The influence of Frank Farrelly and Provocative Therapy on PCW

My world changed in 2004 when I first met Frank Farrelly, the creator of Provocative Therapy. I’d heard of Provocative Therapy, but there was virtually no information on this approach aside from the original book of the same title. The few people hosting Frank did so mostly in their own countries and the original Provocative Therapy website was hopelessly out of date with trainings never current, so it was impossible to find out out when Frank was running events. Worse still , many events were not even open to the public if you could locate them. As I used to say to Frank “This is the world’s best kept secret”

To my total amazement none of the enthusiasts or hosts around Frank could see the bigger picture and Frank generally only ran events on a limited basis in Europe. The event I attended in the UK, only had 17 attendees and was not even recorded. Prior to that many European trainings did not involve getting release forms from the public, so even if they were filmed, nobody was able to view the footage. A couple of Frank enthusiasts in the UK commented “We’re no good at organization” so they had never attempted to host Frank either. This meant that the UK events were sporadic and mostly one established NLP trainer would bring Frank over for her NLP groups and that was your best chance of seeing him.

The 2004 training on the South coast changed my view of communication forever and over the four days, not only did I get to meet Andrew T Austin for the first time (we had spoken by phone and e-mailed for a few years prior to meeting up) but I found what I considered to be a way of working that far superseded everything I had studied to date, including NLP. Interestingly Richard Bandler had already in 2003 cited Frank as an influence on his own work and later when I interviewed him, spoke very highly of Frank.

Elegant simplicity

The first thing that impressed me about classic provocative therapy was that everything was conducted in a conversational manner, as if talking to an old friend. This was very different to the NLP model when often in my view there was an abundance of jargon terms. Here the exchanges seemed very natural and quite different to any “formalized therapeutic approach” where both therapist and client often take on stereotypical therapeutic roles. In provocative therapy, the exchanges are totally informal and the whole approach has an elegant simplicity about it. Even with many years of communication training including NLP, I was totally mystified about what was going on. Frank didn’t really explain a great deal of what he was doing, so it was up to audience members to elicit useful information and many didn’t know where to even start with this!

Later after I started hosting Frank from 2005, I started to get a real insight into how Frank was working and started using the PCW icon system to explain many of the positions a practitioner would adopt during a session to provoke responses from a client.

The development of PCW from Provocative Therapy

I realised by 2006 that after studying Frank’s approach in depth, I was now developing a new model that was in many ways very different to classic Provocative Therapy. Provocative Change Works included core principals of Provocative Therapy, but also included metaphorical explorations, specifically time framing sessions, elements of hypnosis, and many other ingredients. In recent years I have expanded the live training to an increasing number of countries around the world as well as running two one year online monthly trainings for USA, Europe, UK and Asia.

I’m currently looking at certifying students in PCW and my hope is that this will expand to creating trainers in PCW. I’m forever grateful to Frank Farrelly for being the spark that lit the fuse to make all this possible.