How to turn your fears and anxieties into positivity and productivity with cognitive reframing

Bit of a nit-pick, but my NLP trainer said that psychology has recently (late 80s) begun to use NLP terms to steer people away from NLP,saying we do that too.

NLP has been slowly eroding the market share of mind science of medical treatments back to the teaching of skills as opposed to drugs.

NLP and Hypnosis are covered under the national health in Britain, but not yet in N.America as the medical bodies are too powerful and benifit packages are masking the true cost of treatments to the general public.

For now.

You sure told him.

Thank you for your ever helpful and on point input.

Donā€™t exactly know what the nitpick is. Cognitive Therapy 1960s. NLP 1970s. The creators of NLP drew from existing theory and the work of successful therapists. They claim to have modelled techniques so that they could be widely adopted. You donā€™t model something that doesnā€™t already exist.

5 Likes

I have tried listening to some of these ā€œGreat Coursesā€ and they ainā€™t so great. Itā€™s a lot of droning and I canā€™t pay attention to it because I get bored.

2 Likes

Yep. Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Ericksonā€¦

My point was and still is that NLP openly acknowledges their roots.

Makes no real difference.

Okay, I thought your point was:

Maybe you can see how I was confused.

I mean, if your point was just that NLP acknowledges its roots, then it seems very odd to say that reframing isnā€™t psychology when it was psychology before NLP existed and NLP adopted the concept from psychology. Wouldnā€™t acknowledging roots include acknowledging that reframing is psychology?

5 Likes

Actually the mechanism of Reframing in NLP bears little resemblance to what psychology offers, simply because in NLP utilizes tools from a variety of other disciplines, which as we saw earlier Bandler and Grinder openly acknowledge, allowing the NLP practitioner to precisely calibrate pre-existing states and modeling hew ones and then anchoring (another non-Freudian tool) the new perceptive state in place.

Anchoring is a device that places newly modeled responses to stimuli into the body (via touch when possible) or by signal to mind, and often both.

All of this is moot though, simply because the medical approach is to medicate, cut or shock.

In fact anchoring is so effective that it can be used to install states in telemarketers so that they never call back!

(When done correctly)

Okay, so it isnā€™t that reframing is not psychology, but that there is a thing in NLP that is called reframing that is not the reframing that existed in psychology before NLP existed. This seems to be an exercise in conversational reframing.

I know people who have had bad experiences with general practitioners who donā€™t really know anything about mental illness and find themselves being asked to recommend treatment for it, but CBT is a very common recommendation for people with anxiety disorders.

Wow! NLP allows you to say words over a phone that remove you from the call list of a server that feeds calls to telemarketers? Let me guess, the ā€œanchoringā€ strategy is to say, ā€œplease remove me from your listā€ which legally requires them to do so in many jurisdictions.

7 Likes

Podcasts are radio. If youā€™re not a commuter, exerciser, visually impaired or involved in any sort of work involving long waits or situations in which the hands are busy but the mind wanders then youā€™re better served with something else. Doesnā€™t mean itā€™s a bad format, itā€™s not just for you.

2 Likes

Except when they donā€™t.

The daffodil fund is a cancer fundraiser that (a specific caller) refused to put me on the list you refer to.

After several annoying calls from this woman while feeding my young boys dinner, I asked her to think back to a time when that horrid thing happened, see what she saw, heard what she heard and felt that familiar feeling insideā€¦

She gasped.

Now, I said every time you even think of calling me, you will feel this way foreverā€¦now.

I didnā€™t hear from her again.

So now you know how to install an anchor verbally.

Is that psychology?

In fact I did 1 1/2 years of CBT for panic attacks and generalized anxiety aboutā€¦15 or so years back. It worked pretty well.

2 Likes

No.Ā 

3 Likes

What are you saying no to?

oh really?

What sort of informed consent do you provide, and document, before using your ā€œcertifiedā€ health-care skills to trigger a traumatic memory association of someone not under your care?

10 Likes

I too have benefitted from CBT a bit. Feeling Good by David Burns was a good read if anyone wants to know what CBT is.

Current hotness though is mindfulness based. Check out Kabat-Zinn to see what thatā€™s about. (Warning, heā€™s suuuuuuuper dry. Iā€™ll stick with the more honestly Buddhist Pema Chodron and Tara Brach.

I guess thatā€™s the only thing that bugs me about mindfulness based therapy is that it feels soā€¦ appropriative. Something about stripping theology/philosophy/history out of something and making it clinical, but allowing the original stuff to bleed through makes me feel even whiter and western.

1 Like

Thankfully Iā€™m not followed around by dicks telling me what I can and canā€™t do to defend my house and home.

She was not my client and I had no obligation to inform her or receive consent.

If you surprise a black belt donā€™t be surprised if you find yourself on your ass.

Like now.

I have never met a black belt of any discipline who regularly punched anyone outside of a dojo, even (especially?) when surprised.

5 Likes

I did CBT too. It seems great I wouldnā€™t say it worked for me, but everyone else in my group seemed to really benefit, and itā€™s not like you can expect anything to work for everyone.

See, I think CBT already cribs heavily from mindfulness. Like, if you take thought records, itā€™s just putting a structure around the idea of remembering to be mindful of your feelings and thoughts. I donā€™t think appropriation is a big problem here. I think basically whatā€™s happening is that medicine has ā€œgrown upā€ and instead of spending all itā€™s time trying to prove it isnā€™t folk magic or religion like it was at the beginning of the 20th century, itā€™s starting to say, ā€œHey, some of this folk magic and religious stuff seems to work, letā€™s figure out why.ā€ Mindfulness works, so there is a drive to make it work for us. Zen koans have probably done a lot fo work for some people, but I think most of the people I know would do a lot better with CBT. Also, the Dalai Lama loves science looking into meditation and figuring out how and why it works. Not that he can speak for the entire traditional of meditation, but heā€™s certainly someone.

I recall a friend telling me that when he had been doing jujitsu for about three years he was scared that someone would one day throw a punch at him and heā€™d break their arm as part of a training reflex. By the time he had a black belt he felt very comfortable that is someone attacked him he could avoid crippling them.

5 Likes