What's Actually Happening: APHS Frame & Field Podcast

This is What's Actually Happening, the APHS Frame and Field Podcast.

I'm Jim Zboran.

Each week we look at how human systems actually organize themselves through meaning, through frames, through the interpretation that's already running before effort even begins.

Thanks for joining us today, and we're also joining Chantelle Neufeld.

Chantelle has been exploring APHS principles through the papers, and we've been having conversations around each paper sequentially.

And today we are on paper five in the first book, the first foundational collection.

And Chantelle, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

I loved reading what you sent.

I actually read it just this morning, so this is the first time I haven't had a chance to sleep on it.

And I'm excited about seeing what that's going to be like.

Awesome.

That's even better.

It's a real connection to what's written there before it gets a chance to be processed too much.

So I'm sure we'll have some good conversation.

It's not in the library yet.

It's still floating around real close.

Yeah, that's right.

It's being shelled.

Yeah.

Very good.

Well, paper one, five, or the fifth paper in the first collection, the foundation collection, is Toward a Theory of Mind in APHS.

And APHS doesn't rely on a theory of mind.

However, it's really helpful to have a theory of mind, if you want to have one, to understand or make sense of what's going on within what APHS is concerned with.

And this is just my theory of mind, and I think they're very important in this kind of a work.

I had learned a theory of mind when I went to an accredited college of hypnotherapy.

And they, of course, taught me a theory of mind, and it was entirely adequate for the work that I was being prepared to do.

However, it was entirely inadequate in terms of working beyond that.

And so it was helpful as a model, but it was not a complete enough model for the work really that I began engaging in, in my hypnotherapy practice and beyond.

And so what I did is I started really developing, bringing pieces in and developing the model.

And so this theory of mind of mind is really a, it's a very well developed and developed over a long time and a lot of observation and use in analysis and synthesis within my practice coaching and hypnotherapy.

And it's really, it's reflective of what I think, but it isn't necessarily, it isn't required for APHS to work.

In a sense, APH grew out of this kind of a theory of mind, but this theory of mind allowed me to make sense of things.

But I really wanted to make sure that I separated the theory of mind from APHS in the sense that anybody's theory of mind will work with APHS.

This particular theory of mind makes sense of it the best because it kind of grew up with it and things grew out of it.

But it also doesn't require it to be connected to it in that there's no real claim in this theory of mind that it's true.

And Chantelle, you remember from our last conversation around paper four in the first book, you know, the truth and functional models and really truth is not as important as if a model works.

And if we're concerned with the truth of a model, we get stuck defending a model that may no longer work.

And this happens all the time.

If we are more concerned with does this model work, then we're always willing to shape and change it based on what we're observed that's different.

And it allows a model to grow and adjust to reality and become more and more true, not necessarily true in an ultimate metaphysical sense.

But this is an important part in APHS.

If a person doesn't have a theory of mind, because it will make a lot of sense and it can help inform people who have their own theory of mind, it can help inform some aspects of it, help maybe shape their theory of mind and make it grow.

It's not something presented as something that has to be proven.

It just is functional.

And it doesn't explain why it's like that.

It doesn't explain where it came from.

It simply attempts to describe what is there in a way that allows one to make sense of APHS more efficiently, but APHS isn't required to have this.

And so with that said, I know that you're familiar with theory of mind things because you are a hypnotist yourself and you work in this kind of an area.

So I don't know if you've ever formally called it a theory of mind.

You probably have, or you've seen it.

Oh, you haven't seen that.

Okay.

Well, that just wasn't the terminology in my training, but I'm sure that we both understand the concept just as a different title.

It's simply a theory of what's going on in the mind, what's the mind is doing and, you know.

Yeah, I think the closest thing that, you know, what I remember from my training was the NLP model, like the filters of the mind.

I remember that drawing of like the side of the head drawing where the information comes in and it goes through the filters of the mind and then it comes out in like, you know, behaviors, thoughts, actions, etc.

Yeah.

That's a great, that is a great model and I use it myself all the time.

In fact, I'm sure that it's, I'm sure that it's in my own theory of mind.

It's not necessarily copied from it, but it certainly was an influence on my understanding of how the mind works.

So, yeah, that's a great.

Yeah, it was so helpful to me that I literally use the word filters every single day in my circle.

Yeah.

And filters is a really a great word and it's very much what they are.

I kind of use the terminology frames more, but it's filtering or frames or lenses.

It's all the same.

Yeah.

I love the metaphor of like glasses because, you know, a different prescription will let you see blurry or like have the coherence or not.

Exactly.

Like a different color of lens will help you, you know, see it in a completely different way.

Yes.

Or in a relationship, rose colored glasses will filter out all of the, you know, red flags of a person.

Right.

Exactly.

That's right.

Exactly.

See, and that's really what we're getting down to, irregardless of terminology, it's what's really going on there.

And we have to we have to either invent words or we have to adopt words from other places to describe it.

