My thesis is simple: we each have a mind of our own. A 'personal mind', the American psychologist William James called it. A unique, extraordinary labyrinth of neural networks to which no-one else can have real access. Any process aiming to help us change our minds for developmental or therapeutic reasons must start from the premise that the choice must be ours alone.

One of the reasons people go into psychotherapy - as therapists or clients - is because they think (or feel) that their feeling and thinking are somehow opposed. Passion and intelligence are ignorant armies in a a permanent state of attrition. This paper is a preamble to the negotiations the parties must enter before peace can prevail. It is organized into 5 parts, a metaphor for the 5-stage feeling-thinking process itself:

Part 1	Part 2	Part 3	Part 4	Part 5 NEW
AROUSAL	SENSATION	CONSTRUCTION	APPRAISAL	VOLITION

* * * Part 5 has just been added (May 2007)

The 'Mirror-model' was developed in 1998 as a means of introducing a self-reflective, non-interpretative model of conversational change into Organisational Healing's NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings.

Part 1 of this article is a summary of that development, and has a few thoughts about adapting a rigorous therapeutic modality to the wider world of conversational change.

Part 2 will offer a detailed example of how you can use the frames and the questions with a client.

The 2 parts can be found on separate pages in this article.

Philip Harland's report on the French NLP Congress 2001 and his description of working in French with Clean Language

The only information we have about the client at any given moment is symbolic information. What happens when we respond to that information in the moment using clean language, and what happens when we do not?

Sam's addiction started as the sort of petty pattern of occasional craving that touches most of the people I know. He has a compulsion - not for drugs, sex, smoking or gambling, but chocolate. I'm fascinated by this because I like chocolate myself, and I can identify with him enough to know there's a fine line sometimes between liking and craving, and a short step from craving to compulsion. As this is such a universal problem I want to try an experiment and share my work with Sam as it happens. As I write we've had our first session and have contracted for half a dozen more. We have no idea what the outcome will be.

A deconstructivist approach to understanding and working with addictions.

This article is in three parts:

Part 1: Violent Pleasures
Part 2: Limit of Desires
Part 3: The Physician's Provider

Psychotherapy has a history of imposing external patterns (the therapist's) on internal experience (the client's). But working with clean language and autogenic (self-generated) metaphor, complex patterns can be codified into relatively simple configurations which can be explored by the client with minimal interference by the therapist and then more effectively transformed. My purpose in this paper (split into two parts) is to help you identify patterns and to consider ways of facilitating clients to discern, decode and resolve them through clean language and autogenic metaphor. 

A therapist and client describe their experience of Clean Language and Metaphor Therapy (originated by David Grove)

'CONVERSATIONAL CHANGE' is a seminar subject dear to the heart of many who wish to affect or direct others. What do we mean by 'conversational'? What kind of 'change'? Is it possible for anyone to use the same kind of transformational language as a therapist or counsellor and get away with it? Which of these questions are open and which are not?