Nick Kemp dicusses Provocative Therapy
ALAN: I want to talk a little bit more about the Provocative Therapy itself now if that’s ok.
NICK: Sure.
ALAN: And specifically how did Farrelly influence NLP. I mean, isn’t a case that NLP is the finished product and Provocative Therapy was essentially just a prototype from which NLP was drawn from? Nick laughs. I guess that’s a no.
NICK: My simple response is ‘err NO!’.
ALAN: Ok.
NICK: Frank first came across Provocative Therapy first during his work really in around 1963. Provocative Therapy, the book, which was published by …. Publications, which is obviously a US west coast publishing company, came out originally in 1974. Now Frank met with Bandler and Grinder at a conference called, I believe, ‘Analysing the Analyst’. And from there, they wanted to film Frank down in Santa Cruz for a full weekend and to really get a sense of what Frank was doing because he was very much on the radar at that time.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: Same sort of time were people like …… that Frank new very very well. Erickson was also interested in Frank,
although Frank never got to meet Erickson. Satir was interested in Frank and Frank did have a phone conversation with Satir for around 45 minutes I
believe, but she never met him personally. And what I would say is that my experience, certainly from meeting Frank when I first met Frank in 2004
there were a number of quite well known NLP Trainers at that training and there were only about 17 of us there. So about half of us carried NLP
certificates saying that we were Trainers.
And those who had trained with Richard Bandler were really quite taken aback at just how similar Richard appeared to be in relation to Frank. Now my
personal view and certainly a lot of people who have explored PT is that a lot of the influence that Frank had on NLP can be seen certainly in the way
that Richard teaches. And I can sort of literally sit down and show how a lot of the different mannerisms, ways of working, attitudes and even some of
the stories seem “very similar” (LOL)
ALAN: You were saying, well we were talking, about the similarities between Bandlers style of teaching and Frank Farrellys.
NICK: Yeah there are a lot of similarities, a great deal of similarities. What Bandler and Grinder did very well was that they took elements of people who were very successful at the time like Bates and Satir and Frank and ….. and really simplified and stripped things down so people could see the commonalities in the core elements which were effective.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: Now the difference between Frank was that Frank wasn’t modelling anyone else. He thought up this approach entirely himself. He had already trained with Karl Rogers extensively, so he had a good solid background in classic psychotherapy. But his approach with PT was about as far removed from psychotherapy as you can imagine. Now people still ask me the perennial question, even in 2010 ‘Oooh before you see a client do you warn them that you might be provocative? Have any clients (a) ever hit you or (b) have any clients ever run away’? The answer is ‘Well, no’. Because you are working with empathy. As if you are talking to an old friend. If your friends are the type that would kick and you and run away then that clearly wouldn’t fit. So Frank was pretty revolutionary for back then. And certainly even now totally different to just rolling out stock exercises. And my experience of working with private clients is working with Frank’s approaches and the Provocative Change Works approach which uses a lot of Erickson’s indirect hypnosis and other elements I’ve learnt is a bit like using Broadband.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: So no disrespect to some of these old trainings I’ve been in, but it would be like going back to dial-up...
ALAN: Ok.
NICK: When you have broadband, who’d want to use dial-up?
ALAN: No. No-one does. Ok. So if you could like kind of summarise for us the differences between PT and NLP. I mean you said that there is a kind of commonality in that there is some kind of process and obviously a lot of NLP is process driven, specifically for applications for therapeutic and pattern type applications. So what would you say the differences were between them?
