What Is NLP? Article by Steve Andreas
July 19, 2009 by rfliotta · 2 Comments
NLP Research & Recognition Project Trustee, Steve Andreas, has written an excellent and informative description regarding What is NLP? Thoughtful and scientific descriptions of NLP are critical to the development of the field. Steve articulates what NLP is extremely well. This article will be useful for those unfamiliar with NLP, as well as those of us who know NLP well.
Steve gave us permission to reprint this article, in its entirety, here. It recently appeared as an appendix in his new ebook Help With Negative Self-Talk, Volume 1.
The article is under the FAQ tab or follow THIS LINK.
Review of Lisa Wake’s book Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy (2008)
November 1, 2008 by rfliotta · 1 Comment
Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy by Lisa Wake is a well researched, extensively referenced, and scholarly examination of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and the advancing model of neurolinguistic psychotherapy. I enthusiastically recommend this book to clinicians, researchers, NLP practitioners, and anyone interested in advancing the science and theory of NLP… Go to the “Library” tab above to access the full review. Also recommended is the 2002 book by Richard Bolstad, RESOLVE: A New Model of Therapy. This review is also posted under the “Library” tab.
Were Back!
May 20, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
Posted by: Frank Bourke, Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Well, we’re back……. and it will probably take two or three months to fill you in on all that has happened in the intervening six months. In a nutshell, we’ve had to redesign and re-organize our structure and personnel in order to make the second stage possible. What a ride! The most important development is a new Not-for-Profit Corporation redesigned from the ground up. Our thanks to IASH for all the help in getting started. The leadership team of the new corporation had to have representatives from University Administration, Corporate Management, Clinical Research, and NLP to accomplish our goals and interface with large Foundations. It now does. Take a look at the Overview link in the Welcome box for the complete details. The technical expertise and operating design necessary to run a large international organization comprised of a small paid core staff and thousands of volunteers have been put in place. We now need to facilitate the NLP Institutes, 600 volunteers and the leadership team into an effective organization. The first order of business is to thank you all who have come aboard up to this point. Your endorsements, hard work and support are what allowed us to gather the necessary resources to make the transition. All of you on the Projects mailing list will be contacted shortly for help with the development of working teams in a number of areas inclusive of web design/maintenance, volunteer coordination, fundraising, foundation support, library development/maintenance, research development, and the networking necessary to make the realization of all of our goals possible. If you’re not contacted in the next two weeks e-mail me at research@nlprandr.org and we’ll fix it. It’s taken six months and quite a bit of money to transition the website…….It has felt like years! We’re back in the saddle on a fresh horse and ready to ride.
Welcome back to The Project. Stay tuned to the website and Uncle Franks Blog for more details and news. Full details are available on the web site under “The 2008 Overview and Update“.
Project Update July 2007
July 7, 2007 by admin · 1 Comment
Posted by Frank Bourke
The research and recognition project started formally with the presentation that I made at the IASH conference in San Francisco in September of 2006. Since then it has exceeded our wildest hopes and gone from a concept to a growing organization. I thought it might be good here to give a glimpse of what’s happened and what we’re going to need to keep it going.
If you review the action plan you’ll see we have accomplished Stage One and leapfrogged past funding in Stage Two to concrete developments in a number of areas such as; research grants (2.5 million dollar PTSD grant proposal); the largest online library of NLP articles (set to rollout shortly); an application to introduce some of the most serious clinical research scientists to NLP and our research ideas at the annual ISTSS Conference; an NLP in house American university presence (Marshall University, West Virginia); an attempt at a clinical example of NLP excellence (PTSD treatment Grant for Iraq war veterans); a serious internet marketing plan that among other things will inform forty thousand NLP supporters of the project; and organizational/operational possibilities, (especially in the area of grant writing), that could make good use of a million dollar a year operating budget.
Chronologically I thought it would take at least two years to get near here. This is all stretching our initial volunteer core pretty thin. Jerry Beach, Dee Kinder, Steve Andreas, Tom Hoobyar, Barbara Lockhart, Tim Hallbom, Rick Gray, Tom Dotz, myself, and a dozen others including the IASH Executive Board, have all been giving the kind of time and energy that cannot be maintained indefinitely.
