Saving...Neuro-Linguistic Programming
(Excerted from Wikipedia)
NLP is an effective and rapid form of psychological therapy which helps clients overcome learned limitations. NLP emphasizes well-being and healthy functioning.
In contrast to mainstream psychotherapy, NLP does not concentrate on diagnosis, treatment and assessment of mental and behavioral disorders. Instead, it focuses on helping clients to overcome their own self-perceived, or subjective, problems. It seeks to do this while respecting their own capabilities and wisdom to choose additional goals for the intervention as they learn more about their problems, and to modify and specify those goals further as a result of extended interaction with a therapist.
The two main therapeutic uses of NLP are use as an adjunct by therapists practicing in other therapeutic disciplines, or as a specific therapy called Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy.
While the main goals of Neuro-linguistic programming are therapeutic, the patterns have also been adapted for use outside of psychotherapy for interpersonal communications and persuasion including business communication, management training, sales, sports, and interpersonal influence.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a controversial approach to psychotherapy and organizational change based on “a model of interpersonal communication concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behavior and the subjective experiences (i.e. patterns of thought) underlying them” and “a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behaviour”.
The co-founders, Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, coined the title to denote their belief in a connection between neurological processes (‘neuro’), language (‘linguistic’) and behavioral patterns that have been learned through experience (‘programming’) and that can be organised to achieve specific goals in life.
NLP is the ‘science of excellence’ and was created from studing or ‘modeling’ how successful or outstanding people in different fields obtain their results. These skills can be learned by anyone to improve their effectiveness both personally and professionally.
NLP has greatly influenced management training, life coaching and the self-help industry.
Some History:
NLP originated when Richard Bandler, a student at University of California, Santa Cruz, was listening to and selecting portions of taped therapy sessions of the late Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls as a project for Robert Spitzer. Bandler believed he recognized particular word and sentence structures which facilitated the acceptance of Perls’ therapeutic suggestions. Bandler took this idea to one of his university lecturers, John Grinder, a linguist. Together they studied Perls’ via tape and observed a second therapist Virginia Satir to produce what they termed the meta model, a model for gathering information and challenging a client’s language and underlying thinking.
The meta model was presented in 1975 in two-volumes, The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy and The Structure of Magic II: A Book About Communication and Change, in which they expressed their belief that the therapeutic “magic” as performed in therapy by Perls and Satir, and by performers in any complex human activity, had structure that could be learned by others given the appropriate models. They believed that implicit in the behaviour of Perls and Satir was the ability to challenge distortion, generalization and deletion in a client’s language.
Challenging linguistic distortions, specifying generalizations, and recovering of deleted information in the client utterances, the surface structure (what they said), was supposed to yield a more complete representation of the underlying deep structure(what they mean), and to have therapeutic benefit. ‘The map is not the territory’.
Bateson introduced the pair to Milton Erickson who became their third model. Erickson also wrote a preface to Bandler and Grinder’s two-volume book series based their observations of Erickson working with clients, Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Volumes I & II.
These volumes also focused on the language patterns and some non-verbal patterns that Bandler and Grinder believed they observed in Erickson. While the meta model is intentionally specific, the Milton model was described as “artfully vague” and metaphoric; the inverse of the meta model. It was used in combination with the meta model as a softener, to induce trance, and to deliver indirect therapeutic suggestion. In addition to the first two models, Bandler, Grinder and a group of students who joined them during the early period of development of NLP, proposed other models and techniques, such as anchoring, reframing, submodalities, perceptual positions, and representational systems.
In the early 1980s, NLP was hailed as an important advance in psychotherapy and counseling, and attracted some interest in counseling research and clinical psychology.
Despite the NLP community’s being splintered, most NLP material acknowledges the early work of co-founders Bandler and Grinder, and also the development group that surrounded them in the 1970s.
In Europe, the European NLP therapy association has been promoting its training in line with European therapy standards.
In 2001, an off-shoot application of NLP, neuro-linguistic psychotherapy, was recognized by United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy as an experimental constructivist form of psychotherapy.
Today, NLP is a lucrative industry, and many variants of the practice are found in seminars, workshops, books and audio programs in the form of exercises and principles intended to influence behavioral and emotional change in self and others. There is great variation in the depth and breadth of training and standards of practitioners, and some disagreement between those in the field about which patterns are, or are not, “NLP”.
If the assertions made by proponents of NLP about representational systems and their behavioural manifestations are correct, then its founders have made remarkable discoveries about the human mind and brain, which would have important implications for human psychology, particularly cognitive science and neuropsychology.
