Hello, John. I wanted to clarify a few points I brought up in my last post. When I described the term "benefit" as "the consequences of the actions of a person who is mistreating himself, because he wants those consequences, because he's performing the actions that bring the consequences about", I did not mean to describe benefit like what a drug addict gets from doing her drug.  I just can't understand how you're aware of any self-harming person's idea of whether that person's actions benefit him, or if in fact you didn't intend to imply that the person harming himself believed in the benefits of his self-harming actions.  If the latter is true, then I wonder why you described the person's actions as both beneficial and self-harming. In my earlier post, I wrote: "But in order for the depressed client to act without further depression, the client does need to properly respond to the therapist's behavior.  If the client doesn't get what the therapist is doing, or is paranoid about the therapist's actions, or ..., then the therapist's efforts will unintentionally put the client in a worse state." I'm sorry that I can't point you to the exact section of WITW in which the WITW authors describe therapy actions in which process flexibility is exercised while content is avoided.  Here are a few more words about what I meant by my discussion of the examples given in WITW.  When I wrote that the client "doesn't get" what the therapist is doing, I meant to that the client literally does not understand the significance of the therapist's actions.  In that case, when the therapist is fallen on the floor, faking a heart attack, his client, bewildered and depressed, stares at him. Or, if the client did understand what it was supposed to signify, the client might think that the therapist was mocking the client's despair over the client's failure to help himself with his depression.  It might be difficult to reestablish rapport in that case.  The WITW process flexibility examples lead me to let go of Dr. Grinder and Ms. Bostic St. Clair's suggestions when I take them at face value.  The WITW suggestions don't utilize all of Dr. Grinder and Ms. Bostic St. Clair's individual experience as therapists. The idea of choice is central to client decision-making during therapy.  Therapeutic intimidation tactics and physical and psychological abuse are consistent with the therapist belief that a client can be coerced into change. Those methods are also consistent with the therapist belief that a physically intense experience serves to reinforce a therapeutic message delivered to a client.  You can read Steve Andreas' recent article, "Creating an Intense Response 'The Therapeutic Trauma'" Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2004, p. 6. available on his website, to appreciate what I'm suggesting.  When Mr. Andreas relays his story of the child whose foot is stepped on by Milton Erickson, please consider two things.  First, Milton Erickson risked breaking the girl's toes. Second, Milton reinforced the message that the girl's foot was small, after the girl cried out in pain.  He claimed her foot was so small that he couldn't see it and that was why he stepped on her foot.  However, such the incident could reinforce how big the girl's feet are, just too big to avoid stepping on, and that is a conclusion that the girl could reach on her own, independent of Milton's message. To follow on with the distinction between mind-control and body-control, the distinction that I made in my last post, here's a listing of three examples of distinct types of body-control: 1. controlling that the biochemical process of muscle growth occurs in your bicep to a certain degree. 2. controlling your bicep's muscle contraction  (as well as the tension in all the stabilizing muscles involved in the movement), starting at the time you are holding a weight at your side. 3. controlling that you intend and attempt to curl the weight you are holding to your shoulder. If you've ever done a bicep curl, you'll know that you can hold a dumbbell at your side, but you might not be able to curl it all the way to your shoulder.  Proper form is important to lifting a weight, and small changes in form and stabilizing muscle use radically alter how much weight you can curl in a repetition. If you've ever trained to failure, you probably remember dropping the weight when you couldn't lift it past the sticking point, and your whole arm hurt, so you dropped the weight quickly.   But the third description of body control that I gave would include another person deciding whether you'll drop the weight at that point or instead keep straining to lift it until something breaks. Allow me to recommend the following Scientific American article to you: http://www.musc.edu/psychiatry/fnrd/tmssciam.pdf , and invite you to read in it for examples of TMS use that could fit these different descriptions of body-control.  This is a different article than the one I mentioned in my last post.  Please note that the company mentioned in the article as researching deep-brain stimulation coils, Brainsway, now has a website at www.brainsway.com.  Their technology is in US clinical trials for depression treatment.  On the Brainsway website profile page, the developers mention that their coil design also has recreational uses. A fine example of such a future recreational use might be in the movie "The Sixth Day", with Arnold Swartzenegger.  The plot is irrelevant but if you watch about half the movie - I suggest that you keep the sound muted - you'll get to a scene where, in one movie character's home, an easy chair has a paddle that pops up behind the chair's headrest over the reclining person's head, helping create the man's experience of .  In addition to my current list of technologies that could have recreational or therapeutic or performance-enhancing uses, I would like to add the sound-manipulation technology owned by Neuropop.  Neuropop sells itself as a media-enhancement company, but if you read their whitepaper, www.neuropop.com/NeuroPopTechnicalWhitePaper.pdf, you'll read descriptions of neuro-sensory algorithms put to uses like eye-movement control, vertigo inducement, lust triggering, memory-retention, and more. The movie, "The Manchurian Candidate", was mentioned in my last post.  That movie usually comes up during some rant about evildoers out to control other's minds in a secret illuminati conspiracy, yada yada yada.  Well, that's not where I'm coming from.  Actually, the practice of therapy, in the fields of psychiatry and nlp, is the systematic attempt by one or more people to control another person's behavior by achieving one of the three methods of body-control illustrated in my bicep examples of body control.  State- or corporate-sanctioned therapy is simply the widespread application of body-control treatments to meet a particular set of interests.  In the United States, at least, no such interests have that kind of authority.  When someone breaks the law here, she's jailed, rather than treated for insanity, so I have no fear of any illuminati, but rather a healthy fear of breaking the law.   In the next 5 or 10 years, as attempts to achieve therapeutic control improve, therapists can confront some profound issues about the nature and purpose of therapy.  Unfortunately, even if all therapists everywhere ignored or avoided the technology available for influencing others, body-control of the kind I mentioned might enter the change-agent domain indirectly, following the example of Neuropop.  A patented technological method of personal change might aid regulation and licensing of use of that method, and even bring the current technologies of NLP into the scope of the legal regulations that apply to the patented technology, depending on what exactly the patented technology does.  NLP might become illegal to teach or practice!  Precursors of such patented technologies are probably undergoing tests in the dungeons of experimental treatment centers here in the US.  It's a busy time for technological innovation and basic science research into the functioning of the human body, even if the technology behind the examples I've given doesn't pan out. You all can create personal change interpersonally and in a respectful way toward your clients.  So it would be nice if you could distinguish NLP as not needing to use machines and drugs and abuse to benefit an nlp client.  If the leaders of NLP do not distinguish nlp as benefiting nlp clients without abusing nlp clients as nlp practice has in the past, then I've little hope about how they'll distinguish nlp practice from machine-using and drug-using alternatives. -Noah