Behind the scenes I’m becoming more and more convinced that this is an idea whose time has come. The quality and quantity of the energy coming from the working team and volunteers is unique in my personal history. Perhaps it’s the common NLP backgrounds or my own joy in doing something I feel so strongly about…but whatever…it’s just been downright fun most of the time. Yes, there are of course those “other” times. I’m not used to having a backlog of 250 e-mails to answer or of doing something this large without a full time “administrative assistant.” Where are you these days dear Helen? Surely retirement in Florida couldn’t be as much fun as starting a forty million dollar, not for profit, research organization from scratch with no money! (She trained me to look like a well oiled executive in the 70’s but it’s never been clearer to me how much of “my” substance was in her care for the details.)
With the support of over thirty NLP Institutes formally assisting the project, I believe we have come a long way toward proving the projects first basic concept, namely, that the hundreds of thousands of trained and knowledgeable NLP supporters worldwide have the skills, motivation and resources to begin this job when the framework necessary to do this are made available. In addition to the Institutes, over two hundred individuals have signed up to volunteer their time and skills to the project. When the PTSD Grant and a few others on the drawing board are completed and published the second premise will take a serious step forward, namely, that the NLP materials themselves when researched and able to be compared with other established clinical tools will generate the support necessary for continued NLP growth and development.
Our priorities now must be to keep the projects we have started going with a larger, well organized group of volunteers and fund an infrastructure of offices and administrative core staff. I ask all of you reading this to picture our initial needs and sign up here on the website if your personal ecology lines up with some of those needs. If you don’t jump right in, keep yourself energized by giving us your suggestions, ideas and feedback. As my newly adopted “Uncle” Steve Andreas would say “None of us is as smart alone, as all of us together.” Help us grow into a genuine service to NLP Practitioners and those they serve. I’ll try to keep you informed of developments in “Uncle Franks Blog” here on the website and thanks for your interest.
Introduction for NLP Newcomers
June 17, 2007 by admin · 1 Comment
Posted by: Frank Bourke
I’ve had a number of questions from new visitors to our website who want to know what NLP is. I thought it might be good to give a quick introduction from my perspective with the understanding that its utilization goes far beyond mental health to most forms of human learning and communication.
I first heard about NLP about 35 years ago. It was being touted by its founders as the largest advance in psychotherapy in the last hundred years and was developed, in part, by synthesizing the work of three of my favorite psychotherapists, Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. I was teaching psychology at Cornell at the time and while professional opinion was very much skeptical of its claims. I decided to attend a training conference.
My strategy for dealing with my own questions was direct. I volunteered the first day to go up on the stage to get my own shark phobia cured (I had been traumatized as a boy when swimming on vacation by two sharks who followed me in to shore on my rubber mat. My sister maintains they would have eaten me but for the fact that I was so skinny there were mostly only bones in place at the time.) In front of an audience of two or three hundred psychotherapists, John Grinder, one of Neuro-Linguistic Programming’s co-founders, led me through a set of internal visualizations for about an hour and a half. By the end of the session I was snorkeling quite comfortably in imagined situations that at the beginning of the demonstration had me sweating and terrified. While it took me another two hours, using the techniques I learned, to actually get in the water and snorkel, that was still quite an improvement over the weeks or months it would have taken using the then current behavior therapy, with which I was very familiar. Two of my PhD classmates at the Institute of Psychiatry in London had done their graduate research curing snake phobias which left me very familiar with what was considered state of the art research at the time.
Subsequently, like thousands of therapists, I attended four or five other learning conferences and integrated NLP into my clinical work.
Early in my integration of NLP skills into my clinical practice, I helped a well known hospital administrator out of a severe, post divorce, year long depression in a two hour session using the NLP techniques. Word spread quickly among many of our local physicians and I had no problem using NLP after that, though it was almost impossible to explain exactly what I was doing in words they accepted or understood. Training Institutes of varying competency and clinical “integrity” began to sprout up around the country, and I sampled a few of them but settled in with Maryanne and Ed Reese in Tampa Florida who taught and gave me much across a number of trainings. While I tried to interest other lecturers at Cornell University in NLP techniques and some of the NLP organizers in doing research, I was not successful.
