For the Master Programmer training, my teachers were

Since I was living in Berkeley at the time, I could commute (by car pool) to the training. It also meant that in between training segments, I could attend study groups with some of my fellow students. Study groups were scheduled about once a week, but I went to two, and sometimes three, different ones each week. In study groups we had a chance to practice the techniques we were learning in the training. This was also our opportunity to get help in making some of the personal changes we wanted, either by having fellow students do work on us or, occasionally, getting help from the assistant trainer who led the study group.

One evening, the East Bay study group met at the apartment of Robert McDonald, who at that time was one of my fellow students. Robert had been a practicing gestalt therapist for some time, and since there was no assistant present that evening, he led the group. He asked if anyone would like to work on a problem, and since everyone else seemed shy about speaking up, I said that I would like to stop getting so deeply depressed about really trivial things that happened to me.

He had me go through one of these incidents, asking me very detailed questions about the things I said to myself at the time, and the images that went through my mind. Eventually, we seemed to have established a pattern -- my strategy for making myself depressed. Robert didn't try to teach me any way of changing that pattern. Like so many of the exercises we did during the Practitioner training (to my great frustration) the point was simply to learn how to gather information from a subject, not how to make changes.

This issue of depression was one I often chose to work on during the training. Since so many people did so many different things with me, it's hard to say with certainty what was responsible for the changes I underwent. But I've always been convinced that it was that session with Robert McDonald, even though he didn't do any specific intervention with me, that taught me how to stop making myself depressed the way I used to. For several years after the training, in fact, I used to tell myself, "I never get depressed anymore." And in fact, I almost never have that really acute emotional pain that used to be so common in my life. However I no longer think it's completely accurate to say that I never suffer from depression.

I don't think I would have learned nearly as much from the training if I had done the whole thing in one month during the summer, or that it would have had the enormous impact on my life that it did. Between the study groups and just friends in Berkeley who were willing to let me practice on them (especially after they found out how non-threatening what I was doing was, and how effective), I managed to get a hell of a lot of practice on the skills I was learning.

For another thing, I managed to do a lot of other little extra short workshops during that year. I did the NLP Ten-day Hypnosis course in Sausalito (taught by Michael Lebeau) in addition to the Practitioner and Master Practitioner training. I had already done a short (four weekend) hypnosis/NLP course in Berkeley from Patrick Woods and Francis Dreher, who had been students of Steve Gilligan, among others. Furthermore, Tom Condon, Carol Erickson (one of Milton's daughters), and Steve Feinberg had an organization called The Changeworks in Berkeley at the time teaching Ericksonian hypnosis, and I took a few short courses from them. I also took a course from Mary-Beth Anderson (co-author of Phoenix, about Milton Erickson), where she took us through a detailed analysis of one of Leslie Cameron Bandler's marvelous videotapes, which at that time had just come out.

In the summer of 1992, I went to Colorado for a month to retake the Master Practitioner training from NLP Comprehensive. This time, my teachers were