Six Blind Elephants: Understanding Ourselves and Each Other, Vol. 1: Fundamental Principles of Scope and Category - Softcover

Steve Andreas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0911226419 ISBN 13: 9780911226416

Publisher: Real People Press, 2006

Synopsis

A truly ground-breaking new book that provides a practical and generative "unified field theory" of experience and personal change. These simple understandings are illustrated with examples from the most effective therapists, collected over a lifetime.

If you ever find yourself out of choices -- either in your own life, or in your work with others -- you know how nice it would be to always have something to do next. You'll learn how the fundamental distinctions of scope, category, and logical level offer a way to describe and track all our experiences -- from ordinary troubles and difficulties to positive mystic experiences of union or oneness. The same knowledge provides surprisingly endless possibilities for changing your experience when you want it to be different.

The book is illustrated with a multitude of rich examples gleaned from expert therapists -- Milton Erickson, Virgina Satir, Frank Farrelly, Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Carl Whitaker, Salvador Minuchin, and many others. Some of these examples would be completely baffling without these understandings.

Those who appreciate a rigorous analysis will appreciate the clear discussion of logical levels. Although misunderstood by many previous thinkers, including Gregory Bateson, logical levels provide a simple way to determine where and how to intervene in problems. (Volume II continues this by examining a variety of more complex and troublesome communication patterns.)

While I had been thinking of this as an advanced book, the proofreader, with no NLP or therapeutic background at all, said that he wished he had read it twenty years ago, because it would have made his life so much easier.

About this title

About the Author

Steve Andreas has been learning, training, researching and developing NLP models and protocols since the early days. A guiding influence in the field of NLP, he is the author of Transforming Negative Self-Talk, Six Blind Elephants, and Transforming Your Self. He is co-author, with his wife Connirae, of Heart of the Mind, an excellent introduction to the field of NLP, Change Your Mind-and Keep the Change, the NLP Practitioner Trainer Manual, and other manuals. Together they edited and published the four classic NLP books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder: Frogs into Princes, Trance-formations, Reframing, and Using Your Brain-for a CHANGE. Steve has produced over 50 therapy training videos and numerous articles, available through AndreasNLP.com Steve has been an invited presenter at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, and the Milton H. Erickson Brief Therapy Conference for the last 25 years. In recent years he has focused on PTSD treatment and interventions, and has been on the Board of an NLP Research group which completed a successful clinical study on PTSD treatment. Steve earned a BS in Chemistry from Caltech in 1957, and an MA in psychology in 1961 from Brandeis University. He taught psychology and social science at a junior college in California from 1962-1970, and did Gestalt Therapy from 1967-1977. He edited Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and In and Out the Garbage Pail, and wrote Awareness: exploring, experimenting, experiencing-all under his previous name, John O. Stevens, which he changed in 1981 when he married Connirae Andreas, and took her last name.

Edition details

• Publisher: Real People Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0911226419
• ISBN 13: 9780911226416
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292