David:        And then, I use that, then, as a basis for knowing what to do with a client.

Doug:        So, therefore, like Erickson, every intervention could be very different because their structure is different than anybody else's, so where you intervene would be different, as well.

David:        That was the early... that was the ethos that we operated out of in the early days. And, you know, to a certain extent, we became victims of our own successes, in that, you know, we developed certain techniques.

Doug:        Like, the phobia pattern became...

David:        Yeah, which, by the way, came from modeling...

Doug:        Sure.

David:        ...people who fixed themselves. You know, and for instance, the change history pattern came from a woman who came to the group. She said... I don't remember exactly what she said, but basically, she said, "Well, you know, I don't have any problem with the past. If anything happened to me bad in the past, I just go back and change it." Oh, really? Let's find out about that! And, you know, so out of working with interesting people who did interesting things in their experience, techniques were created. Well, they came to the forefront and they became what people learned to do to work with clients.

And, you know, I think what got lost along the way was the whole approach of sitting down with a person and finding out, who is this person? You know, what is the structure of this person's experience? What is the world that this person lives in? What kind of intervention would be meaningful or significant in that person's world?

Doug:        So, for you, then, it was kind of the evolution of that way of thinking that led to this new... well, for me it's new... this experiential array that you have in your book, the "Expanding Your World" book?

David:        Yeah, well, the array came out of... in 1988, when Graham Dawes and I were conducting... we were often, going around, doing the testing weekend in practitioner, master practitioner trainings and we were training in Belgium. I guess it was practitioner training. At any rate, people were, as part of their final thing, they had to work with clients. And, they had to gather information and people would go gather information and Graham and I would walk around and ask them, "OK, so tell us about this person? What's going on with this person?" And, they would proceed to open up their notebooks and go through page after page after page of notes they'd taken. They'd just written down everything the person had said and they thought just by repeating everything this person said, they were answering the question as to what is going on with this person.

And, what we realized, of course, was that you know, these folks had no way to know... keep track of what information they had, what was the nature of the information? What did it tell them about the structure of experience? And, what was redundant and what wasn't? And so, that night, we created this format and it's just an information gathering format for organizing information into different areas of experience and for keeping track of it and start using it, and found that not only was it extremely effective in helping people gather information in doing therapy, but we pretty quickly, tumbled to well, oh, this is a format for doing modeling of any kind. And so, we started massaging it and applying it in that realm. But, that's what it is, it's a format for doing the modeling, one of many that are out there.

Doug:        Is it still evolving?

David:        Well, I hope so. I'll tell you what, the form of it is not evolving, currently. It has, over the years. Originally, it was just four boxes and now, it's got some boxes inside of boxes. But, it's stayed the way it's been for probably the last four years. What has evolved, however, is how we use it, some of the distinctions, how we use some of the distinctions, how we identify some of the distinctions that have evolved. In fact, I'm currently doing a seminar, as you know, in New York, a modeling seminar, you know, and the people in the seminar have just, in the last two meetings, have come up with refinements to the approach, you know, in how we use the array, that I think are wonderful. You know, they still have to be tested out, but my gut feeling is that, you know, these are really refinements.

So, you know, I hope it will continue to evolve and you know, maybe some day, we'll come up with even a better...

Doug:        A revised edition of...

David:        Yeah, yeah, in life.

---about this point in the conversation we experienced technical difficulties and the recording was lost. We will redo our discussion about David's history with Milton Erickson and his understanding of Erickson's methods of therapy and hypnosis. Look for it soon.