Major Product Release: Folding (Version 0.7 alpha)

(General content note: A lot of my thinking has really changed since the old days of this blog. There’s some weird, mean, and polemic stuff in there.)

This is my largest and most ambitious product, yet. In it, I present so-called Three-Levels theory and a technique called Folding. Three-Levels theory isn’t a rigorous theory; it’s really just an (awesome) pedagogical tool. Folding, however, is the real deal, as significant as the concept of “meditation” and, in my opinion, a novel, extremely powerful complement to techniques such as Focusing, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and Coherence Therapy.

Below are excerpts from past blog posts that frame the problem. This product is my first real solution. Below the excerpts are a table of contents (with product excerpts) and disclaimers. Then there are instructions on how to get your hands on this thing.

Please note, this product is a snapshot of my work! It is not a polished object!

Nevertheless, people are using Folding. It’s the most field-tested, by people besides myself, of anything on this blog. And it’s changing lives.

Click here to go to the Folding product page.

brief thoughts on discussions (certain kinds) and intimate relationships

(General content note: A lot of my thinking has really changed since the old days of this blog. There’s some weird, mean, and polemic stuff in there.)

i’ve facilitated hundreds of hours of small-group discussion. this is a first pass, possibly totally impenetrable, of what i think i’m doing that matters most (for discussions that are around creating things–ambience, situations, events, artifacts–where it’s more important to do it right than to just get it done).

So I do these things (stream-of-consciousness):

status management and qualifiers: continual projection of humility-and-offering vs directing (through body language, voice tone, and qualifiers). “what about this? or this?”

acknowledging what people will inject before they do, to take the urgency out of it

i think most of the “magic” is in endless verbal qualifiers, uttered after/during infinitely searching out/modeling/empathizing things that might not be ok and things that might shut people down or turn them away and then fixing those things. sussing out awesomeness and the actual best thing:

“i’m not going to touch this during the week either,” “you don’t actually have to do this…” (and having arranged everything so it’s actually true)

vast field of (opinionated) ok-ness and possibility.

maybe not all of what i do actually matters, and i’m sure i still do things that turn people off.

continually hunting down things that close down possibility as they happen in real time and viciously opening them back up

re viciously tho deep modeling of the other person’s sense of possibility and how it might be narrowing or broadening in each moment

about what’s ok and not ok, what’s possible and not possible

what’s allowed and not allowed, what’s safe and not safe

and continually signaling about that

and sending out true signals that indicate you’re truly doing deep modeling of them, actually doing the work, and not saying fake platitudes

what has to happen and what doesn’t have to happen, what will have consequences and what won’t have any consequences at all

and trying to set things up so people expend zero time and effort that they find out later to have been unnecessary

and continually applying all these things to myself too, to actually produce the actual best possible thing and not a caricature of older, past things.