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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9 comments:
I'd say my biggest lingering question about NLP at this point is how well the effect lasts: is the "miracle" effect lasting, or does it need reinforcement over time?
I tend to think a lot of these things may be related to faith healing, and I don't mean that as an insult. I mean that there may be a similar dynamic happening in which symptoms (and sometimes problems) are removed miraculously by virtue of changing the brain state of the subject.
Again, the question of how long the cure lasts is interesting to me.
My grandfather was permanently cured of a lifelong addiction to cigarettes by 30 minutes of acupuncture. He had tried many, many times to quit; he *wanted* to quit; but all his prior efforts had failed. After the acupuncture he simply had no desire to pick up a cigarette again.
So permanent results are possible, and I have a hunch that acupuncture, accupressure, and some of the other "energy" techniques may be related to NLP: Ie., they may all be acting on the same neural circuitry, albeit through different inputs.
The cure is permanent, because it flattens the "groove" that the original trauma (or the replaying of a mind-movie representing it) wrote into the individual's neural net. Memories, mind-movies, internal dialogue, and the synesthesias we make from them, are recorded sequentially, and keep recurring sequentially as we reinforce them by going over and over them in our minds. Mess with that image and sound sequence and the kinesthetic cycle that results from it, and it can never replay again with any real emotional effect. It's like taking your old 78 and running a fork over the grooves. What plays after that isn't the same song, and never will be again. I know others can describe this effect better than I, but that's the For Dummies version in a nutshell.
I've also experienced fast, painless, and permanent changes so I know this can happen. Of course back then we called it 'incentive training' to the cadence of a grim faced Drill Instructor. (And now that I think of it... it wasn't that painless.)
How very interesting you should mention this! I'd just had a conversation with a friend who had mentioned her (very positive)experience with NLP. It sounds sounds much better than my old roommate's therepy experience. (She knew what her problem was, she wanted to fix the fallout. They just wanted to talk about the problem.) Very exiting that you're getting into it!
AW you've discovered the joy of tarantula love! They're so cute and fuzzy!
thats really cool! and im happy for you gma. i didnt know what it was you were doing at first, (my dad said something to do with jedi computers...) but it sounds really cool, and maybe something i'd like to check out. do you have a link i can go to and find more out about it?
I suggest reading NLP for Dummies, which is a good basic introduction to the subject. There are many other excellent books, but that's a good one to start with. There's a ton of info on the 'Net, but not all of it is helpful, especially to a beginner. So read that book, and if you're still interested, I'll suggest something else.
HI Bridget,
Bridget Clapham here! I was on the training team at the NLP Practitioner in April with Paul, Richard and Michael.
It was lovely to meet you and I was delighted to come across your blog!
Since the NLP Practitioner I have been working with many clients of all ages and helping them achieve the change quickly and painlessly as you so rightly say!
This has included a lady who after three car crashes 15 years ago had experienced severe panic attacks on being a passenger ever since. She had only ever travelled in the back seat and had needed medication to manage her severe anxiety. She had spent thousands and thousands of pounds on therapy...none of which had helped her to achieve any change whatsoever. After one session she texted me later that evening to say that she had got into the back seat of her husbands car as usual ( habit!) then found herself telling him to wait whilst she climbed through to the front where she had sat relaxed and happily chatted to her husband for the entire journey! The pair of them haven't stopped smiling since she tells me!! We had one more session to equip her with some more tools and techniques to further build confidence for driving and she continues to enjoy the freedom that now has.
I love my work!!
Feel free to email me on synergybfc@aol.com. It will be lovely to hear from you Bridget!
Best wishes
Bridget Clapham
Of course I remember you, Bridget! You were the first assistant I met on the course, and I couldn't help feeling you'd been put there just for me. Your story about the lady with the car anxiety is similar to a few of my own about things I've been able to show people how to change. Can't wait for my Master Prac next year, and I hope I'll see you there.
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