right: No, really. Not.
As I mentioned in my first teatime post of this year, I came to London to take practitioner training in Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). Did that, and I’m now looking forward to being able to get further training before I fly home in September.
I first heard about NLP through a friend who went on a course (as one says on this side of the Atlantic) in the early 80s. I went out and bought some books, and was impressed with the attitude and ideas behind it, but it didn’t occur to me then that I might go further down that path. I remembered to remember a few things about NLP, but forgot to remember a great deal more. About a year and a half ago I brought one of the books back out and read it with new interest. This seemed an entirely new take on how we can use our knowledge about the nervous system and language to make huge improvements in the way we think, and by extension the way we choose to feel about events in the outside world. I began to take the idea of training in this knowledge more seriously. A way of dealing with human perceptions that can in a matter of minutes cure a lifelong phobia or residual fear from a psychological trauma, or turn a smoker into a nonsmoker (and I’ve seen this happen over and over again since then) was something I had to get my hands on, and soon.
Last year Æon author John Meaney took practitioner training, and when we met up on my last visit to London, he talked with me about his experiences. Then and there I made up my mind to come back this year and go to “Jedi School,” as we call it in the family, and see what I could see. What I didn’t see was the usual rah-rah motivational talk that sends people out feeling terrific until they figure out nothing in their lives has really changed. What I did see was real change in people’s way of thinking and acting in the world, over and over and over again.
Since I took up a renewed interest in NLP I’ve encountered a certain amount of disbelief and even a bit of hostility when I’ve discussed it with some people. The dominant psychological paradigm insists that change is – must be – slow and painful. Traumas must be discussed in detail and relived over and over again. Phobias must be treated by training the phobic to tolerate greater and greater degrees of terror, or by prescribing drugs. Troubled people must spend years in therapy in order to “deal with their problems,” and statistically not that many come away from that experience materially improved. Change that is fast, painless, and permanent seems to defy all that is holy in our beliefs about the human mind, but those old beliefs – originally the teachings of a man who also told us that all dreams are wish fulfillment and that we all want to have sex with our parents – are a century out of date. Therapists who plan to see their clients once to three times and send them home with their problem sorted once and for all seem like something out of the realm of dreams, but I promise you they exist, and what they do works.
One reason it works is that your brain can most easily comprehend patterns that it perceives quickly. A wise man expained it this way: a flip-book is easily seen as a moving picture when you view the images in rapid sequence, but if someone were to hand you a piece of paper once a week with a stick figure drawn on it, you wouldn't have the same experience. Even if you knew what it was supposed to do, your brain just wouldn't get it. The same wise man compared traditional therapy to masturbating at the rate of one stroke a week. With sandpaper. Your brain also prefers pleasure to pain as a learning strategy. Go figure.
Probably the “fast phobia cure” has created the greatest amount of disbelief and derision towards NLP, but it’s also the easiest to demonstrate. The other day I watched the most arachnaphobic person I’ve ever seen (wouldn’t allow a sealed plastic spider container into the same room – though 30 feet away – when she started) smiling and giggling and quite obviously delighted while a tarantula crawled over her hands after about 20 minutes of going through a few NLP techniques to deal with her phobia. The woman who was “paralyzed” with fear at the very thought of a snake was asking “Can I hold her?” in about five minutes. Former claustrophobics crawled out of trunks they’d been shut into, grinning from ear to ear. In one afternoon I saw dozens of people set free from having constantly to arrange their lives so that they’d never be exposed to the thing they were terrified of.
As for me, I’ve always described myself as “mildly arachnaphobic,” in that I was perfectly happy to trap small spiders and put them outside, but moderately fearful of larger ones, with that fear increasing with the size of the spider. One thing I knew for sure until three days ago was that I was never going to hold a tarantula and let it walk from one of my hands to the other, over and over again, and be reluctant to give it back to the spider wrangler from the zoo when my turn was over. Not under any circumstances. Not this girl. But in that, as in many things I used to think were true, I was wrong.
