June 2024
The other evening I did a Mental Health Professionals Network online discussion group event with other hypnotherapists talking about using hypnotherapy for the treatment of chronic pain and phobias. It was nice being in a group of fellow practitioners talking about things I'm passionate about.
One thing that I couldn't swallow was the uncritical way a couple of the therapists described their use, and training, in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), to the exclusion of other more fundamental studies of human behaviour and, more critically, psychopathologies. You can't treat the habitual use of tobacco or any other substance or behaviour - you can't really understand the psychology behind addictive behaviour at all - just by studying our communication styles (the basis of NLP). You really do have to have made concerted study of the human body-mind beyond what you can achieve in a maximum of 15 days. In 15 days, according to the training websites for NLP, you can get certification as a Master Practitione. And that's all a few of the participants in the MHPN hypnosis group had in the way of other training, apart from hypnotherapy.
I tear my hair out. I used to teach a unit in Advanced Personality Disorders to Psychology students at Murdoch University, Perth. The human psyche is complex. I also note that I did my Honours dissertation in the area of psycholinguistics prior to researching and writing my PhD in the philosophy of human transactions and interactions. I know how communication works, and I know much of how the mind works and I am still learning. Why do I mention this? It's to illustrate that the 15 years or so of concerted study in the areas with which we are concerned: treating humans with human problems didn't happen in 15 days.
It worries me that practitioners of NLP who have not been trained in anything else, and other inadequately trained therapists are garnering lots of money with such a flimsy understanding of what they're dealing with. Neuro Linguistic Programming sounds good, to be sure. It sounds scientific, neurological; it’s got “programming” in its title; must be good. This ain’t necessarily so. No studies, apart from lived experience accounts, have shown it’s an evidence based therapeutic strategy. Of course, lived experience accounts matter, but – and we have to caste a critical eye over this – how much positive outcomes are of a placebo effect? After all, paying a substantial amount of money and time encourages us to think a therapy is working. And maybe it does work for some people. The philosophical basis of NLP, though, is debateable, as I shall describe.
Now, to be perfectly transparent, some aspects of NLP are useful and are used, anyway, in most other therapeutic modalities. What the founders (Grindler, the linguist, and Bandler in the 1970s)) of NLP did was, they believed, at least, to distil and systematize the therapeutic approaches of other client oriented therapies (those of Virgina Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls). It employs anchoring, belief changing, reframing, visualization and visual-kinesthetic dissociation where the client is asked to relive the trauma in a dissociated state (the latter of which could be dangerous in the wrong hands). They also state as a fundamental, that the map is not the territory (which it is true, it isn't). What Grindler and Bandler and their followers failed and fail to realize that while we can study the therapeutic styles of the masters, we cannot decide that success lies with imitating them. Milton Erickson, whose hypnotherapeutic work was legendary, pointed this out to Grindler and Bandler, but his wisdom fell on deaf ears. Erickson’s work really could not be pinned down and his style differed from person to person. Jung, after all, said decades previously, that there are as many therapies as there are people. We are all different and the therapist must work accordingly.
That's the beauty of being a therapist - and a well trained one: we understand human processes, we've studied when things go wrong and what do with the person to heal them, and we listen to each person's uniqueness and work with that, work with them.
It's a beautiful work, a study of which never ends.
