Therapeutic Metaphors: Helping Others Through the Looking Glass Paperback – May 25, 2017

Recommended by Mike Mandel, this is an excellent introduction to the concept of therapeutic metaphors. Comprehensive and deliciously detailed, this work calls for multiple encounters in order to mine it for all its worth. Reading it once is using a spoon to dig into the side of a mountain where the true treasure lies deep within. You may hear it calling you, yet the message will resonate even more clearly as you listen again and again.

Humans process information in story form much more accurately and deeply than they do facts, figures and speicifications.And jsut telling someone what to do meets with incredible resistance. David Gordon does a good job of explaining how to deconstruct a situation and identify the crucial aspects, and then shows how to construct a valuable metaphor (story) to provide the desired result.Bravo, David Gordon, I would love to see you write a similar book related to constructing stories for selling.

My Voice Will Go with You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson is a book of pure stories, using metaphor. This book balances pure story, with a good amount of left brain analysis. The first 60 pages is on metaphor. The next 84 is on Satir Categories, the next 15 are on Representational Systems, in an NLP format. The next 50 pages are on sub-modalities. The rest of it is basically putting it all together, with strategies, anchors, triggers, and examples. Metaphor is extremely powerful. Language is metaphor, and language is also deeply hypnotic. If you know someone's metaphors, you know them. If you change your metaphors, you change who you are- instantly. Here's a Tony Robbins example: he told of a business executive who said he felt as if his boss was holding a gun to his head. That's a stressful metaphor. Tony asked the executive, "So, what color is the water pistol?" The executive started laughing, the restriction was broken, and the executive could change. Archetypes, especially as used by Dr. Richard Bartlett in Matrix Energetics: The Science and Art of Transformation, are a powerful class of metaphors. This is a bit more analytical than I like, but for someone starting out, especially someone who is very left-brained, this is a great book to start out with.

Learn to make up metaphors easily. Gordon was the master and he put it all down for you in a little book. In NLP we use lots and lots of metaphors so creating them easily is a must. What you learn in class is just a taste. Buy the book and read it over and over until you can create magnificent metaphors on the fly.

I bought this book beacuse it was named in another NLP book and I like it because it explains in great detail how to form good metaphors, how they are made up and who contributed to each phase of the NLP science. I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in going deeper in the NLP science.

very good book, actually goes through and teaches how to create great metaphors, I read so many books.. i need to go back and finish reading the book

Made me discover and love the power of metaphors. It already is classic book and a must for anyone that want to be useful to others in subtle ways

Doubtless that back in 1978 plenty of this book’s content was ahead of its time. Or at least very rare. When it came time to edit the book, to complete the much welcomed revision, the author opted to leave it as is. Oops. Thing is it was not particularly compelling writing forty years ago. The topic is compelling but the writing was always sort of waiting to be reworked to make it enjoyable to read. Sorry David Gordon, but I say this because it has potential to be great. I’d even edit the book myself if given the opportunity. Anyhow, the book has some valuable moments (eg, regarding the construction of metaphors) that other authors and researchers have still yet to explore. Many people assume they know all about metaphors. But after spending some time with this early work on the topic by Gordon and one realizes that mostly people just know the layer above the layer that’s above the layer.