Leslie Nipps Counseling

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Where did you learn how to love?

We all learn it in the same place: from our parents. It’s from them that we first learn about how to attach, what it’s like, and how to manage challenges that can arise. If all goes well, we learn that

• attachment is a good, enjoyable and pleasurable thing,
• we have a reasonable ability to choose reliable and safe people to attach to,
• we can navigate relationship twists and turns,
• we can manage ourselves during separations, and
• we eventually can make deep, reciprocal commitments.

But for many of us some part of this learning does not go well, and we grow into adulthood having difficulty with one or more of these skills. We are still unconsciously attempting to complete attachment to our parents, and trying to manage the ways that may have been partial or painful.

Unfortunately, this is not possible now. Even if our parents are still alive, we are no longer children, and the developmental moment is past. So we work out our patterns with our current day romantic partners. But it does not work—we are still trying to complete attachment to our parents, and no partner can fulfill that role.

Yet we desire true intimate peer relationships that are not expressions of our childhood yearnings and wounds. Satisfying intimate relationships should be like falling off a log—we are wired for relationship, partnership and love. Sure, there are those “relationships for learning” (and even those are satisfying in their way) but we are genetically designed to find mates and enjoy relationships.

Unconsciously, though, we are stuck at the moment of incomplete attachment. We develop unconscious belief structures which keep us there, even though we are now adults and have great inner resources for fulfilling relationships. What kinds of beliefs? Here are some common ones:

• I am unlovable.
• Intimacy is dangerous.
• I know it’s love if it hurts.
• As soon as it looks safe and good…watch out!
• Having strong feelings isn’t safe for me.
• I only end up hurting the ones I love.

Wow. Some powerful beliefs that our unconscious mind asserts in order to make sense of some very confusing and often painful childhood experiences. How do we move forward while still respecting the truth of that experience? Because that’s what we truly want, right?

We need at least two conditions before this can change:

1. notice the deeper streams of our ancestral inheritance that wanted us here, and which sends us animating love every day, creating an environment where we can
2. begin to gently and respectfully shift the beliefs in more life-giving and respectful directions, more in line with the vision our ancestors have for us, like

• I am lovable.
• Intimacy is life-giving and necessary and pleasurable.
• I know it’s love if it feels good (at least most of the time!).
• I can trust my judgment when I decide that things are safe and good.
• Having strong feelings is wonderful.
• I and my loved ones appropriately give and take, as is necessary for life.

On October 10th, 5-7p in Oakland, I’ll be leading a free workshop called Want Love? Deep Belief Change Work for Relationships. You are invited.

Weathering the Tides by Leslie Nipps

Being “out of rapport” with ourselves is a deeply painful experience. We feel ourselves, in some way, as our own enemy or to be unsafe for ourselves.

When we look deeply at something we want in our lives that we are unable, despite great effort, to experience, we discover that something deeply unconscious in us finds the desired experience to be fundamentally unsafe.

Every day, my intelligent, creative and committed clients are unable to have the experience of life they would like, not for lack of effort, but for lack of internal safety.

How do we acquire this kind of safety? There are two ways forward.

1) Rapport: The experience of being safe with anyone & anything, especially ourselves

Basic interpersonal rapport is a learnable skill. Many years ago the founders of NLP discovered its principles. The basis of interpersonal rapport is mirroring: demonstrating to others that we are “of like kind,” and therefore fundamentally safe. As we learn and practice interpersonal rapport, we can begin to apply this experience of rapport to ourselves, offering ourselves that mirroring, letting our own minds know we are “of like kind” to ourselves, and safe.

This is a process, best done in a supportive, learning environment where you can get practice in rapport techniques, and take workable steps in allowing your self to create personal safe space. Over time, it becomes internalized and grows spontaneously.

2) Beliefs: The unconscious meanings that provide us with our wanted & unwanted experiences of life.

