In “NLP and the myth of the quick fix,” I discussed how promoting NLP as an instant cure-all causes problems for NLPers an our customers.

Unfortunately, NLP’s “quick fix” mentality also extends to NLP training.

Instant NLP mastery!

NLP includes advanced technology for quickly transferring skills. However, while training can expose students to skills and techniques, mastering skills takes practice. And practice takes time.

NLP’s content has expanded enormously since the early 1970s. But NLP trainings are still short. Especially compared to training in disciplines like therapy and psychiatry.

The expectation of “fast NLP mastery” combined with short, relatively inexpensive trainings has combined to create a business climate in which an NLP training long enough for students to actually master NLP skills would cost far more than most people are willing to spend.

Hype creates unrealistic expectations

Before getting licensed to practice, therapists typically must complete years of school, then do hundreds of hours of work with clients, some under supervision by other professionals. NLPers get no such training to learn to use tools and techniques promoted as far more powerful. What’s wrong with this picture?

Many NLP students start courses with ridiculously inflated ideas of what they can expect to learn and do during and after their training. Some NLP trainers encourage students to believe that they can take a course or two (sometimes just a few days long) and gain “NLP mastery.”

(Think how hard you’d laugh at marketing that claimed “Master the skills of brain surgery when you take our 18-day Master Brain Surgeon training!” Yet this type of claim is so common in the NLP world that NLPers hardly notice.)

As a result of training hype, I’ve met all too many graduates of NLP trainings who were dangerously under-trained, yet overconfident. In fact, I used to be one of them. (Some people might argue I still am…)

“Instant mastery” trainings cost the NLP field

Because of poor-quality trainings and unreasonable expectations about NLP, NLP is rife with:

• Insecure newbie NLPers smart enough to know they really don’t have the skills they took classes to get. Many are afraid to apply what little they know. Far too many have no idea how to gain the skills they thought their training would give them.
• Arrogant newbie NLPers blind to the limitations of their skills and knowledge. Some of these newbies start practices, fumble a bit, and eventually turn into good practitioners. Others disappoint clients by giving them poor results, or even harm clients.
• “Professional” NLPers who don’t follow up with clients or trainees to make sure that what they do actually works. NLP is all about calibration, feedback, and course-correction… but all too many of us NLPers don’t apply that standard to the long-term outcomes of our own work! (I feel somewhat embarrassed by my own track record in this regard.)

What you can do

Frankly, I don’t know how to fix the problems with NLP trainings, although I’ll discuss some ideas in future posts.

In the meantime, what can you do about the problems I outlined?

As an NLP student:

• Expect to get what you pay and work for. If you want a few NLP skills, a short training might suffice. If you want to master NLP and do NLP professionally, take lengthy NLP trainings from first-rate trainers.
• Expect NLP to work differently outside the classroom. Your trainers picked demo subjects and issues that would be easy to succeed with. Real life isn’t like that! There are a lot more complex issues, mixed motivations, and risk.
• Do lots and lots of real-world application and practice. Start with calibration skills. Then practice simple, harmless techniques, such as anchoring good feelings, or using embedded commands to give people empowering suggestions. As your skills improve, work your way up.
• Protect the safety of the people you work with. Start with simple techniques applied to small issues whose outcomes don’t matter. This lets you gain skills and help people without significant risk to them. Notice your results, especially ecology issues, and make corrections to what you do. As your skills improve, work your way up to bigger issues and more complex interventions.
• Plan on spending hundreds to thousands of hours practicing, applying, and improving your skills before you achieve any kind of mastery. Some kind of daily practice will help, as will joining local practice groups. (Google NLP practice group to find a group near you. Somnambulistic Sleepwalkers is a member-run group that hosts free or low-cost NLP and hypnosis practice sessions in various cities worldwide.)

As a NLP practitioner:

Underestimate your skills and mastery. You probably got trained to overestimate your skills, so compensate.

• Base your skills evaluation on your actual results, not wishful thinking. Include not-so-good outcomes and failures.
• Pay attention to failures and mistakes. They provide useful feedback to help you improve.
• Do followup with people you work with. Tracking their long-term results will give you useful feedback about what you do that does (and doesn’t) work.
• Underestimate your results and undersell your skills. If a client thinks it will take 6 sessions to solve problem X, and you do it in 4, they’ll be thrilled — and they’ll get the beneficial outcome. If they think you can solve the problem in 3 sessions, they might leave before session 4 when they would have gotten results that would have benefitted them for a lifetime.

As an NLP trainer:

Help students set realistic expectations of your and other people’s NLP trainings.

• Sell realism, not hype. Market what your students will actually get in your trainings. (A bit of scoffing at other trainers’ unrealistic offerings might help your students reset their expectations to realistic levels.)
• Differentiate between learning skills, which students will do in your training, and mastering skills, which students will need to do on their own after your training ends.
• Tell your students that “NLP mastery” consists of having high-level skills, which requires practice and experience they won’t get in your training.
• Require your students to practice their skills as part of your training.
• Encourage your students to practice after training, and provide resources to help them do so.
• Start thinking about what it would take to shift at least part of the NLP training market from the “instant mastery” paradigm to something more like a college degree in therapy, complete with supervised practice with real clients.

