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Product reviews for States of Equilibrium
L Michael Hall PhD
When John Burton learned NLP and Meta-States through his trainings with Bob Bodenhamer, it was immediately obvious to Bob that John Burton's natural creativity would lead him to use the models in exciting ways. Bob knew that John would find new uses and applications for NLP and Meta-States. And so it was. A couple years ago Bob assisted John in writing, Hypnotic Language. But that was only the beginning.
Now John has done it again! With his background in Developmental Psychology, he has used Meta-States to write a book that integrates in a most extensive way the best of Piaget, drive theory, Kohlberg, Maslow, Rogers, Skinner, Erickson, Jung, and Cognitive-Behavioral therapy to create one of the most extensive descriptions and applications of Meta-States as applied to personality, therapy, and change. It is the most extensive presentation of Meta-States outside of anything I've written. And it offers numerous new applications of Meta-States, applications that I had not thought of!
States of Equilibrium is an entire book on states. It's about primary states, meta-states, and gestalt states. It's about pathological states, sick states, personality disordering states, and about glorious states, empowering states, healthy balanced states, the highest states possible, the “ultimate meta-states.” The thesis is that “the human personality is organized around achieving states of equilibrium.”
If you are a therapist, this is a must read. This book makes an excellent follow-up to The Structure of Personality: Personality Ordering and Disordering with NLP and Neuro-Semantics (2000) that I wrote a couple years ago with Bob, Richard Bolstad and Margott Hamblett. John has filled the book with case studies and lots of practical suggestions. For therapists you will find fascinating descriptions and case studies around addiction, learning dysfunctions, obsessive- compulsive states, depression, fight/flight responses, anxiety, fear, and much, much more. John's analysis of fear is absolutely brilliant. Would you like a taste of it? Here goes:
“Fear is what might happen instead of what is happening. Even during an event that scares us, the fear springs from what could happen if the situation progressed beyond its current status. I believe fear never concerns itself with the here and now, but with what the here and now might become. ... Fear takes a slippery and elusive form. For in survival, fear must remain at least one step ahead of the present. Living in the present, imagining only solutions to any challenge, makes fear disappear. Fear simply cannot exist when we look into our future for solutions while gazing from the present. Your future does not know your past. ... Fear, and in fact all emotions, attempt to provide us with vital information ... leaving the translation up to us.”
Isn't that great? Oh yes, another quote about fear.
“Fear is feedback from our future that tells us to take some sort of evasive action. This evasive action comes to us through our resourceful states, which can prescribe solution options.”
You've got to have to book, right?
If you have any question, any doubt that NLP and especially Meta-States can address the “more serious psychological disorderings” of personality, this book will quell those doubts. As an educator turned therapist, Burton has amply demonstrated the power of recognizing the meta- level structure of states. He integrates the psycho-social states of development of Piaget into the Neuro-Semantic model. He integrates the role of meta-programs into the construction of a painful Matrix of frames, which he describes as limitation states.
It's also a must read if you are a coach or work with people in a coaching way, that is, facilitating the best in people.
As I read the manuscript, the only regret I had was that John wrote this before we had published The Matrix Model (2002) because much of what he has written fits so nicely into that model. He speaks about the cognitive styles of information processing from child developmental psychology and the distortions that we all naturally experience in growing up. He relates it to how our states can go wrong. With that analysis and profiling, John then shows what we can do about it using the formulations of Neuro-Semantics.
While not an academic book, States of Equilibrium is not light reading. It will challenge you to think. It will invite you to read and reread the book. You will be able to harvest new learnings with each reading. If you have people who dismiss NLP for being too much of a light-weight conceptually, buy this book for them. It is solid.
I loved some of John's words and phrases, “The Structure of Personality: It's Just a State of Mind.” “Anxiety amounts to a phobic reaction to a particular state.” “The State of the State: The Emancipating Proclamation.”
This is also a book about Meta-States. Burton describes and defines the Meta-States model in new ways and exciting ways.
“Meta-stating is like climbing an observation tower. Each successful step lets you see and know more, which results in a greater awareness. A hallmark of human developmental theories is that each successful level of development endows the person with expanded awareness. So we find that meta-stating a person directly elevates the person's level of human development, allowing positive change in thought, emotion, and behavior. Our well-being results from our relationship with our states.”
