The Architecture of the Unfolding Self

Kansas

It began with distance.

In the early 1970s, while the high tide of Esalen was washing over the California coast, with the hot tubs, the workshops, the chaotic mix of brilliance and boundary-less experimentation that came to define the human potential movement, I was an undergraduate student in psychology, living in the middle of the country, on the plains of Kansas and paying close attention to a shift that was happening simultaneously in many locations. It was called the human potential movement, and I was soaking it up, reading what I could find, attending seminars with the rare leaders who traveled to Lawrence, Kansas. Gestalt, psychosynthesis, encounter groups, communication trainings, Rolfing, I tried out everything that came my way.

Growing up I had seen my parents getting into conflict with each other often without having a way out. They didn’t know how to get through the inevitable disagreements that come up when two people raised in different households are struggling to raise six kids together, plus keep a farm afloat. I wanted to be happier myself and I would have loved for them to be happier too.

Steve, who would later become my husband, was living back then on a ranch in Utah. He held an MA in psychology, had studied with Abraham Maslow at Brandeis University, and we first met in 1975 at a Gestalt therapy conference he organized. He was an authority in his field. I had just moved to Boulder, Colorado, where I was starting a PhD program in clinical psychology. Steve and I connected personally and both felt a kind of destiny from the beginning. I connected with his warmth and kindness, and maybe something more that neither of us yet understood. That winter he moved to Colorado to be with me.

Pattern recognition

In 1977 we traveled to California for a conference on Gestalt therapy and humanistic psychology, and that’s where we first heard the phrase Neuro-Linguistic Programming. The field had only just been named. A friend of Steve’s had just come from a workshop with Richard Bandler and John Grinder in this new methodology, and presented a brief demonstration that left us fascinated.

The assumption of NLP was simple, and at the time it felt revolutionary: if a therapy expert like Milton Erickson or Fritz Perls or Virginia Satir could help clients change reliably, then it could be possible to find the structure of what they were doing and teach it to anyone. The promise was that what worked for a master could be learned by anyone willing to learn the steps. The name of the game was pattern recognition. That promise turned out to be largely true. The patterns Bandler and Grinder were finding produced results that the rest of the field was not producing, and produced them reliably. We’d not known of anything that worked the way this did.

From there onwards we traveled to any training with the developers that was four days or more, which led us to California, Michigan, New Orleans, Washington DC, and beyond. We wanted to learn everything about this new field as quickly as possible, so we began organizing trainings in Colorado, to bring the learning to us. We brought in trainers Bandler and Grinder recommended, including Greg Brodsky, Robert Dilts, David Gordon, Steve Lankton, and later the originators themselves.

The first trainings were held in our basement room. We invited NLP trainers, set dates, and found participants. It did not take long before we outgrew our basement and moved to hotel venues. There were no popular books on NLP yet, so people wanting to learn usually had to travel, and the field was evolving fast! Steve had his own publishing house, so we made a proposal to Bandler and Grinder that we would create and publish an NLP book that would bring the magic of the training room into people’s homes, based on transcripts of what was actually unfolding in the trainings. They happily accepted.

Reels of audiotape from the early seminars started arriving in the mail. We listened, transcribed, organized, anticipated readers’ questions, and the result was Frogs into Princes, then Trance-Formations, then Reframing, then Using Your Brain, for a Change. Hundreds of thousands of people came into NLP through those books. They were translated into over a dozen languages.

Something was missing

Boulder lay 1,250 miles, over 2,000 kilometers, from NLP’s ground zero in Santa Cruz. At first, that distance felt like a disadvantage. Over time, it proved formative. The center of the field had its own personalities, its rivalries, its sometimes reckless culture. We were far enough away that we could learn the patterns without being caught in the climate. We were inside the field, but we were also outside it. That position shaped what we noticed.

We were inside the field, but we were also outside it.

With NLP, people came in with phobias and walked out without them. Decades of relational pattern came apart in a session. The map of inner experience was getting more detailed every year. Submodalities, the brightness, distance, location, the literal sensory parameters the nervous system uses to code experience, turned out to be levers you could move, and when you moved them, the experience changed. The clinical psychology I’d been trained in had nothing comparable.

And yet, I sometimes had a feeling I couldn’t name at first. People were better. The phobia was gone. The pattern was gone. They reported the change, and the change was real. Even as the map became more refined, something gnawed at me that I couldn’t put to rest. Something was missing. It had to do with what the methods couldn’t reach, no matter how skillfully you used them. And worse, my own source of discontent with those methods was that they didn’t work for me! I wanted to find something that would work with me. I assumed this meant somehow working at a deeper, more fundamental level than what was already mapped out.