World-renowned NLP trainer Steve Andreas has been saying for years, “What we really need is a 4-year college program for a BA in NLP. In four years, we could turn out Milton Ericksons by the hundreds!”

That kind of real result, not hype and unrealistic expectations, is something the NLP world desperately needs.

Joy

To their credit, my trainers were fairly low-key about what NLP could do. But they did promote the idea of NLP working “much faster” than alternatives, such as conventional therapy.

During training, my fellow students and I were often able to rapidly fix some of our own and other people’s problems. Sometimes these were issues that had endured for decades, yet with NLP we could resolve them in half an hour or less. Gaining the power to do this seemed miraculous.

Many of us NLP students, including me, quickly developed overblown ideas of what NLP (and we) could accomplish.

Inevitably, I encountered problems I couldn’t fix right away. Now, in many cases where one NLP quick fix doesn’t work to resolve a client’s issue, a different quick fix will work. It often makes sense to try a few. If an issue can be solved with the right fast method, best to find that out at the beginning, rather taking multiple sessions to do the same work.

But quick fixes don’t always work. My training didn’t encourage me to expect some issues to take longer to resolve.

Sometimes my focus on a “quick fix” kept me from even noticing evidence that a slower approach might work better. Or noticing where a quick fix might prove inappropriate or could cause harm.

Encouraged to be arrogant

By partway through my NLP training, I had gotten overconfident about NLP’s power and my own skills.

In retrospect, I became dangerously arrogant.

Unfortunately, the NLP community I encountered didn’t provide counter-examples to the “quick fix” idea, or encourage me to be humble. Instead, much of what I heard and read fed and inflated my arrogance.

Used inappropriately, NLP can damage people. I feel very lucky that I only did significant harm to two people that I know of. (One of them was me.)

It took me several years working as an NLP developer, and years struggling to work through my own issues, to realize that NLP is not the comprehensive quick fix many people claim it to be.

Quick fixes aren’t always possible or appropriate

Problems and issues have structures. NLP’s emphasis on simplicity and dealing with the minimum amount of structure to get an issued resolved is usually useful.

However, NLPers tend not to distinguish between issues where a “quick fix” is and isn’t structurally appropriate.

To use a simple analogy, let’s say that Juliet comes to you for help because she has trouble running.

• If the issue is a stone in her shoe, you can find and fix the problem quickly and easily. Here, a quick fix is appropriate, while longer “treatment” is not.
• If Juliet has trouble running because she hasn’t exercised in 5 years, she needs to get in shape. Fixing this problem ecologically requires a systemic approach. You would not help Juliet by encouraging her to take amphetamines so she can immediately run faster. Or by convincing her that she can instantly gain the ability to run well by changing her beliefs. With a systemic issue like this, a quick fix might simply fail. But it might make the problem worse.
• What if Juliet has a stone in her shoe and she’s out of shape? You can instantly boost her performance by removing the stone. Such dramatic results might convince both of you that a quick fix approach works. But removing the stone can’t and won’t fix Juliet’s systemic performance issue. Trying to remove more stones from her shoes is a waste of time. Once the rock is gone, she needs to get in shape.

NLPers often complain that conventional therapies, especially psychoanalysis, can take years to fix a problem NLP can fix in 5 minutes. As a NLPer, if you get a client with a systemic problem, do you have the wisdom and humbleness — and the calibration skills — to notice when a quick fix isn’t appropriate?

Solve all your problems instantly with NLP!

I think we in the NLP community harm our clients, our fellow NLPers, and the general public by promoting the idea of NLP as a universal quick fix.

I also think we cause harm by allowing NLP practitioners and trainers to make ridiculous claims without being publicly criticized or held accountable for the results they actually get.

The “quick fix” appeals to our near-universal human desires to get instant gratification and something for nothing. But how many clients that NLP could help instead stop doing NLP because it doesn’t work as fast or completely as they were unrealistically led to expect?

Death to NLP hype!

I think NLP will be better off when we NLPers talk honestly with clients about what we offer. When we openly discuss what NLP can and can’t do. When we encourage clients to develop realistic expectations. When instead of hyping NLP, we market the amazing results NLP really can and does produce. And tell clients that resolving longstanding issues might happen quickly and completely, but more often takes time.

Most of the professional NLPers I know who had serious, ongoing issues in their lives — the kind clients come to us to fix — took years to resolve them fully. That includes me.

Why should we NLPers promote NLP as if it will fix the client’s problems instantly, when it didn’t do that for us?

Joy

What’s your opinion? Please add your respectful and intelligent comments below to begin the community dialogue.

(This clip is part of the 2009 NLP Advanced Mastery Training video series, featuring Andy Austin, Steve Andreas, and Steven Watson. )

What is psychological trauma?

A trauma is a strong, persistent, negative emotional response to a past event, or reminders of it.

Trauma characteristics:

• A trauma is not an experience. It is an emotional response to an experience. If the emotional response is positive, the experience is not traumatic, no matter how harrowing its sensory details. (Think of all the people who pay money to have scary, dangerous experiences such as white-water rafting!)
• Traumas are learned via repetition and exaggeration of sensory stimuli. Immediately after a negative experience, a person usually isn’t traumatized yet. That’s why the treatment they receive immediately after the experience can change its outcome.
• Traumas range from very minor to major, and from contextualized to general. For instance, a person may have a phobia of beetles, but not other insects or spiders. Someone with severe PTSD might feel distress most of the time.
• Causes of psychological trauma vary. Obvious problem events that happen to adults cause recognizable trauma responses such as PTSD. Other traumas happen when a person is very young. Often repressed or forgotten, these traumas can cause pervasive problems with no obvious cause. And some people get severely traumatized by a large number of seemingly small and insignificant events.

