Is NLP therapy? This is a good question, and one that has been confusing most people for a long time.
If you don’t have a good understanding of what neurolinguistic programming is, check out this article.
Essentially, NLP initiated as an approach to understand the subjective reality of experience. In particular, what made some people behave differently than others, especially when both had access to the same internal and external resources.
Throughout the process of discovering, the originators of NLP asked a lot of questions to determine how people represented things differently that allowed them to feel and act differently. For example, if 2 people were presented with a harmless spider, why does one have a near complete freakout, while the other is curious and wants to hold it?
This could be a number of things, but let’s say the person that freaks out plays an internal movie in their head of a big vicious spider munching down on their arm, while the other person plays a movie of the spider walking on their arm and creating a tickling sensation as they marvel at the little insect’s movement.
By discovering these different internal experiences, you can imagine how a therapist could use this information to help someone overcome a fear, so in that way NLP techniques can be useful in the therapeutic process.
However, to say that NLP is therapy is inaccurate and misleading.
It appears most people (in particular those who have not been exposed to the vast majority of the materials) charge that NLP is just a “cookbook” of techniques that are ineffective because they don’t get to the root cause of the problem. Of course, this really depends on the nature of the problem, as well as the reality that techniques and various patterns are only a part of the framework of NLP.
According to Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP: “NLP is an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques.” Thus, as usual, critics ignore what doesn’t suit their biases.
NLP trainer Doug O’Brien put this quite elegantly in his response “NLP is not a therapy so you can’t be an NLP therapist..” “A real NLP practitioner worth their salt can create his or her own technique on the spot based on the unpacking of the subjective experience of the individual they’re dealing with at that moment…”