But that's all legitimate because we are working with things that are really unseen in terms of how they operate or what they're doing or even that they're in operation.

However, we definitely see the effects of them.

Yeah.

So basically trying to explain the mind, why we do what we do, why we can't seem to stop doing the unhelpful things that we find ourselves doing.

And, yeah, just basically how the mind works and also like a lot of the paper was the conscious mind versus the other than conscious and what each does.

Exactly.

And really versus there is more.

How is it?

How is it in distinction?

Not not fighting.

Right.

Because I'm like the reason we love it is because with hypnotherapy and therapy, we see the we see the differences, like with talk therapy versus using subconscious kind of stuff, how it just, you know, the efficiency is noticeable.

Yes, exactly.

When I when I started working with David Grove's Clean Language and this was after I had gone through, you know, formal training in hypnotherapy, it really began to open up my mind to, you know, just the the the broader aspects of the mind beyond the thinking capacities at a conscious level.

And really, it it showed me how we could really access the subconscious mind without really something like hypnosis, but by using its language metaphor.

Right.

And and it really started to I don't know if it really started there, but it certainly enforced it and encased it more in my thinking that the mind is really much more than than, you know, the conscious mind or even even the conscious and subconscious mind.

It's really the entirety of of of who we are.

And it's not residing in one place, really.

It's really pretty comprehensive.

Yeah.

And I have my youngest is, you know, recently read The Untethered Soul and has been thinking a lot about, you know, her conscious mind as a computer and being able to, you know, observe things.

This morning she woke up from a dream and was telling me about like this beach with, you know, things on the beach and the waves coming and knowing the waves were coming and quickly trying to make sure that the waves didn't disturb any of the things on the beach.

Right.

And like the difference between just accepting it's OK for the waves to hit those things versus, oh, no, those are all triggers and we need to make sure nothing touches them.

Very good.

Good metaphor there, too.

Yeah.

And that Untethered mind that really speaks to the the observer or the witness in my theory of mind that very much is observable.

Other than conscious.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So it's a part of the other than conscious.

It's and it actually I laid out in the chapter or in the paper, you know, that it's an important part of reorganizing frames and really what what APHS is about is about frames and reorganizing frames based on meaning and action and, you know, we don't really need a theory of mind.

But before you get too far, you start wondering, why is this work?

And if you have a kind of a theory of why it's working, it helps you to work with it better when you actually start making applications for it.

100 percent.

Yes.

Yeah.

So you can almost see a theory of mind is kind of an interface between the field, which is describing observations and making some connections and finding patterns in it to, OK, what can we actually do with this?

How is this going to do something?

And obviously it's in the mind.

So we have to have some kind of a operating model of the mind so that we can start applying it.

Right.

Yeah.

So like if you were to sum it up, how would you describe the conscious mind or our listeners?

Like what is it?

What is its job?

The job of the conscious mind is to make logical sense of things, to create narratives and to categorize things, to put words to things, to put order, to, you know, to create things that hold up in a physical world.

And its job is really the primary job, in my opinion, in my understanding, is to set directions and then it will come up and it'll create a coherence in the I, in the ego, because it creates a continuous story, so to speak.

And really, that story is not a continuous thing.

It's like a narrative.

The narrative is the continuous thing and conscious mind creates is the job of the conscious mind is to look at what's going on and then and write a story to it.

So the conscious mind is very important to the ego, but it's also important for us to bring things from out of our mind and into physical reality.

The ego, the I, does not live in a physical world at all, and it's completely a non-material

world and its only connection to the material world is through the physical body, which

has all kinds of sensors communicating to that immaterial world, the mind, and the mind

is mapping out the world in its own sphere of an immaterial place based on data coming

in from the physical thing, the thing that's interfacing with the physical world.

But the conscious mind directs that, but it doesn't command it in the sense that it controls it.

It can only see what makes sense because that's its job.

So it's like the car's dashboard and not the driver or what?

Well, let's see.

I would put it more that if you look at the driver and the car as a unit, it's the driver, but the driver can have some influence, but really what's making that car go is not in the driver's influence.

The metaphor isn't going to hold up a hundred percent, but in those terms.

A little bit helpful.

It's helpful because the driver can decide where to go.

Now here's where it gets interesting.

Imagine you're driving a car where you turn the wheel and maybe the car doesn't turn and where you step on the brakes and maybe the car doesn't stop or you step on the gas.

Because it's on autopilot and you're not sure how to get it off autopilot.

It could be that.

You've got to figure out how to program that autopilot.

Exactly.

So now what we want to do is we want to control it really more and control it in the sense of guide.

If we want to guide it more, we have to learn how the system works so that we can then work with the entire system.

But we are still deciding where we want it to go.

Whether we're going to get there or not depends on how well we can control the whole thing, but still we are deciding where we're going to try to make it go.

Yeah.

