Their followers praised their talent or genius or intuition, as if that explained their abilities, but nobody at the time really understood how they came to be this way, least of all the therapists themselves.
As a scientist and a mathematician, I knew there had to be a structure, and I wanted to know what that structure was. I knew that, if it could be identified, it should be possible to replicate it and even teach it to other people. Everybody could become magicians in their own right.
I spent some time with John Grinder studying these therapeutic wizards very closely. Initially, we focused on family therapist Virginia Satir, Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson, the grandfather of modern hypnotherapy. We watched them at work, and instead of getting caught up in the content of what they were doing, we looked at the syntax of what they were saying and doing. As soon as we looked at it that way, the patterns popped out everywhere—in the questions they asked, the words they used, the gestures they made, in the tonality and rate with which they spoke. We started to notice that, even though they were all very different personalities, they shared many characteristics.
The interesting thing was that they all acted intuitively. They all had their own maps or models of therapy; there were similarities and there were differences. Often they had no idea at all why something they had done had been successful, but all shared a belief that the client’s model of the world could be changed. Regardless of what they did or thought they were doing, each believed in helping to expand and enrich the clients’ subjective experience.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) takes the position that no two people share precisely the same experiences. The map or model they create to make sense of and navigate around the world is partially based on these experiences and the distinctive ways in which each processes them. Therefore, each person’s model varies to some degree from the model created by every other person. We live in different realities, some richer, and some very much poorer, than others.
This fact alone doesn’t always cause problems. We have something called consensual, or shared, reality, which means we all, more or less, agree to operate according to the same hallucinations—and this is a useful thing. We need to have certain rules by which we all function. We need to agree on what is up and what is down. We need to know the difference between left and right—something I discovered for myself the first time I visited the United Kingdom and found out that they drive on the other side of the road from Americans. Stepping off the sidewalk and looking only one way is not a good idea if you’re still operating according to a map that applies to somewhere else.
Now, if a map or a model adequately represents the reality it is describing, the person who has created it is likely to be functioning adequately in her or his world. But experience shows us that most people who come to us in pain feel blocked and limited and without any sense of options or choices. In other words, it’s not the world they live in that’s limited; it’s the poverty of their maps that keeps them suffering and in pain.
It follows, then, that it’s often much more productive—and a lot easier—to change the map someone has been using rather than the territory in which the person is functioning. The therapists we modeled were showing us this approach in their behavior.
Despite the fact that some people, usually psychotherapists, believe change is only possible with a lot of time and effort—and then only if the client isn’t resistant—hypnosis, the effective therapists, and those people who “just changed” showed us that change could be a lot quicker and easier. The tools to do this were not available at the time, so I had to create them. Through NLP, I have been able to develop learnable principles, processes, and techniques that make change systematic and easy.
As I pointed out in Volume I of The Structure of Magic, perception and experience are active, rather than passive, processes. We all create our subjective experience out of the “stuff” of the external world. One of the reasons that we don’t all end up with the same model is that our experiencing is governed by certain restrictions or constraints: the constraints of our individual nervous systems (neurological constraints), the societies in which we function (social constraints), and our unique personal histories (personal constraints).
The NLP model we advanced at the time to explain this process was simplified, but it’s held up remarkably well over the years. Basically, the model suggested that we each use our five senses slightly differently from each other to process incoming information. The models we make depend on which senses we favor, what information we take in and how much we leave out, and how we interpret whatever does get through. To summarize briefly:
Neurological constraints. We receive information about the world through five sensory input channels—visual, auditory, kinesthetic (feelings), smell (olfactory), and taste (gustatory). Rather than each sense being given equal weight with every other sense, each of us favors one or two over the others. Of course, we know there’s considerable overlap in the parts of the brain responsible for processing our senses, but one or the other usually dominates in experience. This is known as your sensory preference or preferred sensory system.
Social restraints. As members of a particular society, we are subject to a number of mutually agreed-upon filters, the most significant of which is the language we are born to speak.
The more specific our language is, and the more distinctions we can make, the richer our experience will be. This concept is central to the practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and hypnosis. Words are power, and the language patterns you will learn from this book will help harness this power for yourself and for others.
Individual constraints. As its name suggests, the third category of constraints develops out of our personal experience. We are each born into a particular set of circumstances, and as we grow up we encounter an increasing number of experiences, which in turn give rise to unique likes and dislikes, habits, rules, beliefs, and values. The maps we create from these can become rich and useful, or limited and destructive, and unless we understand how we create our subjective world, we will continue to live in confusion and pain.
People don’t make themselves miserable out of choice, even though it sometimes looks that way. NLP doesn’t see people as bad, crazy, or sick. Our viewpoint is that they are operating out of an impoverished map, limited in the number of choices they have. To put it another way, they mistake the model for reality. This is what we mean when we say: The map is not the territory.
The richness and poverty of our maps are created by three filtering mechanisms: deletion, distortion, and generalization. These are all processes we need to carry out to manage the information that is coming at us so we are not overwhelmed. Problems occur when the wrong information is deleted, distorted, or generalized, creating patterns that either don’t support our well-being or actively diminish it.
Deletion. Deletion occurs when we pay attention to certain parts of our experience at the expense of others, which we do naturally. Think about being in a crowded room, talking to a friend. You automatically screen out the buzz of other people’s conversation…until you hear your name spoken by someone on the other side of the room.
Deletion is a necessary and useful mechanism for making sure your world is manageable in size, but in certain circumstances it can create pain and suffering. For example, I’ve never met a depressed person who can remember a time when he was really happy. As far as depressives are concerned, they’ve always been unhappy. Equally, sufferers of chronic pain often don’t notice those times when their pain is reduced or nonexistent. Certain people believe the world is a hostile place and simply fail to notice how many people act in a caring or supportive way.
Distortion. Distortion is a quality that all creative people have in abundance. We need to be able to shift the meaning of—to distort—present reality to be able to create something new. (Great writers and artists are experts in distortion.) However, as pattern-making beings, we are equally inclined to distort reality in ways that cause us pain and distress.
Some years ago I was in a restaurant, listening to a couple at the next table