Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality by Tad James, Wyatt Woodsmall, Wood, 0916990214, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

Tedious and Out of Date

I am sorry, I really do not understand the other reviews for this book. This is the original book on Time Line Therapy, but, I am afraid, I do not like it at all. The Time Line Therapy scripts are out of date, and I find the stuff on meta-programs and values immensely tedious. There is much better coverage of all this elsewhere. This is one of the worst (of many) NLP books I have read.

This is THE book for Meta Programs and Values

It’s useful to read an explanation of Time-lines from a different angle. Very interesting are the connections between “Anglo-European” time and Through Time and “Arabic” time and In Time. Perhaps “pre-“ and “post-industrial time” would be better labels. It makes one wonder about the stressful obsession with time in the industrialised world vis-Ã -vis the ancient, more natural approach to time.
This is the book for Meta Programs and Values among all the literature I’ve read so far. It’s fascinating and explains these concepts very well. I feel some experiments coming on.
The therapy transcript at the end is also really interesting. This is the first time I’ve encountered NLP taking a client back into the womb and into karma and past lives.
Another helpful point is that, having never studied Gestalt therapy, I finally understand the meaning of the word “gestalt”, at least when used in NLP. Some clients, when ask to pick a specific memory, come up with a generalised image of many memories collapsed together – particularly if they are Through Time. I find I get this a lot and it has made some techniques difficult for me in the past.

A good place to start to explore TLT

As described in another review above this is essentially three books within one cover.
The first provides an insight into the practice and application of TLT and is an easy read. It is informative and straight forward without oversimplifying the subject.
The second and third cover Meta Programs and Values in a more clinical way and are more what one would consider reference works.
For those new to the subject I'd say this was a good place to start.

3 books for the price of one

In the 260 pages of text this book contains, you'll actually get 3 books.

The first one is mostly Tad James' work and discusses the notion of "time line therapy", which are essentially NLP techniques in which a time line is used (the basic idea it to look for part occurrences of a problem that announces itself today, and "change" one's subjective experience, in order to live one without the problem - for instance, if one has a phobia of mice, go back to the first experience you had of being scared of mice, etc). You'll find more extended versions of the ideas discussed in this part in other NLP books, such as Bandler's Magic in Action, his "Using your Brain for a change" or the book "Magic demystified" by Lewis & Puchellic.

The second and the third part are mostly Wyatt Woodsmall's work. The second part deals with meta-programs, and borrows heavily on the MBTI (see Myers' "Gifts Differing) and on the work of Leslie Cameron and her students (such as Rodger Bailey) - a more extended version of that work can be found in "Words that Change Minds". In the part on "values" you'll find the Graves model, which in meanwhile also has a full book dedicated to it, namely "Spiral Dynamics" by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan.

Unless you are already specialized in the topics covered in this book, you'll find them introduced in a readable way here. That by itself makes this book a good place to start. Afterwards you can always find more precise information in to the other books I referenced here.

The only reason why the book didn't get 5 stars is because it fails to quote some of the sources they got the material from, especially in the area of meta-programs. The fact that nobody filed a claim against the authors for that is probably the best proof that this material in now in "the public domain".

Patrick E.C. Merlevede -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

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