There was one part of your paper that you were talking about that kind of made me think about glasses and like if someone didn't know that they were wearing glasses or didn't know if they could take them off and put on a different pair, just was always seeing through that particular lens thinking that that's who they were, that the glasses was them, you know?

That is the illusion.

And it's an illusion that is maintained by the conscious mind too because it's creating a story.

I am this way.

I am this person.

Well, this always happens because I am this or I am that.

Or they did this or they did that.

Exactly.

And so that's a part of the narrative that the conscious mind creates that is meant to make sense of things and because it's concerned with things that make sense, with logic, and to explain things so it can understand how to do things.

But the problem is the understandings are usually wrong.

Yeah.

So we addressed the conscious.

How would you describe the other than conscious?

Like I know in the paper there were different parts.

There was like the subconscious patterns, the somatic like body-based knowing, the observer witnessing.

Yes.

And then like the wisdom part, like the conscience, moral compass, values.

Yes.

Yeah.

So do you have more to say about that part?

I think I don't know if I have more to say in the sense that outside of what's in the paper.

However, I think I could probably clarify things.

I think it's really helpful in my thinking to my theory of mind to understand that these are not really parts in a sense that they're separate entities.

Like part of the orchestra or?

They're all existing at the same time and they are simply levels of one self-organizing mind.

And so we've got a self-organizing mind and it self-organizes at a multiple number of levels at one time.

And they're all working together and that includes the conscious mind.

And none of them is more important or hierarchical in a hierarchical sense.

Each one has its own function that is most valuable at a certain point.

But that certain point isn't one moment at a time.

It's a number of different important things happening at the same time.

Like a harmony, like music or they're all playing.

Yes.

Yes.

And when it's out of harmony is when things go awry.

And a lot of times what throws it out of harmony is the harmony is the conscious mind trying to force.

Control it.

Yeah.

Control.

Exactly.

And that's not to say it doesn't have influence, but its influence is more through intention than force.

Like a direction.

Direction.

Direction.

Exactly.

It's directional, but it has to work.

When it works best is when it sets the direction and it looks, it recognizes contradictions or recognizes values, you know, and when it does things at a conscious level, it begins to kind of set the direction for the other than conscious to start organizing towards that.

But the problem is the conscious mind very often is trying to set a direction that the other than conscious mind isn't ready for or knows better than what's it wanted.

And so it will not cooperate.

Yeah.

And that is, that explains the resistance.

But the resistance isn't necessarily like, I forget the word you used in the paper, but it's not like a stubborn, like bad part or anything.

It's actually doing its job.

Exactly.

And the resistance is helpful and the resistance is there as a, you know, is also there as a sign that there's not coherence yet, that something somewhere within those different levels of the mind, those different levels is the wrong word, because they're not levels.

It's not hierarchical.

It's like gears all working together in some puzzle, you know?

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's any, any kind of language really tries to turn it into a hierarchy and, or a part.

And it's really none of those.

It's all the same self-organizing system.

Now, physically, you know, biologically, maybe those things reside in certain parts or certain parts that create that kind of a phenomena, but I'm really dealing with the phenomena as a whole.

What's the mind doing?

I might have a metaphor.

Our human body and the organs and the cells and the different systems in the body, they're all working at the same time to, you know, help us walk or talk or, you know, exist.

Exactly.

And we don't, we don't have to.

We need them all.

We need them all.

Exactly.

And we can take care of them so that they can all be healthy too.

And so really when we work with the other than conscious mind, it's, it's, we're really allowing it to do what it does, which allows it to remain healthy because it knows how to maintain its own health.

We don't really consciously maintain that, but we mess up the healthiness when we try to control and force and suppress when it's trying to go through a process that is completely normal to getting us to where we want to go.

But we don't recognize it as that we, we interpret it as enemy.

We interpret it as trying to avoid pain and process the pain and yeah, exactly.

And what I didn't use to realize was that, you know, that energy will get trapped in the body if you don't process it, if you don't let yourself feel, feel those things and what's, what's trapped there is, is it's an open loop and the mind is still trying to, to resolve it.

And it's not, That happens often through our dreams or through our, when triggers come up and you're like, where did that come from?

That's a big function of dreams is to resolve that, is to, is to allow the mind to, to play with things and to, to, you know, you know, re-experience it in metaphorical ways to attempt to close that loop.

And I feel like with hypnotherapy, depending on the, the depth you go into trance, it's like a waking dream where you can, the conscious and the subconscious can be in communication and, and make those, make those shifts.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

That, that is one of the strengths of hypnosis is that it puts us into a place where the subconscious is more, Where you have more access to that wisdom and that observer.

Yeah.

It's more dominant.

They're all functioning at the same time, but there's going to be usually something that's more dominantly, more dominant at a moment.

And when we go into hypnosis, what we're really doing is we're setting our conscious mind less dominant and we're moving.

Yeah.

It's like turning the volume down on that inner critic or that, or that resistance part that says, well, that's different than what we're used to.

