I’ve had a number of questions from new visitors to our website who want to know what NLP is. I thought it might be good to give a quick introduction from my perspective with the understanding that its utilization goes far beyond mental health to most forms of human learning and communication.

I first heard about NLP about 35 years ago. It was being touted by its founders as the largest advance in psychotherapy in the last hundred years and was developed, in part, by synthesizing the work of three of my favorite psychotherapists, Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. I was teaching psychology at Cornell at the time and while professional opinion was very much skeptical of its claims. I decided to attend a training conference.

My strategy for dealing with my own questions was direct. I volunteered the first day to go up on the stage to get my own shark phobia cured (I had been traumatized as a boy when swimming on vacation by two sharks who followed me in to shore on my rubber mat. My sister maintains they would have eaten me but for the fact that I was so skinny there were mostly only bones in place at the time.) In front of an audience of two or three hundred psychotherapists, John Grinder, one of Neuro-Linguistic Programming's co-founders, led me through a set of internal visualizations for about an hour and a half. By the end of the session I was snorkeling quite comfortably in imagined situations that at the beginning of the demonstration had me sweating and terrified. While it took me another two hours, using the techniques I learned, to actually get in the water and snorkel, that was still quite an improvement over the weeks or months it would have taken  using the then current behavior therapy, with which I was very familiar. Two of my PhD classmates at the Institute of Psychiatry in London had done their graduate research curing snake phobias which left me very familiar with what was considered state of the art research at the time.

Subsequently, like thousands of therapists, I attended four or five other learning conferences and integrated NLP into my clinical work.

Early in my integration of  NLP skills into my clinical practice, I helped a well known hospital administrator out of a severe, post divorce, year long depression in a two hour session using the NLP techniques. Word spread quickly among many of our local physicians and I had no problem using NLP after that, though it was almost impossible to explain exactly what I was doing in words they accepted or understood. Training Institutes of varying competency and clinical “integrity” began to sprout up around the country, and I sampled a few of them but settled in with Maryanne and Ed Reese in Tampa Florida who taught and gave me much across a number of trainings. While I tried to interest other lecturers at Cornell University in NLP techniques and some of the NLP organizers in doing research, I was not successful.

Indeed, the two worlds of NLP and professional/research seemed to polarize more and more over the years into intransigent believers and non-believers. I have often joked about professional discussions in which I attempted to describe my NLP involvement as having produced yet another chapter in the continuing verbal “holy war” against the abolition of prejudice in the scientific establishment on the one hand and the eradication of prejudice against the scientific method on the other. Personally, it has given me great appreciation for those suffering dysfunctional families, schizoid personalities and an obsessive fascination with windmills.

More recently, to be fair, I have been surprised by the degree of current support I have received to do the project’s research  by serious professional scientists at places like Duke and Harvard…but I shall offer a bottle of fine champagne to the gods if we don’t find our initial research results very “vigorously” questioned by many in the established professional communities…

…exciting and challenging times ahead I suspect.