There is a moment in certain kinds of inner work when two things connect that have absolutely no business being connected.
A participant in a recent session came in carrying a year-long conflict with her sister: passive aggression, a major outburst, months of silence, and an upcoming family gathering she was already dreading. We spent the first part of the session working through the pattern — what the behaviour was, what it felt like, what it was activating in her.
And then we did something that looks, from the outside, quite strange. We chunked up. We moved away from the sister entirely and started asking a different question in a completely different area of her life.
By the end, she was talking about her business finances.
Four minutes later, the energy around the sister situation had changed. She described feeling lighter. She knew exactly what she was going to say and how she was going to say it. The charge that had been sitting in her chest for months had shifted.
Her words: “I would never have linked those two things.”
That is chunking up. And that is how it works.
What Chunking Up Actually Is
Chunking up is a technique from linguistics and NLP that moves thinking from the specific to the abstract. It works by repeatedly asking one question: what is this an example of?
Each time you ask it, you move one level higher. You move away from the particular incident, the specific behaviour, the named person, and toward the underlying dynamic that behaviour represents. The specifics are the bottom of the ladder. The abstract is the top. Chunking up is the process of climbing.
This matters because of a consistent feature of the way human beings carry unresolved patterns: the level at which the disturbance appears is almost never the level at which it lives. The pattern you are carrying shows up in one context. It is running in another. These two contexts can look completely unrelated at the surface level and be identical at the level of their underlying structure.
Your sister’s anger and your business finances have nothing to do with each other at the level of events. At the level of the dynamic they represent — in this case, the experience of being unsupported, of having to manage alone, of not being allowed to need help without something going wrong — they are expressions of precisely the same pattern.
Chunking up finds that connection. It works almost every time.
The Step-by-Step Process
Start with the specific behaviour that is bothering you. Not a general description — a concrete, named thing. Not “she’s difficult” but “she phoned me and shouted at me and called me selfish.” Not “he never listens” but “he turned away while I was mid-sentence and picked up his phone.”
Then ask: what is this behaviour an example of?
Don’t overthink the answer. Go with whatever comes first. If what comes first feels too close to the original behaviour — too specific, too descriptive — that is fine. Ask the question again of whatever just arrived.
Keep going. You are looking for the moment when the abstraction starts to feel personally resonant — when the answer is not just a description of the other person’s behaviour but something that has a quality of recognition about it. A slight internal shift. A thought that arrives about a completely different area of your life. That is the signal that you’ve reached the level where the pattern lives in you.
From there, the question changes: where in my life am I experiencing this?
The answer will almost always be somewhere you didn’t expect. That is not a coincidence. It is the mechanism.
Once you’ve identified where in your own life the pattern is running, the final question is practical: what is one specific action I could take that would address it at that level?
Not a general intention. Not a resolution. One concrete action, taken in that specific area of your life.
In the session I described, that action was straightforward: the participant stopped avoiding her business finances, raised some overdue invoices, and had a conversation she had been putting off. Four minutes of work, in a completely unrelated domain.
And the sister situation shifted.
Why the Specific Behaviour Is Never the Level to Work At
There is a version of this that most people try first, and it rarely works. That version is: focus on the behaviour, understand the behaviour, respond to the behaviour. Explain it, confront it, set a limit around it, try to change it. All of these responses are focused at the level of the specific incident.
They are not useless. Setting limits around unacceptable behaviour is important, and we will come to that. But they do not shift the underlying dynamic. Because the underlying dynamic is not in the other person. It is in the pattern your reaction to them is revealing.
When you address the pattern at the level it is actually running — in a completely different area of your life, at the level of abstraction where it lives — the outer situation changes without your having to engineer the change directly. Not always, and not instantly. But with a consistency that should make anyone who has not seen it working up close genuinely curious.
The reason is straightforward: what you were experiencing as a conflict with another person was, at a deeper level, information about yourself. Once you’ve received and acted on that information, the signal stops firing. And when the signal stops firing in you, the dynamic between you and the other person changes.
How Far Up You Can Take It
One of the properties of chunking up is that you can go as high as you like. Every chain of abstraction, if you keep asking the question, eventually arrives somewhere close to the same place: source, wholeness, connection, being.
This is not a spiritual claim. It is a structural observation: at a high enough level of abstraction, all patterns are expressions of the same small number of fundamental dynamics. Separation. Disconnection. The belief that you are incomplete, unworthy, or unsupported. These are the common ancestors of most of what disturbs us at the specific level.
Which means that for very entrenched patterns, or for situations where the personal connection is not immediately apparent, you can keep chunking up until the recognition arrives. It will arrive. It usually does not take as long as people expect.
And then you chunk back down. From the abstraction, you ask: what is the most specific, concrete action I could take right now, in my own life, that would address this at the level of structure rather than symptom?
That is the full movement. Up to find the level, down to find the action.
The Pattern Was Never About Them
The most important thing to understand about chunking up is not the technique itself. It is what the technique reveals about where the real work is.
Most of us spend most of our energy focused outward: on what other people are doing, why they are doing it, how to change it, how to protect ourselves from it. The outer disturbance is real. The behaviour is real. The impact is real.
But the lever is inward. The place where you have genuine agency is not in the other person’s behaviour. It is in the pattern that their behaviour is activating in you.
Chunking up is the method for finding that pattern and locating it in a domain where you can actually do something about it.
The sister situation was never really about the sister. The sister was the signal. The business finances were where the work was.
That is uncomfortable, the first time you encounter it. And then it becomes one of the most practically useful things you know.