The conventional NLP view of trauma is that you resolve it using disassociation. If we think of trauma as compulsive association into the emotions of a past negative experience, that’s true… but oversimplified, as the following lists will show.

The structure of psychological trauma

Each of the features outlined below can be used as a way to resolve trauma. I’ll discuss specific techniques you can use in the next section.

A. Trauma is an association between a sensory event, and metadata about that event.

Metadata includes the event’s meaning, and the person’s emotional responses. The brain stores sensory memories and meaning separately. That separation allows you to change your interpretation of a past event, give it new meaning, and generate a new emotional response. Removing metadata changes a traumatic memory into a memory of a sensory event, without the trauma.

B. A trauma is a learned sequence, which ends by associating the person into a strong negative emotion.

Usually the sequence is extremely compressed, so that the event plus its associated meaning and emotions replay almost instantaneously. This makes the experience intense, and difficult for the person to unpack. Change the trigger that starts the sequence, or alter the sequence, and the outcome changes.

C. A trauma is a synesthesia.

When a trauma triggers, experiences in multiple sensory modalities replay very fast, producing the intense response. Separating the elements of the synesthesia reduces the intensity of the experience.

D. A trauma is a superstimulus.

Superstimuli are “larger-than-life” representations that the brain uses to create very intense responses and anchors. A trauma is more intense than the original experience, hence the intense response. No real experience is strong enough to fire and desensitize a strong trauma anchor, so it can persist for decades.

E. A trauma changes meaning.

An extreme experience that verifies a person’s existing experience of the world generally isn’t traumatic. An “insignificant” incident that invalidates a large part of a person’s world view may cause major trauma.

Methods for resolving traumas and PTSD

Effective trauma treatments make traumatic experiences into non-problems. What used to be a trauma is now just a past event.

Although I am not an expert in treating other people’s traumas, I used a number of the techniques below to cure myself of trauma flashbacks that troubled me for over 30 years. My NLP research buddy Jan (pronounced “yon”) Saeger and I modeled how traumas and trauma treatments work. Once you understand how people do a problem such as trauma, you can usually find many ways to change their response to make it more useful:

A. Remove association between the original sensory event (memory) and its metadata (emotions, meanings).

Jan and I discovered that any process that reverses the time sequence of a memory strips away its metadata. This converts a trauma into an ordinary memory of a sensory event. (It also strips the good feelings off a happy memory, so use caution.) There are many ways to reverse time sequences, including:

• Visually, using a movie. The NLP Trauma Process and Fast Phobia Cure reverse the traumatic event’s time sequence by running a disassociated movie of the event backward. The Trauma Process also has the client associate into the movie and run it backward, which reverses its sequence kinesthetically.
• Spatially, using a timeline. Processes such as Change Personal History and Reimprinting have the client walk backward along their timeline to before the initial experience. This requires walking through the event in reverse sequence.
• Kinesthetically, by moving a timeline. Have the client step all the way to the future of their timeline, and face away from their past, so their timeline goes through their chest. Now have them grab the timeline and quickly pull it through their body, very fast, all the way to the beginning. This provides the same change in spatial relationship as having the client walk the timeline backward, but often works faster and provides somewhat different kinesthetics.
• Kinesthetically, by turning a timeline inside out. Jan Saeger developed his “Sock Trick” method for clients who can’t resolve traumas using visual methods such as the Fast Phobia Cure. (Generally these people visualize well, and use kinesthetics as their least-conscious modality.) Have the client make a movie of the problem event, then add a timeline below it, like a web video. Get the client to make the line thicker and thicker, and become hollow, so they can reach inside it from one end to the other (e.g. from future to past). Have them stick their arm through the timeline and grasp its opposite end. With their other hand, they grasp the end toward their shoulder, and pull the timeline off their arm — like turning a sock or shirt sleeve inside out. (Show them what you want them to do with gestures before they do it.) Turning the timeline inside out spatially reverses its sequence.
• Using a temporary second timeline. For batch-processing traumatic memories, I typically have the client lay out their timeline, then create a second blank timeline beside it. All their traumatic memories get moved to the second timeline. Any useful learnings on the second timeline are removed and stored in the client’s Learnings Library. I then use any method of having the client experience the time sequence backward: run it like a movie in reverse, quickly walk the timeline backward, imagine themselves pulled backward along the timeline, pulling the timeline through themselves. Run the reverse-time process enough times that the client reports significant changes in the submodalities of the trauma representations on the second timeline. Have the client dispose of that timeline and its contents. On their main timeline, have them fill in the open place where traumas and bad experiences used to be with something positive, like a resourceful color or good feeling.
• The doyletic Speed Trace reverses time using auditory cues. A kinesthetic or visual-kinesthetic version of the Speed Trace works equally well.
• Hypnotic regression reverses time using an emotional kinesthetic (visceral K) as a guide. Make sure the client ends up before the problem experience so they reverse sequence through the problem event.

