Hey Moonfrog1. I don't have time to respond to you in a lot of detail, but here's a few relevant excerpts from this thread in the Laboratory forum from a while back.
I’ve recently been asked to have an informal chat with representatives from the Constabulary’s Occupational Health department about the benefits of NLP. My point of contact framed what was expected of me via email: he’s interested in peer-reviewed research papers on NLP, how my training was researched and warned me that some of the people I’d be talking with were “non-believers.”
I’m not convinced I’m a believer in NLP myself. I’m a believer in my own abilities first and foremost: being a believer in NLP would seem to be like believing that the quality of a spade made a good gardener. There’s a marked difference in between practitioners who use the techniques and those who can make them work, and there’s all sorts of reasons as to why that might be. Knowing what to use and when, how to use it and with what, with subtlety and rapport, warmth and caring… you can’t learn love and wisdom by modelling them. I’m not sure you can learn them at all.
I also know that the pioneers of NLP have a lot to answer for. They chased the dollar and the business market and made some hugely arrogant claims that pissed off a lot of people. If rapport and pacing are as important as they say they are then you have to wonder about their motivations when it came to antagonising the establishment. Enthusiasm for your discoveries is one things, marketing speech quite another. So I imagine I’ll have to address some of these kinds of concerns when I meet with OH.
However, I have a few concerns about how the NLP model seems to directly contradict the way in which usual psychological tests are conducted. Bear in mind here that I have no psychology degree, I’m not well versed in how tests and experiments are conducted, and so a lot of my theorising is based on common sense and best guesses. Please correct any assumptions on my part: learning is the entire reason I’ve started this thread.
Firstly, NLP is a discipline and an ontology without borders. Many advocates stress that it is a model “about” models, and this can border on appropriation: whenever something is modelled by NLP it becomes NLP, because the model used to critique informs all observations made about the model being critiques. I talked with Suzi Smith about her experience of practitioners modelling shamanism – it’s therefore possible to practise a form of shamanic technique under the name NLP.
Combine this with one of the central tenets of NLP, that practitioners are interested in “what works” as opposed to “what is true.” On my training Dilts went as far as encouraging us to riff on the techniques we were being taught, and that if we knew things from disciplines outside of NLP we should use it. I like that: that Robert Dilts is wise enough to distinguish between NLP and non-NLP, rather than state that the primary model that a person uses by necessity co-opts all other ideas and techniques into it. Otherwise NLP would seem to be vampiric, ripping ideas from other models out of context.
However, the presupposition that “what works” is what’s important goes against what I understand to be the typical scientific method of experimentation that requires a technique to be isolated in order to be tested. For me there is no such thing as a typical intervention, and I wouldn’t presume to be such a virtuoso that I’d tie both arms behind my back and run an intervention just using eye-accessing techniques. When I’m working with people I may well use in excess of ten to fifteen discreet NLP techniques. Or I may use no NLP whatsoever. What’s important is helping the clients to bring about the changes they want. My pet theories and my ego aren’t as important as doing what’s right for them, and that requires constantly relating to the person, as well as a lot of love and wisdom. One has to build as thorough an understanding of the person as possible using whatever techniques or observational skills you have at your disposal, and be constantly flexible enough to know when to do the unprecedented. All the best therapists have to stretch themselves beyond what they know whenever they encounter a new client, because they don’t know that client. Milton Erickson knew this very well.
So for me the whole concept of isolating techniques from within NLP goes against testing NLP as a whole. And herein lies a problem. Because in a test of the meta-model you can’t easily distinguish between the efficacy of that technique from the fact that the practitioner might be matching non-verbal cues and building a rapport with the person’s breathing. How do you get rid of these variables? And how is it possible to test the entirety of NLP? I’m beginning to suspect that you can only test the hit-rate of specific practitioners, rather than the model they’re using. More of that later, for now I’ll summarise by saying that isolating techniques involves turning NLP into something that it isn’t, regardless of how relatively easy it is to isolate specifics in the first place.
