Six Blind Elephants : Understanding Ourselves and Each Other: Applications and Explorations of Scope and Category

In this book, the fundamental understandings of scope, category, and logical levels established in Volume I are applied to understanding a variety of more complex and troublesome communication patterns, showing how these understandings can be used for positive personal change.

This book applies the fundamental understandings to additional communication patterns that are more subtle, obscure, and complex: Implication, Negation, Judgment, Modes of Operating, Self-reference, Self-contradiction, Paradox, Certainty, Double-binds, and Metaphor, An annotated verbatim transcript of a session in which a client reaches forgiveness shows how these patterns can be used in a systematic way to achieve a client's outcome.

All these patterns often exist in the painful and confusing communication traps that people often find themselves in, yet most people are unaware of them, and usually respond to them or use them unconsciously. Understanding how these patterns work makes it possible to recognize them, and use them in positive ways to help yourself and others out of these communication dead-ends, enhancing your life and the lives of others. Specific examples show how many of these patterns were essential elements in the work of Milton Erickson and other effective therapists. (Best read along with Volume I.)

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.