B. Alter the trauma sequence.

Once you alter the sequence, the trauma can no longer run the same way. Methods:

• Add time before and after the triggering event. As Andy Austin explains in the video below, someone recalling a traumatic event typically starts and stops the memory at specific points. The kinesthetic intensity begins at zero, and rises to an emotional peak. The peak signals the person to replay the memory, building even more intensity. Have the client expand what they remember to include 15 minutes that happened after the memory’s usual stop point. This moves them past the replay trigger. Now have them start the memory 3 or 4 minutes earlier than usual, and continue 15 minutes extra. Remembering the old content with new start and stop times, and without the automatic loop, changes the client’s emotional response.
• Remove compulsive association from the trauma recall sequence. The NLP Fast Phobia Cure and Trauma Process both use double disassociation to help clients recall the traumatic event without associating into the memory. Once the person knows how to disassociate from the traumatic event, they are likely to choose disassociated recall from then on.
• Deactivate the trauma’s trigger. If a person has hundreds or thousands of traumas, as I did, they usually have a standard sequence for triggering them. Elicit that sequence. You will probably have to use time distortion to slow it enough that you can unpack the details. Find the element in the sequence that stays the same regardless of which trauma triggers. Disrupt it, for instance by anchoring the feeling it evokes and running a doyletic Speed Trace.

C. Deconstruct synesthesias into their components.

Once separated into its elements, a synesthesia no longer operates as a single, overwhelming experience. You can use a process that focuses on deconstructing the sensory memory of the experience, or one that deconstructs its emotional component.

Alter the sensory memory of the trauma:

• Unpack the trauma’s sensory components into the appropriate eye accessing cue locations. In the Failure Into Feedback Strategy by Robert Dilts, you first elicit the client’s eye access cues. Now have the client imagine the problem situation or representation at a specific location, generally directly in front of them. Use your fingers to guide them as they slowly move remembered pictures to their visual remembered eye cue location, “with the other pictures you remember, where they belong.” Then have them move images they imagined to their visual constructed eye cue location. Continue unpacking the synesthesia’s elements into the other eye access cues. Relocate smells with other smells, below their nose… and tastes with other tastes, below and in front of their chin. NLPer Dr. Michael Harris has had great success using this technique to resolve traumas. He reports that moving smell and taste are often critical to resolving PTSD.
• Have the client access the eye access cues and memory simultaneously. Eye Movement Integration (EMI) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) both have the client recall the traumatic memory while visually following the practitioner’s finger through a series of eye positions that include eye accessing cues. When I learned EMI, we were told it works by using eye access positions to bring in resources from other representation systems. (Typically, someone responding unresourcefully deletes content from one or more sensory system.) I now suspect that these techniques work at least partly because they change the sequence in which the person accesses the traumatic memory. EMI and EMDR guide the client to re-experience the sensory elements of the traumatic experience in a variety of sequences.

Alter the emotional component of the synesthesia:

• Change the spin submodality of the emotion, using Richard Bandler’s “spinning feelings” process. Nick Kemp gives directions in this article.
• Change the client’s focus from emotional to background K using Tom Stone’s PTSD resolution process.
• Deconstruct the emotional component of the synesthesia. I use variants of Tom Vizzini’s 3D Mind process. Tom says that the emotion that makes a trauma so powerful is itself a synesthesia, built from other emotions. (Sometimes beliefs get incorporated also.) Tom’s basic process, which I’ll describe in another article, involves (a) physically moving the traumatic emotion outside the body, (b) having the client reach inside the emotion and remove one of the component emotions inside it, (c) adding resources until the component emotion is no longer a problem, and (d) replacing the modified resource after adding some additional enhancements.

D. Normalize superstimuli.

The brain uses several tricks to make superstimuli more compelling than sensory experiences:

1. Repetition and duplication: many examples, many duplicates of one example.
2. Exaggeration: bigger, brighter, faster, louder, harder than real life.
3. Deletion. Real experiences contain vast amounts of sensory data that isn’t relevant to the meaning of the experience. For instance, if I am on a “nice date,” the color of the cars in the parking lot outside the restaurant doesn’t affect the niceness of my experience. Deleting irrelevant sensory data creates a representation that is more intensely “about” its meaning than a real experience.

All these tricks make a traumatic memory more intense and “pure” than any real experience. You’ll remember from your NLP training that if you set an anchor that gets fired a lot in day-to-day life, such as touching a doorknob, it will soon lose effectiveness. I suspect traumas persist partly because they differ enough from real experiences that real life doesn’t dilute their anchors.

Any intervention that makes a traumatic memory more like a memory of sensory experience will de-intensify it:

• Changing internal voice tempo normalizes hyped internal dialog that triggers exaggerated negative emotions. I keep hearing from NLP colleagues how well this technique neutralizes negative emotions and traumas. Instructions by Nick Kemp.
• Normalize submodalities. Remove duplicate examples. Categorize multiple examples into types, and discard all but one or two from each category. Adjust submodalities to those of an ordinary memory, perhaps by mapping across from a non-traumatic experience. Add deleted content back into the memory.
• Unpack double descriptions. Double descriptions compare two (or more) representations of the same thing to generate a third representation that seems “realer” or more compelling than either. For instance, a trauma representation might contain both an associated visual representation of the problem incident, and a disassociated representation of the same incident, which play simultaneously. Emotional traumas might involve judgment from an external authority figure, combined with self-judgment. Separate the examples in space, time, and viewpoint, then add resources to each example until the client’s experience normalizes.