That's not the story we told ourselves when we were five.

What?

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so, so when we go to hypnosis, we're actually moving ourself into a place where the subconscious is becoming more dominant and, and really the entire, other than conscious is becoming more dominant.

But I use techniques where I make like somatic more dominant.

So, or the unconscious more dominant or the subconscious more dominant.

So you know, I use techniques where I make the collective conscious more dominant, the higher self more dominant.

So, so really.

It's like shining the light on the different possibilities and choices.

It's creating a condition where that, that dominant part engages and gets into gear.

And so hypnosis is really just engaging more of the subconscious and getting that into gear.

And, and kind of like gardening, you know, creating the conditions for the garden to grow the way that you would prefer it to grow and being able to find the weeds and being able to cultivate and all those things.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And we tend that garden and if we keep it free of weeds, we enjoy better, better results from our garden, whether it be produce or flowers or both.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I really love the whole idea of being able to reframe something because it's very empowering to not only be able to notice, like, what's the story I'm telling myself about how I'm feeling or the event that just happened.

And knowing that you have the power to, you know, retell the story or to, to shift it in a way or to look through a different color glasses and see a different perspective and be like, you know, it, it, does it always have to be this way?

Like, is there any other way it could be, you know?

Exactly.

Now the trick with frames is it's become a gimmick and a lot of what happens that I'm seeing today in terms of frames or reframe is really a conscious attempt to change narrative.

And it works sometimes, it definitely works sometimes, but if it's going against a deeper frame that is more ingrained, it won't be effective for very long.

Really what I prefer more is like frame shifting where we're trying to shift the frame.

We're not, we're not trying to, you know, redo it consciously.

We're just trying to move the conditions or the orientation so that it takes on a different meaning, but we're not doing it consciously.

The conscious mind is involved, but it is not a conscious process.

The conscious mind sets an intention.

It can create some of the conditions for it.

You know, maybe visualization, maybe affirmations, whatever, the technique.

But really those techniques are only effective insofar as they change that perception or that frame at a place where they don't reframe it, but they shift the frame.

So it leaves a little more technically than most people do.

Well, that's fine.

In your paper, you were talking a little bit about, oh, I love it when I have a thought and then it just leaves.

It'll come back.

I did make a note of it in all of my notes, but anyways, what were we just talking about?

Reframes and it's good that we were able to change those narratives and we can, and I just pointed out that it's helpful to focus on what we're actually changing and not looking at it from a surface level, but rather where we're really actually changing a frame is not reframing as much as frame shifting.

And I'm using those in technical senses to avoid what is popularly understood to be a reframe is actually simply, it's kind of a word game in a sense, in the sense that it's a conscious attempt to look at it differently through a different lens.

And that is helpful and it may be adequate if it's not in contradistinction to a deeply hell frame, because the deeply hell frame will always win.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it'll come back to me later.

No worries.

Okay.

Yeah.

I just remember that there were like two different things I was thinking about in regards to frames.

But let's go back to the subconscious or no, the conscious and the other than conscious using your terminology.

And how can a person who's not necessarily in trance get those two to communicate?

Like there were, that's what I was, that's what I was trying to think about.

They don't have to do anything to get them to communicate.

They're already communicating.

The question really probably more is how can, let's look at what the question, I don't want to put words in your mouth as to what the question really is, but I think you're onto something really important.

So if they're communicating, what's the problem?

What seems to be going awry if they are already communicating?

Something's in the way.

And so something needs to be stepped back from.

Yes, exactly.

To allow.

Yes.

Okay, good.

All right.

What could possibly be in the way?

Just like any kind of block or subconscious thing, right?

Those could be in the way.

It could be conscious trying to force.

It could be, it could be something somewhere is not resolved and they're communicating, but they're not talking to each other.

The issue is not that they're not able to communicate.

The issue is that they're having a disagreement.

And so the, what can a person do now goes to what you're asking.

And that really goes to the level of application and there are all kinds of different ways.

Within the world of hypnotherapy, you have parts work.

A person could simply do their own form of parts work by metaphorizing the different sides of the argument in different metaphorical characters or shapes or something, some representation and had those parts communicate with other.

So really we're getting to an applicational level and.

That's not what this particular paper was about.

It's not, but it's what, it's what, why this particular picture is so important.

It's not important because it's just important to know it.

It's important because it now opens up ways for us to understand how to get things moving again.

And ultimately the way we get them moving again is through applications, but the applications apply, you know, what the field defines.

So it's, it's, it's, that's a legitimate question and it's a natural question.

And so now I'm just kind of shifting away from the focus of the paper to the focus of, of the application is a great demonstration of how we can take things in the philosophy of it.

It's an applied philosophy, how we can take the philosophy of it and turn it into applications that really work and change.

I've mentioned a few visualization affirmations.

Now we've mentioned a couple more parts work.

