Frank Farrelly first came to stay at my house in 2005 and we quickly found that we had all manner of interests in common, aside from the world of therapy. Initially I invited him over to record his “Me and God” second book about his upbringing. I scheduled 8 days for this task, but Frank completed the entire recording in under three days with just a couple of retakes. Anyone who works as a sound engineer knows that it requires a huge amount of concentration to accurately record material and I was amazed at Frank’s level of concentration in recording this audio book. I later found out that most of his workshop promoters put Frank up in the hotel, but Frank far preferred the social interaction of staying with us. Perhaps it was growing up in a family of 12 kids, but we had some truly hilarious and fun times over the years. I also learned a huge amount about his work. Often a casual comment he might make in conversation could spark a huge insight into understanding his work.
Movie Night and meals
Frank loved movies and was delighted that we had a full home cinema set up here are the house, where we have a big projector screen and surround sound system. Over a three day period we once managed to watch all three seasons of the western “Deadwood” with Ian Mc Shane. On another occasion we enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” and of course “The Godfather” was on the essential movie watching list.
We often ate in and Sue created some great meals. Sue and I are vegetarian, so I often teased Frank about “coming over to the dark side’ and joining us, which of course I knew would never happen. Aside from being a brilliant therapist, Frank was great fun to hang out with and we had many great nights putting the world to rights.
Musical and singing
Frank was also a big lover of music and we both had a massive love for Martin Simpson’s acoustic work. I’d been a student of Martin Simpson for a few years and had a huge amount of our lesson time recorded as well as all his official releases. Its fair to say Frank was an enthusiastic guitarist and could quite happily bang out a few chords often to some classic country and western song. He also had a love of singing in churches and my wife who he called “Dr sweet Sue” was tasked in locating suitable locations for this activity!
The curiosity factor and good manners at all times
One of the things I loved about Frank was that he had a burning curiosity about all manner of things aside from therapy. He had a real interest and love of people and in workshops everyone was treated equally regardless of whether they were an experienced therapist or newcomer. He was unimpressed with status seeking individuals and this made for some explosive demo sessions in some of his workshops. Its fair to say, Frank had the unique ability to quickly identify and resolve client problems and of course 50 years of clinical experience was invaluable in achieving this.
Over the years some of the most dynamic workshop exchanges were with NLP and Clean Language trainers who “wanted to experience what it was like being a client” but were totally unprepared and unwilling to engage in any genuine self reflection or as Frank would say ‘to do the work” I was watching some of this material recently and am looking at transcribing some of this material for study.
The Frank Farrelly/Provocative Therapy legacy
When Frank passed, he told his son Tim to send me his archive of material. This was a huge amount of recordings and articles dating back to the 1960s and was a fascinating insight into his Provocative Therapy approach. Inevitably there are all manner of people now seeking to present work as “provocative” and who never studied Frank’s work or trained with him. The worst examples come from the world of NLP and there are some truly terrible examples of this.
Frank Farrelly’s work is far more complex that a lot of coaching and therapeutic approaches and this is why so few people have been able to learn and integrate these skills. There are a great deal of technical skills to master as well as the ability to work in a totally conversational manner which is a far cry from many other approaches. One thing is certain, Frank was truly unique and created an entire body of work by himself as opposed to “modelling” existing therapists. He is greatly missed by those who knew him.
