There is an effective, rigorous school of psychology called Neurolinguistic Programming but it's got a bad rep in scientific/academic circles (the Wikipedia entry calls it out as pseudoscience.)
FWIW I was cured of a chronic, crushing depression in a single session that lasted no more than ten minutes or so. (I don't know exactly how long it was because I was in a deep trance. Subjectively it was only a few moments.)
The things that work should get more attention from the mainstream psychologists IMO. (It's been nearly fifty years since we have had a cure for phobias. At some point it stops being funny and starts being tragic. Everyone today who has a phobia is suffering needlessly.)
As for the "theory that someone just made up." That sounds weird to me, because my experience has been that theory is treated as no more than a prop to support hypnosis. The emphasis is always on the pragmatic and empirical. If you go read the books like "TRANCE-Formations" they are really upfront that they have no idea why this stuff works.
Whatever NLP is, they collected "a bunch of things that do work" many of which no one ever noticed and wrote down before, eh?
> CBT and exposure therapy, is this what you're referring to?
No, this is something totally different.
The core of the process is a double-disassociation and a kind of time
reversal. You watch yourself watching yourself watching yourself and
then play the movie backwards. Somehow that changes, quickly and durably,
the way the brain responds (to kittens or elevators or whatever.)
I made my first account just to respond since no one else has.
Think back to something that made you angry, that annoyed or frustrated you. Think back to a time where you got really riled up. A time where you were really pissed off at someone.
You're going to close your eyes for 20 seconds and think about it, feel it, really try to go back to that day and immerse yourself in that moment. Now, close your eyes.
Did you notice anything? Did anything in your body change in the last 20 seconds?
By thought alone, you can change your physiology, your mental state, your blood pressure and heart rate. Nothing in your environment changed, you're still sitting here reading this, yet to your brain you were momentarily somewhere else. For me, stuck in traffic and some wanker just cut me off, nearly caused an accident and seemed oblivious to it all. I wanted to crash my car into his just to teach him a lesson. It can make your blood boil just thinking back to past events where you were wronged.
I had you think back to something that made you angry, and you probably felt that same way you did that day but to a slightly lesser degree. If you continue to think about it, think about how wrong it was, you can feel EVEN MORE ANGRY. But you don't have to.
You can think back to these moments in your life and feel less or more of the emotion by altering the memory, or your perception of the event.
Your past influences who you are. Your past only exists as memories within your mind. Memories can be recalled and changed by your mind.
You can think back to past events and change the way you perceive them. That's the practice of NLP from my perspective. Changing your memories so that they benefit you.
All those times you've been embarrassed, angry, frustrated or annoyed, you can look back at these moments and laugh at them. Think about some negative moment in your life and then literally laugh out loud about how absurd it was.
Seeing a memory in your minds eye you can turn the colour down so it's only in greyscale. You can mute the person saying hurtful things, or change their voice to that of a cartoon character, something absurd and comical. While you're doing all this, recalling past events and memory manipulation, you're comparing your emotions and how your body is responding, before and after each change.
This might be something you can learn how to do in one session, but for me it took lots of purposeful practice. Like a muscle you develop, you become better at this over time.
I want to emphasis that NLP "is" lots of different things depending on who you ask. The most important aspect IMO is the act of "going meta-" to your own psychology, learning to "reprogram" your "biocomputer".
It's a fundamental shift. People talk about education that adds facts to your store of knowledge vs. education that changes who you are. Learning to operate your own mind+body changes your self-image in a deep way, and raises the level on which you operate.
What excites me is the possibility that enough people learn to take responsibility for their own thoughts and emotional reactions, and we can collectively get over our shit and make e.g. some sort of cool Star Trek future, where humans are mostly sane and healthy. (And "we can hang out with cool aliens that like us." ~Dude, Where's My Car?)
I don't know. I was in a deep trance. Subjectively, I went up on stage (it was a demonstration at a seminar) sat down in a chair, closed my eyes, and the last thing I remember is Dr. Bandler saying something like "Oh I love it when they fight me..." and then a few moments of darkness and indescribable subjective somethings, then I opened my eyes. Later on people who were watching told me I was up there for about ten minutes.
