The Vantage Point Process™: Learning to See From the Center of Yourself

By Kevin Brough, M.A., AMFT, C.Ad., CCHt — Ascend Counseling & Wellness, St. George, Utah

Back in 2013, I posted a photograph that one of our team members from The Retreat at Zion took in Zion National Park and wrote a few sentences about perspective. The idea was simple: when we come together and get centered, we have an internal “Vantage Point” where we see with all of our resources — body, heart, mind, and spirit — at the same time, and from that place we make far better choices.

That short post has quietly been the only thing on this blog about The Vantage Point Process for more than a decade. In the years since, the Vantage Point has grown from a metaphor and concept I had been using since 2005 into a teachable, repeatable practice that I use with individuals, couples, and families almost every week, and it now sits at the center of the VisionLogic Therapeutic Tools library as The Vantage Point Process™. This is the longer article that photo deserved.

Where you stand determines what you can see

Anyone who has hiked in Zion knows the feeling. Down in the canyon you are surrounded by walls, and everything feels immediate and enormous. Climb a few hundred feet, and the same canyon becomes a shape you can read — where the river bends, where the trail actually goes, how small the thing that looked overwhelming really is.

Our inner life works the same way. When we are angry, frightened, ashamed, or hurt, we are down in the canyon. The feeling fills the whole field of view, and from inside it every reaction feels justified because it is the only thing we can see. Before you can shift a thought, soften a feeling, or change a reaction, you first have to be able to observe it. You need a place to stand.

The Vantage Point is the trainable skill of stepping back — first from a situation, and then within yourself — so that you perceive from awareness instead of reacting from inside the storm. It is not detachment, and it is not pretending you don’t care. It is the difference between being the weather and being the one watching the weather.

The outer ground: three perceptual positions

The first movement of the process comes from a model developed by John Grinder and Judith DeLozier in the late 1980s and refined by Robert Dilts, called perceptual positions. The idea is that any relationship or situation can be experienced from three distinct places, and that each one gives you something the others cannot.

First position is Self — your own eyes. You are fully in your own experience: what I see, what I feel, what I want and need. The language is “I” and “me.” This is where authenticity and self-advocacy live. People who spend too little time here become chronic accommodators; they know what everyone else needs and have no idea what they need themselves.

Second position is Other — their eyes. You step into the other person’s shoes and experience the situation from their view, with their feelings and their intent. The language shifts to “you.” This is where empathy and understanding live. People who spend too little time here are often accurate about their own needs and baffled about why every relationship keeps breaking in the same place.

Third position is Observer — the wider view. You step outside the whole thing and become a calm, fair witness of the relationship as a system, watching both people at once. The language becomes “he, she, they.” This is where objectivity and perspective live. It is also the position that most of us have the least practice with.

The skill is not living in any one position. It is the pivot — the ability to move fluidly among the three so that you are not trapped in the one that happens to be loudest. In a couple’s session, I will often have partners literally change chairs as they change positions. It sounds like a gimmick until you watch someone describe their own behavior in the third person for the first time and go quiet, because they just saw it.

What the research says about stepping back

That third position has one of the strongest evidence bases of anything I do in the room.

Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan and Özlem Ayduk at UC Berkeley have spent nearly twenty years studying what they call self-distancing. In their studies, people are asked to recall a painful experience either from an immersed first-person view or from a “fly-on-the-wall” perspective, watching the event unfold as if from a distance. Across dozens of experiments, the distanced perspective reliably lowers rumination, reduces anger and emotional reactivity, and produces less physiological arousal — and, importantly, it does this without shutting down insight. People who self-distance actually make more sense of what happened, not less. Their 2017 review in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology summarizes the body of work well.

A related line of research from Kross’s lab found that something as small as shifting from “Why am I so upset?” to “Why is Kevin so upset?” — talking to yourself in the third person — changes how the brain handles emotion. A 2017 study using EEG and fMRI (Moser and colleagues) found that third-person self-talk reduced markers of emotional reactivity within about a second and, unlike many regulation strategies, did not draw on the effortful cognitive-control regions of the brain. In plain terms: the observer position is not just calming; it is cheap. It does not require willpower to hold.

This is the same finding, wearing different clothes, across the therapy literature. The construct of decentering — the ability to observe your thoughts and feelings as passing mental events rather than as facts or commands — has been shown to predict outcomes in cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based approaches and to protect against depressive relapse. Fresco, Segal, Teasdale, and others have measured it repeatedly. The Vantage Point is a way of deliberately teaching decentering, with a map.

The inner ground: turning the observer inward

Here is where the VisionLogic version goes further than the original NLP model. Once you can step outside a situation, you can do the same thing inside yourself.

In the LifeScaping System, a person is organized into four domains — Body, Heart, Mind, and Spirit — and the second movement of the Vantage Point Process is to witness each of them from the observer’s seat rather than being swallowed by whichever one is shouting.

From the observer’s seat, you notice the Body: the physiology, the sensation, the breath, the tension in the jaw or the stomach. The statement is, “I notice my body — I am not only my body.”

