I've noticed the NLP study system, from Practitioner to Master Trainer, resembles the hierarchy of many classical systems of initiation into a field of knowledge that was thought to be very secretive and reserved for those who would use the power responsibly.

Now, even in the modern world, we still have 'NLP Masters' who will only train 'students' should they meet a specific personality criteria (or perhaps in our Capitalist society -- meet a specific ability to pay). Although this is rare, the whole 'levels' system of NLP, coupled with the consideration that NLP is still not commonly known to the average man and woman, reminds me of the 'master-student' relationship in many elite schools in the past (or even secret societies). A relationship where precious and powerful knowledge is passed on when the student has reached a certain level to be considered worthy of being given the next teaching.

Of course I might just be exaggerating the practice that many trainers have of segmenting the training into several levels to maximise their profits. Has anyone else felt a similar connection between the way NLP is taught and the way many elite or secret societies segment their 'initiations'?

Or alternatively it mirrors the tertiary educational process: from degree, to masters degree to PhD

What could stop someone learning NLP? Anyone can study NLP! That is one of the most wonderful things about it. It is also why it is not just academics who use NLP techniques. What secrecy is there? What secret society's do you mean? As for accessibility I can't think of anywhere more commonly know to the 'average' man and maybe (on a very quick head count) women than the supermarket and that's where some NLP books can be bought along with the shopping. A lot of people watch TV too, watch YouTube, read books, watch DVDs, listen to CDs and participate in forums like this one. I also know that NLP is much more accessible than academic systems. For example

Primary (old eleven plus is gone thank goodness but did prevent some people from gaining further education)

Secondary - IF you get good results you can apply for..

Tertiary - IF you get a first and good references

Postgraduate - IF you get good results and references

PhD

BTW academic courses cost money and their intranet forums are only available to those paying for courses.

I do hear what you are saying about levels but I can't agree when it is possible to go on some amazing courses without having done a Master Practitioner. How would you structure learning? Is there another way to build on skills? There is so so much to learn, practice and and become elegant with how could all that NLP information be dealt with? As it is the courses (the ones I have learnt on) have utilised fantastic training methods such as accelerated learning. I believe that if the same material was being deal with by an average academic four weeks NLP training would take four years minimum.

I love that in NLP, starter and open access courses are taught by originators such as Richard Bandler and experts such as Eric Robbie, John and Kathleen La Valle, Paul McKenna, Michael Neil et al. In art and in horse riding this is unheard of and very often the least experienced teachers teach the least experienced. I often challenge this and like to question those working in the equine training word as it is very frowned upon to let a 'green' horse be ridden by a 'greenhorn'. The term comes from green young wood that is still growing and a greenhorn means a newcomer. Such a combination is considered to be potentially fatal yet green trainers train green horns in many other subjects.

I just started NLP training with the NLP Comprehensive Practitioner classes. After I'm finished I plan on going through the Master Practitioner classes as well.

You guys are saying NLP is like a tertiary educational process, can you get an actual certificate saying you are qualified (or literate?) in NLP? From what I've seen NLP is kind of an underground (not sure if thats the right word for it) community and there is no recognized accreditation in it.

Most sales managers have heard of NLP and after I finish these classes I plan on putting something like 'Trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming' on my resume. Is this my best bet? Can you get like an 'honorary degree' (doubt it) or something?

I'm studying NLP bc I love the field and it really interests me but if I could be recognized for having this knowledge in the 'real world' (it's no where near perfect) that would be an added bonus.

It does seem very 'underground' to me too which is why I guess I unconsciously came up with the idea that it's really a secretive process of learning. I've learned probably 50times more per day of NLP practice than per year of University Psychology study. That gives me the impression that it's very underground and 'we don't want everyone to know this stuff, the 'normal' people can go study Psychology and use slower techniques with less effectiveness'. I don't know when that idea came into my head, but you guys are probably right, it's more of a Tertiary structure than a secret initiation structure.

Yeah I agree with you about the learning process. I feel like I've learned more in 3 weeks than I did in any psychology or marketing course I have taken (especially marketing courses). I don't understand why NLP is not more main stream, at the same time it is nice to have a huge advantage in life that not very many people know about it. I guess that is the trade off of having a 'degree' in NLP.

You can actually get a Grad Cert in NLP in Sydney Australia (apparently a Government accredited programme), which I'm thinking about doing. But still, a lot of my Psychologist friends are like 'NLP that's rubbish' whenever I bring it up, so it certainly shares a lot of the qualities of 'underground teachings' that I've experienced. For example, I've also studied Energy Work and most people think of it as 'new age rubbish' but it's actually a lot more powerful than many modern bodywork therapy systems.

