The Times, They Are A-Changing
Josie Drew

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has had a roller coaster ride to gaining public acceptance. It started as a project by linguistics post grad, John Grinder, and psychology student, Richard Bandler. Initially they were modelling the work of Gestalt therapy founder Fritz Perls. Then they extended to include the work of family therapy specialist Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson, exponent of hypnotic suggestion in psychiatry. The results obtained by Grinder and Bandler formed what we now know as NLP.
It was quickly recognised that NLP had massive potential for personal change and development, and a great wave of creativity was unleashed. NLP was applied to all kinds of problems, and the possibilities seemed endless. However, what is used for good can also be used for ill. In the early days, NLP was used for training sales people who went on to try and use their newly acquired NLP skills to persuade people to buy what they didn’t want or couldn’t afford. What these sales people didn’t realise was that while they could achieve the short-term gain of closing the sale, you cannot manipulate others for long without a backlash. NLP’s reputation became tarnished, sales people in general gained a bad name.
As a consequence, NLP has come to the present day with a mixed reputation. Even recently, when I told someone that I was an NLP Practitioner, their comment was, ‘Oh, NLP – that’s where they take your words and twist them and use them against you!’
The first generation of NLP, and its subsequent expansions, were all concerned with making changes to submodalities. These are the component parts of the modes in which we experience the world – visual - sight, auditory-sound and kinaesthetic- feelings. For example, when you see an image in your mind’s eye, the image will have particular qualities. It may be clear or fuzzy; near or far; monochrome or full colour, and so on. Sounds, voices and feelings also have these individual qualities.
Traditional NLP has concentrated on fi nding ways to change these submodalities: for example, if you have an image which you associate with a fear, then by changing aspects of that image (making it brighter, further away, upside down, etc.) you can reduce the impact that it has for you. There have been three generations of NLP which have worked with submodalities directly. Each generation has brought greater subtleties and refinements, but essentially they are variations on the same theme.
The West Country is home to one of the world’s leading NLP innovators and researchers, Steve Saunders. Since he first came into NLP in 2000, Steve has been driven by the need to know why NLP worked spectacularly well in some cases, but not in others. He has collaborated and studied with a number of the top names in psychotherapy, and has incorporated all that he has learned into moving NLP forward into new realms of effectiveness.
Eighteen months ago he created the 4th Generation of NLP, which has a whole new way of dealing with problems. Instead of manipulating the submodalities, a practitioner in 4th Generation NLP will work with the structure that holds those submodalities in place. This makes it much easier to address the real cause of a problem. Our systems tend to wrap problems up in lots of layers to protect us from them, and if we only deal with the layers, we may alleviate the immediate problematic symptom but we are not reaching the true cause. If we only tackle the symptoms, our system will keep presenting more symptoms (either the same ones but stronger, or different ones) until we fi nd a way of getting to the cause of it all.
4th Generation NLP is a wonderfully gentle form of therapy, and yet profoundly deep. It can be used to resolve anything, even the most diffi cult and painful experiences, without fear of re-traumatising the client in any way.
It is also the fi rst kind of therapy which gives (so far) permanent change for the client. With every other therapy I know, the change slips away. It may take a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months, but they do eventually fade. More than that, 4th Generation NLP helps the client to find an understanding and a real acceptance of themselves, and brings them to a place where they are genuinely free to choose whether or not they want to change, and how they want to go about it.
There are no suggestions from the practitioner, no good ideas, no action plans or formulae to follow.
There is also no magic wand – some people desperately want someone to ‘fi x them’, but the truth is that if there is any change to be made, they must take responsibility for doing it themselves.
Within the last year, Steve has also created 5th Generation NLP, otherwise known as ‘truth work’. This can take the client to the heart of an issue and through to resolution in less time than many traditional therapists would take to find out why their client had come to see them!
With 25 years of slow and steady change, NLP is now seeing the most rapid evolution since its creation. 4th and 5th Generation NLP are doing more than just plugging the gaps – they are offering a new depth of remedy for previously insoluble problems, and they are taking NLP to a new level of effectiveness.