Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)

[luke wilson]

The question I have is why the "state-breaking" as an element of NLP was presented first, seemingly out of order and with some parts missing, so that you had to ask questions to get the whole picture. It's like the cart coming before the horse.

I don't know. I'll be honest monotonic and say NLP is new to me and so I don't have any other references. I'm not sure how much of the class I attend is planned compared to how much is spontaneous. It's only a beginners class and the group is small, only 5. Oh yeah, we are not allowed to take notes, he says it takes our focus away from what matters.

What happens is that even though he has a structure, in the latter stages he asks us what we want to learn and he goes from there. But so far the chronological order has been basically, the aim and making important distinctions about the aim e.g. you should always know what you want and what you want can not be a feeling (state), it's also important to frame what you want in terms of, well, what you want, not what you don't want!! Then it went towards basically how we filter information in our brain, like the theory behind it and how we can experiment with this, mostly involves self-observation and a will/determination to basically change - he says, you do what you have always done and you'll get what you always got, then weirdly it went to perception of time and through certain experiments we learnt that not everyone perceives time the same, how you perceive time determines a lot about you and should be a guide stone to how you should engage with yourself, then it went to association/disassociation. Around these topics we ask questions and he basically fills up the lessons answering them and sort of carrying out exercises.

I have personally been pondering on the 'why' for so long regarding some deep seated issues and no matter how hard I try, I can't change them! Usually I think it's because I'm lacking the right 'why' the right 'insight' but looking back at my life and those few situations where I have moved beyond deep seated issues where emotions were acting as barriers, it's the how that changed, somehow, how I processed the information changed and so in those same situations, how I was acting was different, the circuitry being engaged were different. It wasn't because I had reached a light bulb moment of why, it was more because somehow I was engaging a different wiring mechanism. How I switched from one to the other is something I am yet to figure out but yeah, looking back, I can see some validity to this focussing on the 'how' business.

I think Timothy Wilson has concluded something similar in Strangers To Ourselves: how the reasons for feeling the things we do elude us due to adaptive unconscious not being built for introspection. It's much more useful to simple overwrite the outdated narratives about ourselves (based on feedback from others and self-observation), and the subconscious shifts in response to that. Does that make sense?

I recently came to learn about a term called introspective illusion, basically meaning that we can't really ever know the why. That basically, we just make up the why's. He mentioned it, he said 'I'll tell you a secret', the 'why' is hidden beyond your conscious mind, you have no access to it.