You notice the Heart: the feelings, the longings, the relational signals that tell you whether you feel safe or threatened, wanted or dismissed. “I feel this — I am not only this feeling.”

You notice the Mind: the thoughts, the stories, the analysis, the plans, the courtroom that is already in session. “I have a thought — I am not my thought.”

And you notice the Spirit: meaning, values, conscience, and awareness itself — the seeing behind the seen. “I witness.”

What most people discover, the first time they do this carefully, is that the four domains rarely agree. The body is braced for a fight the mind has already decided is not worth having. The heart wants closeness while the mind is drafting an exit. Living from inside any one of those parts means living from a fragment. When body, heart, mind, and spirit are witnessed together — attuned, congruent, and held in one field of awareness — you see authentically, from the whole of you rather than a part of you. In VisionLogic language, this is what it means to develop Higher Consciousness. It is the state I was gesturing at in that 2013 post, and it is entirely trainable.

One skill, many rooms

One of the reasons I trust this process is that I keep finding it at the heart of therapies that were developed independently, by people who were not talking to each other.

In Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Marsha Linehan’s first mindfulness skill is Observe — noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as events passing through rather than commands to obey. Observe is the doorway to Wise Mind, the place where emotional mind and reasonable mind overlap. That is the Vantage Point in DBT clothing.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Steven Hayes describes self-as-context — the observing self that has been there through every thought and feeling you have ever had and is not any of them. ACT’s defusion techniques, like restating “I’m a failure” as “I’m having the thought that I’m a failure,” create exactly the space between you and the thought that the Vantage Point trains.

In EMDR, Francine Shapiro built the whole reprocessing protocol on dual awareness: keeping one foot safely in the present room while you observe past material “from a distance,” like watching scenery from a train window. Without that observer’s seat, reprocessing becomes reliving. The Vantage Point is that safe seat.

I do not think this convergence is a coincidence. When several evidence-based models, developed for different populations, all end up requiring the same underlying capacity, that capacity is probably worth teaching on its own — early, explicitly, and to everyone.

The move, in one breath

In practice the whole process compresses to four beats that a client can learn in a session and run on their own in the parking lot afterward:

Name it. “I’m flooded.” “I’m about to shut down.” “This is the old story.” Naming the state is the first act of not being it.

Step to the observer seat. Shift to third position. See yourself in the situation from a few feet back — the fly on the wall, or the person on the rim of the canyon looking down.

See the parts at work. From there, check the four domains. What is the body doing? What does the heart actually want? What story is the mind running? What do my values say matters here?

Choose from the center. Now, and only now, decide what to do. Choices made from the Vantage Point are slower by a second or two and better by a wide margin.

Clients tell me the strangest thing about this practice is how ordinary it becomes. After a few weeks it stops being a technique and starts being a place they know how to get to — a spot on the trail they can find in the dark.

A place to start

If you want to try it, the psychoeducation handout that accompanies this article lays the whole process out on one page, and the guided interactive version walks you through it step by step. Both are free for personal, educational, and clinical use with attribution at visionlogic.org/vantage-point.

And if you are in the canyon right now — angry, frightened, stuck, exhausted — the invitation is the same one that photograph offered thirteen years ago. You do not have to fix the view from where you are standing. You just have to climb a little, and look again.

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The Vantage Point Process™ is an original VisionLogic framework that synthesizes perceptual-position work (Grinder & DeLozier, 1987; Dilts), self-distancing research (Kross & Ayduk), the observing self of ACT (Hayes), Wise Mind in DBT (Linehan), and dual awareness in EMDR (Shapiro). It is offered for education, not diagnosis. If you are struggling, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional, or call or text 988 in the United States.

Kevin Brough is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at Ascend Counseling & Wellness in St. George, Utah, and the founder of VisionLogic Therapeutic Tools and the LifeScaping System.

Selected references

Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2010). From a distance: Implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 809–829.

Bernstein, A., Hadash, Y., Lichtash, Y., Tanay, G., Shepherd, K., & Fresco, D. M. (2015). Decentering and related constructs: A critical review and metacognitive processes model. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 599–617.

Dilts, R., & DeLozier, J. (2000). Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding. NLP University Press.

Fresco, D. M., Moore, M. T., van Dulmen, M. H. M., Segal, Z. V., Ma, S. H., Teasdale, J. D., & Williams, J. M. G. (2007). Initial psychometric properties of the Experiences Questionnaire: Validation of a self-report measure of decentering. Behavior Therapy, 38(3), 234–246.

Grinder, J., & DeLozier, J. (1987). Turtles All the Way Down: Prerequisites to Personal Genius. Grinder & Associates.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Kross, E., & Ayduk, Ö. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81–136.

Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, Ö. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., Katz, B., Moran, T. P., Guevarra, D., Shablack, H., Ayduk, Ö., Jonides, J., Berman, M. G., & Kross, E. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7, 4519.

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.