainstays of N-LP is the distinction between words that have easily identified sensory referents and those which don't. The former are called sensory specfic, the latter, "fluff." Having the knack of switching between these types of words goes a long way towards effective communication. The understanding of the difference between these types of words is essential to knowing when substantive information is being communicated as opposed to when noises are being generated for less consciously accessible reasons.
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A friend told me yesterday of a hypnotist he once knew who tried to use hypnosis get sexual favors from his clients. Howwever, such a situation might well be less about hypnosis and more about denial, dis-association, plausible-deniability (which is quite separate from denial per se) and transference/counter-transference issues.
Of course Erickson broadens the definition of hypnosis to include all that, so we're back where we started. The ability of therapists to violate their clients is inherently so great that I can't imagine complicating matters by trying to force someone "hypnotically."
The Grinder/Bandler discussions of stage hypnotism are relevant here: some folks are simply obedient. It is the case that some people will do what they are told, bark like a dog, crow like a chicken, and claim they had no will to oppose the command---for reasons pertaining to their own ego needs, for reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate hypnotic phenomena. Erickson speaks about the damage done, to specific clients and to the practice of hypnosis in general, by uncritical observers accepting such phenomena as valid.
There is a delightful example in the Grinder/Bandler literature of syntactic ambiguity, "Hypnotizing hypnotists can by tricky." A few of my hypnosis-capaple friends have invited strange loops of the hypnotizing hypnotists sort, but I don't much enjoy that game. It seems an unavoidable part of being in the business, rather like gun-slinging in the old West. But it is a big part of what I've avoided all these years, the showing off, the "look what I can do to you" that seems so much a part of the hypnosis community and even more so in the N-LP community, what with all the talk of "irresistible" communication. Get up, walk away; madness starts with refusal to leave the field.
Update, 051222: It has come to my attention that this post was off-putting for one or two of the folks with whom I suspect I could quite enjoy playing hypnotizing hypnotists. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and let the games begin.
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Added Automatic Motion to the glossary.
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The pendulum is a fine tool for certain clients. One of the values of this tool is that while both therapist and client consciously attend to the to-and-fro of the swinging weight they are also each placed in the peripheral vision of the other. The physical structures in the eye that give us peripheral vision are very different, and respond to very different kinds of phenomena, than those of foveal vision. For the therapist who has trained herself to creatively use the information available in such a situation pendulum work can be very powerful. Some people develop a refined sensitivity to the otherwise unconscious cues that are only visible in the part of the eye that tracks peripheral vision. People who grow up in physically abusive homes often develop tremendous abilities at "reading people." Pendulum work is one way to approach developing such "people reading skills" in a healthy and adaptive environment as a competent and capable adult.
However, there is the stigma of occultism and hypnosis to contend with, and some clients will not be able to divorce that stigma from the otherwise meaningless act of pendulum work. Later entries will touch on the ideo-sensory aspects of pendulum work, for now it is enough to contemplate the pendulum as an aid to an altered view of ones clients, the shifting of the therapist's mode of information gathering and processing to one that allows powerful, but seemingly effortless, intervention.
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Last time I saw my friend Lisa Golan I had just finished re-working the hyponsis language patterns. I was very excited. But I was also about to start school, as I recall. Strange, even disturbing how the time flies sometimes.
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There are clients for whom I don't have anything much theraputic that I can give or do because they don't genuinely desire change. "Not ready" turns out to be a gloss for, "Not willing." Take, for example, phobias. People love their phobias. I have never heard anyone say, "Hey, I'd love to get rid of this; when can I see you?" After 20 years of dealing with that phenomena it is time to take that feedback and craft an effective approach. Next time phobia's come up, I will plan on hearing that polarity response. Next time someone says anything about a phobia, play polarity: "Oh, you probably really love that, most people love their phobias. Most people get a lot of personality reinforcement from them, can't imagine giving up the phobia and really still being themselves." That's much more likely to obtain the desired result.
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Dreamt last night about a computer with little inserts for the buttons; someone was changing the insert label for this one button in particular, the only button seen clearly. The changes were coming so quick that only one of the inserts was readable, a yellow one reading "sarcasm." There were other yellow inserts, but their text was blurred; so too for the single red insert. Was there truly an insert of green or blue? It seems like there must have been at least one or the other.
Whatever behaviors are attached to a given button, the truth is that big shiny red buttons are going to get pushed more often than quiet unobtrusive green ones. And who can say, from within that metaphor, that it should be otherwise? There's the issue of attractiveness to the pusher. There's the issue of ease of pushing. There's the matter of what is triggered by the button. Under attractiveness, "button design" if you will, there's size and gloss and color and accessibility. How to balance, say, a red danger button, small, matte finish, but easy to get at, with a fairly large, shiny green "I'm O.K., You're O.K." button right in the center?
The problem with the button metaphor, of course, is that people aren't machines. People resent having things "done to them". No one wants to be "worked on." No one wants to think they are being done to, being run. And, frankly, who would want to feel like they are running people? It's not good to make people feel that way. That was Erickson's genius, the ability to run people and yet make them feel they were running themselves; better still, in time they truly would be running themselves if at all possible. The biggest problem with the N-LP formulations is the instrumentalist view of doing things to people. Try doing things for them, or even with them; it's a much cooler place to be. Make it easier for folks to push the good buttons, harder to push the bad ones, and recognize that the relationship between what they want, what they're looking for when they punch a shiny red button and what is actually wired to any particular shiny red button need not have anything to do with each other.
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Musings on Pattern Interruption
Violation of expectation might be a better term for the phenomenon. Unexpected repitition makes more sense under this view.
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The process of assigning wordness to a noise group is a function of social processes. The value of the the wordness assigned will be determined by the social group in which one was trained to assign wordness. And so the act of assigning wordness to a noise group is in reality a reinforcement of one's relationship to that social group, an act of allegiance. So, every word is allegiance, every use of language a deepening of one's involvement with the social group identified by (and indicative, even diagnostic, of) that language, a deepening of the reliance on the concepts and perceptions demanded by that language, a retrenchment of the world view found therein.
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