Since then, except for one (terrifying) three-day period, I've been free from the depression that was ruining my life.
So yeah, like I say, I don't know what he did. (Frankly, in a sense, I don't care. I'm cured! I have a life!) I actually lost interest in NLP after that. I only promote it because it feels irresponsible not to, so many people are suffering needlessly and many of the solutions to their problems are right there if only they knew.
Dude, I'm right here. You're calling me a liar|fool and that's not very civil. C'mon.
The seminar cost US$4000 but I only used about ten minutes of it. Best investment of my life.
Helped me stop being homeless and kick off my career as a professional programmer.
Ah, story time... I just remembered how I couldn't bring myself to go to CodeCon.
I had a ticket.
I got as close as the corner.
I just stood there and watched my fellow nerds walk up and go into the building for a while and then went home.
(You can't explain these things to normal people. They can't relate. My mom once said to me, "I know you're not faking this because no one would ever choose to be this miserable." which was actually more comforting than you might imagine.)
Anyway, next time, after my depression was cured, not only did I attend CodeCon, but I gave a presentation that went really well, and got my first job as a professional programmer. Literally a guy walked up to me after the presentation and asked if I would be willing to move.
Turns out with out the crushing depression holding me back I'm not too shabby. Yay!
- - - -
Ha! The audio of my presentation is on the Archive!
I'm sorry, but you're claiming you spent 4000 dollars and 10 minutes to cure a disease that millions of doctors and patients struggle with their entire lives. Furthermore, based on this personal experience, you claim that NLP is not the pure crackpot lunacy that it is, but some advanced, misunderstood science.
You may have personally been extremely lucky and experienced essentially a miracle.
But what you are claiming is similar to people claiming they cured cancer with healing crystals, or prayed the lupus away. There is no way to take your claim any more seriously: you are either lying or you experienced an extremely lucky break, and were lied to about the cause.
There is no other way to react to people promoting pseudoscience, especially in medicine. Someone else who is suffering could be duped by your well-meaning sharing of this experience into throwing their good money away on bullshit in hopes of reproducing a miracle.
> you're claiming you spent 4000 dollars and 10 minutes to cure a disease that millions of doctors and patients struggle with their entire lives.
Yes. Exactly that.
(In a sense I did get lucky: Dr. Bandler could have picked someone else for the demo.)
> based on this personal experience,
And a lot of other personal experience, and a pretty good understanding of the formal grammar analysis that spawned it (and that also underpins computer languages.)
> you claim that NLP is not the pure crackpot lunacy that it is,
That you claim it is...
Do you have any experience? I find a common denominator among strident skeptics like yourself is that they have no actual experience and have done no personal investigation. Are you an armchair skeptic? Have you any experience whatsoever with hypnosis or NLP?
> but some advanced, misunderstood
...yes...
> science.
No. Not yet. But it should be.
You insist that I must be a liar or a fool and yet you would prefer a miracle to rational investigation.
Well I'm no liar, but certainly one of us (at least) is a fool.
> And a lot of other personal experience, and a pretty good understanding of the formal grammar analysis that spawned it (and that also underpins computer languages.)
You see, this is where you lose me. Chomsky's work has absolutely no applicability to treating mental illness, and he would be the first to explain that. His work is not even applicable to language translation, and has no hope of being in the foreseeable future. It is just a framework for discussing some basics of how human language works and can be learned.
Hell, it's barely applicable to computer languages, where again, it's only a framework for discussion. It certainly doesn't 'underpin' computer languages (the work of Alan Turing, John von Neumann and others does instead).
> Have you any experience whatsoever with hypnosis or NLP?
No, and neither do I with crystal healing, praying the lupus away, acupuncture and a myriad others.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly and we ban that sort of account. We're trying for something different here.
FWIW I was cured of a chronic, crushing depression in a single session that lasted no more than ten minutes or so. (I don't know exactly how long it was because I was in a deep trance. Subjectively it was only a few moments.)