Unconscious beliefs stabilize the sense that what we want may be unsafe for us. At the same time that we begin to really understand and experience rapport, we are also shifting those beliefs that say so much about danger—after all, if we are experiencing rapport, maybe those beliefs about what is and isn’t safe are beginning to be revised, and new beliefs are starting to take root.

This is an intricate and necessary dance between new experiences of safety and unconscious belief revision. Together, they make a new experience of life possible, bit by bit. You can feel it as it happens—what I feared may not be so true anymore; what I hoped for may be possible. And that is the beginning of change.

What a taste? Try our new Rapport & Belief Change Study Group, starting Sept. 26th. Together, we’ll discover how deeply safe for ourselves we already are.

Powerlessness. Choicelessness.

“Tom” came to me with a complaint that he just couldn’t find the energy to move forward in life. He was stuck in his work life, and everything was tinged by the suspicion that he just wasn’t good enough. As it turned out, Tom’s mother began life having inherited a disease as a result of his parents’ neglect. She almost died, and never really thrived. Tom, on the other hand, was completely healthy. So, why does it look like he has inherited his mother’s near-deathliness?

Powerlessness and choicelessness are the source of our inability to choose the experience of life we would like all of the time. If we had power, we could choose what we wanted easily, right? So, where is our power? Where is our capacity to choose whenever our soul and integrity seems to call that from us?

Many of us are “running on fumes.” We’ve cut ourselves off from the primary source of energy: our tribes. We inherit life from our ancestors; they are our source of power. When we are disconnected from them, or in some way our bonds with them are disturbed or improper, we are without the basic courage we need to live.

But as children, we can be faced with some challenging dilemmas:

• We can have parents who are suffering, or came from families of suffering, and as little children, sensing their pain, we unconsciously decided to try and help. From there, we begin to make a series of unconscious decisions for our lives that seek to find resources for our parents and other family members. We seek to be more powerful than our ancestors.
• Or, our parents were less-than-perfect parents. Maybe even dangerous parents. So we learned to separate ourselves from the danger, define ourselves as apart and different. We seek to be better than they could at taking care of ourselves.

Both approaches are beautifully human, and quite likely necessary to our survival as children. As adults, however, both approaches leave us stranded from our tribal energy, which we can only access through our parents. We literally have life because they gave us life. But in our attempt to be more successful or powerful than our parents, we attempt to reverse a flow that cannot be reversed. The energy is dammed and inaccessible.

We need this energy for our lives. To create, work, love and grow. Without it, we are profoundly disabled. Nonetheless, we are reluctant to receive the energy from our tribal sources because we unconsciously sense the old danger. It feels life threatening, so we continue on low resources as best we can and wonder why we can’t find a way to thrive the way we would like.

Full adult thriving requires us—at some point— to consent to the fact that our parents are our parents, and without them we would not have life. They are our ultimate source energy, despite their manifest limitations. When we can find a way to consent to the fact of all our ancestors—the saints and sinners, the crazy and the sane, the safe and dangerous—we can receive our birthright as we should. And life can flow again.

On August 22nd, at the workshop “The Surprising Source of Effortless Strength & Courage,” we will combine NLP & Family Constellations wisdom to recover our source of strength by re-solving distorted relationships to our families. For more information, go to Effortless Strength & Courage.

Spider Crab by Leslie Nipps

Look at your experience, and you will know what you believe about yourself and life.

Obviously, I’m not talking about conscious beliefs like evolution, the platform of the Republican Party, or who killed JFK. I am talking about unconscious beliefs that determine almost everything we are permitted or required to experience.

These beliefs may be unconscious, but it turns out they are fairly easy to uncover. How?

Think of the woman who is successful in business. Money has always come easily to her. She’s had three start-ups, and each one has sold for several million dollars. Right now she’s on her fourth scuba diving trip to Bali, and thinking about her next venture.

