Credit to Ben Bosely for the information I have just found out. Looks like Alan Johnson is rolling out over 3000 new "therapists" over the next three years. Does anyone know if this involves NLP practitioners overtly or even kind of covertly? Looks like a third will be CBTers but what do they do when working with beliefs doesn't work (i'm welcome to a correction on that feeble understanding of CBT)? Thankfully it looks like NLP is slowly seeping into the health service and education proper. Has the fuse been lit or will it fizzle out?

I suspect a lot will go to CBT and not much to NLP - I wrote my opinion about that in this article: Can NLP Learn from CBT?

Lord Layard is the guy driving a lot of the changes and he loves CBT. You might like to lobby him anyway (c/o The House of Lords) as he's open to discussions.

I was in a meeting a few days ago with some NHS CBTers who deal with people with chronic pain/health/mental health conditions. They passed around some booklets about the service and I immediately saw numerous improvements that could be made using NLP.

I asked one of the practitioners if she used NLP and she said "Isn't that to do with assertiveness training?"

How has CBT become mainstream and NLP hasn't when NLP has much more to offer

Hi Alistair et al,

Alistair_Donnell wrote:

Looks like Alan Johnson is rolling out over 3000 new \\\\\\"therapists\\\\\\" over the next three years. Does anyone know if this involves NLP practitioners overtly or even kind of covertly?

I think this is referring to the government's new Improved Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, which is largely CBT based, but also includes psychoanalysis to keep the psychiatrists kind of on board. Having read many of the IAPT documents in full, I noticed NLP mentioned just once in very small print towards the end of one of them.

The Government are intending, naively IMO, to pay for these posts, first proposed before the recession from getting folk off benefits and back to work - i.e. by resolving depression, anxiety, somatic back pain etc with psychological therapies. One problem is the rise in unemployment since the planning took place. The other problem is that they are having to train the workforce to do it while on the job and have been advertising training posts on 75% wages and the like. All the training and the job specifications are for CBT.

Surprises all round then that nationally they are still trying to recruit and are a long way behind schedule.

So when you write Alistair,

Thankfully it looks like NLP is slowly seeping into the health service and education proper.

Sadly I see little evidence of this.

Ever the optimist

MH

Thanks for the replies. Malcomb - I know its nearly impossible to remain optimistic when the government is involved but I only know that from an education side. Trying to clean a house with handcuffs on springs to mind.

When I said slowly seeping in it prob was a bit ambiguous. I do "believe" the fuse has been lit albeit in the backdoor. What I mean by this are the sporadic trainings/achievements up and down the country by people who clearly and elegantly know how to do NLP and deliver it/research it well that I have seen on my travels. Kate Benson, Richard Churches, Paul Tosey and Jane Mathison doing NLP in education some serious justice are the biggest names I can think of and doubtless many more. Then there is, is it Garner? - magic in practice guy turning heads, I know Eric Robbie has delivered at least one (I know of) training to doctors and I think there is another lady delivering training specifically to doctors and also it looks like Nina Lancaster also is looking to offer something to the health service, and Malcomb abeit maybe more covertly, again - serious justice to NLP. Apologies for the vagueness on the health side my map is education biased!
So currently, "knowing" that it does actually work and people in those sectors who get taught at least some aspect (application) will also be able to see it work (if they use it). Paul Mckenna has been on loose women and Chris Moyles which I mention only due to the increased awareness of NLP (or as my mum remarked NFL!) in general - has the fuse been lit even though it might be a slow burner? I personally don't think anything can be learned from CBT other than how to demonstrate effectiveness on paper - its not a slight just a personal biased opinion.

Ps. I'm going out now so apologies for not replying any time soon if the discussion continues

Hi All,

StevenGoodall wrote:

I was in a meeting a few days ago with some NHS CBTers who deal with people with chronic pain/health/mental health conditions. They passed around some booklets about the service and I immediately saw numerous improvements that could be made using NLP.

How has CBT become mainstream and NLP hasn't when NLP has much more to offer

The NHS has limited itself in the free market by stating that it will only purchase treatments with a sound evidence base. So when Alistair writes,

I personally don't think anything can be learned from CBT other than how to demonstrate effectiveness on paper -

that is not to be sniffed at, even if, as I understand it the evidence base around CBT is now being shown to be less robust than first thought.

I have no desire to kick off the "scientific testing" debate once again, believe me. Nor do I think that route is necessarily the only or best way forward.

