Frank Farrelly impressions and how to spot genuine provocative work

I was thinking recently about my many years of discussions with Frank Farrelly, the creator of Provocative Therapy and what made him unique.

Provocative Therapy meets NLP IN 2005, and its not pretty…

Firstly Frank was merciless in terms of his views on duty of care for clients and had very little time for playing to the crowd for popularity. He was highly critical of the co founders of NLP and was very plain speaking about the hype in that particular world. When I first hosted him almost two decades ago, the audience included a number of NLP trainers and enthusiasts. i was embarassed by the behaviour of a couple of NLP trainers who attended that first training in how they lacked basic good manners and repect towards Frank’s work. One of them endlessley insisted that I should instruct Frank on how he needed more exercises in his training and another one managed to piss Frank off with the first 20 minutes of being introduced to him!

I played a tape of the NLP co creators talking about Frank and he pointed out how clueless they were in terms of their supposed “insights”

Why Provocative Therapy was “the world’s best kept secret”

I had two main impressions when I first met Frank in 2004. The first was that he was by a mile the most talented therapist I had come across. The second was that he had the worst possible support to date in getting his work out to the wider public. There were some small glimmers of hope with Noni in Germany running trainings and a few events in other parts of Europe, BUT globally almost nobody had heard of Frank’s brilliant approach.

When Frank passed, he specifically instructed his son Tim, to hand over his archive to myself and my wife Sue. Otherwise I suspect his work would have just disappeared. A few individuals in Europe totally didn’t get the core elegance of Provocative Therapy and focussed on the key elements being humour and improvisation, when of course classic PT is much more than that.

We had many discussions about the core principals of Provocative Therapy and recorded a lot of our conversations. Frank talked a lot about his desire to bring PT to a more global audience and groaned at the thought of certifications in his approach. Fortunately we have those thoughts on video as a proper reference for his wishes. Since his passing a few characters have insisted that he wanted “institues” for Provocative Therapy in some European countries, but in our hundreds of conversations he only ever mentioned Noni Hoefner’s work in Germany as being credible in respect of his work.

Authentic provocative work, a quick guide

Inevitably just as with NLP, there are a number of people trying to tag the term “provocative” to their work without ever having trained or understood Frank’s original work. Mostly they confuse “provocative” with being “aggressive.” I’ve recently had to have words with characters in Poland and Russia, who both a clueless about Frank’s provocative work and continue to misrepresent his wishes. I’ve also had to take actions to remove counterfeit materials online again used without proper permission. One character even approached me to try and create a documentary about Frank, with the proposal I should fly to Warsaw at my expense to engage in “provocative games” as footage. I can tell you now how unimpressed Frank would be about such stupidity…

So, if you come across any companies or trainers claiming to represent Frank’s original work, if they are not referenced on this original and official site, then I have two words for you “Caveat Emptor”