RESOLVE E-Book

Richard Bolstad

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 383

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002

Beschreibung

The RESOLVE framework provides structure to NLP's brief therapy approach to personal change. Wonderfully clear and easy to follow for all therapists wishing to help clients make fundamental life changes quickly and effectively. "A must read for any professional trainer or psychotherapist" L. Michael Hall PhD, Cognitive-behavioural psychologist, author and international trainer

Leseprobe

RESOLVE

A New Model of Therapy

Dr Richard Bolstad

Dedication

Dedicated to my late partner and lover Margot, the one person who knew all of this, and knew the importance of it, before me.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

The Author

Foreword

Chapter 1How You’ll be Able to Use This Book

The Need for Effective New Models

NLP and the Context of Psychotherapy

How Well Does NLP Work?

The RESOLVE Model

Choosing How You Use This Book

Chapter 2A User’s Manual for the Brain

The Use of Neurology

Perception is Not a Direct Process

Colouring the World

Modalities and Submodalities

Higher Levels of Analysis

Remembered and Constructed Images Use the Same Pathways as Current Images

Cross-referencing of Modalities

Sensory Accessing and Representational Cues

Research on the Eye-Movement Phenomenon

Strategies

The TOTE Model

Meta-Levels in Strategies

States that Regulate States

How Emotional States Affect the Brain

Neural Networks Are State-Dependent

The Brain and State-Dependent Strategies: A Summary

Chapter 3Choices for Change

A Range of NLP Intervention Choices

Anchoring

Installing a New Strategy

Changing Submodalities

Trancework

Parts Integration

Time-line Changes

Linguistic Reframing

Changing Interpersonal Dynamics

Changing Physiological Contexts

Tasking

Chapter 4RESOLVE

The RESOLVE Model and the Relationship of Changework

How People Change on Their Own

The RESOLVE Model

Summary: Using the RESOLVE Model

Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

The Author

Dr Richard Bolstad is a certified trainer with the International NLP Association and five other international training organisations. He has a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy and is a member of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists. His previous book, Transforming Communication, co-written with Margot Hamblett, is a required text in a number of degree-level programmes, training counsellors, health professionals and teachers. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, and he has taught the RESOLVE model to psychotherapists and counsellors around the world, including in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. His book The Structure of Personality, co-written with Bob Bodenhamer, Michael Hall and Margot Hamblett, introduces the RESOLVE model in the context of working with “Personality Disorders”.

Foreword

It is a pleasure for me to introduce this book. There are lots of books on NLP, and a good many of these are about NLP therapy. RESOLVE deals with both in a broad, insightful and in the very best sense, a cultured way. This is a book that will leave you with a deeper knowledge of NLP and therapy whether you are already familiar with the field or not. Although not written as an introduction to NLP, it is a good one in its own right.

Let’s start with the title of the book. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is about words, and to the skilled writer, words are the materials they play with, spinning threads into patterns of meaning that stay in the listener’s mind long after the book is put down.

Take the word ‘resolve’, it has at least four meanings. First, it can mean to break down into constituent parts, to separate out or analyse something. This book does that to the field of NLP and therapy. It takes the elements of NLP, separates them out, explains them and then weaves them into a model of therapy. A model in NLP terms is something that works, and this model has been developed in very testing circumstances, working with Bosnian and Kosovar survivors of a horrendous war. It is heartening for me to know that NLP has been taken to exactly the places where it is needed and can help the people in the most need of comfort, resources and peace. There can be no synthesis into a good model, unless you have first done a good analysis, and Richard has done that. And, as with any systemic synthesis, the whole is greater than the parts.

The second meaning of the word ‘resolve’ is to make a firm and final decision about something. We talk about resolving an issue in the sense of being clear of it. I believe that NLP therapy can do this. It leads to sustainable change, not a quick fix, and this realisation is an important part of this book.

Third, ‘resolve’ can be a noun meaning firmness of purpose. This is an important part of any healing. Resolve or determination on the part of the therapist to do their best. Resolve and determination on the part of the client to deal with the issue. This determination is a crucial part of healing, but is seldom taught.

Fourth, ‘resolve’ can be taken to mean ‘solve again’. In this sense I think the good therapist helps the client to find better and better solutions to the problems that life puts before them. No issue is ever completely solved, living means having to deal with problems, it means always bridging gaps between what we have and what we want. Some issues are more painful than others. I believe Freud said something to the effect that his goal was to reduce the pain of the neurotic patient to the ordinary misery of everyday life. NLP therapy helps clients in great psychological pain or dealing with the aftermath of trauma, as well as those who need to solve again the perennial problems of life: how to relate; how to be happy; without necessarily being very dissatisfied with their lot.

