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NLP SOUNDS LIKE – PROBABLY is, somewhere in the world – a political party. Something a bit frightening, a bit extreme. And in a way NLP (it stands for neuro- linguistic programming), unlike most of the treatments I’ve had in the past year is frightening: like a proper ideology, it seems to alter your mind.
That’s why I like it. I believe your essence, what makes you, is located in your mind – not, I’m afraid, in something nebulous called your “spirit” or your “soul”, and certainly not as more and more people seem to believe in this narcissistic age, in your body. So, for me, NLP is – unlike, say a bikini wax – serious stuff. I need serious once in a while. Serious is good.
What’s also good about NLP is this: again unlike many of my treatments (but not, to be fair, bikini -waxing, whose results were demonstrable (not only does NLP work, but I can see that it works. Ozone sauna therapy, or acupuncture, or Tibetan massage, or whatever, they all may have “worked” in some way, too: the truth is, I just don’t know. I do know they were treatments of which I knew little that were done to me rather than by me, and for that reason, if none other, I find them unsatisfactory. Again, NLP is different. When the therapy consists of playing mind games in and with your own mind, then obviously you are the one running the show. No one, not the most brilliant philosopher, analyst or neurologist, knows more about my own mind than I do. I am the expert. I like that.
NLP is the name given to a group of techniques that attempt to give you more control over your experience. The guiding principle of NLP is that, in seeking to overcome a given problem, a person already has the solution they need within their memory or existing behaviour. NLP is thus about learning to use what you already have, of taking a memory or a thought from one context and bringing it to bear in another. If, for example, you are not assertive at work but you are on the golf course, NLP would seek a way to transfer your confidence from the fairway to the office. Indeed, NLP techniques are commonplace in both business and sport.
For NLP-ers, the brain the brain is a computer, which almost certainly contains all the files you need, but these files are inadequately indexed. A little cross – referencing can bring rapid results. And this rapidity is a huge attraction. You can enter the labyrinth of psychoanalysis, and start a potentially costly, lengthy and fruitless search for BIG answers to BIG questions. (Though, all that said, if I had time, I’d give full – on head – shrinking a go as well.) Or you can, following the NLP way, be less ambitious, and attempt to reorganise, reshape and reuse your memories rather than re- interpret them. If psychoanalysis is about why we are as we are, NLP is about how we are as we are, and how we could change. How is quicker than why.
My NLP therapist is called Sue Beer. We’ve had four sessions so far. Even if I hadn’t bought into NLP in the big way that I so obviously have, these sessions would have been worth it, because Sue and I get on well and the long cycle from Wapping up to her house in North London is doing wonders for my thighs. At the first two sessions we covered self- consciousness in public. At the fourth, we challenged my frankly unattractive addiction to vicious revenge fantasies aimed at people who have done me wrong. (I’ll describe that next week.) At the third session, we decided that it would be useful to focus on something very specific, by the way of an introductory advert for the healing power of NLP.
I said I’d like to stop biting my fingernails. Sue said fine. She asked me to imagine a picture of myself at the moment I set out to bite my nails. No problem. She then asked me to summon up the feelings that went with that image. Again easy: anxiety plus fear. Then she asked me to form an image of my nails having grown. I did that. Then I had to attribute positive feelings to this new picture, the feelings that represent my desired state of being a non nail–biter. This was harder. I’ve bitten my nails for longer than I can remember. So I had to borrow from elsewhere. I came up with the calmness I feel on a long solitary walk. I tried (silent, eyes closed) to give the picture -the second, unbitten fingernails picture – this quality of calm.
Sue then got me to bring up the nail – biting picture big and bright, filling the screen. She asked me to put the second, unbitten picture small in the left-hand corner of the screen, like an icon on a computer. On the count of three, she got me to drag the small, unbitten picture behind through and over the big, bitten picture, so that the two images swapped places. I did this about ten times. “The idea” said Sue, “is to lay down a new neurology: one image instead of triggering the compulsive behaviour, triggers another image which in turn triggers pleasant rather than unpleasant feelings. Given the choice, the brain seems to choose the pleasant feelings.”
Sounds like a load of rubbish? Well for ten days I felt no urge to bite my nails… then I confess, I had a little nibble. Even so I’m going to stick with NLP for a week or two, so be warned. I’ve done loads of shallow. I reckon I’ve earned the right to go deep.
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