Integration work is a good way to do it.

Another, another technique I've used with great success very often is with, you refer to it as trapped energy.

You know, you know, is, is I help people to just sit with that, enter that feeling they're feeling.

And then I allow it to take a shape of its own.

And then it develops its own meaning.

And once it has meaning, the loop is closed.

And so it resolves, it releases in the sense that it resolves.

So the loop is closed.

So it no longer is creating attention.

So these are applications.

Is that usually like a somatic or a metaphorical experience?

A somatic.

Okay.

Now I'll do the same thing in a metaphorical sense, usually more in a, in a, like a clean language type of a technique or, you know, I've referred to these techniques as wrappers that are, are the way we deliver the candy.

And the candy is the APHS ideas.

Okay.

It's, it's those things, whatever you call them.

APHS just defines them, but they're out there.

Whatever we call those things, or we don't even necessarily call them anything.

Most people actually don't call them anything.

They're not even really aware that they're, you know, they're there as a field, but they didn't have the wrappers.

And the wrappers are the applications that are somehow working because of those things, even though they're not aware of it.

And so the application is simply a wrapper that, that delivers in some way.

So I've, I've made up wrappers on the spot.

Just stories to do things.

One example is that comes to mind is the February Man.

Dr. Milton Erickson wrote this account that he worked with a client and he completely made up this lover for her who came to visit her.

And, and they went through an entire relationship.

She had no relationship and, and it, it completely, he just made it up.

And then it became an ongoing week by week meeting with this lover during the sessions.

And it was, that's the wrapper.

He was, he was, he was kind of like an archetype.

It could be an archetype.

Archetypes are like wrappers.

It also reminds me a little bit of like when a client hasn't ever had the experience that they want to experience and they kind of watch the movie of someone else experiencing it and then kind of put themselves in that movie and experience it after that, like learning how.

To, to do that, they have to be in self-hypnosis and, and that's a place where self-hypnosis shines is, is helping people.

And that's the context with the February Man with Dr. Milton Erickson.

In order to imagine your, in order to relate to a fictional character, you have to go into hypnosis.

You have to, you have to suspend your conscious mind saying, well, that's not real.

That's not really a character that's, that's made up.

And so you have to let that, you have to let the subconscious mind become dominant and set back those filters of the conscious mind.

And so you're going to hypnosis when you go into a story.

That's why they're so effective at, at shaping our frames because they are, they are helping to bring about shifts and integrations through, through a story that we live, right?

We live that story, even vicariously, we're living a story.

And then we, then that allows those parts that are not going back to your question, those parts that are not talking you know, they're communicating, they're just refusing to, to agree.

And so there's that movement, but, but when they, when we do these things, we, these, we deliver these, these frame shifts in, in the wrapper, whatever wrapper or application we happen to be using, we are opening the door for them to integrate and resolve differences or in other words, build coherence because it's looking for coherence.

And communicate with each other.

Like that's been helpful to me with parts integration, where you have like the symbol on one hand and the opposite one on the other to resolve inner conflict where they can talk to each other and then they come together to form a new symbol.

That's very powerful.

I've used that many times.

And that is, that is a super powerful way to integrate two opposing viewpoints with one self and where the conscious mind can't do that.

It can decide which is right or which is wrong, but it can't integrate the two.

And the two are operating as frames and they're just, just frames that need to, to integrate for coherence and that integration is, is, is the work there.

So it's not that somebody has to do something to get them to do it.

It's just that it's, but it can be facilitated.

And when we can facilitate it, it can happen much more smoothly or with much less resistance.

And because there's, there's less obstacles being put up by trying to force something.

So understanding, you know, understanding the field allows you to create the wrappers or the applications that are going to work in a particular instance or for a particular person.

And so it's, anything that, anything that is looking to resolve or get the conversation going again between different, different parts of us, so to speak, those are, those are wrappers for what's actually working.

What's actually working is that people are changing their frame shifting.

The level of belief is shifting to something different and it doesn't change the outside.

It really just changes the, the perception of it.

But in a way that allows for the person then to move forward.

Yes, because often the client comes in with a particular goal in mind and then when they go in,

like inside their subconscious, then often that inner conflict that reveals itself,

not only is it the path instead of the thing to be that they would have otherwise banished

or suppressed, but that inner conflict is, you know, just something that they didn't

know consciously before coming to the session that that was the issue or that that was the path to

the, you know, trauma that happened to their, to their inner child, you know.

But in fact, it was the path and that's, that's why that block is a part of the process.

Okay.

The block isn't the destination.

It's the part of the process.

And all that has to be done is the block doesn't have to be gotten rid of.

The block just needs to be worked through, integrated some new information, but, but not at a cognitive level necessarily, although the cognitive level can play a part, but really the frame is happening at a below conscious level at an other than conscious level below kind of puts it hierarchical.

It's not in an other than conscious level, but it needs to be worked through.

But that is the process.