“Meta-stating expands our awareness of the behavioral driving forces that have been out of conscious sight. Expanding our consciousness illuminates our higher states. This increased consciousness allows access and restores conscious choice.”
“A meta-state in our unconscious mind can dictate to our lower states, requiring that we operate from sadness. Past experience may have led to aversive feelings associated with freedom. In this case, then, to exercise freedom as if it endangers the individual. We may ascend the meta-state ladder going to higher and higher meta-states unless an injured state exists at a certain height. ... The injured meta-state puts a ceiling on further development until it experiences the freedom that healing brings.”
John plays with the layering of states and offers incredible descriptions of highly complex toxic states. For example he writes this.
“Some people fear that if they become convinced of their competence, for example, they would then experience a state they fear even more.”
Did you catch all of the meta-states or layered frames in that? No. Then consider it again: is
“Some people fear (fear state) that if (subjunctive state) they become convinced (conviction state) of their competence (primary state), for example, they would then experience a state they fear even more.”
On a personal note, I love how Burton has also begun to extend and expand the Meta-States model. This is good. Unlike some in NLP, I want the history of Neuro-Semantics to never, but never get into fights over “intellectual property.” If an idea or model is brilliant, if it maps new places for us to go, and new things we can do “then it is bigger than any one of us, and bigger than all of us together. And it should continue to develop and grow. And it will give to ever new models. John has creatively described new things in this field: injured meta-states, laying the meta-train track for a meta-state strategy, climbing and evoking others to go all the way up the meta-ladder, meta-motivation, “injecting a limited meta-state with an awareness boost,” crossing “state lines,” etc. So even though John is not yet a Neuro-Semantic Trainer or Coach, his creativity in this work certainly exemplifies what I'm writing and talking about as the spirit of a Neuro-Semantic Developer.
And even without knowing about the Matrix model, Burton describes the same:
“The layers of Meta-States vary from person to person. We might find that each layer gets “born' into awareness, or recruited, resulting from life experience. The more layers present, the more need for intervening states. Adverse experiences seem especially likely to prompt additional states into the mix.”
Are you interested in balance, focus, mental and emotional health, emotional intelligence, running your own brain, eliminating stuck and limited states, getting on top of anything internal that might sabotage you? Get States of Equilibrium!
Now John has done it again! With his background in Developmental Psychology, he has used Meta-States to write a book that integrates in a most extensive way the best of Piaget, drive theory, Kohlberg, Maslow, Rogers, Skinner, Erickson, Jung, and Cognitive-Behavioral therapy to create one of the most extensive descriptions and applications of Meta-States as applied to personality, therapy, and change. It is the most extensive presentation of Meta-States outside of anything I've written. And it offers numerous new applications of Meta-States, applications that I had not thought of!
States of Equilibrium is an entire book on states. It's about primary states, meta-states, and gestalt states. It's about pathological states, sick states, personality disordering states, and about glorious states, empowering states, healthy balanced states, the highest states possible, the “ultimate meta-states.” The thesis is that “the human personality is organized around achieving states of equilibrium.”
If you are a therapist, this is a must read. This book makes an excellent follow-up to The Structure of Personality: Personality Ordering and Disordering with NLP and Neuro-Semantics (2000) that I wrote a couple years ago with Bob, Richard Bolstad and Margott Hamblett. John has filled the book with case studies and lots of practical suggestions. For therapists you will find fascinating descriptions and case studies around addiction, learning dysfunctions, obsessive- compulsive states, depression, fight/flight responses, anxiety, fear, and much, much more. John's analysis of fear is absolutely brilliant. Would you like a taste of it? Here goes:
“Fear is what might happen instead of what is happening. Even during an event that scares us, the fear springs from what could happen if the situation progressed beyond its current status. I believe fear never concerns itself with the here and now, but with what the here and now might become. ... Fear takes a slippery and elusive form. For in survival, fear must remain at least one step ahead of the present. Living in the present, imagining only solutions to any challenge, makes fear disappear. Fear simply cannot exist when we look into our future for solutions while gazing from the present. Your future does not know your past. ... Fear, and in fact all emotions, attempt to provide us with vital information ... leaving the translation up to us.”