Clients come to the therapist with problems. We often think in terms of ‘solving’ those problems, but it seems to me that these problems can be dealt with in other ways. The way the therapist thinks about a problem will determine how they approach it and, as Richard says in this book, not all NLP techniques work with everyone, but I think it is true to say that all NLP techniques will work with someone. Part of the magic is knowing what will work with each of us. This book is particularly good at making clear the theoretical and presuppositional basis of NLP change.

Problems can be ‘solved’. Problems can also be ‘dis-solved’. Perhaps when a problem is dissolved it falls apart into its elements and disappears like sugar into water. Some problems might be ‘absolved’. This would mean that you discover it is not your problem after all, but someone else’s. What a relief! And of course a problem can be resolved. This book tells you how to do all of these.

As well as being well written and well structured the book offers a historical perspective on NLP and therapy, an element that is very necessary, but often lacking. NLP does not exist in a vacuum, it has roots and connections to other forms of therapy and this book is extremely good at making these clear, giving a sense of what NLP does, what it does not do and how it links with other approaches. The book is also well documented with research (and not only NLP research), which grounds the ideas and methods.

Finally, as Richard says, all change in the final analysis is self-change, and the therapist needs to have faith in the clients’ resources. It was wonderful to see the word ‘love’ come into a book on therapy as it does here. As this book says, there is a sense that love is necessary for healing. Rapport in its best sense is not an empty attempt to be like the client or even to understand the client. It is about caring. Clients are not a race apart. Neither are NLP therapists, they are not magicians and need not pretend to be. They are real people working with love from a grounded methodology to help the client mobilise their powers to heal. This takes work. Reading this book is a fine start.

Joseph O’Connor, NLP Master Trainer and Author May 2002

Chapter 1

How You’ll be Able to Use This Book

The Need for Effective New Models

This book is written for all those who are passionately interested in finding verifiable ways to assist human beings, as they create a life worth living. While the RESOLVE model is useful in any situation where people want to make major changes, this book emerged out of the work I did in 1998 and 1999 in the city of Sarajevo. At that time, my late partner Margot Hamblett and I were invited to teach our model of therapy to groups of psychiatrists and aid workers, who were working with Bosnian and Kosovar survivors of perhaps the worst trauma that human beings can face.

We were accustomed to teaching counsellors, health professionals and others in the comfort of a custom-designed training venue. We were used to having several weeks gradually to introduce our ways of thinking and our new techniques, from the field of NLP (or Neuro-Linguistic Programming). In Sarajevo, we worked in a hospital meeting room with shell damage still evident around the walls. We had two days, and a group of people who needed immediate and practical help. The psychiatrists themselves had lived through the terror of the war, and wanted the skills to deal with their own distress as much as with their clients. We did not speak Bosnian, and we had no personal experience of the war. We needed to be able to demonstrate that the techniques we taught were:

Backed up by research supporting their rationale and their clinical effectivenessAble to be learned quickly and applied with success in real-life conditionsIntegrated into a compassionate therapeutic relationship Compatible with therapists’ current therapeutic modalities, which ranged from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioural therapy

After only two days’ training, over three-quarters of those professionals who trained with us in Sarajevo said they now planned to use the methods we taught. For example, Dr Cerny Kulenovic described the model as “Definitely useful. We used it on ourselves and we treated our colleagues too. We got the predicted effects … We were well informed and gained very good results in the second day. A new treatment which was economical, short and successful.” Dr Mehmedika Suljic Enka agreed: “This training gives more practice in dealing with survivors of traumatic experiences or clients with phobias. Used with my own similar problem, it helped to relieve my fear, and I realised how I can help other people. I have improved my knowledge in psychiatry.”