E. Change the meaning of the experience

• Recategorize the experience by adding resources. These might come from the current self, other people, or other contexts. Many NLP and hypnotic processes use this method, including Reimprinting, Change Personal History, and hypnotic regression.
• “Expand the frame” of recall to include other events and points of view. Viewed from within a larger context, the meaning of the event will change. Examples:
  • Have the client experience the event from all perceptual positions. A number of NLP techniques, including Reimprinting, use this method.
  • Have the client experience the event from various physical locations. Examples: the Comprehensive Memory Cleanup process from Thought Pattern Management; the Defining Moments pattern recently developed by Jan Saeger.
  • Expand the scope of time. The Comprehensive Memory Cleanup has the client experience events from various times in the future. Past life regression might not change the trauma itself, but can make it seem irrelevant in the context of many lifetimes.
  • Have the client pay attention to the trauma and the present moment simultaneously. The new information from the present tends to interrupt and update the trauma’s past-only focus. In the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), the client taps their body in present time while recalling the trauma, adding a new physical sensation. Stating the problem in the format “Even though I feel angry with Dorothy, I deeply and profoundly accept myself” while they tap also creates an implicit meta-position. Rather than focus on the past-based feeling of the trauma, they focus on accepting the trauma now.
• Change the traumatic experience enough that it seems unfamiliar. Brains learn and recall events based on similarity. The kind of memory that links trigger X with trauma Z is specific. Changing a memory using any of the many methods listed above makes it less familiar. Once the memory changes, the brain has to re-evaluate it. Maybe trigger X doesn’t equal trauma Z! Instead of knowing “that loud bang is a shot,” the brain must recategorize the loud bang using its current resources and understanding. Now the bang gets reclassified from “shot” to “loud noise.” Most of the interventions above do something to make the traumatic memory unfamiliar.

Utilizing trauma treatments

Some clients respond to one trauma intervention but not another. Techniques are most likely to fail when they use the client’s most-conscious sensory modality and their usual information processing strategies. (What the client already does automatically hasn’t fixed the problem.) If the first trauma-resolution technique you try doesn’t work, switch to a method that operates via another modality or less-familiar strategy. Nick Kemp reports that the “spinning feelings” and voice tempo change interventions described in his article work particularly well together.

While some traumas resolve after a single intervention, others require multiple interventions (often of different types) to get full resolution. You may also need to do additional work to resolve trauma-related issues involving the person’s identity, self-esteem, etc.

Good luck. Please share your favorite trauma-resolution techniques in the Comments, and post your results!

Joy

Video: http://www.vaporizeyourcombatstress.com/Resolution.html

Tom Stone’s process for eliminating PTSD

From my analysis of Tom’s video, the steps are:

1. Elicit the trauma/PTSD state enough to get a reaction. (The client must be able to feel the reaction to do the process.)
2. Have the client verify that they can feel the problem response in their body.
3. Have the client close their eyes.
4. Have the client feel the energy field of the feeling in their body, and then notice where it’s located. (You can also have the client locate the feeling first, then notice the energy field.)
5. Have the client notice where in the energy field the energy is strongest and most concentrated.
6. Have the client put their attention on the place where the energy is most intense, and observe it.
7. Suggest that the energy might stay the same for awhile, but then it will decrease in intensity.
8. As the feeling gets less, have the client focus more closely on the most intense part of the energy until there’s nothing left.

I have only done this process a few times, with myself and a friend. The feelings associated with the problem completely disappeared within a couple of minutes. I can’t think of my problem states the same way any more.

Typically, a process that can permanently eliminate a negative feeling can also eliminate a positive one. I haven’t tested a positive emotion with this process yet. However, I did try eliciting a mildly positive feeling and increasing the size of the intense part of the energy field. That greatly increased the intensity of my emotion.

What makes this process work?

I actually don’t know why Tom’s Trauma Resolution Techniques process works, but I have some ideas:

1. The process shifts the client’s attention from kinesthetic emotion (visceral K) to a different kinesthetic modality (background K). The client dissociates from the emotional part of the feeling, while simultaneously staying at least partly associated into the background K kinesthetic.
2. The process shifts the client’s attention from experiencing an emotion to observing a component of it. This automatically and implicitly creates meta-position.
3. The brain uses background K to code metadata about emotions, such as their intensity. This process first has the client pay attention to the metadata (background K) rather than content (the scary emotion). Then it has the client change the submodalities of the background K in ways that will automatically decrease emotional intensity to zero.

These steps are identical to Richard Bandler’s “spinning feelings” intervention, which is also very effective at defusing emotional traumas. The Bandler and Stone processes differ in eliciting and changing different submodalities of background K. This has me wondering whether other background K submodalities also code for emotional intensity or content. If so, will changing them also resolve traumas?

Expand NLP knowledge!

Try the process, then report your results in the Comments.

