But the engineer went silent and walked upstream. He realized he was trying to solve the problem at the 'effect' level. He stopped looking at the cracks. He looked at the source of the pressure. Upstream, a boulder had blocked the main drainage valve.
A Gordon metaphor (not a generic story) would go like this: "There was a famous hydrodynamics engineer who was asked to fix a leak in a massive dam. Every time he patched one crack, the pressure forced water into a new crack. The villagers panicked and blamed the engineer. david gordon therapeutic metaphors pdf
If you cannot find a free PDF, respect the intellectual property. Purchase the 2012 edition from Meta Publications or request it at your university library. The few dollars spent are negligible compared to the decades of clinical wisdom you will gain. But the engineer went silent and walked upstream
This article explores the genius of David Gordon’s methodology, why his 1978 book Therapeutic Metaphors remains a cult classic, and how you can ethically locate and utilize this knowledge. Before the rise of brief therapy and solution-focused approaches, David Gordon was a student of the co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder. While Bandler and Grinder focused on the structure of subjective experience (leading to classics like The Structure of Magic ), Gordon took a specific interest in language patterns. He looked at the source of the pressure