I am optimistic however that through the efforts such as those described by Alistair,

Paul Mckenna has been on loose women and Chris Moyles which I mention only due to the increased awareness of NLP

and others that through a (slow perhaps) process of raising public awareness through the media etc. when the great British public are in surgeries asking to see an NLP Practitioner, politicians and NHS Commissioners will finally take note. The other strand of NHS Policy that actually is favourable is that in the current climate, the Service User is king, and increasingly empowered to ask for what he/she wants. It may not currently be available, but supply and demand and all that.

Historically, there is a culture shift about 100 years after any major scientific breakthrough. like the industrial revolution after Newton had done his thinking. Relativity was put forward to the scientists about 100 years ago. Perhaps the time is now for the majority to realise that we are not necessarily stuck in the narrative of our lives or with the cards dealt to us by fate, or destined to just react to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" ?

Of course there's a lot more to it than just that, IMO, but you asked if Alan Johnson knows about NLP. Maybe he does, maybe not, I don't know, but as a politician he'll only start banging on about it when it is popular to do so. In the mean time it's up to all of us I would suggest to engage interest and curiousity in others by doing the business rather than talking about it. By that I mean getting results that challenge and make people think or better still, ask, "How did they do that ? " in whatever arena of application floats your boat.

MH

I recently helped a client who was undergoing CBT. After four sessions with the practitioner she was no closer to a positive outcome than when she started. From what I can gather, the main part of the treatment was setting goals, changing her diet, and getting a social life. The most mystifying part was a run down of all the bad side effects a lack of sleep can have on the body and the mind, which for someone who was unable to sleep was most distressing. Being as most of the work was homework, £180 per hour seem a little over priced. (not my words but hers). Some of the tasks that were set fit in with NLP, however there were no specific interventions used to overcome the solution to the problem.

StevenGoodall wrote:

I was in a meeting a few days ago with some NHS CBTers who deal with people with chronic pain/health/mental health conditions. They passed around some booklets about the service and I immediately saw numerous improvements that could be made using NLP.

I asked one of the practitioners if she used NLP and she said "Isn't that to do with assertiveness training?"

Well, that illustrates part of the problem right there! No one seems to know what NLP actually is, including NLPers! Where's the centralized, agreed-upon definition of NLP? Where's the "shared reality?"

A while back my wife told a shrink about my interest in NLP, and his response was something like, "Oh, that stuff about eye accessing cues?" He'd given up on NLP back in the 70s, I guess. Actually, I think psychiatry in general did.

It doesn't help that NLP tends to be massively oversold, even by the founders. You get these fantastical stories about NLP being used to cure bipolar disorder, heroine addiction, alcoholism, schizophrenia, vision disorders, cancer; then you get on YouTube and see the ugly reality--a video of Bandler just barely making a dent in some woman's fear of flying.

I think there are some really useful things in NLP, and the model of people encoding and organizing their experience in terms of their senses and language fascinates me. That said, I must at the same time acknowledge that NLP's bad reputation is well-earned and that NLP will likely never get pulled out of the gutter.

Maybe create a branch of NLP called something like "Therapy Application of NLP" or TANLP?

Alistair_Donnell wrote:

... NLP (or as my mum remarked NFL!)

!

Regarding the popularity of CBT in certain circles, "leading psychotherapy experts" have this explanation:

"The government, the public and even many health officials have been sold a version of the scientific evidence that is not based in fact, but is instead based on a logical error. This is how it works:
1) More academic researchers subscribe to a CBT approach than any other.
2) These researchers get more research grants and publish more studies on the effectiveness of CBT.
3) This greater number of studies is used to imply that CBT is more effective."

"This is a classic example of the logical fallacy known as 'argument from ignorance' ie the absence of evidence is taken as evidence of absence."

Source: CBT superiority questioned at conference - University of East Anglia (UEA)

StevenGoodall wrote:

How has CBT become mainstream and NLP hasn't when NLP has much more to offer

1. CBT comes partly out of BT - behavioural therapy, the bastard child of behaviourism. Thus backing CBT allows academic psychologists to pretend that their profession wasn't completely wasting its time when they backed Behaviourism - through most of the 20th century

2. For the same reason, although cognitive psychology was actually a revolt against behaviourism, backing CBT allows academic psychologists to pretend that they are "scientists" whose work is cumulative - even though the genuine scientists (chemists, biologists, etc.) know psychology is nothing of the kind and often laugh at psychologists for their delusions of grandeur

3. CBT was developed WITHIN the academic psychological community with people like Professor Aaron Beck leading the parade. NLP, on the other hand, was developed outside the academic community. That sin alone is enough to cause most academics to dismiss it out of hand

4. In the 1980s two members of the establishment - Australian Dr Chris Sharpley (1984 and 1987) and Brit Dr Michael Heap (1988, etc.) published three articles which trashed "NLP".