But that was not the most important feedback we got. The most powerful experience we had in Sarajevo involved ordinary people whom we had the privilege of taking through the RESOLVE model of therapy. Let’s give you one example. A woman whom we will call Fatima began her session with Margot quite tearful, announcing in English, “I hate the war; and I hate talking about it!” She explained that she had had nightmares every night since the war, when many of her friends and family had been killed in front of her. Sounds were powerful triggers for her traumatic memories, and the sound of explosions sent her into sheer panic. The previous week someone had organised a fireworks display in Sarajevo. Rationally, she knew she was safe, but her panic put her right back in the war situation. She ran into a nearby house and hid in their basement until the display was over. Such experiences were deeply humiliating to her, and felt quite uncontrollable. After attempting unsuccessfully to explain the background of our method to her (her knowledge of English was limited), Margot simply took her straight through the model you’ll learn in this book, in this case specifically directed at healing her post-traumatic stress response. At the end of the session, Margot asked her to think of the fireworks and find out how it felt now. She laughed. Next, she invited Fatima to remember some of the worst times from the war, and check how those memories were. She gazed ahead with a shocked expression. “So how is it?” Margot asked. “Well,” she said, with a smile, “I’m seeing the pictures, and it’s as if they’re just over there, and I’m here.” The entire process had taken twenty minutes. On our return visit in 1999 Fatima reported that she had had no further panic attacks or nightmares, and had actually forgotten how seriously they once disabled her. She was delighted with the change in her life.

Like the psychiatrists in Sarajevo, you probably want to know how this is possible. But, much more, you’ll want to know how you can get these results yourself. Consider one of our trainees, a New Zealand counsellor named Jeff, who was previously trained in Gestalt and Client-Centred therapeutic modalities. It was a step away from the mainstream for Jeff to choose to study NLP, the modality that is central to the RESOLVE model. After using the RESOLVE process for some time, he agreed: “As a psychotherapist, my obligation is to help clients change in the ways they request. I know of no other psychotherapeutic tools more likely to accomplish this … Professionally, my work has just taken off. What a gift it is to be able to remove a person’s phobia, relieve a past trauma, halt an eating disorder, end a sense of abandonment, enhance self-esteem, instil a sense of purpose in someone’s life – and much more. The possibilities seem endless the better I get at using these understandings of how human beings function.”

NLP and the Context of Psychotherapy

Neuro-Linguistic Programming itself is a discipline studying how people achieve success in fields as diverse as sport, education, management and healthcare. Its original developers proposed in 1980 that NLP would provide the user with “a set of tools that will enable him or her to analyze and incorporate or modify any sequence of behavior that they may observe in another human being”. (Dilts et al., 1980, p. 3.) This set of tools involve an analysis of a human being’s internal and external communications (linguistics) and their effects (programming) on the functioning of the brain (neurology). Centrally, NLP analyses the structure and sequence of the person’s internal experiences: their internal images, sounds, self-talk, feelings, tastes and smells. The tools used in NLP are more fully described in Chapter 2. The use of these tools to analyse how someone achieves success is called in NLP “modelling”. Within that wider field, NLP-based “psychotherapy” is first and foremost the study of how highly successful change agents assist others to change. NLP was not originally created with the intention of developing a new “school” of therapy, so much as with the intention of understanding the patterns behind the work of highly successful psychotherapists. Psychotherapists studied in this way by NLP developers include:

Dr Virginia Satir (Grinder and Bandler, 1975; Andreas, 1991)Dr Milton Erickson (Bandler and Grinder, 1975)Dr Fritz Perls (Grinder and Bandler, 1976, pp. 62–96)Dr Sigmund Freud (Dilts, 1995, pp. 1–296)Dr Carl Jung (James and Woodsmall, 1988, pp. 91–109)Dr Carl Rogers (Bolstad, 1995, pp. 24–33)

These psychotherapists were often themselves very surprised with the results of NLP-based explorations of their work. Virginia Satir says:

I do something, I feel it, I see it, my gut responds to it – that is a subjective experience. When I do it with someone else, their eyes, ears, body sense these things. What Richard Bandler and John Grinder have done is to watch the process of change over a time and to distil from it the patterns of the how process … The knowledge of the process is now considerably advanced by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who can talk in a way that can be concretised and measured about the ingredients of the what that goes into making the how possible.” [Grinder and Bandler, 1975, pp. vii–viii.]

Milton Erickson MD said of NLP that “it is a much better explanation of how I work than I, myself, can give. I know what I do, but to explain how I do it is much too difficult for me.” (Bandler and Grinder, 1975, p. viii.)

Other psychotherapists, while not “modelled” by the NLP co-developers, have eagerly incorporated the insights of NLP into their own work. Dorothy Jongeward PhD, author of numerous books on Transactional Analysis, including Born to Win, says of the NLP text Influencing with Integrity, “It could well make the difference between success and failure in your personal and career relationships.” (Back cover, Laborde, 1987.) Hugh Prather, author of Notes to Myself and other books, says of the NLP book Heart of the Mind that it “contains a wealth of understanding that can help people become more fully human. It also contains the insight and basic honesty that ensures this knowledge is used wisely and compassionately.” (Back cover, Andreas and Andreas, 1989.)

