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Origins of NLP

Written by: Dr. Fathi El-Nadi

Article Overview: Back in the 70's NLP started as a meta-model, or a model for making and changing other models. The NLP meta-model focuses on verbal models, and how language both shapes and reflects human thought. The two explained their meta model in The Structure of Magic. They first used the meta-model to find how highly successful therapists like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir managed to help so many people. They wanted to know: What language and behavioral patterns did these therapists have? In Erickson's case, how did he consistently produce deep hypnotic trances? What happened in the client's mind as they changed?

Origins of NLP

Bandler and Grinder wanted to package this knowledge so that anyone could use it to produce the same results - influence human behavior, induce trances, and change their own lives. These studies produced a slew of distinctions and techniques such as pacing and leading, slight-of-mouth patterns, anchors, rep systems, and the Milton model (all of which I will cover in future articles). Throughout it all, the NLP attitude has said that if one person can get a result, so can anyone else - if they have a detailed enough model of what the first person's strategy.

NLP took a quantum leap with the discovery of submodalities. Human experience comes in at least five modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. These correspond to the five senses: sight, hearing, feeling, smell, and taste. But within each modality is a wide range of experience. Noises can sound loud, soft, high-pitched, or low-pitched. Qualities such as these correspond to adjectives in language: "I heard a loud sound to my left."

Bandler, Grinder, and their students found that submodalities controlled a great deal of our behavior. Consider: if you can remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, and you can imagine what you might have for breakfast tomorrow, how can your brain tell these two apart? How do you tell the future from the past, things you like from things you don't, things you believe in from things you feel uncertain about?

Obviously, these pairs of thoughts have contrasts, qualities that differ between them. Suppose that by applying meta- model questions, you found that you imagine your beliefs off to your left, and uncertainties to your right. What would happen if you imagined something you believed and something you felt uncertain about and then switched their positions? It turned out that most people would feel less certain about their old belief, and more certain whatever they had been uncertain about.
About that time, a kid named Tony Robbins, who studied under Bandler and Grinder, decided to demonstrate to the world how this simple but powerful information could change anyone's life. Robbins started as a janitor in a cramped little apartment, and within a few short years made millions of dollars, bought his own castle, and taught thousands of people about NLP.

Why you should know about it
NLP changes people's lives - for better or worse. Whatever your lifestyle, you have created it through a lifetime of beliefs, attitude, and actions. Because NLP focuses on just these topics, everyone uses its techniques and patterns every single day. When we learn to use NLP consciously, we give ourselves the power to create new lives for ourselves, and get any outcome we desire.

One common thread in NLP is the emphasis on teaching a variety of communication and persuasion skills, and using self-hypnosis to motivate and change oneself. Most NLP practitioners advertising on the WWW make grand claims about being able to help just about anybody become just about anything.
The following is typical:
NLP can enhance all aspects of your life by improving your relationships with loved ones, learning to teach effectively, gaining a stronger sense of self-esteem, greater motivation, better understanding of communication, enhancing your business or career... and an enormous amount of other things which involve your brain. (from the now defunct http://www.nlpinfo.com/intro/txintro.shtml )

Some advocates claim that they can teach an infallible method of telling when a person is lying, but others recognize that this is not possible. Some claim that people fail only because their teachers have not communicated with them in the right "language". One NLP guru, Dale Kirby, informs us that one of the presuppositions of NLP is "No one is wrong or broken." So why seek remedial change? On the other hand, what Mr. Kirby does have to say about NLP which is intelligible does not make it very attractive.
For example, he says that according to NLP "There is no such thing as failure. There is only feedback." Was NLP invented by the U.S. Military to explain their "incomplete successes"? When the space shuttle blew up within minutes of launch, killing everyone on board, was that "only feedback"? If I stab my neighbor and call it "performing non-elective surgery" am I practicing NLP? If I am arrested in a drunken state with a knife in my pocket for threatening an ex-girlfriend, am I just "trying to rekindle an old flame"?

Another NLP presupposition which is false is "If someone can do something, anyone can learn it." This comes from people who claim they understand the brain and can help you reprogram yours. They want you to think that the only thing that separates the average person from Einstein or Pavarotti or the World Champion Log Lifter is NLP.

NLP is said to be the study of the structure of subjective experience, but a great deal of attention seems to be paid to observing behavior and teaching people how to read "body language." But there is no common structure to non-verbal communication, any more than there is a common structure to dream symbolism. There certainly are some well-defined culturally determined non-verbal ways of communicating, e.g., pointing the back of the hand at another, lowering all fingers but the one in the middle, has a definite meaning in American culture. But when someone tells me that the way I squeeze my nose during a conversation means I am signaling him that I think his idea stinks, how do we verify whether his interpretation is correct or not? I deny it. He knows the structure, he says. He knows the meaning. I am not aware of my signal or of my feelings, he says, because the message is coming from my subconscious mind. How do we test these kinds of claims? We can't. What's his evidence? It must be his brilliant intuitive insight because there is no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Sitting cross-armed at a meeting might not mean that someone is "blocking you out" or "getting defensive". She may just be cold or have a back ache or simply feel comfortable sitting that way. It is dangerous to read too much into non-verbal behavior. Those splayed legs may simply indicate a relaxed person, not someone inviting you to have sex. At the same time, much of what NLP is teaching is how to do cold reading. This is valuable, but an art not a science, and should be used with caution.

Finally, NLP claims that each of us has a Primary Representational System (PRS), a tendency to think in specific modes: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory or gustatory. A person's PRS can be determined by words the person tends to use or by the direction of one's eye movements. Supposedly, a therapist will have a better rapport with a client if they have a matching PRS. None of this has been supported by the scientific literature.*

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