NICK: Ok. Well the central thing with PT is that you’re working very much in a improvised way with clients. So you are only responding to what’s coming up in the session with the client. So you are always arguing for the benefit of the client maintaining the problem. What I developed with to teach Provocative Therapy I,s I noticed, that there is whole bunch of different approaches that Frank would take and these have been categorised also through the Farrelly Factors which others helped put together. You can see these if you go www.AssociationforProvocativeTherapy.com they are all listed. So I created a set of Provocative icon cards, each of which has a different symbol which would make the therapist go down a particular line or tact or take a particular stance.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: So let me give you a couple of examples. And this sounds a little bit through the looking glass and very different. So for example one of the stances you may take in relation to a client is that you blame the client for everything to do with the problem.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: You consistently and insistently accuse the client that it’s all their fault. Everything to do with this is exclusively their fault. There are no other external factors involved in it. You may then switch to a flip side, total opposite of that in that ‘it’s not your fault’. In fact one of the PT exercises that we’ve been doing in London is that ‘it’s not your fault’.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: It’s because you’re a certain star sign. It’s because you were born in a certain part of Essex. It’s because you’ve got blue eyes. It’s because you’re 6 ft 5. If you had been 6 ft 4 it would have been ok. It’s because your dad was a banker. It’s because your dad smoked. It’s because you’re a vegetarian. It could be any number of different things. You’d adopt that as a stance to provoke responses from the client. Now those are just two examples when a Provocative Therapist will adopt a particular stance in a conversation that challenges that the client. What they perceive as being the problem. Also the client will then shift from being in a certain state of what the problem is to a confused state. So we are talking about changing states intentionally.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: Conversationally. During this conversation, as with some less skilled ‘NLPers, you always know when something is coming because the voice tones changes and they go ‘now’ in a very poor imitation of an American accent and an attempt to six step reframe or something similar. So instead this is working much more conversationally.
ALAN: Right:
NICK: Work in terms of getting people to do specific changes but you are doing the same thing pretty much conversationally by making suggestions to the client that really takes them off in quite extreme visual ideas. Take them in different places inside their mind that they wouldn’t normally go to.
ALAN: Right. Ok. So earlier you mentioned the Provocative Icon Cards. Can you sort of tell us a little bit more … is this sort of a little bit like the Zebu cards of Jamie’s salad kind of coaching cards?
NICK: Well I can really appreciate and only applaud the salad being a vegetarian for 30 years myself! The PT Icon cards are definitely a good idea. The cards have individual icons on them. So you will have all kinds of different icons. You will have ‘it’s not your fault, it’s your fault’, you might have ‘go universal’ where you might start talking about the problem only in terms of big universal principles. You might go into itsy bitsy tiny little details where you ask the client more and more for details. You might explore family relationships. You might speed up with how you respond with a client. You might slow down. You might suddenly pause and use that to provoke a response.
ALAN: Rightht.
NICK: And one of my favourites, when I was going through all the icons with Frank and he said ‘you missed one, you missed a really important one’ and I said ‘ok which one’ as I thought we had at least the first 26 that we would be doing in London. There’s more I might add for the more advanced workshops. He said the one you missed is ‘give bad advice’.
ALAN: Oh my God!
NICK: That was the hardest one to come up with an actual symbol for. But we managed to figure it out ‘so give bad advice’. Now this is a pretty long way from your standard stock NLP stuff.
ALAN: Yeah absolutely.
NICK: I was running an NLP Master Practitioner workshops, usually 8 to 9 days into the training, I’d a morning on Provocative Therapy. Just then illustrating how we use it, time lines, pattern interrupts, building rapport, breaking rapport and all these different elements and literally the would-be Master Practitioners, although if anyone can be a master of anything in 2 weeks is another question, but at the time, we would literally have them spinning like tops. Because there are a lot of elements to it. But the heart of it is working in a very good natured way and we having the ability to pay attention to what’s going on.
ALAN: Right, ok, just for my benefit, the cards, they are effectively a training tool for the Provocative Therapist? They are not something you would actually use within the scope of a session?
NICK: Correct.
ALAN: Ok.
NICK: The cards are a bit like learning, if you’re learning to play the guitar the shapes you’d go A, F sharp, D. Once you’ve got these locked down, then you’ve got them in place in places you can go in in the interaction.
ALAN: Right. So how did you get to be Frank Farrelly approved PT trainer then?
NICK: Well I think mostly because I spent a lot of the time with him. I started hosting him from 2005 every year. I started out really just wanting to learn these skills. I really in the first instance was pretty mystified even though I’d done an extensive amount of personal development and NLP before I met Frank and I started attending as many of Frank’s events as I could, hosted him from 2005 onwards through the NLP concern that I was involved in and now laterally through the Association for Provocative Therapy and Nick Kemp Training.
