NLP THERAPY: It’s Not Just One Thing

As I’ve been presenting Meta-Therapy in some trainings this year, I recently came across Lisa Wake’s book on therapy. I heard of it years ago, but I had not seen the book prior to writing Meta-Therapy: Psychotherapy in the Meta Place. I recently got a copy of her book, Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy (2008). That’s when I discovered that it presents a “pecular” view of NLP psychotherapy—it is a view that I kind of recognized, but it is not exactly the view that I have known or practiced during the past 40 years. It’s a good book and covers a lot about psychotherapy and about NLP, but it also has a lot of weaknesses.

What’s best about the book is chapter 1 “Founding Principles of NLP.” There Lisa Wake covered the NLP presuppositions and connected them specifically to therapy. There’s also a lot of good connections between NLP and therapy. Wake mostly focuses on psychological research. As I read the book, it reminded me that one’s view of psychology or therapy depends to a great extent on who you read and who you do not.

Now counter-balancing the good, there are a great many things that are simply inaccurate. First of all, there is a lack of understanding the origins of NLP. Reading this book, a reader might come away thinking that NLP first modeled Erickson, and the great majority of NLP comes from Erickson. You would never know that it started with Perls and Satir for two years before the founders ever even heard about Erickson. Wake constantly presents the order “Erickson, Satir, and Perls” whereas the historical order is “Perls, Satir, and Erickson.”

Also, not knowing the history, here is an entire book on NLP and therapy with almost no recognition of the Human Potential Movement and the role of Maslow and Rogers. That may have been acceptable once, but in 2005 I revealed that history in articles which are still on the website. I even presented it at the NLP Conference in London in 2005,2006, but there’s no indication of any awareness of that. The presupposition “People already have all of the resources they need to act effectively” came from Maslow long, long before Erickson may have repeated it (p. 34). While Erickson would have accepted that premise, it expressly came from Maslow and Rogers and the Human Potential Movement.

Nor did the Meta-Model come from Erickson (p. 88). It simply did not. Frank Pucelik and Richard Bandler worked with their Gestalt class for two years developing the Meta-Model from Perls and Satir. They developed it using Transformation Grammar that Grinder brought to the party. And that was long before they were introduced to Erickson. The statement “... the Meta- Model from Erickson and Satir...” completely leaves Perls out and mis-attributes it to Erickson. I wrote about this in 1997 in the book now titled Communication Magic.

Then there are the attributions to sources of NLP that has no basis at all. Wake attributes a lot of

constructionism to Piaget (p. 39, 89) and to Jung (p. 48, 68, 109) but neither of them were quoted by any of the founders of NLP in any of the literature from 1975 through 1980. None! So quoting them in this book gives a false impression about what NLP is about and where it came from. My journalist reporting of the history of NLP, Untold Secrets of NLP (2018) is a good corrective.

Lisa Wake also has some kind of concept in her mind about “the programmatic and modelling work of Bandler” and how it works. What that concept is, I could not determine from the writing. Regarding it, twice she asserts (without any evidence) that “In this approach the therapist stays outside of the relationship with the client and operates from a model of facilitating change in ‘how’ the client does what he/she does.” (p. 7, italics added). This is very strange! It does not fit anything that I even encountered or experienced in all of my trainings in NLP or the work I did with Bandler. In fact, the opposite it true. When I ask a client about how he or she does an experience like depression or panic, I do that while creating and maintaining rapport ... and rapport at all levels. For me, this description of Cognitive Psychotherapy constitutes a straw- man argument.

Later in the book I discovered her misunderstanding. Like many in NLP, she confuses the idea of meta-position with dissociation (p. 163). If she had read any of my five books on Meta- States, she would have known better. That is only one of 16 possibilities! Very sad. Actually “going meta” has nothing to do with what is called “dissociation.” When you can “go meta” or “step back” out of one state, you can step into all sorts of other states—learning, joy, curiosity, playfulness, etc. Going meta into pure observation or neutrality is only one of many choices.

It is my guess that “programmatic and modeling” for her refers to asking a client, “How do you do X or Y?” and somehow she thinks this makes it entirely conscious and cuts out anything and everything that is outside-of-consciousness. I don’t know how something like that is suppose to work. In Meta-States, we know that the great majority of higher frames and states are all outside- of-consciousness. It’s systemic—everything human is both conscious and unconscious simultaneously.

There are several other similar strange assertions in the book.

“The more unconscious approach involves the therapist as a core element of the therapeutic process and recognises that all behavior and therefore all change lies within the unconscious, and it is only through direct communication with the unconscious that change can occur.” (p. 7). All change? There is no change at all that lies within the conscious mind?

“It is mainly Erickson’s work that has influenced the neurolinguistic psychotherapist today.” (p. 14). If you read The Structure of Magic Volumes I & II (1975, 1976) that presents a model of change in therapy and all of the original NLP work about therapy—which occurred before they even met Erickson, this is a very strange statement and simply not historically accurate.

“We therefore make meaning of our experiences outside our linguistic representation.” (p. 101). Really? We make meaning outside of linguistic representations? Then what about all of the NLP materials about framing and reframing. That’s what Erickson is also known for.

Bandler’s book on Reframing is sub-titled: The Structure of Meaning.

I thought, and had hoped, that maybe the case studies of therapeutic processes would add a great value to the book. But sadly, the case studies are written as abstract conclusions. There are not actual dialogue with clients of the therapeutic processes which are described.

Finally, there are quotations from Chopra and his book, Quantum Healing, also from Quantum Linguistics, and other new age non-sense that, for me, really undermine the value of the book. For anyone who wants to promote the credibility of NLP, and identify its scholarly and scientific standing, this does not help at all. In spite of all of these inaccuracies and weaknesses, there’s a lot of value in the book and I do recommend it to anyone interested in NLP and Therapy.