Some psychotherapists have tended to see NLP as having an affinity with cognitive behavioural modalities. For example, in his review of the development of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), Albert Ellis (1989, p. 12) says that between 1975 and 1979 there was a sudden explosion in CBT and RET [Rational Emotive Therapy] literature. He adds, “So many significant texts on RET and CBT were … published that it is difficult to list even the most outstanding ones. Some of the influential ones included those by Bandler and Grinder.”

On the other hand, practitioners of more psychodynamic approaches have considered NLP an important psychodynamic method. Dale Buchanan is director of the Psychodrama Section at Saint Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, and author of numerous articles in the Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama and Sociometry. He has written an article with Donna Little studying the similarities between NLP and psychodrama. They note, “Bandler and Grinder have refined the therapeutic process. Needless to say they have miraculously packaged a process of immense value to all therapists.” (1983, 36, p. 114.)

How Well Does NLP Work?

The need for research that provides information useful to psychotherapists was emphasised in the earliest NLP writings (e.g. Bandler and Grinder, 1979, p. 6). However, it was twenty years before the field of NLP itself began to respond effectively to this need. Because much of NLP is a metadiscipline (a way of analysing and describing other disciplines), research conducted in these other disciplines will often validate NLP hypotheses. For example, while NLP has modelled (from Milton Erickson’s work) the hypnotic technique of communicating using unconscious hand signals, there is no separate research verifying this procedure and using NLP terminology. However, in the field of hypnotherapy, the technique has already been well studied (see Cheek, 1981). In this work I will consider research both from within the NLP field and from other fields when selecting therapeutic strategies.

There have been several studies of NLP use in psychotherapy published over the last ten years. For example, a study of NLP use in psychotherapy was organised by Martina Genser-Medlitsch and Peter Schütz in Vienna, Austria, in 1996. The test sample of 55 therapy clients and the control group of 60 clients on a waiting list were matched by pattern of symptoms, age, family circumstances, education level, therapy experience etc. The test group were seen by members of a group of 37 NLP master practitioners (22 men and 15 women) who used a full range of NLP techniques as described in this book (in particular in Chapter 3). Clients were assessed with a number of questionnaires before therapy, after therapy, and at six-month follow-up. The assessments checked occurrence of individual discomforts, clinical psychological symptoms, coping strategies used for stress management, locus of control (whether the people felt in control of their lives), and subjective evaluation of the therapy by the client and the therapist. Diagnoses ranged from schizo-affective and other psychotic disorders, through alcohol dependence, endogenous depressions, psychosomatic disorders and other issues to post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). These disorders were more severe initially in the test group than in the control group on all scales, and their use of psychiatric drugs was higher. On average, treatments lasted twelve sessions over a period averaging twenty weeks.

After treatment 1.9 per cent of clients who had had NLP therapy felt no different, 38.9 per cent felt better and 59.3 per cent felt considerably better. None of those treated felt worse. In the control group, meanwhile, 47.5 per cent felt no different, 29.5 per cent felt better and 6.6 per cent felt considerably better; 9.8 per cent of the controls felt worse and 4.9 per cent felt considerably worse. At six-month follow-up, 52 per cent of clients who had had therapy felt considerably better, 28 per cent felt better, 12 per cent felt there was no change, and 8 per cent felt worse. Meanwhile, the therapists rated 49 per cent of their treatments as having met objectives well, 47 per cent as having somewhat met objectives, and 4 per cent as of little or no success. The NLP practitioners then evaluated themselves with tougher criteria than their clients, well over half of whom reported feeling considerably better as a direct result of their NLP sessions.

After therapy, the clients who received NLP scored higher in their perception of themselves as in control of their lives (with a difference at 10 per cent significance level), reduced their use of drugs, used more successful coping methods to respond to stressful situations and reduced symptoms such as anxiety, aggression, paranoid thinking, social insecurity, compulsive behaviours and depression. The research showed that a small number of positive changes also occurred in the control group and could not be accounted for by the therapy, including some of the reduction in psychosomatic symptoms, social isolation and some paranoid thinking. Altogether, positive changes in 25 of 33 symptom areas (76 per cent) occurred as a result of the therapy, positive changes in three areas occurred in both groups, and no significant changes occurred in five areas.

