The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1: A Book About Language and Therapy First Edition

Excellent book. I was using this as a self help learning adventure. This book was written by therapists for therapists, so be prepared to up your game.That said, I did find relief by using this text and the concepts within. I combined what I learned with AI. I asked AI to use concepts from the book to write my personal NLP statements based upon my life and childhood.The results, amazing. Fanatastic. I do not regret buying this book. Reading the book helped me learn what questions to ask, and how we frame our lives through language and perception of events. This leads us to our full linguistic model, the understanding of our lives that is engrained into each of us as individuals.

It’s unfortunate that this book is not marketed better because I believe everyone can benefit from reading it. Who am I to say this? I am not a professional psychologist or therapist — I don’t work in the field. I stumbled upon this book after reading “Introducing NLP”. That book offered me tools to break through situations where I used to freeze up or be inefficient by putting myself in the correct state to get things done. It also gave me tools to communicate more effectively with others by first building rapport and then communicating more in line with the other person’s mode of thinking.Having benefited from reading about NLP, I wanted to know more about it. The Amazon description for this book says its the seminal work in NLP but doesn’t really say much about what that means or what it can do for you personally. There’s no “look inside” option. Some of the reviews mention this book is for psychotherapists. I want you to know more about it so you can make a more informed decision as to buy it or not.This book is written for therapists but I understood it without being one. The authors explicitly wrote the meta-model so that anyone can use it. They describe how we as people cannot see the world for how it is because of neurological, social, and individual constraints — we create our own model of the world that we act on. They argue that every individual makes the best decision based on the choices from which they are aware; that successful people have many options to choose from in their model of the world while unsuccessful people have limited options to choose from. So the way to be more successful at doing something is to open up more choices to choose from. How? This is where the meta-model comes in to play.The authors describe the meta-model as a way of asking questions to uncover what is lost in a person’s model of the world thats preventing them from making effective decisions in their life. We think using language. Often in a way that deletes, distorts, generalizes, presupposes, and nominalizes events, which prevents us from seeing whats really there. The meta-model is a way of questioning our language so that we can work our way back to more raw perceptions of the world so that we can create more options in our model to make better decisions.There’s a lot more to this book then what I described, but that is the main piece. The authors also included conversations between therapists and clients using the meta-model to solve problems.This book has had a major impact on me. I’ve used the techniques on myself to work on my problems. I used the meta-model on myself to breakdown my generalizations on my career-outlook and personal life to create more opportunities for myself to achieve my goals. You don’t need to be a therapist or specialized expert to benefit from this book. Anyone can.

I was truly blown away when I read this book. It's by no means casual reading, it's very technical and pretty obtuse, but it's also perfectly precise, which is the point.What this book is, more than anything else, is a treatise on all the holes in (y)our thinking, with all the patches for the holes presented excruciatingly thoroughly. It does a better job of that than any amount of study on logical fallacies.If you have a background in either computer programming or lingusitics, it may be of interest that those are precisely the backgrounds of the authors, and they apply those backgrounds to therapy (in a very broad sense of the term) in this book.

The source of many techniques well known in hypnotherapy and NLP practices are finally revealed. The indept scripts and practice assignments are valuable to any level practioner.

This book would help any student new to counseling theory and process to examine their interactions and clarify the communication that is missing from statements. It might be useful to young debaters to analyze their opponents arguments and to protracted who want to yell short phrases that will generate the most emotional response from the crowd. Interesting to a scholar but slow. There aren't stories that would help carry the message better.

I was annoyed by some of the word salad in this book then I realized the author was just quoting someone else, who is just a lousy writer.

What is NLP? Nero linguistic Programming. Structure of Magic is almost NLP . How do we communicate? Is it our voice tone that say yes or no? Is it our hand gestures that says give me a cup of coffee? Sometimes it is, point at the cup. Ask a deaf person about communication. What we think we know we really have not gleaned the totality of what was really communicated. The Structure of Magic can help you understand communication, therapy and the bigger picture. This book has it's depth, however over all a manual in it's own right.

I couldn't be happier with this purchase. I bought book I and II together and I can't recommend them high enough. If you are interested in communication and a more concise dissection of Ericksonian principles. I recommend these and and books by Milton Erickson. The closest thing to real magic there is. Awesome and insightful. I'm completely fascinated with the whole subject matter and all of it's trappings and off shoot subjects. Eye accessing cues, micro expressions, psychotherapy, neuro linguistic programming (NLP), hypnosis, trance, etc, etc. Buy these books and you won't be disappointed.