From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Change, NLP, and science (was NLP)
Keywords: NLP  NeuroLinguistic Programming
Date: 13 Sep 92 22:08:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: nmt.1992Sep13.220845.28695
Organization: New Mexico Tech


>	Second, the idea of brief therapy was invented YEARS before NLP and
>is still widely used.    The idea that real change happens instantly and
>is not a gradual process it the subject of numerous books, many of which
>I have posted before,  Paul Watslwick, Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, Virginia
>Satir, and many more.   The life work of Milton Erickson is filled with
>hundreds of such examples.

	Quite a few well-respected therapists have stated that actual change
occurs very quickly in therapy.  Carl Jung said that he'd observed patients
who would be in therapy for several months,  even years,  and suddenly
they would come in one day and decide to tell the truth,  and change would
proceed rapidly from there.  Eric Berne and others have made similar
observations.

	In helping people informally,  I've run into the same phenomenon;
you might talk to someone for months and months about a problem,  and
one day they suddenly decide to get better.  My own guess about what is
going on is that personal change requires a kind of internal consensus
that "this is what I really want to do."  Everything leading up to this
in therapy is a matter of breaking down defense mechanisms,  fear barriers,
and the like until a person is ready to take a step on his own.

	Some of the techniques in NLP seem to recognize this;  specifically,
the six-step reframing process.  Six-step reframing is particularly good
for conversion disorders;  the idea is to cause a person to "make contact"
with the part of them that is responsible for an undesired behavior.  The
client then needs to learn to accept that this part of them is generating
this behavior for a legitimate reason.  Then an attempt is made to get this
part to find other,  more acceptable,  ways to attain the same goal and to
substitute this for the original behavior.


>	For instance, I have a theory.   There have been studies that show 
>there is no corelation between eye movements and accessing any particular 
>representational system.    However many people have found that once they
>started looking at people's eye movements they had a better life in some 
>way and attributed it to their "NLP skills."   I think that what is going
>on is twofold.    First, I think that once people are convinced that they
>need to look at other people to figure out what responses the other person
>is having to their behavior, they have a better life.   For example, once
>they learn to notice that what they are saying is pissing someone off and they
>shut up, they get along with people better.   Second, I think that because
>they are looking at the person's eyes, they are making eye contact and the
>person feels like they are being listened to.    So, results happen, but
>not for the reason that students are told.    I would not put it past 
>John and Richard to have done this on purpose.

	I started looking for eye accessing cues and rapidly found that
only a small number of people (probably less than 20%) had organizations
exactly like what is claimed in NLP books.  Yet,  I think that individuals
seem to be relatively self-consistent.

	I'd actually be interested on getting a citation for this study since
there are quite a few ways that one could play with the variables that might
eliminate eye accessing cues.   My own observation about it is that EACs
are only useful if you calibrate them to each individual.


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