The fact that neither of those men understood genuine NLP - and in my opinion, based on e-mail discussions with both of them, in late 2007-early 2008, they still don't , and neither did most of the researchers whose work they reviewed - was irrelevant to people determined to find fault with what they imagined was "NLP".

5. Ever since the mid-1980s, these reviews have been referenced over and over again by members of the academic psychology community with no perceptible attempt to discover whether Sharpley or Heap, or the original researchers, knew what they were talking about. Even as late as July last year, a journal out of the University of Glamorgan (Wales, UK) published an article that was substantially based on the supposed accuracy of Sharpley's 1984 article.

6. As well as the errors made by the academic community, the credibility of the FoNLP also has also suffered due to the twaddle presented by Robert Dilts in some of his writings -

- The nonsense about synaptic gaps being the point where two dendrites interface, in Roots of Neuro-Linguistic Programming,

- The sheer ignorance of the claims made about brain activity at certain levels of the Neuro-logical levels model in Changing Belief Systems with NLP , (hardly surprising since the descriptions appear to be based on sheer guesswork propounded by Gregory Bateson prior to 1972, when brain scanning devices were just beginning to show how brain circuitry really operates)

- The exaggerated claims for the value of Dilts' "experimental" work, in Neuro-Linguistic Programming,. Volume 1.

Many NLPers may regard such errors as unimportant, and in one sense they are.
I'd guess that, apart from the so-called neuro-logical levels model, most NLPers will never have read these books, and almost certainly won't be basing their use of the NLP-related techniques on Dilts' fantasies.
Unfortunately, however, the psychological community picked up this rubbish and made the convenient assumption that Dilts was presenting basic NLP material (see the Druckman and Swets edited NRC report of 1988). As a consequence this stuff has been recorded by them as proof that NLP was based on unproven, disproven and out-of-date theorising. Another line of criticism which has been recycled over and over again.

7. CBT is genuine therapy, and the use of CBT techniques, such as they are, has been limited to the therapeutic context. The field of NLP, on the other hand, is a set of techniques which can be applied in a wide variety of contexts, including therapy. This balance has mainly tended to favour CBT.

Because CBT has such a limited focus, and was developed on an academic setting, it has been the subject of a considerable amount of research.

Because NLP and the NLP-related techniques have such a very wide range of applications; because it was developed in a university setting (initially), but outside the academic community, and because of Bandler and Grinder's lack of interest in trying to justify their work to the academic community, has been the subject of comparatively little research, and much of the early research, being carried out by people with little knowledge of authentic NLP (and most of what they did "know" being inaccurate), was largely useless.

8. Don't forget the money. One of the sockpuppet(S)' favourite quotes is a poll that showed that NLP is dislike by psychotherapists. CBT isn't.
But think about it. CBT aims to produce results in 6-20 sessions, depending on the nature and severity of the problem being therup'd. A skilled therapist, utilizing the appropriate NLP-related techniques, is more likely to be doing genuine "brief therapy", involving 1-6 sessions.

Since therapists get paid by the hour, and lose a customer every time they are successful, is it more likely that they will like CBT, or the technique which utilizes "go faster stripes"?


In fact, overall, CBT has a backstory that almost guaranteed its success, whilst the FoNLP has a backstory that strongly appeals to mavericks, but is a lot less attractive to the people who hand out grants and recommend various disciplines for special attention.

in the politics of the academic/psychology communities, NLPers have proved themselves massively inept.
As I said earlier, many people involved with the FoNLP will regard that as completely irrelevant. It's only when we start asking questions like "Why is CBT getting the limelight, whilst the FoNLP is widely ignored/unknown?" that the way we've done things up until now begins to take on any importance.




Hope that helps to answer your question, Steven

Be well

Andy B.

I agree with almost everything you say there Andy.

Just one thing confused me - what's FoNLP?

Chris

chris_morris wrote:

I agree with almost everything you say there Andy.

Just one thing confused me - what's FoNLP?

1. Over the last year I've been reading article after article about "NLP" written by people who have little or no idea what genuine NLP is

2. In Whispering in the Wind, John Grinder identifies three aspects of "NLP" - NLP itself, the specific modelling process used by Bandler in regard to Satir and Perls which became the basis for the FoNLP, plus the collection of NLP-related applications/techniques,, and NLP-related training.

"The FoNLP" stands for the Field of NLP. I use it as shorthand for Grinder's three aspects, and to distinguish genuine or "classic code" NLP from the various nonsense definitions of "NLP" as used by the critics.