Secondly, any test has to have a concrete aim. You can’t run an experiment without knowing what you’re testing. This creates two further problems. NLP is about pacing the client in their model of the world. The first thing you’d do if you were working with someone is find out what they want and work in their terms. Let’s hypothesise that the test is “How you can use NLP to cure depression.” First of all any decent practitioner would ask what the client wants, and would get them to frame it in the positive. It’s very hard to give someone “not-depression,” it’s a vague objective to the point of being useless. The positive expression of this objective might be “health,” “happiness,” “a sense of well-being,” “wholeness:” all things that are object-oriented and involve positive goals that would necessitate the curing of their depression in the process, because a state of general happiness and wholeness cannot exist with a state of general depression within the same person at the same time. Therefore you change the frame of the experiment and work towards the client’s positive aims from the outset because the original objective was logically ill-formed by the criteria that is true to NLP. Again, you have to disregard elements of the NLP criteria in order to test it by the experiment’s criteria. The practitioner would prefer to work towards what the client wants in a way that is achievable rather than try to force themselves into a shape permissible by the experimenter’s wishes.
Thirdly, and taking further the above example of depression, any practitioner worth their salt would want to re-attach the client back to their experience rather than the story they’ve told themselves about their experience. This involves asking them exactly how they experience their depression – what tells them they’re depressed? How do they know? In other words, you elicit the symptoms and separate them back out from the diagnosis. Suddenly you’re no longer working with depression. The client’s issues become about a general lack of energy, apathy, feeling useless or hopeless, unable to motivate themselves. Is depression the client’s word for their experience, or is it the doctor’s? What changed when they started calling their experience “depression?” I’m interested in whether the diagnosis helps create the condition that it describes, and whether a problem oriented approach simply perpetuates the problem rather than moving the individual towards what they want. Here again, by re-attaching the person to their actual experience and not abstract descriptions or value judgements about their experience we change the frame of the experiment: it’s no longer about depression. How does diagnosis fit in with the presupposition, “no-one is wrong or broken?” That “we’re doing the best we know how to do, and if we knew better we’d do better?”
I’m increasingly feeling that I don’t necessarily want to sell NLP at the meeting, because I think that it’s only one full person who can help heal another person. You can’t just be a bag of techniques. You have to be able to extend yourself past your limits and work in new ways for the individual. There’s no substitute for love and wisdom, which explains why some therapists are successful and others aren’t.
and
My definition of NLP was pretty much drawn from Robert Dilt’s rather good website (check out the Encyclopaedia, it’s a fantastic resource). I went into a little exposition on the way NLP suggests that we form our conceptions or models of the world by generalising, deleting and distorting information that is taken in through our five senses. Because of my own particular slant on NLP I spoke about physiology, making the point that we don’t experience the world, we experience the effect that the world has on our bodies, and I also went into a little detail about how experience is coded into posture, boy language, muscle stresses and breathing. So the first section was essentially establishing that human beings are incapable of being anything other than subjective.
I then went on to break down NLP, that it’s not monolithic and that there are many different takes on the ideas, often with different names. I spoke about the major influences behind Bandler, Grinder, Dilts and DeLozier’s thinking, about how they drew from Alfred Korzybski, Gregory Bateson, Noam Chomsky, Virginia Satir, Ivan Pavlov, Milton Erickson, Ernst Haeckel and Fritz Perls (amongst many others). The idea was to contextualise it, something that is hugely missing from a lot of NLP writing and presentation. NLP is often portrayed as new and revolutionary when a huge amount of it is very well established throughout the last hundred years. With this existing material NLP at best took the ideas further and suggested innovative uses, most frequently finessed it and made it easy to learn, and at worst appropriated it and simply rebranded it.
I made all my reservations clear throughout, particularly concerning how access to NLP training is dictated by the size of your wallet and how ethics and best practise are modelled by the trainers but not specifically taught. So many NLPers are virtual automatons possessed by the jargon, refusing to see any flaws, and people rightly find that mentality disturbing and cult-like.
Having defined and contextualised NLP I then gave some examples. I chose specific examples for a very good reason, specifically the wonderful tale of Milton Erickson treating a patient with a condition nicknamed word salad and examples from my experience of working with a girl who was phobic of work (always raises a chuckle, but she was actually terrified of work and would sabotage herself at every turn to avoid getting or keeping a job. The actual work wasn’t the issue – she recently got a first in her degree with the highest mark in the history of her course, achieved through an obsessive amount of late nights/early starts and a keen eye for detail – it was being employed that triggered the phobia).