Using my NLP and hypnosis skills to deal with cancer

As you can imagine, throughout my diagnosis and treatment, I have been using my NLP and hypnosis skills to:

• Accept my situation, and deal with it resourcefully and proactively.
• Keep my perspective. While I am dealing with a potentially life-threatening illness, in the present I’m in good health, and better off than millions of other people. Including many people I’ve personally met.
• Manage my internal states, so that I am consistently resourceful almost all the time, in a good mood, and mostly happy. Rather than staying in unresourceful and unpleasant states, I have taught myself to automatically pop out them after a short time.
• Feel and express my emotions, without letting negative emotions overwhelm or dominate me.
• Minimize worry and awfulizing.
• Reduce stress — largely by not creating it in the first place! For instance, I stay in the present moment during medical procedures, so that I only experience what actually happens, rather than creating the exaggerated imaginary problems that patients often upset themselves with. Rather than resisting my situation, and instead of worrying and complaining as I used to, I relax into and welcome what’s happening as much as possible. It helps a lot.
• Prepare for and cope with medical procedures, so they are as easy and pleasant as I can make them. I have found hypnosis particularly useful for staying calm before and during procedures, minimizing discomfort and fear, and minimizing after-effects.
• Appreciate what I do have, especially the many wonderful people in my life.
• Express appreciation, thanks, and gratitude.
• Clearly request what I want people to do for me, and accept their choices to do it or not.
• Let people respond to my situation however they do, without feeling attached to their responses, or getting upset about responses I dislike.
• Remain cheerful, upbeat, and pleasant about my experiences and condition. This makes it much easier for other people. My friends know they can interact with and support me without getting dragged down by my negativity. Staying cheerful also makes life much more pleasant for me!
• Utilize this situation to improve my life. Dealing with a life-threatening illness has helped me rearrange my priorities in some very useful ways.

Therapeutic NLP

Since I had the option to use conventional cancer treatments, and their documented success rate is so far much higher than alternative therapies alone, I decided to use NLP, hypnosis, and other alternative therapies as an adjunct to standard anti-cancer therapies. (Note that the higher documented success rate of conventional treatments doesn’t prove that they actually work better than alternatives, only that their successes got documented more thoroughly.) If my cancer had been one with a very poor prognosis via conventional therapy, I might have chosen otherwise.

I am lucky to have 3 excellent NLPers working with me to resolve any and all mental issues that may affect my wellness:

1. Pati McDermott is a specialist in an offshoot of NLP called Thought Pattern Management (TPM). TPM has an excellent track record of helping people heal physical illnesses. Pati is known for her thorough work helping people achieve what she calls “whole-life makeovers.” I’ve noticed big changes since I started working with her, in areas of my life where, despite my skills, I hadn’t been able to change myself.
2. Michael Harris has years of experience doing health-related NLP. In one phone session, a nifty diagnostic he uses uncovered a bunch of areas of my life where having my life work was in conflict with healing with cancer. (If I imagined the cancer vanishing, my imagined quality of life decreased. Or if I imagined increasing my quality of life, my representation of the cancer got bigger.) We were able to resolve these issues in 2 more phone sessions.
3. NLP developer Jan (pronounced “yon”) Saeger specializes in helping people make rapid paradigm shifts.

I find staying resourceful more useful than bravery

Several times before in my life I dealt with (and overcame) seriously disabling or life-threatening problems. Back then, I was much less resourceful, seriously conflicted, and a master of worry and negative self-talk. I made my problems even worse than they needed to be.

This time, thanks to NLP and hypnosis, I’m having a much easier time dealing with my health issues.

People keep commenting on my positive, upbeat attitude, and calling me brave. I don’t think of myself as particularly brave. I get scared. Sometimes I get intensely scared. However, even when I feel scared, I stay resourceful. Because I stay resourceful, I keep taking action, and that action gets me results I want.

Actually, I stay resourceful almost all the time. Which means that I rarely get scared or overwhelmed.

In talking with people who have dealt with cancer or are dealing with it now, I keep wondering what would be the fastest and easiest way to teach people the key skills that have made dealing with cancer so much easier for me. Any ideas?

Not a core theory of how the mind works. NLP doesn’t have one.

Not field of application. NLP gets used for therapy, business, sales, seduction, negotiation, writing, sports, education, personal coaching, and more.

Not origins or developers. Lots of people developed and expanded NLP. Many NLP models (including the first formal NLP pattern, the Meta-Model) got imported into NLP from other disciplines or modeled from experts in other fields.

Given that, what makes a model or technique an NLP model or technique?

1. NLP’s techniques, applications, and models were all acquired, developed, or refined using modeling . Without modeling, NLP simply wouldn’t exist.
2. NLP models and techniques are prescriptive, and tell you what to do. Contrast with mainstream psychology, which uses mainly descriptive models and labels (ego, inner child, bipolar disorder) that don’t tell you what to do.
3. NLP’s models and processes are designed to get outcomes. No armchair theorizing here! We NLPers don’t much care how something works, as long as it does work.
4. Outcomes are specific, stated in positive terms, and sensory-based. In NLP jargon, they meet the NLP well-formedness conditions. A model like eye accessing cues doesn’t “tell you what someone is thinking,” a goal too vague to be useful or achievable. Instead, it gives you precise information about a specific aspect of people’s internal processing: the dominant sensory modalities of their internal representations.
5. NLP models are (mostly) sensory-based, not abstract or theoretical. A few NLP developers (including Jan “yon” Saeger and myself) seek to develop more unified models of how people work. These general models are more abstract, more theoretical, and a lot harder to test. But they’re still NLP models because sensory-based evidence always trumps our theories!
6. NLP’s models, applications, and processes are testable. You can easily try an NLP process or model and learn for yourself whether it works, and how well. (I find it interesting that people who use unsubstantiated, unprovable descriptive models such as the id and superego object to NLP on the grounds that it is “unscientific.”)
7. NLP practitioners get trained experientially. We learn by doing, not reading, memorizing, or theorizing.
8. NLP operates as an ongoing process of sensory-based feedback and course-correction. If something doesn’t work, as judged by sensory cues, you respond immediately and do something else. That makes NLP “techniques” dynamic and interactive rather than static formulas.

