THERAPY

If you want an introduction describing how the basic NLP is used in therapy, I'd refer to the book of Thies Stahl. Apart from this, a lot of the original NLP-books cover therapy more or less explicitly.

From one of the co-developpers of NLP, known for her therapeutic and relational skills:

This book has 2 main sections: in the first you get an overview of the "classic NLP tools" to establish rapport and gather information.This section should help to prevent relational problems. If this doesn't work, you're in for part 2. To solve "problems", this second part contains some well known step by step techniques from the NLP field. You'll find descriptions of Anchoring, V/K-dissociation, Change Personal History, Reframing, Therapeutic Metaphor, Future Pacing and more.

Linking NLP with other elements, from a therapeutic point of view:

The Enneagram is a personality typing system according to which a person belongs to one of 9 personality types. This book helps you to recognize what type a person belongs to, without this being an instrument of judgement or self-righteousness. Based on the type, the book suggests how a person can develop himself (or can be helped to develop). No prior knowledge of NLP nor of the Enneagram is needed, since this book does right to its title: it explains both models, and about half of the book is spent to explain several NLP-based models. Anné is the founder of NLP New York.

Specific books, with NLP influence

Alcoholism can bring much damage to someone's life, and the author knows all about it, having seen her daddy destroying himself with alcohol while she was a little girl. She overwon it and fighting it became a part of her current work. The first part of this book is autobiographical. The author found the courage to tell us what happened to her - and to lots of other persons in similar situations. The second part serves as a model on how to get over alcoholic abuse, mixed with testimonies of past alcohol victims. The NLP material in this book is limited to 12 pages, but these are directly applied to the topic of alcohol abuse.
Since writing this book, the author has increased her NLP knowledge, and is now using it more actively in her work. She will write another book on the topic, containing more NLP material. She also gives trainings related to the topic (see the trainer's list).

Thom has written 4 books on Attention Deficit Disorder (or ADD). Thom is one of the sysops of a forum on CompuServe and often participates in discussions in the NLP section of the forum, which is part of his connection to NLP. In the acknowledgements I saw some other familiar names from the forum.
This book gives multiple descriptions, coming from different backgrounds, and comes close to what Gregory Baterson calls "it takes two to know one", or the multiple descriptions idea from systems thinking. As such the book is a nice example of the idea that the map is not the territory (an also an example how "strange" the map of therapy and medicine can be. In fact, taking the definition of ADD at large (according to DSM IV), it's not difficult to build a map of someone having a mild form of ADD!

Non-NLP books that I like are:

Keeney puts his book in a therapeutic context himself. It can be seen as the ultimate book on applying the idea's of systems thinking to the field of therapy, successfully including the idea's of Gregory Bateson, Ashby, Miller, Galanter & Pribram, and also referring to Bandler, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson.

I always like the big picture. And this book gave it to me, even if it comes from a medical point of view, with a light bias to medication and genetics. But, did you know that :

This are just some of the facts learned from "A History of Psychiatry". The book starts during the 18th centuy and goes all the way to 1994, ending with the popularity of Prozac.

This book, written in a critical style by a professor in the history of medicine, places therapy in its historical context and besides alternatives like "Electroshock treatment", "lobotomy", and medication like "Valium" and "Prozac". This book contains enough information about medication, genetics and the evolution in the DSM manuals to have an overview of the field.

If you are interested in psychotherapy, it is good to know the competition. Remember that psychiatrists (and the rest of the medical world) still have the "monopoly" in prescribing legal drugs.
Peter D. Kramer is known as the psychiatrist who helped make the antidepressant Prozac "popular". He also first coined the term "cosmetic psychopharmacology". These "contributions" to the field is large enough to make it to the pages of "A History of Psychiatry" (reviewed above) Prozac was released by the FDA in December 1987,and had made the cover of Newsweek in 1990. By the time "Listening to Prozac" was published in 1993, Prozac was already among the best-selling drugs of the 1990's, only to be overtaken in "popularity" by Viagra in 1998. By 1994 Prozac was the second best selling drug in the US. No wonder that this book became a "National Bestseller". In the book, you'll get stories about the treatment of minor depression, minor compulsives, sensitivity to loss, stress, social introversion, etc... From the stories, it is clear that a lot of patients could have been treated therapeutically as well (for problems like sexual abuse, violence during youth, etc.). But the of course, Prozac starts working in a few weeks in 70% of the cases, while psychoanalysis is known to take for ages. (Luckily, NLP can do better and sometimes helps you in a few minutes as in the "5 minute phobia cure").

Metaphors

Sometimes one has to take a decision where to categorize books. Metaphors is an element often used in NLP, and the origin of the first book I'll cite below certainly fits in this section. The second book will argue that metaphors are more than therapy.

David Gordon was around in Santa Cruz when NLP was "invented" by Bandler & Grinder, yet he choose to focus on a different aspect, thus giving us some more material to learn from. This book is about building metaphors, improving upon them using elements that come from early NLP-research, and using them. In short,it is a complete guide to become another Milton Erickson or Virginia Satir yourself, or at least as far as story telling will bring you. You'll learn to use representation systems, submodalities and Satir categories to enhance your story.

This book looks at the topic from a different angle: combining the linguistics and philosophy backgrounds of the authors. It gives a more theoretical framework that tries to explain the role metaphors play in our lives. In fact, it tells you why the techniques that Gordon teaches you will work. At the end of the book you'll also find an interesting critique to the Universal Grammar and Chomsky's work.

Addition to the review, as remark to my last sentence, from an e-mail by Katherine V Packard

There's no such thing as universal grammar. I lived in Japan, France, and now in California. These three countries(!) have languages based on different grammatical structures. Some things that can be said in one language cannot be said in another.

I started NLP when I was living in France. Our trainer taught in English, and a translator translated for those who didn't understand. I don't remember any problems with the Meta-model, but we did have problems with the Milton-Model because of the puns, double-entendre, and play on words that are cultural and possible in one language but not in the other. Japan, France, and the US function on different social models, upheld by different social metaphors in the collective unconscious. (In Japan the metaphor of the circle, "wa," carries weight far beyond our own understanding of this concept.) This is only a problem in inter-cultural communication, not in intra-cultural communication. The Milton-model was adapted satisfactorily to French. If you keep the goal in mind, there is usually a way to attain that goal... in a different way. Since most NLP work is done intra-culturally...there is no need for exact grammatical translation of the Meta-Model (or other), it simply needs to circumscribe the contexts and linguistic expressions of the client's culture.

My answer to the remark:

  1. The "Universal Grammar" doesn't refer to a "real" grammar, but to a structure behind language (such as NLP became). At the structure level below, French and English (as well as Dutch and German) are very much alike. For instance, we remember the "generalizations", "deletions" and "distortions" from Chomsky's work. The concept of "universal grammar" itself is still used nowadays by modern translation software.
  2. I know about the language problems, especially concerning use metaphors and playing with double meaning of words or ambiguous sentences. 95% of NLP hasn't much cultural problems, except maybe for the remark that some basic principles of NLP techniques come from the cultural background of the modeler and the exemplar (the person modeled from). For instance, the well-formed outcomes imply that the outcome is in your control. But what do you do when you work in groups?

Page Last modified on: 22 mrt 2001