From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re: NLP
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: About that first technique ...
Keywords: NLP   NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 21:13:22 GMT


In article <1992Sep02.012615.12587@crash> johnlee@crash.cts.com 
            (John Wiley) writes:
>
>Lee Lady writes:
>>I did learn two extremely simple little techniques.
>
>Yes, yes...  Please tell us what they were.  I realize these were things
>you use "on yourself," but perhaps they'd be of interest to all of us?

Gee, I thought you'd never ask!  :-)  


In the past, in sci.psychology there's been a lot of ridicule about NLP's
famous ten minute cures.  (The people who ridicule them never bother to
try them out, of course.)  Well, the first of the first of these two
techniques takes about four or five minutes and will seem even more
preposterous.  Those who want to flame it for that reason can do so.
It's certainly made my life a lot better though.  

I think you really need to have someone take you through it the first
time.  It has to be done very abruptly and that makes it just
momentarily uncomfortable (at least for me).  The best analogy I can
think of is a time when I'm immersed in thought or in feeling and
somebody comes up and interrupts me to ask a dumb question.

You have the subject think of a thought or image that makes him feel
bad.  Then give him the following instructions:  "Make your right hand
[or left one, for those few left-handed people who are "reversed"]
stiff, like a karate chop, and hold it vertically on your right thigh,
like a trap door that's open over a black hole.  Then think about the
thing that makes you feel bad, take a very deep breath, and blow all
those bad feelings into that black hole.  And as soon as you've blown
the feelings out, *slam that drap door shut really hard against your
thigh* and follow my fist with your eyes as I raise it up, so that
you're looking upwards to your right.  And as soon as your gaze moves
up there I'll spread out my fingers as a signal for you to immediately
take a deep breath.  And then right away blow that breath out towards
the horizon."

It's all got to be done very fast, so that just as you start to settle
into one state you're jerked into the next.  It's also important to
slam your hand against your thigh reasonably hard.  Then you repeat the
process until you can't get the bad feeling back any more -- maybe four
or five times.

What you're doing is retraining the nervous system, breaking the
cause-effect between a certain thought (whether that thought is something
you say to yourself or an image that comes into your mind) and the
feeling that goes with it.  

I was taught this by one of the assistants in the training (Larry
Sanders) and then he taught it to our whole study group.  (Charles
Faulkner also took me through a more elaborate variation of it.)  It
seemed to be reasonably effective those first few times but since I had
to come up with something to work on in a hurry, none of the things I
chose were major problems.

My partner in the study group for the exercise though, started out by
saying "Maybe I shouldn't choose this, because it's really a big one."
And I shrugged and took him through the steps and after we did it about
four times he said "That's amazing!"  Later, at the end of the
study group he said to me "Boy, I really owe you one.  That's been
bothering me for a long time."  (I checked back with him a few days later
and he said that everything was still fine.)  

That's anecdotal evidence of course.  I don't have carefully done
statistical studies, but I can say that I have used it on myself several
times since then and it's been consistently effective.  Even though I
still have trouble jerking myself from one step to the next as fast as I
need to.  


Learning this process made me really aware of how frequently I say things
to myself that really make me feel bad.  Before, when I read books on
cognitive therapy, I just didn't recognize this.  When therapists asked
me about my "self-talk" I'd think of things I say to myself like "That
was really stupid" when I make a mistake.  But I didn't really have bad
feelings associated with those.  

Now, I became of other thoughts at a deeper level, although still above
the threshhold of consciousness.  I hadn't identified them as
"self-talk" because I don't think of myself as saying them to myself --
they're just things that go through my mind.  And they're not like the
standard examples that cognitive therapy mentions.  They're sentences
like  "I'll never get X" or "I'm no good at X"  or  "Being nice never
gets me anywhere."

In the weeks after the NLP training, I started being aware of how
much of my life I spend feeling bad -- despite the fact that I usually 
don't usually think of myself as being depressed!  Now I've become
sensitized to that "feeling bad" state so that I notice it immediately
when it happens.  And lots of times I stop and identify the thought
that caused it and sit down right then neutralize it.  (This can be
hard to do when I'm in public.  People look at you a little funny when
they see you blowing at your thigh and then looking up at the sky and
blowing another breath out.  Now I've got it down to the point where I
don't have to do it so overtly.)

And the amazing thing was:  As soon as I taught myself not to have bad
feelings about a particular thought, I stopped having that thought
at all!  I discovered that the bad feelings were acting as a
reinforcement for the thought!  That's certainly contrary to the naive
conception that a reinforcement is something which is pleasant and
desirable.

And when I started thinking about this, I realized that there are lots
of cases with human beings of this sort of paradoxical reinforcement,
where a reinforcement can be something that a person doesn't like.
Such as the way that spanking a child or sending a student to detention
hall can be a reinforcement for certain types of behavior.

And I also thought:  Gee, Beck and the cognitive therapists are really
dumb.  (Despite the fact that they do help a lot of people.)  They notice
that a person's thoughts are what causes that person to feel bad and then
it never occurs to them to challenge that cause-effect and to try and change
it.  Instead they go through a clumsy procedure to teach the person not
to have that thought anymore.  As if the connection between the thought
and the feeling were something innate in the person which can't be altered.
(The Beck interventions also seem to be addressed to the rational mind,
which is not where the problem lies.  In my opinion.)

And this brings me up to the issue of how the most important questions
in clinical psychology never get investigated because they fall between
the crack between clinical and scientific psychology.  The clinical
people are too busy doing carefully designed studies of various
"treatments" to try to understand fundamental questions such as:  Why
makes people feel bad about certain things?  Why does the mind (for many
people at least) keep going back to things like unpleasant memories,
for instance, when the principles of behavioral psychology (applied in
this case to internal subjective experience, of course) would suggest
that these are precisely the memories our minds would stay away from?
And the scientific psychologists don't investigate this kind of
question because they have a disdain for anything "clinical."

I could go on and on about these issues, but this is getting a little
adrift from the topic.  And I haven't even got to the second technique.

--
It is a poor sort of skepticism which merely delights in challenging
those claims which conflict with one's own belief system.  
                                                          --Bogus quote 
lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet
Newsgroups: sci.psychology