These examples were chosen as a platform to talk about how verifiable NLP is in terms of clinical trials. I made the point that psychological research and therapy have two extremely different goals. The former seeks to establish broad laws of how people work, the latter is interested in helping and healing one specific person. In effect the therapist has to become as fully conversant as possible with that persons world model in order to make a difference, and reinvent their approach for every person they encounter. The structures and sub-models of NLP are not attempts at describing truth: they are suggested as useful models to try out, to act as if they were true, to be utilised, discarded or adapted in the field. Because essentially NLP was designed by people in the field for people in the field. It wasn’t created with the laboratory in mind.
I spoke a little bit about how clinical tests are conducted, and then went back to the example of Dr Erickson with the patient who had word salad. I asked them what specifically could be proved from that encounter? Erickson effectively had to learn a brand new grammar for English, which involved unlearning how he was used to speaking. I’d say his methods were the equivalent of learning a foreign language for the purpose of speaking to its sole native speaker, like learning French if there were only one other person who spoke it in the world. In other words Erickson’s approach was almost inconceivably imaginative, compassionate, resourceful and kind. And successful, let’s not forget. But what can be proved? How many other people have word salad? We have no idea whether this method, invented for one man, would work on another person. All we can really say is that Erickson and this particular patient worked together for the healing of the latter, and that what they did was successful. Erickson’s presuppositions and beliefs were hugely important in what was done, but ultimately there’s not a great deal you could say was provable about this case.
Then there was my own example of the work-phobia. I started by running a standard NLP-phobia technique, which was successful in the short term and enabled her to painlessly maintain a summer job. However a few months later she came back, and it was pretty clear that she needed something else. The fear was returning, specifically surrounding the end of her course and the idea of getting a full time job. Now that’s a scary thing for anyone, but in the context of the phobia I did a little more digging. With her in a light trance I got her to verbalise what she believed about work, and then track back in her experience to where those beliefs originally came from. The answer was immediate and formed the key to the whole pattern: both her parents were thoroughly stuck and institutionalised into jobs they hated and had given up on their dreams and freedom. It was a powerful learning experience. The girl was hugely free-spirited and thought that by going into employment a part of her would have to die, because that was the example her parents set (in fact her mother had literally said, “You may be carefree now, but just you wait ‘til you get a job. You’ll be in for a shock!”. She was terrified by what she perceived would be the end of her freedom and the loss of her dreams, that her very sense of self would be destroyed. Having found this out the work went onto another footing altogether, the phobia cure technique that originally seemed most appropriate was discarded in favour of totally improvised methods. She’s now finished her course with the aforementioned grades and is enthusiastically job hunting, something previously unheard of for her.
What does this illustrate? You can run a clinical trial on the truth of the Phobia cure technique and it will show that it doesn’t always work. This is because that technique might not be the best means of curing a phobia in individual cases. Ian McDermott uses an example of a woman who wanted to give up smoking. She started smoking in her late forties when her beloved best friend died of lung cancer. She smoked to make herself feel as though her friend were still around. McDermott used a bereavement technique followed by an addiction technique in order to help her give up. Clearly just using the addiction technique would not have been successful in this instance. Flexibility is the key.
Objection-wise things were pretty straightforward. One person asked whether NLP can hurt people, to which I gave the analogy of whether a spade can be used to hurt someone. Of course it can, but that’s at the will of the person using it, not an intrinsic property of the tool. The same person asked what’s to stop someone setting themselves up as a practitioner with practically no training, in effect what quality controls are in place to stop people who are dangerous or quacks. I couldn’t quite believe my response to that, it was totally unprepared and left my mouth before I’d had a chance to engage my filters: I asked her how successful the established safeguards were when it came to Harold Shipman.
Heh. I wish I’d had everyone’s faces on camera at that point, it was like I’d fired a gun in the room. In retrospect it was a cheap shot, but in my defence it wasn’t like I’d rehearsed it in case I needed it. It just kinda came out.
I haven't re-read those excerpts in a while so I don't know if they're representative of my current best ideas on the subject, but I hope that helps a little when it comes to the cultishness and quackery of many NLP practitioners. NLP isn't one thing, it's a huge mess of stuff and keeps cropping up in different forms all over the place.
In one of those quotes I mention Robert Dilts' magnificent Encyclopedia of NLP, which can be found here for free in its entirety. Dilts is the bomb, he's a deeply good and wise man who I loved a lot when he taught us. If you're going to turn to any decent practitioner for quality stuff on NLP you can do no better.
Maybe someone else can help out and compile some of the topics we've already had on this... if they haven't done it by the time I return to the thread then I'll work something out. |
