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It has been very useful to me to think of everything I do as either splitting or joining. Splitting is the process of separating two aspects of an experience that have been joined together. For instance in the phobia process, the unpleasant feelings are separated from the visual memory of the traumatic experience. In the forgiveness process, certain ideas or meanings that the person has about forgiveness (for instance that forgiveness is for the other person, or that to forgive means to condone the harmful act) have to be split away from the experience of forgiveness before the person will be willing to forgive.
Joining is the process of putting together two elements that have been separated in the person's experience. In any process of integrating anchors, such as changing personal history, two separate experiences are joined together in the same moment in time.
Of course in many interventions, splitting and joining occur simultaneously. In content reframing an old meaning is split away from an experience at the same time that a new meaning is attached to it: You have always thought of your daughter as being stubborn, not realizing that you have taught her a welldeveloped ability to stand firm for what she thinks, and not let others sway her judgement and take advantage of her.
Splitting and joining are actually one of the fundamental properties of all nerve cells, and the technical terms in psychology are discrimination and generalization. When two neurons in the retina of the eye respond differently to a visual stimulus, they are splittingresponding to some difference in brightness, color, etc. When a child responds to two different animals with the same name, dog, he is responding to the sameness (four legs, fur, etc.) rather than to the differences (size, color, etc.).
Every experience that we have is a complex structure built of layer upon layer of perceived sameness (joining) and difference (splitting). When we want to change an experience, we will always be changing the perception or understanding of sameness or difference, and this will result in a change in response.
lf you think it would be useful to you to learn how to think in these universal terms, it can be very helpful to take an example of any NLP method you know and examine it carefully to determine at each step what is being split and what is being joined. The more you do this, the more it will become an automatic way of thinking that can guide your work.
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