By S. Nathan Stein, EFT- ADV, CH,TCHT/NLP

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

“Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again”
       - Unknown

I love the opening quote because it reminds me of many examples of how we often trick ourselves into being unwell because of the way in which we experience life.  One of the most powerful ways we deceive ourselves is by the principle of inertia applied to the human mind and experience. Inertia is a principle of Newtonian Physics that says if something is at rest (not moving) it tends to stay that way, and if it’s moving it will tend to keep moving, unless affected by an outside force. 

This principle makes us reason that, because something has been experienced a certain way in the past, it has to be re-experienced the same way in the future. While this might seem reasonable, it actually is erroneous for several important reasons. First, there is the aspect of human “free will,” or intent and awareness.  These are our own incredibly powerful internal, not external, forces, which quantum physics suggests creates our reality. 

The second important reason has to do with the subjective nature of our experience, and this is where the topic of  NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, comes in. NLP is really a set of powerful perceptual tools for change, based on an understanding of how people naturally experience their world internally.  The formal definition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is: “The study of the structure of subjective experience.” At WolfStone, NLP is integrated with the practice of EFT and Transpersonal Hypnotherapy and actually enables a person to make long-lasting change by utilizing everyone’s natural ability to re-assign meaning to experience.

Richard Bandler, Ph.D., an information scientist, and John Grinder, Ph.D., a linguist, developed NLP in the early 1970’s. They were interested in how people influence one another, and in the possibility of being able to duplicate the behavior, and therefore effectiveness, of highly influential people. It began as an exploration of the relationship between neurology, linguistics, and observable patterns, or “programs,” of behavior. The word neuro refers to an understanding of the brain and it’s functioning. Linguistic relates to the communication aspects (both verbal and non-verbal) of our information processing. Programming is the behavioral and thinking patterns we all go through.

What Bandler and Grinder found out was that there is a relationship between perceptions, thinking and behavior that is neuro-linguistic in nature. The relationship is operating all the time – whether we are aware of it or not.

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, MD - a world renowned psychiatrist and hypnotherapist.  It was Erickson's work that formed the foundation for a lot of NLP, thus the tight connection with hypnosis.  Some of the more important findings of Bandler and Grinder are shown below.

First, they found that thinking is tied closely to physiology.  People's thought processes change their physiological state powerfully.  A good example of this is a person going to a doctor’s office to get their blood pressure checked.  Just sitting there, thinking about it, perhaps even worrying about it and waiting for the doctor to come in, is usually enough to make your blood pressure register higher than it would normally. Also, interestingly, they found that it worked in reverse - that a person’s physiology powerfully affected their mental state.  So, for example if a person was worried or upset and their body was all tensed up, the person could alleviate how he or she felt by taking steps to relax their body. 

Another very significant finding was that a person’s surface sentence structure provides keys for understanding their subjective experience. The various ways in which this can happen were called the Meta Model. An example of this is “nominalizations” – a grammatical changing of processes into things. So, for instance a person might say: “Our relationship (thing) needs work” instead of, “I don’t like the way I relate (process) to you”. 

This allows people not to have to take responsibility for the part of the process variables that they can control, and not to have to address the question “What is it about how am I relating (process) that I don’t like”.  This question, asked in this way however, has the advantage of elucidating the “players”: their actions, presuppositions, etc.  From another perspective, a nominalization is a way for people to disassociate from their feelings of discomfort or pain in a situation by symbolically putting it in a box so-to-speak - by labeling it. 

Bandler & Grinder made an important observation relating to internal experience appearing to be highly structured. When you think about this a moment it makes some sense, because as we go through life and interact with the world, we use one or more of our senses, and we form feeling associations with those things encountered which causes us to react in certain ways. After an experience is over, the only thing that remains with us is internal experience - some internal representation of it that is eventually stored in our sub-conscious mind. 

Now, what they observed specifically was that the structure of your internal representations determines your response to the content. For example, picture someone you really like.  Make the colors more intense, as if you were turning up the color intensity on a TV. Now turn the color down, until it's black and white. For most people, high color intensifies the feeling, and B&W neutralizes it. The degree of color, part of the STRUCTURE of the representation, affects the intensity of your feelings about the content.

Now think of a voice that you associate with authority or perhaps even the sound of a person’s voice that you find intimidating in some way. Now think about something they said to you and hear them say it to you in your mind. Now think about that again as you change the voice in your mind to that of a cartoon character like Daffy Duck or maybe Tweety Bird.  Did what you hear have the same power over you?  And what would happen if you mentally turned down the volume of that cartoon voice and imagined it to move far back from where it spoke before – does that affect the power of it further? 

You see, for many people the degree and quality of sound is also part of the structure of the internal representation.  In fact, from their work it was learned that any of the physical sensory channels, such as the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc., could be part of the structure of our internal representation of an experience. It is also important to mention that although many people have a primary physical sensory channel, people can and do use more than one simultaneously. 

Out of these understandings, an NLP principle called the “4-Tuple” was put forth, that states that if you use at least 4 of the 5 physical channels to internally represent an experience, it makes it very real, vivid and powerful to the sub-conscious mind.  So, for example, if some experience happened to you in the past, and every time you think about it you visualize it in intense color - perhaps as a close-up or a movie, and you hear harsh, loud, shrill words or sounds, and perhaps you re-experience smells that were present and have strong unpleasant feelings in your body - chances are that it will seem very real and powerful to your subconscious mind, and you will react spontaneously to it.  

Bandler and Grinder, observing the work of Milton Erickson and others, noticed that different people seem to represent knowledge in different sensory modalities. In fact, they found that the language used reveals their representation. Often, communication difficulties are little more than two people speaking in incompatible representation systems. For example, the "same" sentence might be expressed differently by different people as follows: Auditory: "I really hear what you're saying." Visual: "I see what you mean." Kinesthetic: "I've got a handle on that."  A practical application of this, as Erickson taught, and the founders of NLP were quick to pick up, is that naturally mirroring a persons posture, as well as their representational systems, creates strong rapport. 

So what is the practical value of NLP and what are some of the real-world problems they can be applied to? First, let me state that NLP, as is the case with Transpersonal Hypnotherapy, can bring about rapid and long-lasting beneficial change. NLP has several techniques that are extremely effective for intervening in certain situations. For example, there are methods for dealing with phobias, even life-long phobias, that work very rapidly. There are ways to de-traumatize past traumas, ways to identify and integrate conflicting belief systems that keep you from doing things that you want to do. One way an NLP therapist might approach a client in session is by understanding the cognitive structure of how the client creates a problem. They then help figure out the cognitive structure of an area of life where the client deals satisfactorily. Then they would teach the client to use the good strategy in the problem situation.       

Yes, experience is a wonderful thing. It can help you recognize a mistake you’ve made before, when you make it again. Learning to experience in a new way is even better however, because it can help you to heal and, at the same time, to not repeat the mistakes. 

For more information about how NLP and Transpersonal Clinical Hypnotherapy can help, contact Nathan at WolfStone (828-669-2933) .  You can also email us directly at wolfsource@wolfstone.us, or visit  this page on our website by clicking on the link below:
Transpersonal Hypnotherapy and NLP.

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