Quite some time ago, Norm (who unfortunately no longer participates in the newsgroup) suggested, in connection with the NLP Fast Phobia cure, that all therapy really comes down to a matter of changing beliefs.
I personally don't think that this is the most useful way of looking at techniques such as the phobia cure. But I've just now been listening to an audiotape recording of a seminar with David Gordon called Modeling with NLP (copyright 1998 by David Gordon, distributed through NLP Comprehensive). And in this seminar, David Gordon supports Norm's point of view by saying the following:
David Gordon: You know, there's this interesting thing that goes on. Let's say that Rick is really terrible at handling criticism, but he wants to handle it better.
Like most human beings, we can want to change, but just wanting to change doesn't mean that we're willing to. Remember that I said that we are all coherency-seeking systems. We are set up at every level to try and maintain coherency, that is, to maintain ourselves as we are. And that's a good thing. We are operating out of a set of filters which include all of our beliefs and our strategies, etc. That's what keeps Rick Rick and David David; everything that comes into the world of Rick goes through those filters and gets distorted, generalized, and deleted. If it weren't for that, Rick would not be Rick, but simply a reflection of whatever environment he's in at the time.
So we are set up to maintain who we are. But because we are human beings, we can represent in our subjective experience what it's like to be other than who we are: somebody who doesn't handle criticism well can imagine handling it well and say, ``I want to be like that.'' But the person who wants to handle criticism well is still that same person who doesn't, and who is also set up to stay who he is.
This is the fundamental therapeutic conundrum and difficulty. You've got a client saying, ``I want to change. But you have to change me through the set of filters that I am.'' And anything you try to introduce will be generalized, deleted, and distorted through these filters in such a way as to keep the client the same.
The therapeutic challenge is: How do I get through these filters and make it possible for my client to reorganize their filters in a new way -- in a way that supports the outcome that they want?
That is the purpose of all the techniques you've been learning. What a technique does is to set up what I consider to be a ritual context, that allows it to be possible for somebody to open up their set of filters and to allow a new experience to come in long enough for them to have that experience and then re-form their filters around it.
And if the client does re-form their filters around this new experience, that's when the client changes.
That's what I think goes on in every technique.
--
Universities are nurseries of orthodoxy. The university, while offering
a nurturing environment, is not a creative one. It can't be. That isn't
the function of higher education. -- Rita Mae Brown