It's, it's a self-organizing system, a self-organizing mind doing what it does best organizing towards something.

And that block is a part of the process of the organizing.

So often, you know, if someone comes in with like a panic attack issue, they don't want these triggers to catch them off guard in public, out of nowhere, or not, you know, even at home, they, you know, it's a very bad feeling to have a panic.

Yes, of course.

And so a lot of people don't realize that if you do hypnotherapy and you can get to what's underneath those, then you can kind of neutralize the landmines.

I don't know what other metaphor to use, but.

Well neutral, well, ultimately when we neutralize the landmines, that's really frame shifting.

We neutralize it by, by taking its meaning away.

Because the only, the only real, the only real power it has is the meaning.

It's like, this is dangerous.

Well, consciously, no, it's not.

But, but the feeling is this is dangerous.

And so what the feeling comes from the meaning being assigned to the thing that's triggering it at another than conscious level.

And what we neutralize it by shifting that frame to where that's nothing.

Why was I worried about that?

Right.

We don't really change the external thing.

We change our reference point to it.

And that reference point is our frame.

What the lens we're looking through at it and which assigns it meaning.

It doesn't necessarily have that meaning at all.

And a lot of times things that, you know, very clearly don't have a certain meaning.

People think that's what it means simply because of the reference point.

Yeah.

And like how it helped me, one of the ways that it helped me, was I wanted to be able to like go back to my parents' place without feeling triggered.

So it seemed like that, like five-year-old part of me was like, this is dangerous.

You know, this person caused me harm in the past.

But like, that wasn't what was happening now.

Like, obviously, my parents have grown.

Obviously, I understand, you know, that they're on the spectrum and they were doing the best they can.

But all of those were reframes.

All of those were new stories I told myself instead of this person doesn't love me because they did such and such.

Yeah.

Now, that's exactly how it works.

Now, here's the thing.

I suspect that the reframe part, the conscious part happened after the other part had already taken place.

Oh, 100 percent.

And that's part of the paper too, seeing that it makes the story up after.

Exactly.

And then later on, that's where like a reframe can work, is where the frame is already shifted.

And now we need to bring the rest of our conscious mind over to it.

And so it's all a process working out.

And but yeah, definitely.

And see, these are when we can create these wrappers or these applications of what is really going on when people change and they're changing on how they're making meaning of their life, how they're interpreting meanings in their lives.

We can do significant work to help people in that process of reorganizing towards what they want to organize to.

Whereas it happens naturally, people do it anyway, but it can take a long time.

And sometimes it'll never there's not enough time for it to ever even actually happen in a person's experience.

But we can we can help it along with these wrappers without forcing it.

We create the conditions for it to happen.

And we can do that, you know, as practitioners, but we can also do it for ourselves.

We can do it on our own because really a practitioner isn't making it happen.

The practitioner is just simply recognizing what's going on in the person already and then just helping that person to navigate it better.

And kind of holding the space of witness, shining the light on things that their conscious mind would have otherwise suppressed or run away from, or, you know, otherwise thought was the danger.

Yes.

And making it a safe and comfortable space for that to occur.

Oh, absolutely.

It's very helpful.

And the more the bigger point is that the person holding space isn't creating the change.

They're helping the conditions.

And most definitely not responsible for the change.

Yeah, it's and this is the key for a wrapper or an application is is it's using what the person is already has going on and their own ability to self-organizing.

It's self-organized towards an end that they would like.

But helping them in that process, we're really holding space for is them to go through their own process.

But the guidance we offer is really a guidance through their own process.

When it's done right, when it's done the best.

A lot of times it's not that.

A lot of it's people telling, well, you should do this.

You should do that.

And coming up all kinds of applications that have no real bearing.

That are not helpful.

No, they're not helpful at all.

Having a plan before you meet, even meet a client or even know what their issue is, is so ridiculous.

And like ourselves going into that state where we can, you know, access the tool that's needed in the moment and trusting that that's the right one is, is like, I feel the most important thing.

Because it's not about us telling them what to do or how to feel or any of that.

It's like, just almost being like a conduit or providing a tool from the toolbox.

Yeah, exactly.

That is the one that fits into that particular screw or whatever.

Exactly.

Yeah, in the moment.

It's very much a done with you type of a process.

And a very intuitive process, I feel.

Well, it is.

It has to be because what you're describing really is you're relying on your entire mind, not just the conscious mind to do it.

And so then you have access to other tools, in particular insights and intuitions that you wouldn't have at a conscious level.

And if a person, a practitioner makes it too conscious, they are cutting off access to a lot of tools that they otherwise have at their disposal.

So remember before when I couldn't think of what I wanted to say?

I know it now.

Oh good, okay.

So it's the part in the paper where you were talking about the partnership, partnership with the conscious and the other than conscious.

And there were different points that you had.

One was provide orientation, which is focus your attention.

Another one was reduce internal contradiction, like notice things that are happening.

