The Larger Frame

When I first heard about NLP, entered the field, learned the models, and then later began contributing to the model, I was not quite sure how to think about where NLP fit in the field of psychology. My own journey in psychology to becoming a psychologist began with psychoanalysis, then Adlerian individual psychology, I dabbled in Jungian, got caught up with the transactional analysis movement in the 1970s, and when I next found cognitive psychology (Beck and Ellis) in the early 1980s, I made that my model of choice.

It was during the time that I was focusing on the cognitive-behavioral approach to communication that I found NLP. And, having known and read Chomsky and George Miller (two of the key individuals who launched the Cognitive Psychology movement), I was not surprised to later see NLP put into the category of Cognitive Psychology in various textbooks.

Sometime later, I wrote that Bandler and Grinder created a cognitive model of communication by using the formulations of transformational grammar and general semantics as they looked at Gestalt therapy (Perls), Family Systems (Satir), and medical hypnosis (Erickson). And yet I missed another frame, another category, and one that I now realize is actually the larger frame. I missed how NLP was but one of scores and scores of off-shoots from the third force in psychology, the Human Potential movement. Why did I miss that? How did I miss that? And how did everybody else who has written about the sources and history of NLP miss it?

My guess is that we missed it, in part, from being too close to it and because perhaps Bandler and Grinder didn’t even know the larger from within which they were working.

As every student of NLP knows, it all began with Fritz Perls and Gestalt theory. It began when Richard Bandler, working as a student stocking the books for Science and Behavior Book Company was asked to transcribe some audio-tapes of Perls. Perls who prided himself in being “a dirty old man” was getting old and Dr. Robert Spitzer had some tapes that he wanted transcribed for a book. So he found a student to do the transcribing.

Now Perls was living at Esalen at Big Sur, the key “growth center” of the Human Potential Movement and Richard was at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he took the transcription job on the side from his school work. Then, as he put on headphones and transcribed the tapes, he began to pick up on Perl’s language and intonational patterns which he later used as a fourth-year student for a class on Gestalt therapy. Later, just prior to Per’s death, Richard went to Esalen to interview meet him.

Then Dr. Spitzer asked Richard to record and transcribe sessions from Virginia Satir. Now she had been the first person in charge of the residential training program at Esalen and creator of Family Systems therapy. At the same time, another person who played a key role at Esalen was none other than Gregory Bateson. In fact, the two last years of his life, he moved to Esalen and lived in the house that Perl’s had lived in.

In this way NLP was directly influenced by these key leaders of the human potential movement. And where did the idea of modeling experts come from other than Abraham Maslow who began doing that in the 1930s. What Richard discovered from his ability to hear the patterns of influence from Perls, Satir, and Erickson and John discovered from his ability to articulate the linguistic structure of those patterns was a way to model these experts — and that began the content of NLP.

Well, almost. They also introduced other content into NLP as they picked up on the premises of the third force in psychology and colonized as the NLP presuppositions. I say “colonized” because typically in NLP practitioner training and in the early NLP books the presuppositions are presented as just a set of ideas that they heard which didn’t come from anywhere in particular. But that was not exactly t rue. They came directly from the human potential movement! They came from Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and others.

So what’s the larger frame? The third force in psychology, the Human Potential Movement. NLP came into existence from those who lived in southern California where “the spirit of the times” was the counter-culture hippie movement, the anti-war movement, the Cognitive psychology movement, and the Human Potential Movement. Why is this important? How is this relevant to anything?

It is critically important because it helps us understand the larger frame. It helps us understand what “running your own brain,” taking charge of your states, communicating with more precision, etc. is all about. These are the sub-goals that Maslow and Rogers set in the third force in psychology. These were expressions of how we begin to actualize our highest potentials. And they come from the new psychology that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century that assumed people were not broken but had all the necessary resources to become fully human.

And if that’s the larger frame, now we can see where NLP and Neuro-Semantics stands and what these models were originally designed to achieve. Unlike the pessimistic and deterministic nature of the first two forces in psychology, Psycho-analysis and Behaviorism (Learning theory), NLP and Neuro-Semantics believes in human possibilities, in change, in ongoing development, and in modeling the best specimens for advancing and accelerating development.

Of course, without this larger frame some people have used NLP to sell cars, “persuade” people in order to get their way, and to manipulate others without a concern for the ethics or ecology of such. Not surprising, this is the biggest complaint against NLP. People who have studied just enough NLP to be dangerous have used it in hurtful ways to their own advantage. And a model that began with the vision of each and every person running his or her own brain has now many offering a way to use language patterns and processes covertly so that others don’t know what you’re doing or installing. This has become the shame of NLP and something that we in Neuro- Semantics strongly oppose.

Why? Because of the larger frame. All of the models, tools, patterns, and languaging is about enabling and empowering people to take charge of their own lives and to actualize the potentials of talent and wisdom so that they can become fully themselves. It is also about enabling people to be conscious and reflectively mindful of what we do with them.

It is the larger frame, in fact, that today can rescue us from the shame of NLP. It is also the larger frame that can enable us to take the models of self-actualization from Gestalt, Family Systems, NLP, Cognitive, Ericksonian, Narrative, Humanistic Pyschology, and the scores and scores of other off-shoots of the Human Potential Movement and now pull them together to create the Neuro-Semantics of Self-Actualization.

It is this larger frame that has opened up lots of new things –

• Self-Actualizing Companies
• Self-Actualizing Cultures
• The Self-Actualizing of Synergy
• Living above the Deficiency Motivation Level
• Enlightened Management and Leadership (Self-Actualizing Managers and Leaders)
• Managing through Meta-Pay (Maslow’s term)
• The Volcano of Meaningful Needs (Maslow’s new Motivation theory enriched by Neuro- Semantics)
• The Peak Experiences through Meta-Motivation (Maslow’s term)
• Etc.