What does she believe? I can’t say anything about her political party or stand on global warming, but we can say quite firmly that she believes that…

• it is okay for her to have money
• if she brings effort to her endeavors, there will be a reward
• there’s more than enough money for her to have some, too

Then, how about the guy who has struggled his whole life in part-time jobs, never quite finishing that novel or completing that degree or getting the job with benefits that would make stability possible? He’s always lived hand to mouth, has occasionally gone on food stamps to get by, and still hasn’t paid his brother back that $5000 loan he got to move to Austin where there were better job opportunities.

What does he believe? He may believe that…

• there isn’t enough money to go around
• he’ll always come in last when success is passed around
• success isn’t something that is under his control

And there are two other beliefs that these two people are probably living with, day after day, totally unconsciously:

• She believes that success and money are safe.
• He believes that lack of success and having little money are safe.

Look at your experience, and you will know what you believe about yourself and life.

At my workshop on July 10th, making use of some simple NLP techniques, you’ll be able to find out what you believe, and start shifting them toward what you really want to believe and experience in your life.

Block Island Sky by Leslie Nipps

What’s got you spooked?

“Genevieve” has been struggling with depression. She came to me asking for that to change. She quite understandably doesn’t want to experience the depression.

We carefully unpacked the process through which she, in particular, gets herself to the place of being depressed. It starts with a difficulty in her life that she doesn’t feel she can navigate. A part of her unconscious says to her “This is going to end in annihilation.” This generates terror, and an all-out-effort on the part of her entire consciousness to avoid annihilation. It has come up with a lifelong useful response: Get depressed instead. If she gets depressed, shuts down, pulls the blanket over her head, then the situation eventually passes, and on the other side her unconscious can say “Wow, that depression stuff really works! Look, I live to see another day!”

When we unpacked all of this, Genevieve could thank herself for the depression: it had been fulfilling an intended positive outcome for her. Depression may be lousy, but it usually ranks higher than annihilation, right? And no way would changing the depression ever be allowed by the unconscious, because that would open the door to annihilation. Ironically, appreciating the depression and our brain’s resistance to changing it is the first step in moving forward in a new way, without depression.

What’s got you spooked?

You may not think you’re spooked, but if you are stuck in any way about something you would like, but haven’t been able to change it, your unconscious thinks that something is dangerous about that change that must be avoided at all costs.

Your unconscious is spooked. And you know the worst part about that? Underneath all the layers, we are actually spooked about ourselves and about life itself.

How so?

• It is us, after all, who are reaching for the new thing that scares us so much.
• It is life, after all, that is offering us those things we most want but which have us so nervous about change.

Life itself is scaring me. I am scaring me.
I am out of rapport with myself and life.

Rapport is the experience of feeling deeply safe with another person. In order to have change, we need rapport with ourselves and with the universe to keep ourselves safe through the process. For Genevieve to stop having depression, she needs to be in rapport with her whole self which is doing its very best to take care of her. Appreciating the frustrating choices our brains have chosen over the years can be challenging, but it is one of the necessary steps to deep and permanent change work.

We can begin to learn how to feel safe with ourselves and the world no matter what new choices we make about what we would like. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) offers our brains a better offer than the ones they have become accustomed to, so that change can feel deeply safe.

At my June 6th workshop, “The Secret of Safety: Rapport with Self & Life,” you’ll experience some of these NLP exercises, and leave feeling a new sense of confidence about reaching for what you would most like in life.

New Mexico Door by Leslie Nipps

Have you almost given up on them? Those deep life desires that have failed to unfold for you: Are you contemplating a funeral for them? Or done so already?

These dreams have been stuck so long they become defined by their stuckness and unavailability. There’s no way to imagine getting started. Indeed, trying to imagine getting started usually only generates a sense of despair that keeps things from moving before there’s ever any chance.

These kinds of dreams tend to fall into a few important categories:

• love and relationships
• financial security
• work & other meaningful activities
• emotional struggles

What if there was a way to begin moving? It couldn’t be by the usual methods: writing a list, weighing the pros and cons, starting a class, etc. There’d have to be an untapped and unimagined wellspring of energy, possibility and resourcefulness to begin experiencing such dreams.