ALAN: Right.
NICK: So I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Frank and had him to stay each year, usually for about 14 days, so I’ve got him for one on one for 14 days and mostly we talk to him at least every week to 2 weeks on the phone for extensive periods of time. So I really soaked up a lot of his approaches and insights and then started to practice and then started to ask him questions. So this was essentially a proper apprenticeship for around 4 or 5 years. And then about 3 years ago I was on one of the events and we were just tidying up, the end sort of wrap up section at the end of the event, and Frank sort of spoke out to the group and he said ‘Thanks to Nick Kemp who’s brought me here today and he said ‘hey you could run one of these’. And actually at that time I thought God I haven’t really made that mental leap. Because I’m a believer that people need to develop skills and apply themselves. They don’t just do a 5 day course and then they’ve got a certificate saying that they’re a genius.
ALAN: Yes. I don’t know what you mean by that.
NICK: I am sure those specialists in being able to mind read will be able to figure that therapeutic conundrum out themselves.
ALAN: Yes.
NICK: And from there, I got involved initially with just running some of the exercise during Frank’s events and now have, for the last two years been sort of co-training with him. Doing demonstrations and teaching the bits that Frank doesn’t really explain. When he was in San Francisco last year at the IASH Conference, the number of people who attended Frank’s events came up and were really pleased about my ability to actually explain what Franks doing and also, more importantly, how you can learn these skills. Which is one of the reasons why I am going to be back in San Francisco later next year at IASH again and also co-training and teaching some of the Provocative Change Works approaches with Steve Andreas and some other excellent trainers including Andrew T Austin in Denver in August this year.
ALAN: Fantastic.
NICK: This is really advanced stuff for people who have done a lot of work.
ALAN: Right. Ok. Cool. Fine. So was it the draw that left you, as I know that you have trained a lot of NLP certificated events. Was it the draw of the PT that led you to stop running the NLP events?
NICK: Well mostly, I mean I was very happy with teaching NLP events and up until probably around 2008 and then I thought I’m really looking for something now which is going to stretch me a little bit more and I want something that gives greater flexibility. So I’d kind of done it really. And the thing to remember is if you’re teaching say an NLP certification you’re actually teaching people a curriculum which has been created by somebody else. Say for example if you’re in the Society for NLP which I was back then, you would have a whole bunch of different things which you have to cover during the course. Some of which I would use absolutely and some of which I would just never use in a million years. Some of which I think are really very useful skills and some of which I’d say well, it teaches a principle but …
ALAN: So you were saying the last thing I really got was that you don’t really do kinaesthetic anchoring?
NICK: Yes. I mean from my point of view. Some things, the reason I moved from NLP was because I found that I had got everything I wanted to get from it. Bearing in mind that a lot of people when they are talking about NLP they will have done a Practitioner, a Master Practitioner and then a Trainer Training. So in some instances you have people who are actually training in NLP who have done less than 20 days actual experience from scratch now, which is something I’ve never really advocated...
ALAN: Right. Yes.
NICK: So from my point of view this is very much about I wanted to learn something that I could actually work with, with clients, and really work in an effective way. So it’s a bit like learning to be a musician. On the one hand you can learn set pieces and you can go out and you can be like a tribute band and you can play tribute Thin Lizzy or whoever and play their music. It’s a whole different ball game to be able to create your own work, write your own songs, write your own music and really say this is something which I’ve come up with which is not found in other peoples work in the same stock kind of way.
ALAN: Right I get that ok.
NICK: So one of the reasons why I have good communications with very talented people like Steve Andreas is because some of the Provocative Change Works exercises, which work fantastically well in private practice, are not in standard NLP training or hypnotherapy training.
ALAN: Right, I see.
Go to part 3 - Nick Kemp Discusses the Professional Benefits of ANLP
Free MP3 Download of this interview is also available from Nick Kemp's Online Store.
