Critiquing and Sorting

 January 2017

     It’s the time of  the year when old beliefs, old paint, old everything, and some new things, needs to be reassessed.  Some are still good, but some just have to go.  In the midst of this sorting activity I am mulling over the practice of NLP that is used by some hypnotists, therapists, police interviewers, and salespeople, because it sounds like it has substance. But does it?

     I feel waves of irritation and I wonder why. At the heart is the realization that NLP is a technique that resists critiquing itself and its trainers seem happy promoting it and collecting good money doing so.  Putting aside the ethics of this, that fact that it does not examine its fundamental philosophies, core beliefs, and presuppositions is, to me,  unconscionable. Everything, I think, should be examined and critiqued.

     I am aware that there is a popular anti-critique movement afoot; a movement that resists examination; thinking that “if it feels good, that’s sufficient”.  We have, though, both a heart and a mind and should use both. The “feel good” crowd often draw on an aspect of Phenomenology, the “lived experience” bit to support this uncritical thinking, but Phenomenology, on the contrary, has a very rigorous side to it. It is in fact a tool for deep critique and as such is a really good place to begin the examinations of ideas. Thus feeling irritated by something is useful.

     Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), sounds decent enough. I mean there’s the classy words of “neuro” and “programming” (we’re like computers, aren’t we), with “linguistic” thrown in to make an apparently convincing package. But take it apart, aided by what its founders Bandler and Grinder say of it, and one can discover that it lacks substance. They describe  the triad of neurology, language and programming as its basis and very broadly note the following: neurology regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we communicate with one another and our programming describes the models we have of the world and which we work by; models which can easily be changed. The programming bit suggests that we model ourselves on successful people to change how we are (a problematic subject I may explore in another article).

     Many NLP practitioners rather arrogantly suggest that everything, from Parkinsons Disease to Depression, can be treated with NLP, that is, with changing the story of a person’s perceptions, but this is wrong. Not merely wrong, but logically upside down: human conditions are not caused by the stories we tell ourselves, there is a more complex physiology involved.

     The stories we tell of our particular problems do not have the power to make us ill (they can exacerbate things), and so the stories we change are unlikely, in themselves, to make us well again. A staphylococcus infection isn’t the result of negative self-talk; it’s an invasion of  bacteria.   Further, the stories we tell are a bit after the event of  problems, or recovery, not because of the stories themselves. Our capacity for story telling is strong, but it is, after all, a meaning making process, an explanation.

     I’m reminded again of the work of  Zaporozhets and Leont’ev in their book Rehabilitation of Hand Function  (1960) which is based on their research in Russia during WWII. What these neurophysiologists found was that the stories their patients told themselves aided their recovery, but the need to recover preceded the stories they told of their recovery.  In other words, non-conscious processes  plus desire were at work before an explanation for their recovery was manifested.

     Good therapy, whatever form it takes, needs to take a more holistic account of the problems at hand and this is why I recommend to my clients that they get themselves checked for physical problems (blood, hormone levels, etc) if their psychological issues are affecting their lives in more ways than self talk would suggest.

     The critical eye is paramount. A simplistic explanation for a problem is often  not enough and I am critical of NLP for this reason. Good counselling requires a deeper examination of things than merely the stories we tell ourselves.