The result? Techniques and models that NLPers import from other fields “act like NLP” once we adapt them. We apply our NLP understandings to them, and use them like we use other NLP techniques. If their content is good, they work. If not, we quickly notice and switch to something that does.

Joy

That’s unfortunate, because modeling is the core skill of NLP. In fact, Richard Bandler and John Grinder used it to create Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP’s rich array of techniques, models, and applications got developed and refined using modeling.

How ironic that NLPers so rarely learn NLP’s core skill and strategy. But fortunately…

If you learned elicitation, you learned NLP modeling skills

Elicitation is a process of figuring out what someone does and how they do it.

For instance, Jane and Mary both feel happy, but they use individual strategies to do it. When doing NLP with Jane, you need to know that she feels happy by saying pleasant words to herself in a happy voice. When doing NLP with Mary, you need to know that she feels happy by watching color movies of herself having fun.

Mary’s strategy might work for Jane, but you will have the easiest time getting Jane into a happy resource state by using her own strategy. You discover Jane and Mary’s strategies by eliciting them.

NLP modeling is also a process of figuring out how someone does something. Modeling typically involves more detail than elicitation. However, you can use all your elicitation skills to do modeling. If you already do elicitation well, you will probably find modeling easy as well as fun.

The key difference between elicitation and modeling

Elicitation requires getting enough detail about how someone does something that they can reliably access their state, skill, or resource. You know you have successfully elicited Jane’s happy state when you can get her to go into it, reliably and repeatedly, using the cues you elicited. Because Jane already knows how to do her happy state, you can usually elicit just a few components and get the entire effect you want.

Modeling requires getting enough detail about how someone does something that someone else can reliably do it. Jane already knows how to do her happy state, so you just have to trigger it. But Mary doesn’t know how to access happy states using Jane’s method. Triggering Jane’s state won’t work for Mary, who has a different set of anchors. Instead, Mary has to build the new state. As an NLP modeler, you need to elicit enough detail from Jane that you can teach Mary to do what Jane does.

How much detail is enough?

To know whether you’ve elicited enough detail to make a valid model (a strategy someone else can use), simply try on the state, strategy, or resource you have elicited. Do you get the outcome?

If you try on Jane’s happiness technique and feel nothing, or very little, you haven’t elicited enough details to generate the effect. Jane also does something else that makes her strategy work. Once you discover the additional components and add them to your model, you will be able to get at least some of Jane’s happy state.

Even if you have no formal training in NLP modeling, you can start modeling now. Simply use your elicitation skills to figure out how someone does something, then test to discover whether you can duplicate what your subject does or experiences. Begin with skills and states that won’t require knowledge you lack, or lots of practice.

Once you can do the skill or get the state, teach it to someone else. If they can do the skill or get the state, you have a viable model… without formal training in NLP modeling!

Joy

• Make friends and keep them
• Become more popular and attractive to others
• Get dates and keep partners
• Reduce conflict and negativity in your life
• Get more support from others
• Keep people around you happier

You already know this skill. You learned it during NLP training, and use it during interventions.

But you probably haven’t generalized it to everyday life. (Most NLPers don’t.) This subtle shift in language can make a big difference.

Association and dissociation cues

What skill do I mean? Associating and dissociating people using language and other cues.

When doing change work, you can dissociate a client by telling them to “observe that younger you, over there.” To keep the client dissociated, you then describe the people in the representation as “that you,” “she,” “him,” or “they,” while gesturing toward the representation and away from the client.

When building a resource state, you use “you” language, present time, and associated sensory cues to associate the client into the experience: “And as you feel that good feeling, now, notice where the center of it is in your body.”

That’s great for change work, but what about the rest of life?

Avoid these association mistakes!

A couple years after my NLP training, I began to notice the ways my NLPer friends and I used association and dissociation cues in everyday life. Our casual language often associated people around us into negative states and experiences! We didn’t mean to do it; it happened automatically while we had our “talking to a client” filters turned off.

I also heard even skilled NLPers accidently associate and dissociate people during interventions. Several times I watched an NLP professional skillfully work a demo subject or client out of a deeply unresourceful state… only to accidentally plunge them back into it by using “you” language to talk about the person’s problem!

I do a language experiment

I decided to experiment with changing how I used association and dissociation cues in everyday interactions. No more “You know when you…” language for my negative stories!

Until then I had used a lot of association cues with negative content. I decided to do the opposite most of the time:

1. Help listeners associate into desirable, positive, and empowering experiences and resources. If you have something good to share, help your listeners experience it too.
2. Help listeners dissociate from negative, unpleasant, and disempowering experiences and attitudes. If you talk about hardships and problems, keep people dissociated. If they talk about problems in an associated way, help them dissociate.