Among the group who received therapy, there were some interesting differences. On 63.15 per cent of the symptom scales, changes were more pronounced in those under 36 years than those over 35 years old. On 40 per cent of the symptom dimensions, men improved more than women (especially in the areas of feeling more in control of life, and reducing paranoid thoughts, aggression, depression and anxiety). Clients receiving a longer duration of therapy (more than ten sessions) had more gains (especially in relief from compulsive and psychotic behaviours) at the end of therapy, but also accounted for more of the loss of success at the six-month follow-up.

A further summary of these results is available on the Internet at www.nlp.at/at/oetz. While such results are encouraging, the fact that NLP is successful in a general sense is not enough to have drawn so much attention to it. What is most often commented on by other practitioners is the speed at which NLP achieves many of its specific results. This is important because it enables a psychotherapist to incorporate brief NLP interventions into the context of their own modality.

One example of such brief interventions is the one-session NLP “trauma process” for treating PTSD and simple phobias (Bolstad and Hamblett, 2000, pp. 5–22) used by us in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dr David Muss did a pilot study on this method, with seventy members of the British West Midlands Police Force, all of whom had witnessed major disasters such as the Lockerbie air crash. Of these, nineteen qualified as having PTSD. The time between trauma and treatment varied from six weeks to ten years. All participants reported that after an average of three sessions they were completely free of intrusive memories and other PTSD symptoms. For most, one session was enough to solve the problem. Follow-up ranged from three months to two years, and all gains were sustained over that time (Muss, 1991). This kind of success is almost unprecedented in the field of psychotherapy. Even more important, it can be achieved by anyone with a basic understanding of NLP, and does not depend on the magical talents of a rare “expert”.

In Chapter 3, I will review ten basic types of NLP intervention. The trauma cure is just one example of one of these intervention types. In that chapter, I will mention some of the research about each method of intervention, and give an example of its use. I will also relate the method to techniques used in a number of other psychotherapeutic schools. This will give readers familiar with those schools more sense of how one can more fully incorporate NLP techniques into what one already does well.

The RESOLVE Model

The fourth chapter of this book is structured around the RESOLVE model, a model for understanding the steps behind the successful use of NLP-based changework. The NLP trainer Steve Andreas says (1999), “I think that someone who uses the NLP methods exceptionally well has several ways of gathering all the different skills and techniques under a single overarching framework of understanding.” In meeting this aim, the RESOLVE model has a similar function to Carkhuff and Egan’s “Developmental Models of Helping” (Carkhuff, 1973; Egan, 1975). Most models of psychotherapy propose some structuring of the session, or of the process of psychotherapy. In NLP terms, there are several key elements of this process that enable NLP “tools”, such as the trauma process, to work effectively.

The co-developers of NLP (especially Richard Bandler and Dr John Grinder) did not initially teach a framework for understanding the vast array of new patterns they revealed and developed. Dr Tad James was one of the first NLP trainers to do so. His General Model of Therapy (James, 1995) evolved out of his own modelling of Richard Bandler’s client work. My colleague Bryan Royds grouped all the NLP interventions we had studied, based on this model. Margot Hamblett and I expanded this grouping and formalised it into the RESOLVE model, which is now taught in a number of NLP training programmes round the world.

RESOLVE is an acronym for a series of steps used in NLP-based change work. As a preview, these steps are summarised here.

Resourceful state for the practitioner: NLP-based changework is centred on a person-to-person interaction between the NLP practitioner and the client. The practitioner’s ability to be confident, to be clear about their role, and to embody the basic assumptions of NLP is considered a key to their enabling the client to do so. Because the role of the NLP practitioner has certain unique requirements, I consider it misleading to refer to this role with the previous term “psychotherapist”. Increasingly, in this book, I will use the terms “practitioner”, “change agent” and “consultant” rather than “counsellor” or “psychotherapist”. This is a similar shift in terminology to that made by Robert Carkhuff (1973), who coined the term “helper”. Both Carkhuff and I are searching for terms that are more comprehensive and shift away from the medical or healing metaphor towards a model in which the practitioner assists the client to change and extend their choices.

Establish rapport: The NLP change process involves inviting the client to alter their way of responding to their life situation. This will not be successful until a sense of shared understanding, an attunement of practitioner and client, occurs. In NLP this state is known as rapport.

Specify outcome: NLP is an outcome-oriented system. Changework is focused on enabling the client to make the changes they have chosen, and the clarification of these goals is seen as an intrinsically useful process, which ensures that the client is not merely “wheelspinning”.

