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Perceptual Positions" has been an important and useful distinction in NLP, one that can be used to enhance our flexibility, wisdom and resourcefulness. There are three major perceptual positions:
SELF position is experiencing the world from my own position: I see and hear other people and the world around me from my own point of view, have my own feelings, etc. This is also called association.
OTHER position is experiencing the world literally from some other persons position. If I remember a conversation with a friend, I recall it as him, seeing and hearing events from his viewpoint, feeling his body feelings, etc.
OBSERVER position means experiencing the world from the outside, as an observer. If I do this, I literally observe myself and whatever situation I am in from the outside, as if seeing someone else. This is also called dissociation.
Brilliant people in many disciplines are able to shift their perceptual position flexibly, and this is a basis for their special skills. Most Practitioner Trainings include training in shifting from one position to another.
Many limitations have been usefully described as being stuck" in one perceptual position. A phobia, for example, arises from being stuck" in Self position. Phobics plunge right back into a terrible memory and panic. The phobia technique trains people to experience the traumatic event as an Observer. At the other extreme, people can be described as so dissociated into an Observer position that they no longer experience their own lives.
Codependence has been described as being stuck" in Other position. Codependents report feeling the feelings of another person intensely.
While I have always found the perceptual positions model tremendously useful, I noticed several of my own experiences just didnt fit with the model. This led me to develop a new way of thinking about perceptual positions that has produced fascinating results.
Weve all had the experience of asking someone to step out of an experience and dissociate into Observer position, and heard them say, I cant do it; I still feel the feelings." From the Basic Perceptual Positions model, we could describe this as, They fell back into the experience," or They couldnt get out of the experience."
One day, as I was doing an NLP process, I noticed that as I stepped out of the experience, into the Observer position, I felt my own feelings more strongly. Clearly, I wasnt falling back into it," or even taking my feelings with me." I was feeling my feelings much more intensely when I was watching myself from the outside. I thought, Thats strange," and stepped back and forth several times, to be sure.
I began thinking, What if its not that limitations arise out of being stuck in one perceptual position? What if limitations actually arise out of our representational systems being split in different perceptual positions at the same time?" For example, as I experience an event, I could be seeing out of my own eyes (Self position); I could be feeing the feelings of the other person (Other position); and I could be hearing an internal voice making comments from the outside (Observer position). In this example, each of my three representational systems would be in a different perceptual position.
This results in a new model for what to do. The goal now becomes aligning perceptual positions. This means having all three major representational systems in the same perceptual position, at the same time.
While this sounds obvious, and commonplace, in considerable research to date, we have found no one so far who has their perceptual positions fully aligned in situations of difficulty. Although aligning perceptual positions doesnt magically turn every difficulty into a wonderful event, it does get consistent, significant shifts toward resourcefulness, and sometimes it makes the crucial difference in whether another NLP pattern works or not. Thinking about our experiences in this way brings into awareness misalignments that were not obvious to us with the old model.
One NLP Practitioner who had been through many perceptual positions exercises reported that this process finally allowed him to completely be in Self position. Before this, I felt like I was trying to get into Self position, but I couldnt stay there. I automatically moved out," he said. When he aligned his Self Position, he felt a strong physiological flushinga rush of heatthat let him know he was really in his own experience and feeling it. Another Practitioner reported having a boundaries issue" where she found herself falling into other peoples feelings. After aligning her perceptual positions, she reported that this work had made more difference for her than any other work she had done with boundaries." Others have experienced perceptual shifts as striking as regaining hearing loss, recovering peripheral vision, and improving vision.
The transcribed example that follows provides a demonstration of the alignment process.
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