Almost by rule of thumb, anything mainstream isn't quite as effective or powerful as many 'underground' niche courses that very few people know about. I find the whole thing very interesting.

I've just done a forum search for "why isn't nlp more recognized?" but not a lot of useful information came up.

I suspect it's different in Australia but here in the UK it's almost impossible to leave the house without someone trying to sell you NLP. I was in the airport shop recently and they only had 20 books on sale. Three were NLP books, and two others were self improvement books based on NLP. When we arrived at our hotel, there was an NLP training going on there. My partner (who thinks NLP is a load of nonsense) joked that nowhere is safe any more. We just can't escape!

There are levels of learning, as with anything. You can't build the second floor of a house before building the first, and you can't build the first until you've laid the foundations.

The problem with NLP is that most people want to learn the advanced stuff (which is very powerful and fun and useful) and very few are willing to build strong foundations (which is harder work for less obvious benefits). That's why lots of people jump ahead of themselves and now walk around saying they've learnt these advanced skills, and they have their certificate, but they can't really do much.

I think many of the magick and secret society traditions actually have a better model. They usually aren't selling anything, so they have less reason to flatter people. Their students/initiates advance less slowly and few get beyond the first couple of stages, but there's much more authenticity.

(Of course, there are counter-examples to that and most other things.)

Maybe I'm also biased - I've learnt more from the world of magick than from NLP.

it's almost impossible to leave the house without someone trying to sell you NLP.

And lets not foget the free stuff.

At the top of this page there is a Learn Hypnosis for free in 5 Days and a Learn NLP online for free.

More free ways to learn NLP,

Chris Howards course (I know it is £1000 but there are so many complimentary tickets about it can be classed as free)
Free Podcasts (dozens to choose from).
Taking a NLP book out from a library.
Use NLP connections to ask questions.
Most local practice groups are free to attend.

If you look for reasons to not get on a do something then you will constantly find barriers. If you look for ways to get on and do something then you will have a fun and exciting life.

Thanks,

Matt

alexd181 wrote:

the 'normal' people can go study Psychology

Here in Sweden, getting into the psychology programme at any university requires top grades from high school. In order to be admitted, you must also have atleast one year of working experience. Even if you have all this, you aren't guaranteed to get in because there are too many people applying for it and those that get in are chosen at random.

Attending an NLP training is far easier.

The other choice is buying books on psychology and study at home. The same applies to NLP.

It all comes down to whether you want/require any sort of accreditation and what kind of field you want to work within since I fail to see how any NLP accreditation can substitute a psychologist degree.

NLP training not only substitutes a Psychology degree, it puts most Psychology degrees to shame. I know how hard it is to get in, at the average Psych school there are 1000s of applicants fighting for 50-100 supervised places.

The degree is a total waste of time. When I talk to people about NLP, they get excited about it and start getting motivated towards helping people, some are even able to help others overcome their problems that same day using basic techniques like eye-monitoring (matched with active listening). A psychology degree at best teaches the value of medication and helping people 'live with their problems'.

The reason I say it's for 'normal' people is because normal people have been conditioned in our world to 'live with' problems like being overweight, dyslexia, ADHD, etc. Where as most NLP practitioners actually help people resolve them. That's far more valuable IMO. Of course if you value a MPsych/PhD on your resume more, then that's a matter of opinion.

alexd181 wrote:

The degree is a total waste of time.

Depends on what you want to do, if you want to work with mental patients I wish you the best of luck doing that without any form of degree in psychology. Where I live, there are also legal restrictions on what kind of people you're allowed to work with using certain methods. Most importantly from an NLP perspective you aren't allowed to use hypnosis for treating any form of disease.

I'd guess most people go to their doctor first when they begin to believe they are depressed, simply because it's a requirement to get any form of sickness allowance. The doctor will most likely refer them to a psychologist or psychotherapist. As an NLP practitioner, you don't get that kind of referrals, probably because it'd be against the law for the doctor to refer his patients to someone practicing therapeutical treatment without being a licensed psychologist.

alexd181 wrote:

When I talk to people about NLP, they get excited about it and start getting motivated towards helping people, some are even able to help others overcome their problems that same day using basic techniques like eye-monitoring (matched with active listening). A psychology degree at best teaches the value of medication and helping people 'live with their problems'.

A psychologist isn't allowed to medicate or prescribe any form of medication, I think you've mistaken it with psychiatrist. Do you know the difference? And what a psychologist does compared to a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist?

I haven't had any referrals from a doctor for NLP, however I've had clients referred from a Psychologist, because the Psychologist didn't know how to resolve the problem (which took 2 NLP sessions to resolve). The same Psychologist is now considering studying NLP. This is all a testament to how effective the entire psychological system is. Lol.

