RE-PACKAGING BANDLER MAKING HIM CUDDLY

In June I saw a new video which has been made about Richard Bandler, it is called Altered States: The Richard Bandler Story. It was produced by people in Bandler’s group and it is obviously a promotional film. This becomes especially noticeable in the last 20 minutes of the film as the focus goes to a new book that has been produced. My guess is that someone (namely John LaValle) decided that they needed to humanize Richard and re-package him in order to deal with all of the bad press, the negative stories, and a lot of the not-so-nice facts about Bandler. And why would LaValle be interested in doing that? Because he is “the heir apparent.” He will take over when Richard is gone. Now overall the video presents Bandler in a positive light and reframes the negative facts. You can see a lot of use of NLP in how the video was produced.

What’s good is that there are a few moments of old videos of Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson which I had not seen. Also some old videos of John and Richard. But the facts get sacrificed a lot in this video. There’s a suggestive hint that maybe they also saw and worked with Fritz Perls. But, of course, they did not; he died two years before they met or worked together. They used Robert Dilts to talk about the origin of NLP, but of course, Robert was not there during the first two or three years (from 1972 to 1975). Robert didn’t entered until 1975. He had not been a part of the original group with Frank Pucelik and Richard before John Grinder ever came along.

When you watch this video, you will get no hint or indication that before “Richard and John,” there was Frank. “Frank and Richard” were the dynamic duo who ran the first gestalt class and the first “meta” people class. And it was into that class that they invited John some later time. But because this video completely eliminates Frank, it is a major deletion and distorts the NLP history about how it all began. At the end of the video, they quote from John’s 2001 book to validate Richard. But they did not quote where John wrote in that book that there was “a third man,” Frank Pucelik, who also was a co-creator. Judith DeLozier also left out significant facts, small things like she was married to Frank Pucelik when they moved to Santa Cruz and that later she married John Grinder.

When it comes to addressing the murder lawsuit, the strangest thing about that is that they portray Richard as if he was the victim(!). Nothing is said about why his “best friend” was a known drug dealer, James Morino. How come? What was that about? Nor why James would call Richard to come and pick him up at a bar after a fight (sounds kind of shady). Another unstated fact was that, at that time, Richard was taking a lot of drugs (cocaine, LSD, etc.). The film presents Corine Christenson, the woman who was shot and killed either by Richard or James, as a prostitute! What they did not say was that this same Corine was also Richard’s personal assistant and handled his books, appointments, etc. Richard portrays himself as having

been completely set up for the murder charge and it’s presented in such a way as to create sympathy for him.

The film also skips over all of the lawsuits that Bandler brought against people—against Grinder, Anthony Robbins, against the field of NLP, against Andreas, etc. Nothing. Instead the video focused on the death of his wife Paula and then the dating and marriage to his current wife (Glenda). All of this certainly humanizes him and creates a feeling of sympathy for him. This humanizing continued as various people talked about his depression about the loss of Paula, his “stroke,” and how so many people “took advantage of him.” Yet that really does id not fit with anything I know about Richard, especially the idea of “people taking advantage of him.” Really?

There’s not a single mention of Richard’s lawsuit against “the field of NLP” in 1995 which lasted until Feb. 2000, and which essentially destroyed the field of NLP in the US. There’s no mention of the fact that he lost the lawsuit, had a court judgment against him for $600,000. He was to pay to Christine Hall, but he never did. Instead to avoid the IRS, he moved to Ireland.

If the purpose was to make Bandler more human and more cuddly, then it works. If it is to portray the history of NLP, it is sadly distorts a whole lot of things. It also deletes even more about the story. Knowing the power of “deletions” to distort one’s perception of reality—the film deletes so much that in the end, the video leaves a very distorted view.

To view the video— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dAY14wSow

Reference For a more accurate history of NLP, see NLP Secrets: Untold Stories (2019). You can even get it on the Shop as a PDF file. https://www.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/6/

Neuro-Semantic News The newest book from Neuro-Semantics: The Meta Place is now on the shop. https://www.neurosemantics.com/shop/page/7/