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NLP was developed in the mid-70s by John Grinder, a Professor at UC Santa Cruz and Richard Bandler, a graduate student. NLP, as most people use the term today, is a set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. It's more a collection of tools than any overarching theory.

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, hypnotist.

An email exchange by Stever Robbins

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but NLP seems to correct the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself.

I believe that it depends totally on how it's used. It takes a very different view of cognition than traditional therapy; it's much closer to a cognitive approach (in fact, many of the NLP interventions resemble subsequently developed cognitive interventions).

You can use NLP techniques on symptoms, but as you point out, that absolutely won't solve the underlying problem. The different with NLP is that we consider "underlying problem" to be the constellation of beliefs, values, and behaviors that you have to hold in order to have the problem. While understanding how those beliefs got there can be useful (trauma, lecture by parents, whatever), there are ways of changing beliefs that don't depend on how the beliefs were originally formed. The emphasis in NLP is on spending the bulk of the time finding and understanding the underlying beliefs.

To use a possible lousy chemical analogy, once you have a complex molecule, you can change it in different ways regardless of how you got that molecule to begin with. I would imagine that if it's of sufficient complexity, you could only change parts of it at a time (maybe break it in half, then combine the halves with other things), so it might take many interventions to do what you want. But the molecule's history is only interesting insofar as it tells you about the structure of the molecule and how it might be changed in the future.

Traditional therapy examines underlying stresses an anxiety and more importantly teaching you how not to get into the same situation again by learning to recognize your patterns of behavior.

NLP has a very, very strong emphasis on recognizing patterns of behavior. Where it differs is in the techniques for teaching yourself how not to get into the same situation again. In order for a pattern of macro behavior to happen, the NLP models say that you must make a whole myriad of mental judgments and take actions within your head, first. Quite probably most of those will be on an unconscious level.

An example [I'm TOTALLY making this up--it's obviously influenced by what you've described as your current situation, but it is in NO other way based on you]

Macro behavior: dating the same kind of person over and over

Micro behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that combine to cause the macro behavior:

• when seeing certain kinds of people [e.g. Tom Cruise], saying to self "I could never date them", and turning attention elsewhere, thus eliminating an entire category of people from consideration
• when thinking about going to a particular social venue, e.g. a potluck, making mental pictures of all the failed casseroles made, and deciding not to go due to social embarassment. This is again selecting against meeting a certain category of person.
• when seeing a certain physical type, feeling attraction, and deciding to walk over and talk. I've never dealt with the cognitive roots of attraction, so I don't know much about how that works, but the deciding to walk over and talk is a decision which automatically includes certain categories of person.
• when finding out someone is/n't religious, deciding "I could/could never be with this person" rather than taking the time to get to know them more 3-dimensionally

etc. These things aren't really conscious behavior. In fact, these "strategies" only become a problem when they become so automatic that they don't enter into consciousness. They just become "the way I usually act."

In NLP, we would try to understand the constellation of micro-behaviors. There are lots of techniques for eliciting them, but among the best are simply to put someone in the situation and call their attention to their own thought processes when they're in the middle of the cognitive "strategy" they want to change. Interventions would take the form of changing the micro behaviors through rehearsal, and explicit skill building around whatever new macro behaviors are needed.

For example, people make better decisions when they're feeling good. Imagine Stever Robbins [true story] who consistently makes lousy job decisions, because he's so afraid of the impact of a wrong decision that he gets stressed out when making the choice. An NLP approach might take a couple of tacks:
(a) teach him an explicit strategy for making job decisions and have him rehearse that, even when stressed, so he at least performs well under stress
(b) teach him to put himself in a really good frame of mind and hold the good feelings while thinking about the job decision.

I tried (a) and it didn't work. The stress always overwhelmed me. But then I started going for (b), and discovered that once I'm in a resourceful state, it's much easier to keep myself there. Then I automatically had access to a better quality of decision making.

The historical root cause is quite easy to identify: it has to do with the way my first employer negotiated with me. He was a good friend of mine, and he explicitly manipulated me using our friendship as a lever over our business relationship. But knowing that history was only marginally useful in changing my behavior. I was able to remove the strong emotion connected with the history, but I still needed to teach myself a different cognitive strategy.

old strategy: think "job," think, "relationship with potential employer is more important than my own boundaries," get stressed if anything seemed to violate relationship [e.g. they don't accept my offer], and then lower my offer until they said yes--in order to preserve relationship

new strategy: think "job," think "we need an arrangement that pays me what I'm worth and gives them commensurate value," and that thought is enough to bypass the old stress reaction and go into a more consultative state where it becomes a challenge to create a deal that works for both of us, rather than a preserve-relationship-at-all-costs fear thing.

.....

So I don't know if this fits the definition of "root cause." It certainly does NOT treat the past event in any sense. The past can't be changed. What it does is find out what the relevant cognitive structures are that cause the problem--some of which may be inappropriately remembering past events in a way that over-influences the present--and then help someone learn to change those structures. It's a "root cause" in a systems theory sense, NOT in a historical sense.

Does that make sense?

NLP is very intervention and results oriented, rather than being understanding oriented:
(a) the questioning procedures themselves can cause people to become VERY aware of all kinds of things they weren't before. How they act on this awareness is, itself, a change;
(b) there are many intervention techniques;
(c) it's considered part of the NLP culture that the purpose of therapy is to help someone make significant changes in their life at the speed that works best for them. And if someone "isn't ready to change," then it becomes the therapists role to help them get ready as quickly as possible.

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