A psychologist isn't allowed to medicate or prescribe any form of medication, I think you've mistaken it with psychiatrist. Do you know the difference? And what a psychologist does compared to a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist?

A psychologist is a research scientist who can look up stats on disease and the effects of medication. Usually most Psychologists have some training in CBT and the medical model, and other methods of training are rare exceptions. A psychologist will therefore only ever be able to (1) use CBT (limited model) (2) refer you to a GP for anti-depressants or (3) use other techniques not under the license of psychology.

Psychiatrist - abnormal brain neurology specialization (beyond the scope of this topic, NLP practitioners don't deal with severe psychopathology usually)

Psychotherapist, well that's what I'm licensed in, so to answer your question briefly, yeah I do know the difference. Most people haven't taken the trainings to realize that the majority of modern Psych is totally pointless as a therapy model.

I still stand by my viewpoint that most Psychology schools are failing to educate their students in the true depth of mental strategies (as NLP does) and emotional strategies (as Psychotherapy does). I was shocked by how many limiting beliefs most Psych professors have during the Psych units I took back at Uni. It was a total disappointment. One of the things I love about the NLP educational model is that the trainers are charismatic and love the actual process of NLP (at least most of them). NLP Trainers tend to want to work on themselves before working with others -- a quality few Psychologists nowadays have.

Do you really believe NLP is an inferior model of treatment than CBT or SSRI medication?

I'm curious Alex: how many psychologists do you know? While I honour what's possible with NLP, my experience is that person for person, trained psychologists tend to be more grounded, reliable and self-aware than trained NLPers. They often meet the needs of their clients in a more rounded way. So psychologist-bashing doesn't make much sense to me. The best NLPers can do awesome things, and so can the best psychologists. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.

alexd181 wrote:

Do you really believe NLP is an inferior model of treatment than CBT or SSRI medication?

No I don't, and I never wrote that. What I'm questioning is your statement that NLP training substitutes a degree in psychology. You say it does because it's more efficient as a therapeutical method. I say it doesn't because of legal reasons.

IME, the are often massive differences in quality within the domain of formal training for clinical psychology. That said, the depth and complexity of the frameworks required for good university level education in psychology far, far exceed those required even for the most advanced training (currently envisioned!) in NLP.

This is basically an example of comparing apples to oranges, or anything else categorically dissimilar. NLP may be thought of as a grouping of techniques, attitudes, and perceptual filters that are maximally useful in certain contexts and less than optimal in other contexts.

However, it is also true that many professionally certified mental health professionals are missing some of the "pieces" that NLP is specifically good at. I have attended trainings where the audience was predominantly or had a good percentage of degreed psychologists who, from my NLP filter set, appeared grossly incompetent and incongruent in areas I believed they damned well needed to be competent and congruent.

OTOH, I have seen NLP trainees and trainers who, in my judgment, were also dangerously naive, and in a few cases, just plain dangerous, when it came down to their level of self awareness and capacity to diagnose the true nature of the problem before them.

For specific example, undergraduate students preparing for advanced degrees in clinical psychology will be expected to have a thorough mastery of Personality Theory and be able to distinguish, with some subtlety, both the basic personality structure and the severity to which it has been impacted.

NLP in no way, shape, or form prepares the student to make clear diagnostic category distinctions between, say, the many fine grained subsets of the Paranoid, the Antisocial, the Avoidant, the Histrionic, the Schizoid and the Schizotypal, the Narcissistic, the Obsessive-Compulsive, the Dependent, and lucky you if you get one of these, the Borderline personality.

And that's only a short list of the Personality Disorders... there are MANY other types of presenting disorder, some of which can be harrowing to confront, like Bipolar Disorder which suddenly, without warning, escalates to a manic psychosis.

OpenSite gives a nice encapsulation of the general characteistics of the personality disorder spectrum:

Patients with personality disorders share certain characteristics:

1. Except those suffering from the Schizoid or the Avoidant Personality Disorders, they are insistent and demand preferential and privileged treatment. They complain about numerous symptoms, though they frequently second guess the diagnosis and disobey the physician, his treatment recommendations and instructions.

2. They feel unique, are affected with grandiosity and a diminished capacity for empathy. Consequently, they regard the physician as inferior to them, alienate him and bore him with their self-preoccupation.

3. They are manipulative and exploitative, trust no one and find it difficult to love or share. They are socially maladaptive and emotionally labile.

4. Disturbed cognitive and, mainly, emotional development peaks in adolescence.

5. Personality disorders are stable and all-pervasive – not episodic or transient. They affect all the dimensions of the patient's life: his career, his interpersonal relationships, his social functioning.

