According To NLP...

By Adam Cox

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a form of psychotherapy that while not typically recognized by mainstream psychotherapy has become extremely popular with teachers, life couches and marketing and business executives. There are even several psychotherapists with private practices and many hypnotherapists who employ the methodology behind NLP.

NLP seeks to change the programming we have in our brains that causes us to react negatively to certain triggers. The belief is that those triggers are really memories or learned behaviors from the subconscious mind that are impacting our emotions. By reprogramming these memories with something positive - a calming color or sight, a happy memory or a pleasant tone of voice - we are thereby changing the way our brain interprets the trigger and changing the way we react. Sure there is little hard, scientific data to back up the claims made by NLP and NLP practitioners but when carefully considered, the theories posed by the method make sense.

There has to be some reason Patient A and Patient B react to things like dogs, snakes or spiders differently. They could have grown up next door to each other, spent their entire childhoods together and came from the same basic background. We'll say, for arguments sake that they were both from middle class, average families with one sibling two years older and one sibling two years younger, and both parents still married - one parent worked, the other stayed home and for the argument's sake again, will say it was the same parent at home in both families. They got similar grades in school and both had the same friends. Yet somehow, despite nearly identical childhoods, Patient A is terrified of dogs and Patient B is a dog lover. How does this happen?

According to NLP, it is likely that Patient A was bitten by a dog or had a bad experience with a dog, or someone in their family had a fear of dogs and displayed it in from of them. In either case, it is probable Patient A has no memory of this experience because it may have happened when they were too young to remember. That doesn't matter to the brain though. The subconscious mind remembers this and triggers the fear reaction every time Patient A sees a dog.

Patient A wants to solve this problem because Patient B is a close friend and, yes, has a four legged friend of their own. Patient A just wants to be able to visit Patient B without having a panic attack at the thought of seeing the dog. Patient A turns to an NLP practitioner to get help.

The NLP practitioner is going to try to get to the root cause of Patient A's phobia. Together, they discover that Patient A did in fact have a bad experience which programmed into Patient A's mind that dogs are bad news and should be avoided. The NLP practitioner will now set about trying to reformat that program by changing the reaction the brain has to dogs. They will do this by reprogramming the brain so when Patient A sees a dog, a pleasant reaction is triggered; allowing Patient A and Patient B to have pleasant visits without the panic attacks. - 31969

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