Open up the client’s model of the world: By model of the world, we mean the set of internal thoughts, beliefs, images and feelings that a person uses as a model or “map” for understanding the outside world and getting from A to B in it. Just as not all maps are updated and accurate, not all models of the world are equally useful. A person’s model of the world may, for example, contain the belief that “people can’t change the way they feel”. This belief may have been formed at a time when the person was very young, and may not have been updated after the discovery that (for example) some of the foods you avoided as a child are now your favourites. If someone is depressed, this old belief may seriously limit their sense of being able to change. Unless such a belief is effectively loosened, it may obstruct the process of change.

Leading: Leading is an NLP term for any intervention whereby the practitioner assists the client to change their internal experience so that they reach their outcome. The formal “techniques” of NLP, such as the one-session trauma cure (mentioned above), involve leading. Such NLP change techniques often involve apparently simple visualisations, guided relaxation processes or changes in the type of thinking the person does in response to a challenge. However, the term “NLP techniques” also encompasses making physiological (body-management) changes and practising new behaviours in daily life.

Verify change: Just as beliefs can limit a client’s willingness to enter into the change process, so they can at times prevent the person from noticing that they have changed, and fully enjoying the change. A lion that has been kept in a small cage for years learns to pace up and down the length of that cage. If it is released into a larger cage, it will tend to pace up and down the same limited area, not noticing that it could move further. In the same way, a client who has had panic attacks in public may be reluctant to go out until they have not only stopped having those attacks, but have also reassured themselves that the attacks will not happen again. In NLP we invite clients to test their success carefully, to prove to themselves that change has actually happened.

Ecological exit process: Ecology is the study of consequences; the study of what else will change if we change one thing. When we help a client to give up an addiction to alcohol, for instance, we also need to consider what other consequences this change will have. In such a case, the person may want to develop new friendships, new skills for meeting people, new ways of resolving conflicts and so on. These changes to deal with the consequences are a key to ensuring that the central change will work for the person.

For a person new to NLP, it is tempting to think of “leading” as the real NLP change process. In fact, each step of the RESOLVE model is equally significant in the achievement of change. The steps overlap and reinforce each other, forming a system that increases the chances of success dramatically.

Choosing How You Use This Book

There are three main groups of people who will benefit from this book. First, trained NLP practitioners will find that it gives a system for making sense of the vast choices available to them. I hope they will also value the background research and the links I make between NLP models and other ways of thinking about change. As NLP trainers and coaches, Margot Hamblett and I evolved this model in direct response to the questions and challenges raised by our trainees as they sought to apply NLP in real-life situations with real clients.

Second, I have written this book so that psychotherapists trained in other models can have access to more than just the “pyrotechnics” of NLP. I am a member of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists, and have a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy. My initial psychotherapy training focused on Gestalt therapy and Robert Carkhuff’s “Helping” model. When I came across NLP in 1981, I was completely sceptical about its claims of one-session “cures”, and disparaging of its lack of focus on catharsis. My own method of dealing with systems I do not believe in is to learn enough about them to refute confidently their basic assumptions. In the case of NLP, I found that the more I read, the more I began to agree with the NLP model. Finally, in 1990, I completed international certification as an NLP practitioner, and began incorporating NLP techniques into my work as a psychotherapist. The first book written by Margot and me (Communicating Caring, 1992) presented a general developmental model of helping, incorporating NLP concepts along with Gestalt, Transactional Analysis and Client-Centred models. NLP enhanced my ability to use my previous psychotherapeutic style, and offered me new choices for specific interventions. NLP will also confirm what you are already doing well, and give you new ways to understand and emphasise it.

Third, this book will also be of use to those new to the field of personal change. If you are looking for a structured, research-based model for helping yourself and others to change, you have found it. If you are searching for a way to make almost magical shifts in your experience, quickly and comfortably, NLP can show you how to go about it. I say that because I know how much my own personal and professional life has changed since learning NLP. NLP, remember, is not just a way of helping other people to fix themselves. It is the study of success. The first step in helping someone else with NLP tools is to help yourself, using the same tools. Your success becomes a “model” for their success.

That said, you’ll notice already that this book is punctuated with references, and structured as a text. There are other books, which offer a more fluent self-help introduction to NLP (e.g. Andreas and Faulkner, 1996). Of course, if you like to know the research behind what you are doing, or you’d like to learn how to help others while you help yourself, then this book will give you those extra pieces.

