NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) therapy
NLP is an in-depth toolkit of open-eyes hypnosis methods with lots of unique plusses, including a creative set of techniques, creative development of open-eyes hypnosis for psychotherapy, and a masterful way with words.
Strengths of NLP as a stand-alone psychotherapy
Basic to NLP are a rich storehouse of open-eyed therapeutic trance techniques which cleverly capture just how the brain works. For example, if you notice how you think of past, present and future you’ll realise you have a line outside your body that represents this. For some people past-to-future goes left to right, others right to left, up and down, through the body, around the body – many variations. NLP is works with the brightness, direction, and colour of the line, with which direction you are facing, with whether you are looking at events from now or slipped from the present to re-inhabit the past. It has many clever things to work with. It’s also masterful with words and communication techniques: “The meaning of your communication is the result you get” – think about that.
It shares with SOBT an emphasis on resources, not problems. Action-oriented, with a good balance of inner process with action. Emphasises that you are in the driving seat of your life, and that quite a few thoughts can be changed ever so quickly. At its best, uniquely precise about the micro-details of how the mind works internally – NLP has no equal for this. Many ingenious and clever techniques including the very successful “rewind” technique for phobias and trauma.
Weaknesses of NLP as a stand-alone psychotherapy
Technically, NLP is a cognitive-behavioural therapy. This means that you directly change the thoughts in your head without too much concern why you were thinking them in the first place. It is therefore effective in business settings exactly because of what I find its drawback – it can deal with things in an unemotional, cognitive way. NLP is somewhat of a movement, and can be unaware of its limitations.
“Eliminate jealousy and obsessive thoughts with this simple technique …. If anyone is going to feel jealous, they have to go through three stages. First, they have to make a picture of something they want that they havn’t got. Second, they have to see someone else having it. Third, they have to say to themselves ‘That person has it, I want it and I can’t have it.’
Whenever a picture that makes you jealous comes into your mind, immediately turn up the brightness up and up and up until it whites out. … If you repeat this process over and over again, it automates to the point where it is almost impossible to think of the image any more.”
If you are torturing yourself with shallow-rooted repetitive thought then this, like other CBT methods, can you good. – indeed one I use. But it doesn’t begin to heal the emotional roots of true jealousy and for this – again like many forms of CBT – it is only a sticking plaster.
NLP is an excellent therapeutic toolkit. As a stand-alone form of counselling, it’s somewhere between incomplete and shallow.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. ”
– Albert Einstein