I was lucky enough to spend considerable 1 – 1 time with Frank Farrelly the creator of Provocative Therapy and hosted many of his events. His provocative therapy workshops attracted a wide range of people, especially from other approaches such as NLP, hypnosis, psychotherapy and other talk therapies. I have become used to a wide range of responses to Frank’s work including total mystification by many attendees!
Provocative Therapy is fundamentally different to the “digital, logical, sequential manner of working in many other therapeutic approaches. Frank himself encountered all manner of resistance when presenting this work to professional colleagues in the early days and this continued throughout the time that I knew him.
I noted that the NLP and Hypnosis communites tend to have 3 main responses to provocative therapy –
Total mystification about the approach
A great love of the flexibility and working in the here and now with this approach
A complete hatred of this way of working
Colour by numbers?
I find these same reactions to the Provocative Change Works model which was inspired in part by Frank Farrelly’s Provocative Therapy. Many medicals and talk therapy professionals have embraced PCW and this year will be my 19th trip to teaching in Japan as well as running trainings in the UK, India, Russia, Austria and Poland. I have the same challenges as Frank where some people can’t get their heads around the brilliance of working with provocation and just want a sequence of protocols to follow like a recipie in a cook book.
This “colour by numbers” approach is very popular, especially at NLP and Hypnosis conferences and I’ve never had any challenging questions at any such events. Nothing wrong with that, but it shows to me that often people warm to approaches that are more formula based.
My own view is that the “colour by numbers” approaches many be easy to master for practitioners, but are often not that effective for clients. Some newer approaches reduce interactions to simply asking the same questions over and over again. These simplified approaches also have resulted in a series of weekend certificated trainings so new practitioners talk about being “qualified (as opposed to certified” in “X approach” This is a far cry from Frank Farrelly’s way of working and Frank was unimpressed with such scenarios. I remember him wonderfully commenting
“How can anyone become a master of anything in a couple of weeks” (Talking about NLP)
Frank always commented “Show me the evidence” and I wholeheartedly agree with this view. From the moment I first saw Frank in action I immediately realised that Provocative Therapy was like a “broadband’ way of working, and Frank famously commented
“Throw away your professional dignity in the service of the client”
I feel so lucky to have met Frank and to have inherited his archive of Provocative Therapy work that date back to 1950s. Frank’s work has been invaluable in developing Provocative Change Works and I fully expect to meet the exact same mystification when I teach around the globe. Those who keep open minds and seek to study this approach tend to find it wonderfully liberating and highly effective when working with clients.
