Hello John, Carmine here -

I find the hallucinations that drive this subject to be fascinating, and as such I decided to throw my dollar into the pot. The idea of parts is only a metaphor, a way of organizing experience, and a rather limiting one at that.

The six step reframe, as near as I can tell, was organized as a method of performing covert hypnosis. In thinking about the six step reframe it would also be useful to consider the context that the methodology was created in. If we go back twenty years ago the notion of being able to utilize one's own other than conscious resources was one that was then unacceptable. The word hypnosis conjured up images of fear and distrust in many of the minds who represented psychology back then. However, as with many other models, people began dropping quotes, therefore mistaking the map for the territory. In other words, people began believing that we really do have parts.

I think it was John Grinder who said, time and time again, that multiple personality was an evolutionary process, that as a result of living in a fractionated society we needed to build many faces. Maybe with what we knew twenty years ago, that was a viable operating metaphor. But a great deal has changed over the last twenty years in the minds of the people who came up with the parts metaphor.

Almost simultaneously and in two very different ways, both John Grinder and Richard Bandler moved away from the limits of the parts model into a more congruent holistic set of methodologies. Bandler developed the eloquent models he termed Design Human Engineering (TM), while Grinder evolved into what he presented in "Turtles All The Way Down."

My guess is, when the two were working as a pair, they were far too effective in selling the parts model. Think about it. They taught the model, and have since moved away from that model. Yet, the NLP community at large is continuing to perpetuate a much outdated model for organizing experience.

Let me go about this another way. Plain and simple - people do not have parts!! There aren't these little people running around inside of one's mind. The idea of parts was a metaphor that was used as a tool to perform limited remedial shifts in behavior. And although most people in the NLP community have yet to realize, NLP has evolved beyond the remedial. The focus has become one of generative models instead.

In "Turtles" there was a sharp movement in the direction of a generative self-organized approach toward organizing one's experience that was largely context dependent. While in Design Human Engineering (TM) there is a generative approach to organizing one's experience that is designed to provide full access to all of one's resources regardless of context.

I guess that what both models have in common is the notion of generativity. Both models also agree in methodology that the parts model is outdated and limited.

Some thoughts

Carmine Baffa

BTW, this is the fourth time I am posting this. The first three times I posted I was in the old parts mode. I have finally gotten congruent and am now posting the entire reply. CB