Having experienced first hand the way in which many people seem to voluntarily dehumanise themselves when learning NLP, I’m very happy to play Devil’s Advocate in these kind of threads. There were times on both courses that I encountered people who seemed to be a walking set of techniques rather than capable of showing heart, empathy and compassion. My friend J’s mate committed suicide when J was on the Master Practitioner course: he was told that it would be OK, because the next day they’d be doing techniques that centred on grief and loss.
J nearly floored him. I don’t think I would have been so self-restrained.
One of my posts is not the sum totality of my thinking on the subject. I believe in checks and balances: here I’m providing a counterbalance to many unchecked assumptions about what people believe about beliefs and how to change them. I’m a strong advocate of what NLP can do, when it’s used with insight and wisdom by a practitioner who recognises that NLP is not the truth. It’s the people who suddenly become the jargon (changing your mind now has to be called “reframing,” giving someone a hug now has to be called a “setting a positive anchor”), who sacrifice critique for credulity, who lose their unique identity in a mass of homogenising technique and psychobabble.
So yeah, I’ve seen an NLP practitioner sort out fifteen years of back trauma in just under an hour. I’ve also seen them project their own fear and confusion onto their clients. There is no such thing as an unassailable cure-all, there is no Unified Field Theory of body-mind therapy that will always work regardless of human fallibility.
One of the areas where NLP is underdeveloped is the area of physiology. It assumes too much control lies with the mind – the best practitioners spend time eliciting physiological states and working on breathing and posture in themselves and their clients. However, NLP doesn’t have a huge amount to teach in this field beyond techniques for observation and rapport: most practitioners are interested in quick wins, and there’s still an unhealthy amount of Cartesian dualism infecting what people are writing and training. Hence the focus on the body, on bioenergetics, on Reich and Lowen that informed my first post to this thread. There are other theologies of changework outside NLP, and referring to physical hardware when there’s an unhealthy unbalance in favour of apparent brain software is one of my ongoing ways of trying to get people interested in finding out about their bodies and how their body effectively is their identity.
Those will sound like dirty words because a huge number of people don’t like their bodies and hope to evolve beyond them. Hence 2001 and Neon Genesis Evangelion, we will become silhouettes when our bodies finally go… I’m increasingly finding that way of thinking to be massively short sighted, separating people from their basic nature, in that they are part of nature. To a large extent a lot of NLP practitioners encourage this by teaching the discipline unchecked – why rest when you can be on tip top form with a five minute Circle of Excellence and induce the state of when you were last whizzing your tits off or pilling? No balance, no recourse to the natural wisdom of just resting when you feel tired.
NLP is incomplete, and will never be completed. For example, you site the logical levels (I assume that’s what you were referring to) from the work of Bateson/Dilts. The logical levels aren’t true. They may be useful, but that’s a very different matter. And different people think different things about them: I was taught them on five strata by McDermott (Identity, Beliefs, Capabilities, Behaviour, Environment), and was later taught them on six levels by Dilts (he adds a spiritual dimension, and the fact that McDermott leaves this out says a lot about their differences in opinion, at least in terms of what it’s appropriate to teach at Practitioner level). That’s what we’re taught theoretically, but in practise I’ve added levels such as Relationships and Physiology, because the existing model didn’t have the requisite functionality for the individual I was working with.
NLP gives a method, but only a human being can help heal or change another human being. Things like love, listening, trust, relationship, honesty and courage are more important than NLP and always will be.
I don’t believe in the basis of your question, Netaungrot. There’s no such thing as an anti-virus program for anything other than the type of machine I’m typing into. I could pick any spurious technique and pretend to have de-loused myself, but all I will have done is run one technique, to which my experience will conform like plastic and give me results in accordance with that technique.
Knowing that won’t stop me from engaging in the process of self-knowledge and self change, but I won’t pretend that the process is called virus checking, with all the connotations that entails. I may still run that aforementioned hypothetical technique, but I won’t pretend that I’ve had all the little parasites and critters removed from me as a result. I know the terms “anti-virus” and “virus” are just metaphors, and as such their use will remove me from my direct experience of myself and give fuel to my ego and what it thinks it’s capable of, while recognising that my “ego” is just a metaphor for my experience, while recognising that my “experience” is just a metaphor for my experience… ad infinitum, you get the picture. Language isn’t true, you sever yourself from the world in order to describe it, and the more jargon you add the further you get.
When I run a technique on someone and they experience “nothing” as the result, I ask them “what kind of nothing are you experiencing?” If they’re flummoxed by that I’ll say something trite like, “Monks have been training for years to experience a state of nothingness, and it’s highly unlikely that you will have been able to do it by accident in the duration of a five-minute session.” What’s interesting is that people invariably are able to come up with rich and interesting discussions of the “nothing” they are experiencing, and you have no idea whether it’s because their nothing was explicable to begin with, whether they’ve just never observed their experience of “nothing” before (enough to notice that it’s not “nothing”), whether the process of them observing it has caused there to be something to observe, or whether the hypnotic presupposition that their “nothing” is of a specific type has caused their experience to shape itself into a type. I have no idea of the answer: what I do know is that therapy becomes easier from that point because out of the person’s answer a metaphorical "user interface" has been built for the purpose of ongoing work. Is it actually a "user interface?" No. It might appear to be if the tools I choose to use treat it as such, but it's only a pretty way of partially decribing the indescribable, which if you're wise is often of questionable benefit. I’ve had results in accordance with the type of tool I was using to do the work.
But the tool is never the truth. |