I first heard about NLP through a friend who went on a course (as one says on this side of the Atlantic) in the early 80s. I went out and bought some books, and was impressed with the attitude and ideas behind it, but it didn’t occur to me then that I might go further down that path. I remembered to remember a few things about NLP, but forgot to remember a great deal more. About a year and a half ago I brought one of the books back out and read it with new interest. This seemed an entirely new take on how we can use our knowledge about the nervous system and language to make huge improvements in the way we think, and by extension the way we choose to feel about events in the outside world. I began to take the idea of training in this knowledge more seriously. A way of dealing with human perceptions that can in a matter of minutes cure a lifelong phobia or residual fear from a psychological trauma, or turn a smoker into a nonsmoker (and I’ve seen this happen over and over again since then) was something I had to get my hands on, and soon.
Last year Æon author John Meaney took practitioner training, and when we met up on my last visit to London, he talked with me about his experiences. Then and there I made up my mind to come back this year and go to “Jedi School,” as we call it in the family, and see what I could see. What I didn’t see was the usual rah-rah motivational talk that sends people out feeling terrific until they figure out nothing in their lives has really changed. What I did see was real change in people’s way of thinking and acting in the world, over and over and over again.
Since I took up a renewed interest in NLP I’ve encountered a certain amount of disbelief and even a bit of hostility when I’ve discussed it with some people. The dominant psychological paradigm insists that change is – must be – slow and painful. Traumas must be discussed in detail and relived over and over again. Phobias must be treated by training the phobic to tolerate greater and greater degrees of terror, or by prescribing drugs. Troubled people must spend years in therapy in order to “deal with their problems,” and statistically not that many come away from that experience materially improved. Change that is fast, painless, and permanent seems to defy all that is holy in our beliefs about the human mind, but those old beliefs – originally the teachings of a man who also told us that all dreams are wish fulfillment and that we all want to have sex with our parents – are a century out of date. Therapists who plan to see their clients once to three times and send them home with their problem sorted once and for all seem like something out of the realm of dreams, but I promise you they exist, and what they do works.
One reason it works is that your brain can most easily comprehend patterns that it perceives quickly. A wise man expained it this way: a flip-book is easily seen as a moving picture when you view the images in rapid sequence, but if someone were to hand you a piece of paper once a week with a stick figure drawn on it, you wouldn't have the same experience. Even if you knew what it was supposed to do, your brain just wouldn't get it. The same wise man compared traditional therapy to masturbating at the rate of one stroke a week. With sandpaper. Your brain also prefers pleasure to pain as a learning strategy. Go figure.
Probably the “fast phobia cure” has created the greatest amount of disbelief and derision towards NLP, but it’s also the easiest to demonstrate. The other day I watched the most arachnaphobic person I’ve ever seen (wouldn’t allow a sealed plastic spider container into the same room – though 30 feet away – when she started) smiling and giggling and quite obviously delighted while a tarantula crawled over her hands after about 20 minutes of going through a few NLP techniques to deal with her phobia. The woman who was “paralyzed” with fear at the very thought of a snake was asking “Can I hold her?” in about five minutes. Former claustrophobics crawled out of trunks they’d been shut into, grinning from ear to ear. In one afternoon I saw dozens of people set free from having constantly to arrange their lives so that they’d never be exposed to the thing they were terrified of.
As for me, I’ve always described myself as “mildly arachnaphobic,” in that I was perfectly happy to trap small spiders and put them outside, but moderately fearful of larger ones, with that fear increasing with the size of the spider. One thing I knew for sure until three days ago was that I was never going to hold a tarantula and let it walk from one of my hands to the other, over and over again, and be reluctant to give it back to the spider wrangler from the zoo when my turn was over. Not under any circumstances. Not this girl. But in that, as in many things I used to think were true, I was wrong.
So there's my experience, or a very small slice of it, and you may do with it what you will. The usual travelogue will resume with the next posting.
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