NLP The Promise of Salvation from Anxiety

NLP, or Neuro Linguistic Programming to give it its full moniker, has been around for several decades now and seems to promise the world to anyone with issues from anxiety and depression to anorexia and poverty. Does NLP work? I have blogged about this elsewhere.  There is a lack of peer reviewed evidence that NLP is effective, this may in part be due to the fact that lots of peer reviewed journals are too snobbish to cover NLP. Certainly mainstream medicine and psychology don’t like NLP. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t work however.

Well, in my own opinion and experience some aspects of NLP are very useful tools for anyone who is suffering from some negative emotions be they anxiety or anything else. Changing how we see pictures in our mind can alter the way we feel about past events and future events that are worrying us. Changing how we hear the voices in our heads, where they come from and what they sound like can alter how much we believe of what we tell ourselves. Taking the feelings in our bodies and concentrating on them, seeing how they seem to move within us and then speeding up or slowing that movement down, or changing its direction. All of these things can have a profound effect on our mood because how we feel physically within ourselves, what images we see and what we tell ourselves are basically what makes up our mood.

You could spend hundreds or even thousands of pounds on learning NLP from a qualified and certified practitioner, they really know how to charge and finding a good one can be tricky. The great thing about NLP though is its simplicity. You really can learn it from a book.

Let me say a slightly less positive word about NLP practitioners. Lots of them are now selling what they call ‘breakthrough’ sessions. These are day long sessions that they say will cure you of anxiety or whatever brings you to them. I have been quoted anything from £800 to £2000 pounds for this day long session. It is in my opinion not worth doing. The skills you can gain from NLP can be learnt far cheaper from a book such as that described above. The eight hour long session, although it may be full of promises, is probably not going to be very helpful and like all therapists NLP practitioners know how to make money from people that are suffering from anxiety and other problems. They also know how to promise a money back guarantee without ever having to give money back. The last thing I would add is that Breakthrough sessions rely a lot on timeline therapy. I am very cynical about regression type therapies and am still waiting to hear from one single anxiety sufferer who was cured by releasing negative emotion from the past. My advice: avoid.

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