Remarkably, your own unconscious is that wellspring. Despite feeling like we are struggling with our own selves, the catalyst of moving forward lies within our unconscious self, which is always, always, always ready to serve us as best it can. You’ve probably noticed this yourself in the past: a time when something felt incredibly stuck, and then you had a dream, or the weather changed, or you took a hike somewhere unfamiliar, and suddenly you had the energy and inspiration to move forward.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could put that kind of resourcefulness on “manual”? If we could reliably reach inside to find the manifesting energy for the thing we want but can’t seem to even hope for anymore?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming has a toolkit of practices that do just that. Here’s one simple exercise for you to try now.

Think of something you would like that you do not currently have or experience.

1. Up and to the right, make a picture of a future you in about six months who has that experience. (Making a picture up and to the right, with eyes open or closed, helps tell your brain that this will be happening in your future.)

2. Step into (associate into) that future you. You can close your eyes and relax them if you like. From the vantage point of your future you, ask yourself: Six months ago what were the signs that I was beginning to have this new experience of life? Was it a different emotion? A new pattern in my daily routine? An idea I got to do something? What was the evidence that I was on the path toward the experience I am now having so reliably six months later?

3. After answering that, then ask yourself: And, what showed up during the second month? What happened then that was part of getting me to where I am now five months later? Note that.

4. Continue for each of the six months, asking what happened during that month on the way to the experience you’re having now, six months later. Note each sign along the way.

5. When you are done, notice it all, from the you six months ago, to the you who six months later now has the experience you want.
While noticing all of this, take some deep breaths, and then squeeze a finger. Hold it firmly.

6. Keep holding it firmly as you disassociate from the future you back to the present you. Keep breathing deeply. Hold your finger for at least thirty seconds as you bring everything you just learned and noticed to the present moment.

7. Let go of your finger, and look back at the picture of the future you. Notice how deeply connected the two of you are. Notice how much inner wisdom your consciousness always has in a safe place for you.

On May 2nd, we’ll be doing many more exercises to gain access to your inner wisdom and energy for moving forward with the dreams you would like. For more information, click on How to Turn Stuck Dreams Into Movement Forward.

Nicasio Fence by Leslie Nipps

Ever had one of these experiences?

1) You are so torn between choices A and B (and maybe C and D, too) that you are paralyzed into inaction, convinced that either choice will make you wrong.

2) You do something regularly in your life that you really wished you wouldn’t do, but you can’t stop it, and every time you think about how unable you are to change it, you tell yourself how terrible you are for being unable to change it.

You’ve got Inner Conflict.

Some anthropologists claim that inner conflict is what really makes us different from animals. Okay, I just made that up, but think about it: when was the last time you saw your dog or cat make themselves wrong about something? I remember when I growing up, watching my sleeping cats with infinite envy, I wasn’t coveting their restfulness or their furriness or their cute way of chasing their tails; I was envying their equanimity, their way of being at peace with themselves. Even then, I knew I wanted that.

In NLP, we assume everything has a positive intended outcome, even the most self-destructive of behaviors. Given how incredibly common inner conflict is, it must be a very highly valued state indeed. Making ourselves wrong about the normal challenges of life is an attempt to make something good of things that perhaps, in the past, weren’t so good for us. It’s an attempt to reach for something better, make things right, re-set the clock, return to innocence.

But inner conflict achieves none of these things. Instead, it causes infinite human suffering, and usually shuts down attempts at change before they can get started.

What if this was all unnecessary? Or better, what if it was all based on an understandable but useless illusion? Think about it: “conflict” requires multiple agents in some sort of opposition with each other. That’s what happens when two nations go to war, or neighbors get into a fight, or siblings struggle over the toys. It takes “more than one” to make for a conflict.

But what are you? You are one person. We carry the illusion that we are multiple selves. It’s an illusion that can be useful at times (it’s not me feeling the pain right now, it’s that body there), but it is an illusion. Inner conflict is a story we tell about our divided sense of identity. It keeps us from feeling like we are one person, and fuels struggle that keeps us at war with ourselves.