Indeed, the two worlds of NLP and professional/research seemed to polarize more and more over the years into intransigent believers and non-believers. I have often joked about professional discussions in which I attempted to describe my NLP involvement as having produced yet another chapter in the continuing verbal “holy war” against the abolition of prejudice in the scientific establishment on the one hand and the eradication of prejudice against the scientific method on the other. Personally, it has given me great appreciation for those suffering dysfunctional families, schizoid personalities and an obsessive fascination with windmills.
More recently, to be fair, I have been surprised by the degree of current support I have received to do the project’s research by serious professional scientists at places like Duke and Harvard…but I shall offer a bottle of fine champagne to the gods if we don’t find our initial research results very “vigorously” questioned by many in the established professional communities…
…exciting and challenging times ahead I suspect.
First Entry
March 21, 2007 by admin · 3 Comments
Posted By: Frank Bourke
The team has been chasing me for the last month and a half to start “Uncle Frank’s blog” and place it on the website. Truth is until Jerry Beach, who has taken on the role of IT Manager, led me through two of them on line this morning, I really didn’t know what a blog was. So, unable to plead ignorance any longer, here we are. Welcome to Uncle Frank’s NLP Research and Recognition Blog.Best to start with a little history. I am a licensed clinical psychologist, who was trained in research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, lectured at Cornell University and built a psychiatric management business which grew to twelve hospitals. I came out of semiretirement to go down to New York after 9/11 and work with eight hundred survivors of the building from the AON Corporation. Afterwards, I found myself with a serious case of cancer losing my bladder and almost my life on a number of occasions.I found I was able to change the symptoms of the PTSD survivors I was treating with an NLP derived protocol, much quicker and more effectively than the thirty or so therapists I was working with. Similarly, I used NLP techniques to deal with the pain and optimize the healing process with my cancer. When I realized I had “survived” and did the reevaluation natural to that stage, I took an oath to do what I could to get NLP researched and recognized to allow the full use of its wonderful capabilities. In discussions with Judith Delozier and Robert Dilts at NLPU and Dee Kinder from the sponsoring, not for profit IASH, The Research and Recognition Project, seen here on the website, was born.
In a nutshell, the Project intends to organize and network those members of the NLP community with the skills and interest in scientific research, to do research, and then to go on and ensure its effective utilization across the full practice spectrum.
Its core assumptions are two; first, that the hundreds of thousands of trained and knowledgeable NLP supporters worldwide have the skills, motivation and resources to begin this job when the framework necessary to do this are made available; and second, that the NLP materials themselves when researched and able to be compared with other tools will generate the support necessary for continued growth and development. While we have only been going on a volunteer basis for under six months, initial progress has been wonderful.
FIRST ANNOUNCEMENTS
#1. Research grant on treatment of PTSD. Meetings with faculty and administrative staff at Marshall University have resulted in the writing of a large, multi million dollar grant aimed at developing a national NLP treatment program for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for returning Iraq war veterans. The initial pilot study will use treatment protocols developed by NLP clinical experts from around the world. Steve Andreas, Tim Hallbom, Suzi Smith, Charles Faulkner and Robert Dilts have volunteered to participate. Richard Gray PhD. of Fairleigh Dickenson University is writing the NLP underpinnings for the grant proposal and the Marshall team, led by Professors Bill McDowell and Mike & Amanda Corrigan are constructing the rest. They hope to have it ready to submit in April.
#2. ISTSS Proposals Two proposals have been submitted to the Annual International Society for Trauma Stress Studies, being held in November in Baltimore. A team of six to eight Project members, from the Research Committee, (Steve Andreas, Joe Yeager PhD, Rick Gray PhD, Bill McDowell PhD, Mike Corrigan PhD, Amanda Corrigan PhD, Mike Saggese, Bill Garrison and yours truly) have developed proposals which, if accepted, will present a Symposium on the PTSD Grant and a Workshop over-viewing NLP Eye Movement Integration Treatment with a PTSD Vietnam Vet. This will put the Project and for many, NLP, on this national scientific stage for the first time. Stay tuned and come join us at the conference if the proposal is accepted.
So much has happened in such a short period. And much more to report as soon as there’s time…
Future Announcements and Articles:
- The beginning of an online Research Library.
- Multimillion dollar research grant on NLP treatment of PTSD.
- Clearinghouse for international practitioner evaluation study.
- NLP Wikepedia project.
- The research and recognition project as a marketing tool for NLP Practitioners, NLP Training Institutes, and IASH.