[Neurons] 2010 Meta Reflections #41

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2010 - #41

August 30, 2010

History of NLP Series #7

 

THE HISTORY OF

NLP's IDENTITY CONFUSION

1975- 1980s

 

                                                                        


>From the beginDning NLP has had an identity confusion.  After all, what is

it?  What exactly is this thing that we call Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
Now if you ask the people who should know, even NLP trainers, you will
actually get all kinds of answers.  So the confusion exists even here.

 

 For example, many of them will identify NLP as a form of therapy.  "It's a
new form of psychotherapy," many will assert.  True enough, this field began
from the field of therapy as it was modeled from therapists and because it
has at its heart many therapeutic processes.  Yet while it began from there,
that's not what NLP is.

 

The big confusion that confusing NLP with therapy has created for the field
of NLP has been highly problematic from  the beginning.  And yet, how that
confusion came to be makes perfect sense.  After all, NLP was modeled from
three therapists, three world-class communicators who worked with hurting
people who needed healing.  So it really isn't a big surprise that many
people, right from the beginning even to this day, confused it with therapy.
NLP has a significant background in therapy.  Add to this the fact that all
of the original books and writings about NLP were written in the context of
therapy and the examples and illustrations that were used were almost always
from the field of therapy.  Nevertheless, this was still a big confusion
because NLP is not a therapy, not even a psychology.

 

Of course it makes sense that it took two men from outside the field of
therapy to walk into that field and see things that those on the inside did
not.  Thomas Kunn (1972) wrote about this in his book, The Scientific
Revolution.  Those inside a paradigm often become paradigm blind and cannot
see what is obvious to those on the outside.  So when Bandler and then
Grinder happened upon the "magic" of Perls and Satir, for a short while they
had a distinct advantage.

 

Now against that background is another one, and one of far more importance
for identifying what NLP is.  I have been calling it "The Secret History of
NLP."  This is the fact that Perls and Satir and Bateson were part of the
Human Potential Movement and that means that the focus was on psychological
health (self-actualization) rather than therapy.  It was on Maslow's idea of
modeling the best and healthiest in human nature.

 

Imagine how things might have turned out for the field of NLP if that had
been made the focus and the "therapy" context was made more peripheral.
But they didn't.  In fact, one of the surprising things that I found from
the time I began studying NLP is that throughout the early literature of
NLP, both Bandler and Grinder refer to themselves as therapists!  Of course,
they were not.  They might have been working with clients and taking on
therapeutic issues, but neither was trained in therapeutic work and neither
had any expertise as therapists or psychologists.  As a side-note, later in
the late 1990s, the name NLP was changed in several countries in Europe to
NLPt - which stands for Neuro-Linguistic Psychotherapy.

 

An interesting comment from Bandler, Grinder, and Andreas comes from Frog
into Princes, which was published in 1978.  In the following quotation they
seemed to have just gotten the idea of moving from traditional therapy to
Self-Actualization Psychology although they didn't have a name for that:

"We are very slowly tapering off teaching and doing therapy because there's
a presupposition common in the field of clinical psychology which we
personally disagree with: that change is a remedial phenomenon.  You find
something that is wrong and you fix it. 

"There is an entirely different way to look at change, which we call the
generative or enrichment approach.  Instead of looking for what's wrong and
fixing it, it's possibly simply to think of ways that your life could be
enriched: 'What would be fun to do, or interesting to be able to do?'  'What
new capacities or abilities could I invent for myself?'  'How can I make
things really groovy?'" (190)

"The idea of generative change is really hard to sell to psychologists. ...
We are currently investigating what we call generative personality.  We are
finding people who are geniuses at things, finding out the sequence of
unconscious programming that they use, and installing those sequences in
other people to find out if having that unconscious program allows them to
be able to do the task." (191)

 

What is NLP?  Many others confuse it with hypnosis or hypnotherapy.  But
again, that's not what it is.  That is just one of the sources of the
original modeling and one of the applications.  The "magic" that Milton
Erickson was able to produce with his medical hypnosis led to a second
communication model in NLP, the Milton Model.  And with that discovery, it
seemed that the original founders took a strange turn, one that brought many
other confusions.

 

So what is NLP?  It is a Communication Model.  That's what it is- a
discovery of how people use words to inform themselves, map reality, and
create their behaviors.  Modeled from people who were excellent in their use
of language, NLP used Transformational Grammar to generate the Meta-Model
from Perls and Satir.  And as a set of communication tools, the NLP model
provides a way for us to model human experiences.  So, NLP is a modeling
process.  That's how it began, accidently, and that is (and will be) how NLP
will grow and develop.  The founders called themselves modelers in that
early literature of NLP.  And if they had really focused on that, they might
have turned to focus on business and if they had done that, the field of NLP
could have possibly discovered the field of Coaching and would today own it.
But they didn't.  It would be many years later before NLP applications for
business would develop.  That came in the 1980s, not the 70s.

 

 

 

Unleashing Leadership is for anyone who is operating as a leader at any
level and in any area --- home, business, politics, government, community,
etc.   Unleash your leadership and step up to become an Enlightened Leader
who brings out the best in people.  You'll learn about self-leadership, the
leadership pipeline, and how to create a self-actualizing company or
community.  The last time this will be offered in 2010 is in France the very
first of Oct.  I'm currently delivering to the leadership in a Company here
in South Africa.

 

Details: 

            October 1-3, 2010 in Avignon France - organized by Gilles Roy

Gilles <mailto:Gilles.roy2 at orange.fr> .roy2 at orange.fr               -
gilles.roy2 at wanadoo.fr 

 

 

 

L.  Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, International Society of Neuro-Semantics

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO.  81520 USA

1 970-523-7877

      <http://www.neurosemantics.com/> www.neurosemantics.com 

 

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