In the end, though, all parts of us also have a positive intended outcome for us. The part that wants to move to New York, and the part that wants to live near family—both of these are reaching for the best thing for us. There is no conflict. We are doing our best to love ourselves, deeply and usefully.

What helps you experience yourself as one person, with one heart and soul?

Pt. Judith Red Tire by Leslie Nipps

Healers want to heal. People in pain or distress want healing. What a perfect fit. Right? Or maybe not…

Last fall, I herniated a disc. I developed very severe sciatica, and for those of you who’ve had this experience, you know the pain is quite extraordinary. I suddenly became willing to spend any amount of money to whoever could take away the pain.

I met a lot of incredibly skilled alternative body workers. But I found myself cycling through all of them. None of them seemed quite right, and they all, to be honest, kind of scared me. I was in a state of near-terror due to my intense and sudden pain, and I couldn’t find anyone who made me feel like things were going to be okay (despite a lot of reassurances that they could indeed fix my pain). I remember talking with one highly recommended practitioner on the phone who began to castigate western medicine, even though I had never brought up the topic, and I wondered what was going on and why I was feeling nervous about meeting this person.

Eventually, I found a practitioner with whom I immediately felt safe and I have been working with him since then. But a client’s experience of safety with us as practitioners doesn’t need to be left to blind luck.

Most healers focus their efforts on a particular healing framework that really feels like it works. They want to offer the healing that works so well to those who need it. People in need of healing are searching for just that healing you have to offer. But they don’t have the framework. What they’ve got is the pain or distress.

When these two people come together—the healer and the sufferer—there’s the potential for terrific engagement, but this potential often has to overcome an initial gulf: The client has the pain, the healer has the answer, but the client doesn’t know or understand the answer. They need, somehow, to be brought on board.

This gulf is usually obvious to the healer. The client doesn’t know anything we know about how energy moves and is blocked; or how posture is causing their pain; or that they need to balance their nutritional intake; or how to engage their core in order to feel healthy again. They know very, very little about these things. We want them as partners in their healing. We don’t want to just do things to them—which isn’t very useful anyway.

But let’s ask for a moment: What does the client want in the beginning? In addition to having their pain taken away, what do they want? What do you want when you become the client? Do you want to be initiated into a new healing framework?

What almost all potential clients want is for their pain and their experience of it to be met, seen, understood, and deeply respected. They also want their health and the rest of the meaning of their lives also to be met and respected. They don’t want feel that all that needs to be shoved aside in order to have the healing they most want. They want to believe that what they already value can be integrated into a healing framework.

It turns out that creating that reassurance is simple and can take place in the first few minutes of an interaction with a potential client. It’s done with something called “rapport.” Have you ever met someone who seems to create safety for almost everyone s/he meets? That person has an instinctive gift for creating rapport. They do it unconsciously in the way they stand, move, speak and engage with those they are with. But it isn’t mysterious. It’s a set of skills that are easily learned.

People relax and feel safe when they feel they are with “of like kind.” Imagine a gazelle on the savanna: anything that looks like a gazelle feels safe; anything that might not be a gazelle (even if it’s just a waving bunch of grass) might be a lion. RUN!

It turns out we are not much different from gazelles, and even though we don’t usually run, we find good excuses not to be with people with whom unconsciously we don’t feel fully “of like kind,” or fully safe. We suddenly realize we don’t have enough money for the service, or feel like it’s just not a “match” for us.

Rapport skills are what make it possible to help almost anybody feel safe with us. We give people the assurance that we are, indeed, “of like kind,” and fundamentally okay. Through learning a few easy, concrete skills, we can increase our ability to create rapport and help others feel really, really good with us no matter how different they may be.