Some years in, after having become trainers ourselves, I remember watching Robert Dilts demonstrate a Visual Squash at the close of one of our NLP Practitioner Trainings in Colorado. He worked with a man who hadn’t been able to resolve a deep inner conflict, and elicited two parts that had serious objections to each other. Each part thought the other was the problem. Robert is a brilliant trainer, and the negotiation he did was masterful, finding multiple reframes for each side, getting them willing to acknowledge each other, finally getting to integration. The room was impressed. We all learned something.

Even Steve was impressed and commented to me afterwards about this masterful demonstration. I agreed. “Yes, it was definitely an artful and skilled demonstration,” I said. “Yet Robert probably wouldn’t have had to do any of that negotiating if he had taken the positive purpose for each part a few levels farther. The objections would have evaporated on their own.” I knew this because I had been doing it that way for a while with my own clients, and I was finding that the changework always seemed to go more easily when going several levels deeper.

This was what nobody in the NLP field at that time was teaching. That there was value in going beyond “just getting a positive purpose” (as we did with Six Step Reframing and the Visual Squash parts integration). I had found that by going deeper, objections would evaporate. Go deep enough, and what emerges is that which is beyond objecting. I did not fully recognize yet where this could lead, but I did realize that I was doing parts work differently than the rest of the NLP field. Not in opposition to it. Further along the same line it was already on. I had begun noticing that going beyond the positive purpose to an even deeper positive purpose resulted in the part somehow gaining more flexibility, more options opening up. I hadn’t found the “Core State” access yet, though. That was what Core Transformation brought into being. To get there required subtle yet significant changes in how the part was asked the questions.

The experiment

Core Transformation emerged in full in 1989, through giving myself a practical challenge. I decided to accept only clients who had tried everything with their life’s biggest issue, yet nothing had worked. My agreement with them? “I won’t do anything I already know how to do, and you can go home when you have what you want.” I would laugh when saying it, but I was serious at the same time.

This experiment was a leap, and it felt like risking my professional identity. At the same time I had a deep trust that something would emerge. And that’s what happened. With the very first person I worked with, something special happened. I had been asking a series of questions in a different way than I’d been taught to do, and within less than thirty minutes he went from feeling out of control and trapped in a problem, to accessing, or better, to ‘becoming’ a kind of bliss. The state shift was nonverbal, but so clear it was impossible to miss, and it came to me instantly what to do next, so that this state would be both transformative and healing. Afterwards I asked him to think about the issue he’d come to me for help with, and it was clear to both of us that everything was different now. His presence was calm in a way that felt completely natural, not something that had to be held onto or maintained, but as if we’d gotten to his ‘true nature,’ what had been there all along, but perhaps forgotten.

When I called him up later to find out if the changes had held, he was profuse in his description of the change for him. It had been profound. After trying the same method with twelve people, it was clear that I’d found a method that was deeper than anything I had known, even with all my years in the NLP field, plus my background training in clinical psychology. On top of this, it was a method that was “transdiagnostic”: it worked with a wide range of issues.

At the core of every issue there’s a silent, even blissful beingness.

I called it Core Transformation, since people would transform their issues, and themselves, by using the issue to go deep within to the core of our being. It turned out that at the core of every ‘issue’ there’s a silent, even blissful ‘beingness’ that’s our truest, most powerful and gentlest resource for deep healing: the Core State of the part.

Parts work, so to speak, had been the entry, but with Core Transformation the parts would integrate into a state far beyond ‘parts’. It became something else. With the very first client in the experiment, when his part’s Core State emerged, it was clear that this was something special with tremendous healing capacity. I could see that a deep and palpable calm emerged. And everything about the way this man was present in the room subtly shifted, a gentle relaxation that seemed to emanate from within, facial muscles released, eye focus relaxed, to take in peripheral vision all around.

It was the first time that I ever witnessed something like this happen for a client of mine, something that sat in the same family as what happened to me with Milton Erickson (See my first Substack article).

The doorway

Looking back, I can name what had happened. We were no longer focused on fixing the problem that the person came in with. We’d gone beyond that and had arrived in a completely different territory. We used the problem as the doorway to something deeper. To experience that which was always there. A beingness that’s beyond words, but impossible not to recognize. This was what mystics and spiritual teachers had been sharing for ages. The first clients to go through this new Core Transformation sometimes whispered to me as if revealing a secret: “This is a really spiritual process.” And people still do.

We were changing both the experience and the experiencer.

From that day I was no longer focusing on changing the experience. We were changing both the experience and the experiencer. And that made all the difference.

NLP gave me the assumption that experience has a structure, and that structure can be identified and changed. The work I do now rests on that assumption, and on something that, to this day, is hardly ever recognized in coaching or therapy methods: there’s a structure underneath, the structure of the one having the experience, and that’s where I believe the future of healing lives.

- Connirae Andreas
Written in dialogue with Peter van Rhoon

Originally published on Connirae’s Substack. Subscribe there to get new reflections in your inbox.