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A few quick responses to doctorbeck’s post on CBT and NLP. I’ve never trained in CBT and only know a little about it so I can’t compare the two particularly well. In the main I agree that it’s probably not a like-for-like comparison, but probably for quite different reasons.

I am a master NLP practitioner having been trained by some of the people who have been involved with it since its inception, and I also engaged in a fair old bit of research to give a presentation to Hampshire Constabulary’s Occupational Health department on the uniquely slippery nature of this skill and idea set. That included talking about its colourful reputation and history of non-engagement and questionable results with the testing process. I’d really recommend reading my topic on that presentation before reading the following.

So hopefully this will be helpful to round out some of the perspectives on NLP here:

NLP is not concerned with truth. It does not state that what it teaches is true, only potentially useful in specific contexts if used in specific ways. For example, techniques that are designed to overcome addiction will not work for everyone trying to overcome an addiction, and I would hope that anyone who has created such a technique or used it knows that and is prepared to use something else if it is not successful. Most decent practitioners know the distinction, and if they were trained as rigorously as I was then it was certainly how they were taught to operate.

So to continue using the above example no NLP practitioner worth their questionably obtained £5,000 Master Practitioner Certificate would back up a test that intended to establish the clinical utility of an addiction technique, because they would say that the technique was never true to begin with, only an idea about how one might go about operating on a person who has an addiction that may or may not apply to a specific person in the field. This is intrinsically linked to NLP presuppositions about paying attention to what the specific situation is actually like (the map is not the territory) and behavioural flexibility (if what you are doing isn’t working do something different).

In short, if the practitioner realised that working with grief reframing would be a better solution before going into an addiction technique (a real example from my training) they would do that, at which point the test would break down because it would cease to be testing the addiction technique at that point. It has been my observation that almost every NLP intervention I have conducted has used many techniques to get the job done, and some of them I didn’t even realise I was doing until afterwards. You adapt your methods and ideas to what the client needs.

You cannot isolate fragments of the NLP model in order to test them while still claiming that you are testing NLP, because to do that contradicts the NLP model and turns it into something other than NLP. In fact we were specifically encouraged in our training to use expertise we had gained from outside the training if we deemed it appropriate, and so it’s perfectly conceivable to hypothesise an NLP practitioner who was also trained in CBT using CBT if it were the best way to heal a specific person in a specific context. This is why anecdotal evidence of NLP is probably the best you’re going to find, because it advocates a total adaptation of the practitioner to the client.

To give another example of this in operation, I’ve used NLP with several individuals who termed themselves as “depressed”or “having depression.” The first thing I asked them is, “What do you want?” to which their initial answer was some variant on, “To not be depressed.” This is the first step of the intervention and would typically be the first point at which the test “Can NLP be used to assist people with depression?” would break down. In a nutshell this would be because “to not be depressed” is too vague an outcome to work towards. There is an infinite variety of “not being depressed.” It’s expressed in the negative and doesn’t give any sense of what specific type of “not being depressed” the client wants. Maybe they want peace, or to be happy, or to have more motivation, or to work on increasing their energy levels, or to feel healthier… asking, “If don’t want to be depressed, what do you want?” is one way of getting towards this. I would also invariably ask, “How do you know you’re depressed?” because I’d want to break the abstract diagnosis of “depression” into the specific symptoms that they’re actually experiencing, which in my experience gives more material to work with and breaks down some of the depression narrative they’ve constructed or in some cases bought into wholesale. This is not the same as contradicting the diagnosis or saying that all diagnosis is wrong: it’s intended to return the person to their direct lived experience in addition to the diagnosis, and typically I’ll use whatever is helpful.

At this point any test stops being about NLP as a cure to depression and starts measuring how successfully a specific client and practitioner work together to achieve goals that they collaborate in setting. In my experience almost all interventions work out like this in practise. It’s important to notice that this breakdown between the criteria of the test and the criteria of NLP happens at the first hurdle: that the first usage of the model is to reframe a problem-centred enquiry into a well-formed object-oriented approach that is in keeping with the client’s wishes. Almost invariably the first thing you do is to thoroughly critique and where necessary alter the stated desired outcome with the permission and collaboration of the patient/client.

But backing up a bit, there’s also the notion that NLP is not only a model but also a model about models. In the strictest sense NLP as a monolithic construct with its own orthodoxy does not exist. It’s a fabrication, a straw man set up by practitioners themselves when they (at best) dubiously sell it as a miracle cure and therefore understandably co-opted by those who would want to debunk. When you break it down historically it becomes apparent that certain facets of it have undergone a great deal of testing before they became part of the model. As one example, consider how classical/respondent/Pavlovian conditioning was modelled and renamed anchoring. Robert Dilts and Judith DeLoziers masterpiece Encyclodepia of Systematic NLP and NLP New Coding (found in its entirety online here) is an incomparable resource for delving into the history of the ideas and techniques that have been modelled and included with NLP. I really recommend checking it out to anyone who has an interest in this stuff, it’s fabulous and very balanced.

I guess in closing this post I’d summarise by saying that while I agree with many of the criticisms levelled at some NLP practitioners in some contexts I’ve also never found an example of a clinical test on NLP which was conducted in a way that respected the model as it was taught to me by the people who created it. From experience it seems only testable in terms of how one specific person uses it with another specific person in the specific context in which they are operating, which inevitably leads to the anecdotal as the prime source of evidence of its efficacy. It is a field without borders, without a limit on the lengths and efforts a practitioner should go to in the healing act, one that requires an extremely high standard of ethics, discipline, skill and wisdom with which to perform well. It is let down frequently in practise by money-grabbing, sloganeering, misunderstanding and poor standards of ability. But I’m not convinced that its unusual relationship with scientific methods is one of the ways it lets itself down. I think that’s just par for the course.

One more thing… I can empathise with doctorbeck’s reservations about the speed at which many practitioners operate, because I don’t always believe such speed is appropriate. Hopefully the above waffling has made the case that any decent practitioner would attempt to work at the right speed for the person or situation they were working with. I also have to balance this with my own experience dealing with somatic pains within seconds, and watching fifteen years of one man’s back injury disappear within forty-five minutes, an improvement that was confirmed by doctors between modules. The speed at which one should work is a challenging component to judge wisely, but I’m not convinced that quick interventions should be resisted just because they’re… well, quick.

I’d be really interested in a discussion of how CBT and NLP would be mixed and used together.