Be well

Andy B.

I think the problem is that anyone can write a book and put "NLP" on the cover without any lawyers standing up and saying "hold on there son, thats not NLP"

We need ONE official governing body. Things will start falling into place when that happens. Until then I think we are stuck with the heartache of knowing this stuff works but having hardly anyone believe us

StevenGoodall wrote:

I think the problem is that anyone can write a book and put \\\\\"NLP\\\\\" on the cover without any lawyers standing up and saying \\\\\"hold on there son, thats not NLP\\\\\"

Too true, blue.

My own publisher, Kogan Page, brought out a book last summer called "Understanding NLP" which is almost complete rubbish from the front cover onwards (see the review here http://www.bradburyac.mistral.co.uk/revs37.html#unlp). When I challenged the Production Director on this he acknowledge that it would only be pulled if it fails to meet it's required sales figures.

I have consequently asked the company to stop publishing my own books, though since I'm under contract I cannot get out of my situation until they choose to release me.

So, if anyone here is tempted to buy either "Successful Presntation Skills" or "Develop Your NLP Skills", written by me - Andrew Bradbury - and published by Kogan Page, in a new 4th edition this month and in June respectively, I'd suggest that you don't.

In fact you could e-mail the company's managing director and/or the production director at

hkogan@koganpage.com (this is Ms Helen Kogan Page, the MD)

jfinch@koganpage.com (this is Jon Finch, the production director)

to express your displeasure.

If you do, please keep it civilzed or you'll likely only create resistance.

Be well

Andy B.

Andy, I seriously doubt that you'll find a publisher out there that only publishes books that you agree with. In fact, as you start working with bigger and bigger publishers, the number of silly books tends to increase. My last book was on a fairly large publisher who also has another imprint that is mostly sappy self-help titles that sell a lot - which probably allows them to also publish the more esoteric titles. Publishers want to make money, period. That's their business. A publisher who only wants to make great books - is usually called a "small press," has small distribution and tends not to last more than a few years, unless there are other streams of income.


Anyway... if you write good books, keep doing it and keep them out there. If the publisher doesn't mess with them, then you are way ahead of most writers, even if there are also crappy books on the same imprint. The more good books out there, the better... Celebrate that you have a publisher and work on keeping your quality up there as an alternative to anything else your own publisher or others might issue.

Tell people to BUY your books. Sell more than the stupid titles and your publisher will listen to you more. And the people who read them will have a better basis of comparison, too.

Steve and Andrew,

I really like yours and Grinder's ideas of making distinctions of modeling, applications, and training, and to have a central governing body.

However, wouldn't it be very difficult put in to practice the actual enforcement of what is "authentic" NLP? For example, say someone presented ideas that heavily contradict some ideas in classic-code NLP, but passed it off as NLP. But turns out their ideas are very useful in some context. Does the FoNLP then reject these ideas as not part of genuine NLP or does it evolve to include those ideas?

Chris Johnson wrote:

Well, that illustrates part of the problem right there! No one seems to know what NLP actually is, including NLPers! Where's the centralized, agreed-upon definition of NLP? Where's the "shared reality?"

A while back my wife told a shrink about my interest in NLP, and his response was something like, "Oh, that stuff about eye accessing cues?" He'd given up on NLP back in the 70s, I guess. Actually, I think psychiatry in general did.

It doesn't help that NLP tends to be massively oversold, even by the founders. You get these fantastical stories about NLP being used to cure bipolar disorder, heroine addiction, alcoholism, schizophrenia, vision disorders, cancer; then you get on YouTube and see the ugly reality--a video of Bandler just barely making a dent in some woman's fear of flying.

I think there are some really useful things in NLP, and the model of people encoding and organizing their experience in terms of their senses and language fascinates me. That said, I must at the same time acknowledge that NLP's bad reputation is well-earned and that NLP will likely never get pulled out of the gutter.

Chris

this is one time when I'm very glad that an individual such as yourself is just speaking for YOURSELF

Jim

I thought Chris's contribution was very sharp. Especially...

Chris Johnson wrote:

It doesn't help that NLP tends to be massively oversold, even by the founders. You get these fantastical stories about NLP being used to cure bipolar disorder, heroine addiction, alcoholism, schizophrenia, vision disorders, cancer; then you get on YouTube and see the ugly reality--a video of Bandler just barely making a dent in some woman's fear of flying.

I think there are some really useful things in NLP, and the model of people encoding and organizing their experience in terms of their senses and language fascinates me. That said, I must at the same time acknowledge that NLP's bad reputation is well-earned and that NLP will likely never get pulled out of the gutter.