And then one was stop interfering, which I had remembered before.

Very good, you're doing great.

Another one was maintain continuity.

Yeah, so those were, I thought those were really cool to just define what they were in the communication between the conscious and other than conscious.

Yeah, there are very powerful connections.

I mean, it's totally connected.

So there's really no division between the two.

We're really manufacturing divisions and talking about it.

But it's okay because it allows us to talk about different aspects of it more conveniently.

But really, the conscious mind is very important to the process.

And it's very important to direct the process.

And it can be done because it's designed to do it that way.

The problem really comes in when we don't really understand the relationship.

And that's kind of what you were talking about from the paper.

It's really just defining some of those aspects of that relationship.

It reminds me of, okay, so in this scenario, I'm thinking about someone wants to go on a date, but they want the date to go perfectly.

So they try to ahead of time plan.

What am I going to say?

Then what are they going to say?

What am I going to say?

What are they going to say?

But the only thing that they have power over is the first thing they say.

After that, it's anybody's game.

Like it could be a trillion different things.

And so the better plan is to set your intention and then trust yourself and just go with it and do some improv.

You know what I mean?

Exactly.

And that's what a person is doing when you're talking about going into state yourself.

You don't use those words exactly, but that's what you're describing with a client.

That's what you're doing.

You are simply trusting yourself and you're setting intention.

I'm going to help this person.

And then you go in and then how it unfolds, it unfolds.

Yes.

Because the first thing that pops up in their mind as the answer to whatever intuitive question you ask is the right thing instead of the conscious mind sometimes trying to get involved and be like, but what about this?

What about this?

What about this?

Exactly.

It's more about just go with it and see what happens.

Exactly.

And so really we are able to do things much better when we work with our entire mind, not just our conscious mind, but our conscious and other than conscious minds and very powerful.

But we may be out of habit of it, especially in a culture where the conscious mind is really considered to be about basically everything.

Yeah.

And so it's a little different for us in a Western culture and other cultures probably experience those things a little differently, but it's helpful to really just understand if I set my intention and then roll with it, I'm really working in partnership.

The conscious mind is really working in partnership with the entire mind.

Mm-hmm.

Like in a conversation without going into any kind of trance or anything, you can ask somebody like, if this was your teenage kid going through this same issue, what advice would you give them?

So kind of bringing in their higher self or conscience or whatever you want to call it.

What you're really doing is you're sending them into hypnosis.

Just with the question.

Yeah.

They can't answer that question without turning their thoughts inward and using their imagination and that's just to demonstrate how we're always in hypnosis.

We don't realize it.

But when you understand the tool, you can cause that to happen on purpose.

And yes, that is a great way to get somebody in hypnosis is just asking them a question like that or to imagine something.

Just anytime you say imagine, you're now inducing hypnosis.

A very low level, but it could be deepened and I have deepened it before.

But we're really working, highlighting a function where the mind is working together.

See, consciously, I'm thinking, okay, imagine this.

And then I do it.

Now, all of a sudden, the subconscious is dominant and they're just working together.

It's just like turning it to what's dominant.

It's just like turning the entire mind to what part is dominant, what comes up.

And of course, my favorite way is through metaphor.

So when you ask, like when someone has their issue and then you say, that issue is kind of a little bit like what?

You know, where you run out of words and you have to use metaphor to describe it.

Exactly.

You're moving them into their imagination.

And once you have the metaphor, you can work with it.

You can transform it and you can bring whatever resource needs to it to help it.

And later on, the conscious mind would make sense of that shift and be like, oh, I believe this now.

But in the moment, this metaphor stuff going on is all.

Well, those frames in reality are metaphors.

I have another paper coming up.

I'm not sure if it's in the first collection or the second collection.

I think it's the second collection.

But it's very early in the second collection.

Next paper is Frame Shifting.

That's a good one.

Yay.

I'm excited to read it.

Let's see.

Yes, the very first paper in the second collection.

The reorganization book is frames as pictorial and metaphorical structures.

And in fact, frames are the metaphors.

They're collections of metaphors, which are collections of symbols.

And so very much when you're talking to metaphor, you are really speaking the language of the frame and you're really, you know, when you're allowing them to be expressed, like you're saying you ask the question, you're really, you're not asking them to invent one, which would then become a conscious process.

You're asking them, well, what is that like?

So they're really slipping into another than conscious mode to connect it with some picture of something, which is the metaphor.

And what they're going to connect it to is the picture they're holding.

Right.

And so and then when you work with that metaphor, you're actually working with the frame.

Problem is a lot of times people work with a metaphor at a conscious level.

Even when they know to ask for the metaphor, they work at it there.

Whereas what I found David Groves was particularly powerful at was how to work with metaphors as metaphors and where you're actually working with the frame, even though it's dressed up as a metaphor so they can be talked about and put in the words.

But the very powerful stuff.