Rapport is not “people skills,” warmth, friendliness, good listening skills, or any other version of sociability. It involves specific cues we give to others’ creature neurology that we are safe for them. It’s a remarkably respectful way to be with others: instead of asking people to get on our map of the world, we kindly move onto theirs, and work with them on their map—and this works so much better.

After establishing rapport, if we’ve done that well, we can start telling our clients about our healing framework and how we are inviting them into a new way to feel better. But let’s start with letting them know they are safe with us, no matter what. We get a whole lot more clients that way.

Mt. Diablo Rapport

“ Raymond” came to me wanting a closer relationship with his father. He knew their estrangement was sapping energy from his life, but there was so much enmity and misunderstanding, he couldn’t see any way through to closeness.

Wouldn’t it be nice to trust that we were born into the very best family for us? The truth is…we did. Even the dangerous, crazy families are the source of our life. Take out even one member of our direct ancestry, and we…are…not…here.

All members of a family have this sense, and it creates spectacular loyalties and confusions.  Every member belongs equally, and can never unbelong. Each member has his or her particular respect and place in the system. These are, as Bert Hellinger puts it, a result of “Orders of Love”: everyone always belongs to their family, and everyone deserves respect.

Another Order of Love is that those born first send life down to the younger ones. Life and “help” never flows the other way. But when the younger ones look backward and see the older ones suffering (or having suffered, if they have died), they often reach back in an effort to help. We do this naturally and lovingly, but it never has good effect. We see this quite explicitly in the lives of the descendents of Holocaust survivors, who in an effort to honor and help those who suffered so much, make their own lives completely unlivable. And we see it many other ways in which we take on others’ problems as our own, structuring our lives around trying to resolve and heal their wounds.

This turns out to be the source of many common issues: financial problems, relationship difficulties, food disorders, depression. We are making our lives miserable in an unworkable effort to say “I love you” to someone upstream. Argh! How do we begin to unentangle this?

What if we could gather the family together? All of them: kids, parents, grandparents, great grandparents. Bring them together so that we could see and honor the suffering, include the lost ones, notice how much bigger the older ones are than the younger ones, and hear the ancestors lovingly say to those pesky younger ones “Cut that out!” What if we could bring them together and unentangle all the inappropriate attempts to help, bring peace to the heartbroken, and put everyone back in their proper and right place in the family?

As it turns out, nothing is ever truly lost, and everyone’s family is still available through the presence of their unique “Family Soul.” Family Constellation work gives us access to this ongoing and real phenomena. We tap into what Rupert Sheldrake called the “Morphogenetic Field” where all information is accessible, and discover the love of our families—the kind that is stuck and the kind that is flowing.

In that safe, contained environment, Raymond was acquainted with his long dismissed Mormon ancestors, his father’s family. The constellation quickly revealed that these people had been both on the end of terrible victimization, and had themselves committed crimes. As a result, they had been rejected, and all but forgotten.

Our family souls will not put up with this. No one may be rejected or forgotten. Apparently, Raymond had offered to be the one who would make sure they would be included by sapping his life of energy and being alienated from his father. By his own suffering, the dishonor done to his ancestors could be addressed. The little ones in a family are almost always willing (if unconsciously) to do this out of love for their family.

But the constellation offered a new and much more effective solution. We made these Mormon ancestors visible. We watched them willingly take responsibility for any wrongs they had committed, and also offered them our respect for their sufferings and losses. The strength of these ancestors became re-accessible to the entire family, which is what the little ones always need to be able to live their lives fully. And Raymond received his ancestor’s blessing to live the life that they had given him. In this context, it became easier for him to respect his father’s limitations and challenges, and once again accept the full blessing that his father is able to give. In this tableau, we could see Raymond’s energy beginning to return, now that he wasn’t cut off from his own family’s life and love.

Love freely flowing. This is what our whole family wants for all of us.

Chandalar River, Alaska, by Leslie Nipps

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Atlantic Light by Leslie Nipps

A beautiful day on the ocean…

An invitation to dive in…

The sheer aliveness of everything…

What do you see?