History of the Treasure Tool

The story of the Treasure Tool, which is the psychological self-help method or protocol you can use for both addressing ‘issues’, as well as gaining insight into your ‘path with heart’.

In early 1999 I did an NLP course with Jon Brenton and a small group of students. Jon himself was trained by Tad James who uses a method he (TJ) developed called TimeLine (T/L) Therapy in tandem with the NLP. The 2 methods together are most effective for goal-setting and for clearing the things that stop us getting to them, hence I consider them very important.

NLP is a suite of techniques based on an understanding of how the mind works. These techniques are great for solving problems, and we ‘bring the problems up’ by setting goals. I did the basic course and learned the methods, much of which worked fairly well for me, although I had an enormous amount of trouble with the actual goal-setting, and asking me my values stumped me greatly. Also, some things I worked on didn’t really seem to stick. However, there was so much for me to work on that it seemed to be a very moot point at the time.

Jon continued to run a group for us on a weekly basis where some 5-10 people would come and we would practice our NLP. Jon gave me enormous help with traumas and goal-setting; hours and hours of help. This is to say I needed a lot of help, and got it. It sounds a bit dramatic to say that it saved my life, but that is how it feels.

I was also trying to understand what I had been taught and how to use it, since I would have liked to have been as effective as I considered Jon to be for me and others. However, I suspected I just did not have the mind for it, in terms of speed of thinking. I also found that I was more interested in the unconscious methods rather than the conscious ones.

Jon’s method of goal-setting (from NLP) used our values as a hierarchy and we then also looked at what we actually had which were usually the complete opposite of what we wanted. Another woman in this group, Susan Oliver, along with Jon’s son Ben, spotted that repeating the opposites, as in, looking for the opposite of the 1st 2 opposites, was an interesting thing to do. She used the words ‘absolute opposites’; AO1 for the first level and AO2 for the second level. This was a breakthrough for me; the insights were so interesting and the goal-setting seemed to work better.

As the years went by, I spent a lot of time working on myself by myself. I was still ill with Chronic Fatigue, and trying to work out how on earth to keep myself afloat. There was still an awful lot wrong with me, and I was still trying to work out how to get better. I had already had a great deal of help for free but couldn’t keep doing that, and couldn’t afford to pay for help from others, so DIY was what I got to do.

Besides, it helped me relax as nothing else could, and I loved it. It is a way of ‘tracking/stalking’ myself, and I found it fascinating and absorbing, and really, it gave me hope; I knew no other way of beating this illness, and I was hunting down the ‘hidden advantages’, which Jon taught us about as part of the course. He felt strongly that getting rid of or ‘busting’ all the secondary gains would result in better health, and this has been true for me.

I eventually noticed with trying to goal-set that I was often better off starting from what I didn’t want in the absence of any idea of what I did want. It would end up as a ‘see-saw’ or a ‘dance’ as I went from one side to the other developing the concepts and building up a ‘feeling picture’.

Then from reading Byron Katie’s books, I learnt about ‘turning it around’ and started to do this to what I wanted to complain about (aka ‘judge thy neighbour’). This concept was familiar to me as the question ‘how am I that thing (that I disapprove of)?’, however Katie gives a much better ‘handle’ on it. When I combined this with the clearing timeline that Jon used, I began to find that I had done to others in a previous life exactly what I most complained about in this one. It was through these ideas and experiences that I began to formulate the Mirror Laws.

From reading about the MBTI, I began to realize that the ‘values’ questions that Jon used to start the process of ‘looking’ didn’t work that well for me, and in fact work better when tailored to the person’s MBTI category of Perceiver/Stalker or Judger/Dreamer.

I also modified the goal-setting and the T/L scripts to run together, and found that if I had done the 1st set of opposites (the AO1s) properly and thoroughly the script would ‘run’ well, and I would get a great deal out of it. The AO2 would ‘lock’ that process in, and so I trundled on. Eventually, I learned to address every single concern that crashed around in my head by using this method, and what I learned in the process is what I am writing about here. Once I had this method in place, and had practiced it over and over, and seen the results which I liked so much, it gave me more reason to trust that I could handle whatever turned up in my life. Thus, I could learn to ‘trust life’ and allow and enjoy, and there’s always more to see.

I tried to tell people about this tool but found that I could not explain it sufficiently in the face of so many ‘normal’ beliefs about Life and what it’s for. After all, most people would prefer to take no notice of these beliefs accepting them as ‘givens’ and ‘that’s how it is’. Only an idiot would question such things. Most people who knew me thought that I had had a large dose of luck.

Eventually I realized that if I wanted others to know about this tool, then I had to write about it. Hopefully, if I explain it sufficiently, people will be able to learn it and use it for themselves as they wish.