I'm just trying to think of an example so that the audience who hasn't had experience with this might know a little bit what it's like and what was coming to the picture that was coming to my mind was, you know, if the client was experiencing a chaos and then you ask, like, what kind of animal might this chaos be like?

And they say like a wolverine just running around, you know, trying to do this and that and just boundless energy.

And it's like, oh, what does that what might that wolverine need or, you know, what kind of weather could be helpful or whatever?

You know, it doesn't have to be the right question.

Just any kind of shifting-ish question.

Well, they're going to make it the right question because they're going to answer what they think it means.

And that's exactly.

And then you just go with that.

So it's like an improv for the subconscious.

And then at the end, it's not necessarily to solve an issue, but it's to be more helpful to the issue and creates some shift, some kind of helpful change that will create the conditions for a more easy, easier life.

It'll create shifts.

No question about that.

Yeah.

And that's that's the power of it.

And but the but but the reason it's powerful goes back to APHS, because that's how we change.

Exactly.

And so clean language or anything that works as metaphor, those are really wrappers that deliver what's really making the change.

And that doesn't mean the rappers are bad.

The rappers are great.

They're making.

There's not one size fits all.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because everyone's going to have a different metaphor and a different, you know, way to shift it.

Exactly.

But if we can go to and the reason why I put out APHS and why I actually had to had to had to put it into words so that I could work on empowering my own wrappers, my own applications, like timeline surfing, is is that when we understand what is the active ingredient.

Any of those wrappers are probably about 95 percent inactive ingredients and 5 percent active ingredients.

Any wrapper, parts, work, whatever.

OK, NLP, whatever.

Timeline surfing, whatever.

But it's it's that active ingredient that really is making the difference.

And once you get that, you can make up any wrapper as you go.

And you can you can you can take any wrapper that exists and and shape it to fit what you need at that moment.

You can just improv a wrapper, which I've done many times.

You can just improv.

That's what I really got good at helping people with change work is is I had studied so many different wrappers, not really.

They were just wrappers.

But in studying how they worked, I started seeing the pattern.

Well, wait a minute.

And then I started realizing, well, you know what?

This is really working because of hypnosis, but they're not selling it as hypnosis.

No.

And, you know, but then I started realizing, well, you know what?

This is a wrapper delivering some of the things that are effective through another wrapper, hypnosis or hypnotherapy techniques.

And so once I started really seeing what the active ingredient was, I can now improv anything, any wrapper, because I could I knew it was going to make it work.

And I think that's the power of defining the field, but defining in a way where it's not stuck with pieces of wrapper in it, like like those like Laffy Taffy's or, you know, some of those old those taffy type candy unwrapping is like half the wrappers embedded in the candy.

Yeah, that's a good one.

That's a good metaphor.

So really, APHS was my attempt to get the whole candy separate from the wrapper so I can see what the candy was.

But now I can wrap the candy in a lot of different ways.

And, you know, which I do, which, you know, my timeline surfing actually is like 100 percent putting this stuff into application.

And so but but in order to do that cleanly, I needed to know what the candy was so that when I put a wrap around it, I understand what what really tastes good about the whole thing, not the wrapper.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, well, I don't know if there's anything else that I can remember from the paper.

But you did a fantastic job.

You've read a very hefty paper.

It's a deep paper, but it's not it's not it's not obscure, but especially if you're familiar with a lot of the concepts and have thought about some of the concepts before.

But you did a good job, Chantelle.

Very nice interaction with it.

And how will what do you know now that you didn't know before?

And not necessarily in a revolutionary way, but it could be just a different take on something or maybe a new insight.

What do you know now that you didn't know before reading the paper?

I felt that the terms emergence, you know, like the change feels easy after the fact and the other term was coherence.

I felt like I understood it deeper, like about it being like the absence of tension, like processed and not suppressed.

And just about it being like balancing and making you flexible, more responsive.

I just felt like I understood that in a deeper way.

And also I understood the other than conscious better, like what that umbrella all had within it.

Nice.

What will knowing that now do for you or where do you see that emerging or going to or unfolding?

I see it where I could use more of the somatic, like the body based knowing the gut instinct, the trusting yourself and also like the wisdom part, like getting sort of advice from your higher self.

I don't know.

I just see I see the subconscious differently now or I see it as part of a bigger, a bigger system.

And it makes more sense to me in that organization.

Very nice.

Very nice.

Well, thank you, Chantelle.

I appreciate it.

And any last words before we say goodbye to the audience?

I can't think of anything.

Well, things are in process, I'm sure.

So, yes, I haven't had a chance to sleep on it.

That's right.

Excellent.

Well, Chantelle, thank you very much.

And thank you to our audience.

Also, thanks for listening to What's Actually Happening.

The founding papers of Applied Philosophy Human Systems are available at APHSfield.com, APHSfield.com, all one word, including everything we discussed today.

I look forward to continuing the conversation with you next week.

And until then, see what you notice.