In any case, it is contrary to the attitude of NLP to assert that any book, or any model, has the absolute “truth”. The most fundamental assumption of NLP is that no particular model of the world, no particular “map”, is real. Some maps are more useful than others, but even the best map misses out some things and oversimplifies the real-life territory it portrays. My hope is that you will remember that as you read on here. Take what is useful to you, and leave the rest. Use the book as a reference, as a catalyst to stimulate your own thinking, and as a starting place rather than an end. NLP is only a set of tools. It is life that is sacred, not our theories about life. If you find some new ways to live your life more fully through reading this, then you made a good choice. I am passionate about NLP, because I have seen it used to change lives. But, as I frequently say to clients, NLP by itself doesn’t really “work”: you work! NLP is just a way of understanding how you work. Let’s begin by learning this way of understanding how you work.

Chapter 2

A User’s Manual for the Brain

The Use of Neurology

Increasingly, those of us working with human beings have come to terms with the fact that we are communicating with and through the human nervous system. Of course, what happens between human beings is not able to be reduced to neurology, any more than the beauty of a Rembrandt painting can be reduced to the chemistry of oil paints. However, if we want to paint like Rembrandt, a knowledge of that chemistry can be crucial. If we want to understand human communication, a knowledge of how the brain functions (neurology) will be similarly crucial. This is the starting point of the discipline called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

It was also the starting point for most of Western psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud’s declared aim was “to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles, thus making these processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.” (Freud, 1966.)

Everything we experience of the world comes to us through the neurological channels of our sensory systems. The greatest spiritual transcendence and the most tender interpersonal moments are “experienced” (transformed into internal experiences) as images (visual), sounds (auditory), body sensations (kinaesthetic), tastes (gustatory), smells (olfactory) and learned symbols such as these words (digital). Those experiences, furthermore, can be “re-membered” (put together again) by use of the same sensory information. Let’s take a simple example:

Think of a fresh lemon. Imagine one in front of you now, and feel what it feels like as you pick it up. Take a knife and cut a slice off the lemon, and hear the slight sound as the juice squirts out. Smell the lemon as you lift the slice to your mouth and take a bite of the slice. Experience the sharp taste of the fruit.

If you actually imagined doing that, your mouth is now salivating. Why? Because your brain followed your instructions and thought about, saw, heard, felt, smelled and tasted the lemon. By recalling sensory information, you re-created the entire experience of the lemon, so that your body responded to the lemon you created. Your brain treated the imaginary lemon as if it were real, and prepared saliva to digest it. Seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting are the natural “languages” of your brain. Each of them has a specialised area of the brain, which processes that sense. Another NLP term for these senses is “modalities”. When you use these modalities, you access the same neurological circuits as you use to experience a real lemon. As a result, your brain treats what you’re thinking about as “real”.

Understanding this process immediately illuminates the way in which a number of psychotherapeutic problems occur. The person with post-traumatic stress disorder uses the same process to re-create vivid and terrifying flashbacks to a traumatic event. And knowing how these brain circuits allow them to do that also shows us a number of ways to solve the problem.

Perception is Not a Direct Process

Perception is a complex process by which we interact with the information delivered from our senses. The biochemist Graham Cairns Smith points out that there are areas of the neural cortex (outer brain) that specialise in information from each of the senses (he lists the modalities as olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, auditory and visual). However, there is no direct connection between the sense organ (the retina of the eyes, for example) and the specialised brain area that handles that sense. The cortex is the outer area of the brain, and each sense has an area of cortex specialised for it. The visual cortex, for example, is at the back of the brain. A great deal of redesigning has to happen at other places, before the raw sensory data gets to areas of the cortex where we can “perceive” it.

Figure A: Specialised areas of the cortex

Consider the case of vision, for example. Impulses from the retina of the eye go first to the lateral geniculate body (see diagram below), where they interact with data from a number of other brain systems. The results are then sent on to the visual cortex, where “seeing” is organised. Only 20 per cent of the flow of information into the lateral geniculate body comes from the eyes. Most of the data that will be organised as seeing comes from areas such as the hypothalamus, a mid-brain centre, which has a key role in the creation of emotion (Maturana and Varela, 1992, p. 162). What we “see” is as much a result of the emotional state we are in as of what is in front of our eyes. In NLP terminology, this understanding is encapsulated in the statement “the map is not the territory”. The map your brain makes of the world is never the same as the real world.

