I recently wrote an article for Medium entitled Prisoners of Beliefs, in which I pointed out that what we believe we make real in our lives.
One of the pervasive beliefs in our world is that it is difficult to change our habits and undesirable behaviors. Another is that there is a scarcity of resources in the world. If you combine these two, you become a person who believes there is never enough money, opportunity, or joy to go around, and that you may be powerless to dig yourself out of poverty or whatever life circumstance you are in.
This belief in difficulty of changing yourself is supported by many, if not most, models of psychotherapy. In a book by Jay Haley, published in 1963, entitled Strategies of Psychotherapy, he shows that the conventional Freudian model of therapy has an unintentional but nevertheless approach that creates dependency on the therapist, and may hook the client into a very long-term relationship.
I saw this first-hand in the 70s, when a friend told me that his wife had been in therapy for 10 years!
In 1975 John Grinder and Richard Bandler published volume one of Structure of Magic and in 1976 the second volume came out. They introduced a new model for doing therapy that was based on the work of Dr. Milton Erickson, who, as a practicing therapist, effected cures in patients in remarkably short time. It was called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and proposed that we are programmed to behave in repetitive ways through brain wiring, and that this wiring could be easily re-wired.
I studied with both Grinder and Bandler in the late 70s and early 80s and became a certified practitioner of NLP. There was an important premise in their work that was a paradigm-breaker. It is not necessary to uncover the original cause of a person’s undesired behavior. There are methods that can be used to rewire the brain and effect changes almost immediately.
It was interesting to me to observe the reaction of the professional psychotherapy community to this claim. Thomas Kuhn wrote a book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he showed that new paradigms are always met with skepticism and rejection by the established community. A few early adopters, however, embrace the new model and over time, they present enough evidence for its validity that the nay-sayers finally give up and accept it as valid (most of them, anyway).
This was true when Einstein published his work on relativity and it was true for Bandler and Grinder’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Recent brain scans have confirmed that our brain wiring is constantly changing, and very importantly, that imagining doing something repetitively, such as shooting baskets or playing a musical instrument, creates the same brain wiring as does actually doing the activities. So the premise of NLP has been validated.
It is interesting that psychotherapy has been able to discount those instantaneous transformations that take place in individuals through some event or encounter that has a strong impact on them. In some cases, such as severe alcoholism, the person “hits bottom,” and is primed for a change, and through an intervention or encounter with someone the person escapes the addictive hold of drinking and never takes another drink.
Milton Erickson wrote a wonderful little book, entitled My Voice Will Go With You, in which he describes some of these kinds of transformations in his patients. I will leave it to you to read the book.
I am presenting a series of webcasts that I’m calling the same thing as the title of this article: Transform Your Life Using NLP. My plan is to do a webcast monthly on using NLP to do this and the series is free of charge. To sign up for it, you can simply go to https://tinyurl.com/NLPforMe2021
