Steve Andreas > Articles > Kinesthetic Swish

Introduction

In their recent Anchor Point article (September 1998, pp. 33-37), Michael Hall and Debra Lederer present a procedure which they call “The Kinesthetic Swish Pattern.”

I am sure that the pattern they present is useful to clients, since it includes the following elements or patterns:

1. “At least” four spatial anchors (“as many as six to ten,” including two different dissociated meta-positions which are used repeatedly).
2. Full elicitation of a specific problem state and stabilizing the kinesthetic response with touch anchors.
3. Elicitation of the visual, auditory tonal and digital cues (but not the kinesthetic cues!) for the problem state.
4. Overlapping from the localized kinesthetic response to a visual and auditory representation of the response.
5. Acceptance, validation, and thanking of the part responsible for the problem response.
6. Asking for the positive intent of the part responsible.
7. Asking for an alternative outcome (which is likely to be a meta-outcome) if the intent elicited is not “considered strongly positive.”
8. Identifying and accessing a specific resource response in all rep. systems.
9. Using submodalities to amplify the resource state.
10. Amplifying motivation by questions containing positive presuppositions.
11. Moving physically between problem state and resource state repeatedly.

Since many of those elements can bring about profound change either by themselves, or in smaller combinations, I'm sure that the entire process can produce good results. Indeed, it has so many change processes built into it, that a NLPer would have to be extraordinarily inept to fail with it.

However, by no stretch of the imagination is this process anything like the swish pattern (kinesthetic or not), and the NLP community is not served by describing it as such. In fact, this process has only a simple element of the swish pattern (chaining from the problem state to the resource state. Chaining of states occurs in many other patterns and interventions other than the swish, and in the swish the chaining is accomplished by linking analog submodalities as they change, not by moving from one space to another.

I would like to describe the basic elements of the Swish pattern as we characterized it many years ago (1, 2) in order to contrast it with the foregoing.