Isn't that great? Oh yes, another quote about fear.
“Fear is feedback from our future that tells us to take some sort of evasive action. This evasive action comes to us through our resourceful states, which can prescribe solution options.”
You've got to have to book, right?
If you have any question, any doubt that NLP and especially Meta-States can address the “more serious psychological disorderings” of personality, this book will quell those doubts. As an educator turned therapist, Burton has amply demonstrated the power of recognizing the meta- level structure of states. He integrates the psycho-social states of development of Piaget into the Neuro-Semantic model. He integrates the role of meta-programs into the construction of a painful Matrix of frames, which he describes as limitation states.
It's also a must read if you are a coach or work with people in a coaching way, that is, facilitating the best in people.
As I read the manuscript, the only regret I had was that John wrote this before we had published The Matrix Model (2002) because much of what he has written fits so nicely into that model. He speaks about the cognitive styles of information processing from child developmental psychology and the distortions that we all naturally experience in growing up. He relates it to how our states can go wrong. With that analysis and profiling, John then shows what we can do about it using the formulations of Neuro-Semantics.
While not an academic book, States of Equilibrium is not light reading. It will challenge you to think. It will invite you to read and reread the book. You will be able to harvest new learnings with each reading. If you have people who dismiss NLP for being too much of a light-weight conceptually, buy this book for them. It is solid.
I loved some of John's words and phrases, “The Structure of Personality: It's Just a State of Mind.” “Anxiety amounts to a phobic reaction to a particular state.” “The State of the State: The Emancipating Proclamation.”
This is also a book about Meta-States. Burton describes and defines the Meta-States model in new ways and exciting ways.
“Meta-stating is like climbing an observation tower. Each successful step lets you see and know more, which results in a greater awareness. A hallmark of human developmental theories is that each successful level of development endows the person with expanded awareness. So we find that meta-stating a person directly elevates the person's level of human development, allowing positive change in thought, emotion, and behavior. Our well-being results from our relationship with our states.”
“Meta-stating expands our awareness of the behavioral driving forces that have been out of conscious sight. Expanding our consciousness illuminates our higher states. This increased consciousness allows access and restores conscious choice.”
“A meta-state in our unconscious mind can dictate to our lower states, requiring that we operate from sadness. Past experience may have led to aversive feelings associated with freedom. In this case, then, to exercise freedom as if it endangers the individual. We may ascend the meta-state ladder going to higher and higher meta-states unless an injured state exists at a certain height. ... The injured meta-state puts a ceiling on further development until it experiences the freedom that healing brings.”
John plays with the layering of states and offers incredible descriptions of highly complex toxic states. For example he writes this.
“Some people fear that if they become convinced of their competence, for example, they would then experience a state they fear even more.”
Did you catch all of the meta-states or layered frames in that? No. Then consider it again: is
“Some people fear (fear state) that if (subjunctive state) they become convinced (conviction state) of their competence (primary state), for example, they would then experience a state they fear even more.”
On a personal note, I love how Burton has also begun to extend and expand the Meta-States model. This is good. Unlike some in NLP, I want the history of Neuro-Semantics to never, but never get into fights over “intellectual property.” If an idea or model is brilliant, if it maps new places for us to go, and new things we can do “then it is bigger than any one of us, and bigger than all of us together. And it should continue to develop and grow. And it will give to ever new models. John has creatively described new things in this field: injured meta-states, laying the meta-train track for a meta-state strategy, climbing and evoking others to go all the way up the meta-ladder, meta-motivation, “injecting a limited meta-state with an awareness boost,” crossing “state lines,” etc. So even though John is not yet a Neuro-Semantic Trainer or Coach, his creativity in this work certainly exemplifies what I'm writing and talking about as the spirit of a Neuro-Semantic Developer.
And even without knowing about the Matrix model, Burton describes the same:
“The layers of Meta-States vary from person to person. We might find that each layer gets “born' into awareness, or recruited, resulting from life experience. The more layers present, the more need for intervening states. Adverse experiences seem especially likely to prompt additional states into the mix.”
Are you interested in balance, focus, mental and emotional health, emotional intelligence, running your own brain, eliminating stuck and limited states, getting on top of anything internal that might sabotage you? Get States of Equilibrium!
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15/09/2004 01:00
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