Because the brain is a system with feedback loops, this process goes both ways. What we see is affected by our emotions, and it also shapes those emotions. Depression, anxiety, confusion and anger are all related to certain “maps” of the world; certain types of perceptual distortion. So are joy, excitement, understanding and love. For example, the person who is depressed often actually takes their visual memories of the day’s experiences and darkens them, creating a gloomy world. Notice what that does. Take a memory of a recent experience you enjoyed, and imagine seeing it dull and grey. Usually, this doesn’t feel as good, so make sure you change it back to full colour afterwards!

Colouring the World

To get a sense of how “creative” the perception of sensory information is, consider the example of colour vision. Tiny cells in the retina of the eye, called rods and cones, actually receive the first visual information from the outside world. There are three types of “cone”, each sensitive to light at particular places on the spectrum (the rainbow of colours we can see, ranging from violet through blue, green, yellow and orange to red). When a cone receives light from a part of the spectrum it is sensitive to, it sends a message to the brain. The cone does not know exactly which “colour” it just saw: it knows only whether the light was within its range. The first type of cone picks up light at wavelengths from violet to blue green, and is most sensitive to light that is violet. The second type picks up light from violet to yellow, and is most sensitive at green. The third type picks up light from violet to red, and is most sensitive to yellow. The most overlap in the sensitivity of these three types of cone happens in the middle colours (green and yellow) and as a result these colours appear “brighter” than red and blue, when independent tests verify that they are not (Gordon, 1978, p. 228).

If the brain gets information from only three overlapping types of cone, how does the brain tell which colour was “actually there”? The answer is that it makes an estimate. In a specific “colour” area of the visual cortex, the brain compares the results from several cones next to each other, taking a sample of the three different kinds, in order to guess which colour was actually present (Cairns-Smith, pp. 163–4). The colour scheme that we “see” is a very complex guess. In fact, you’ve probably noticed that colours seem to change when placed next to other colours. A blue that looks quite “pleasant” next to a green may look “too strong” when seen next to a red, or vice versa. Placing a dark border around a colour makes it seem less “saturated” or pure (Gordon, 1978, p. 228). Furthermore, what colours we see will also be affected by our emotional state. In everyday speech, we talk about “having a blue day” and about “seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses”. Emotional information altering the perception of colour is actually fed into the visual system at the lateral geniculate body, as mentioned above.

The area of the visual cortex that makes final colour decisions is very precisely located. If this area of the brain is damaged in a stroke, then the person will suddenly see everything in black and white (acquired cerebral achromatopsia). At times a person will find that damage results in one side of their vision being coloured and one side being “black and white” (Sacks, 1995, p. 152). This phenomenon was first reported in 1888, but between 1899 and 1974 there was no discussion of it in the medical literature. The medical researcher Oliver Sacks suggests that this resulted from a cultural discomfort with facts that showed how “manufactured” our vision is.

Figure B: The neurology of vision

In 1957, Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid instant camera, produced a startling demonstration of the way our brain “makes up” colour schemes. He took a photo of a still life, using a yellow light filter. He then made a black-and-white transparency of this image. When he shone a yellow light through this transparency, viewers saw an image of the still life, showing only those areas that had emitted yellow light. Next he took a photo of the same still life, using an orange filter. Again he made a black-and-white transparency, and shone orange light through it. This time, viewers saw all the areas that had emitted orange light. Finally, Land turned on both transparencies at once, shining both yellow and orange light on to the screen. Viewers expected to see a picture in orange and yellow. But what they actually saw was full colour: reds, blues, greens, purples – every colour that was there in the original! The difference between the yellow and orange images had been enough to enable the viewers’ brains to calculate what colours might have been there in the “original scene”. The full-colour experience was an illusion; but it is the same illusion that our brain performs at every moment (Sacks, 1995, p. 156). That is to say, the colours you are seeing right now are not the colours out here in the world: they are the colours your brain makes up.

Modalities and Submodalities

Inside the visual cortex, there are several areas that process “qualities” such as colour. In NLP, these qualities are known as visual “submodalities” (because they are produced in small subsections of the visual modality). Colour is one of the first fourteen visual submodalities listed by Richard Bandler (1985, p. 24). The others are distance, depth, duration, clarity, contrast, scope, movement, speed, hue, transparency, aspect ratio, orientation and foreground/background. Colour is also one of a list described by the psychology pioneer William James as early as 1890:

The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the illumination, definition and coloring of the mental image, and were framed thus: Before addressing yourself to any of the questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object – suppose it is your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning – and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind’s eye.

1. Illumination – Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?

2. Definition