I began by changing one thing: the way I used pronouns — words such as I, you, we, they, he, she, someone, and a person. Later I added other linguistic cues. Eventually I also added gestures and body language.

What happened?

1. My results with clients improved.
2. People feel good around me, so they like me more, find me more attractive, and give me more support.

Before I tell you how to quickly change your automatic association cues, let’s do a quick review.

How cues affect association and dissociation

As you know, when you mention or describe an experience, people understand what you say by building mental representations of it. Association and dissociation cues tell your listeners how to represent point of view.

Association cues include:

• Referring to “you,” “we,” “us,” and “this.”
• Using the person’s name: “John, read this now.” (Sometimes naming a group the person belongs to will also associate them, especially if you also use other linguistic cues: “Like you, most NLPers enjoy learning.”)
• Specifying present time: “As you experience that now…”
• Spatially enclosing the listener in the context: “As you’re in that experience now…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is real; using words like “because” and “of course.”
• Using your listener’s real experiences as examples.
• Gestures that suggest something is in or on the person’s body, or surrounds them.
• Associated sensory cues: “Hear with your own ears, see with your own eyes, feel your body.”

Dissociation cues include:

• Referring to “they,” “he,” “she,” “someone,” “a person,” “one,” “it,” and “that” in representations, and to yourself and your own experiences as “I.”
• Using names to specify people other than the listener, and groups they don’t belong to.
• Specifying past or future time, especially if qualified as not happening now: “You used to do that.”
• Spatially distancing the listener from representations: “As you see and hear those people way over there…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is unreal; using words like “if.”
• Unreal and hypothetical examples: “If you listened to an elephant playing a piano…”
• Gestures that suggest that what you refer to is distant.
• Sensory cues for dissociation: “As you observe that from over here, notice how distant it seems.”

Fortunately, you don’t have to consciously keep track of any of this if you use my strategy and…

Create a “mental movie screen” over each listener’s head

You can’t know exactly what representations other people will build in order to understand what you say. However, you can approximate their representations, and get a pretty good idea of whether your words and gestures will trigger association or dissociation.

I didn’t want to spend weeks or months retraining myself, and you probably don’t either. Instead, use the fast process below to drastically improve your awareness and cue choices within days.

Creating awareness of association cues

1. Imagine talking with a friend.
2. Create a small movie screen over your friend’s head. You will use it to display your friend’s internal representations. (Note: People who visualize less clearly can pretend they see the movie screen, knowing their subconscious mind sees it clearly. Or they can substitute a “sportscaster” voice that will describe their friend’s representations, and adjust the rest of these instructions accordingly.)
3. Say something that includes association or dissociation cues. I suggest pronouns — “I,” “you,” “them” — because they so strongly evoke point of view.
4. Have the screen show the mental movie your friend will probably make in order to understand what you say, and include the soundtrack.

   You want a movie that will give you the information you need, without associating you into the content. To do this, see and hear the movie from Observer position (so you see your friend, their movie, and how the two relate), put a frame around the movie screen, distort the sound so it seems to come through speakers facing your friend, or use whatever tricks work for you.

5. When you use associating language, have the movie screen show your friend associating into their representation of what you say. When you use dissociated language, have the movie screen show your friend dissociating from their representation. At this point, don’t try to change anything. Simply notice the new information. Practice with both positive and negative content, and adjust as needed.
6. Imagine utilizing the information you get from the screen to improve your word choices. How do you want your friend to receive your communication? If your intent matches their movie — if you want your friend dissociated, and they make a dissociated mental movie — you already chose appropriate cues. If your intent mismatches your friend’s movie, change your language cues.
7. Do imaginary practice with more people and varied content. To have a client to access a traumatic memory, or to get rid of an obnoxious person, you might want to associate someone into negative content, or dissociate them from positives. Build in flexibility and choice!
8. Once you like the results, use New Behavior Generator to install the pattern:
   • Create a dissociated movie of you using your new skill successfully. Your movie should show the screens over people’s heads, their movies, and your responses.
   • Adjust your dissociated movie until you like it.
   • Step into your movie and experience it associated from beginning to end. Do you like it? Do you feel confident and congruent? Do you want to change or improve anything?
   • Step out to make adjustments, step in to check how they work.
   • Continue until the whole movie works the way you want it to.
   • Repeat the New Behavior Generator pattern with 2 more examples.

Initially, you will probably simply notice when you use pronouns in ways that mismatch your intent. Soon your mind will start to anticipate people’s likely responses before you even open your mouth. You’ll notice mismatches between your language and intent, and make corrections before you speak.

For most of us who know NLP, most interactions happen in everyday life outside NLP interventions. How we use everyday language affects our important relationships, our interactions at work, even who likes and dislikes us. We can use association and dissociation cues to uplift and empower people, separate them mentally from their problems, and help them feel good. That benefits the people around us, and it benefits us as well.

Want to experiment?

1. Calibrate how you us associative and dissociative cues in everyday interactions now. How do people typically respond to you?
2. Switch to using cues that associate people into good experiences, dissociate them from bad ones.
3. Calibrate how people’s responses change, immediately and over time.
4. Post your results in the Comments below.