6. Though the patient is sometimes depressed and suffers from mood and anxiety disorders - defenses - splitting, projection, projective identification, denial, intellectualization - are so strong, that the patient is unaware of the reasons for his distress. The character problems, behavioral deficits and emotional deficiencies and instability encountered by the patient with personality disorder are, mostly, ego-syntonic. This means that the patient does not, on the whole, find his personality traits or behavior objectionable, unacceptable, disagreeable, or alien to his self.

7. The patient is prone to suffer from other psychiatric disturbances, both personality disorders and Axis I disorders ("co-morbidity"). Substance abuse and reckless behaviors are also common ("dual diagnosis").

8. Defenses are alloplastic: patients tend to blame the external world for their misfortune and failures. In stressful situations, they try to preempt a (real or imaginary) threat, change the rules of the game, introduce new variables, or otherwise influence the external world to conform to their needs.

9. The personality-disordered are not psychotic. They have no hallucinations, delusions or thought disorders (except those who suffer from a Borderline Personality Disorder and who experience brief psychotic "microepisodes", mostly during treatment). They are also fully oriented, with clear senses (sensorium), good memory and general fund of knowledge.

chris_morris wrote:

I think many of the magick and secret society traditions actually have a better model. They usually aren't selling anything, so they have less reason to flatter people. Their students/initiates advance less slowly and few get beyond the first couple of stages, but there's much more authenticity. (Of course, there are counter-examples to that and most other things.) Maybe I'm also biased - I've learnt more from the world of magick than from NLP.

Chris, I think you are correct about magical traditions. I'm going to add that the idea of "initiation" in a shamanistic or magical tradition is a bit more intense than merely learning a subject. The initiation is usually marked by a ritual which either a) celebrates a major neurological change in the candidate, or b) induces major neurological change in the candidate.

Type a) is more common in contemporary magical societies, but nonetheless, the emphasis is on a change in personal epistemology on a deep, "hardwired" level. An imprint, in Lorenz-speak. Type b) is more common in indigenous shamanistic settings in which the initiation ritual induces intense neuroplasticity (an imprint, again) by use of shock, fear, pain, altered state, etc. When the point of imprint vulnerability (intense neuroplasticity) is reached, the new epistemology is installed.

There's little or no comparable sort of initiation in NLP or modern education. I have some Meta-Magick versions of initiation rituals, but I only offer them to candidates who have studied the subject enough to know exactly what they are getting in to.

Personally, I think NLP is modeled more along the lines of martial arts in terms of memetics and achievement levels.

I think we are comparing apples and oranges here, and the Psychology vs NLP argument is definitely not a simple linear one.

I'm curious Alex: how many psychologists do you know? While I honour what's possible with NLP, my experience is that person for person, trained psychologists tend to be more grounded, reliable and self-aware than trained NLPers.

I know quite a few, but then again, I haven't seen many NLPers 'in action', so the statement about not being as grounded could well be correct. The problem is that I'm not sure what a psychologist can really offer you in terms of real results. Bufo Marinus above brings up a list of personality disorder issues that NLP practitioners might not be aware of. That's a great thing, because rather than spending 2 years on treating someone's dyslexia or spelling difficulties an NLP practitioner doesn't need to label it as a 'disorder', instead they can introduce a new way of representing the information to students.

Just the other day, I was talking to a young woman who kept telling me "Yeah, well, my psychologist has been teaching me this visualization technique for 6 weeks now, but it's just not working" ... after 2 minutes of helping her re-model the same technique as a Kinesthetic process she found it instantly helpful and easy to do. That's the reason that I 'bash' Psychologists on the odd occasion: Ignorance about the human mind. But my experience may be biased, since most of the one's I've met don't know much beyond their limited models.

1. For a Psychologist to use a technique it generally has to be well-tested.
2. For a technique to be well tested it generally has to be applied to a well defined disorder with replicated success.
3. If a Psychologist doesn't use well tested techniques they may be liable if something goes wrong.

1. NLP practitioners use techniques that work 'on the spot', there is little debate about their effectiveness because it's visible in plain sight to everyone.
2. NLP practitioners therefore receive 2 forms of scrutiny, one of competence, and one of legality.

That's a simplified version of my view on the two fields, with each one having substantial flaws. In my personal experience more Psychologist that I've met have done harm to their clients than NLP Practitioners that I've met. Once again, I haven't met very many NLP Practitioners to observe them in practice, so it's certainly possible that they are not as 'self aware'.

I'm not sure about the People, but the Model of NLP puts cognitive/behavioural therapies to shame over and over. I think if this argument crosses from Models to People then it will become even more complex. But it may well be the People who want to maximise their client payments and control over the mental health industry who have driven NLP into the underground.