In article <77611@netnews.upenn.edu> zorrilla@cattell.psych.upenn.edu (Eric Zorrilla) writes:
>In article <92131.185751RHUMPHR@auvm.american.edu> RHUMPHR@auvm.american.edu (Richard Humphries) writes:
>
>>I am doing research on cognitive-behavioral treatment for negative thought
>>cycles (automatic thoughts) and need some help. I know a bit about the
>>technique of thought stopping, and was wondering about a few particulars.
>
>>First, does thought stopping occur at the point of stimulus (i.e. directly
>> after stimulus, but before negative cognitions) or is it employed when
>> the subject observes automatic thoughts occurring?
>
>By definition, thought-stopping is post-experiential. It can't happen
>before a negative cognition or else you wouldn't be stopping anything.
>Usually, you would say that you thought stop when you feel a particularly
>strong emotion, or you find yourself in a mood you don't want to be in or
>you think your mood might be inappropriate for the situation.
>Pay attention to what your cogntions are at the moment and challenge them.

Looking at cognitive therapy from an NLP perspective, there are two things which I believe would make it much more effective than it is. However figuring out how to incorporate them into cognitive therapy might require some major effort from its developers.

The first consideration is that thinking is not a purely verbal phenomena. An important component of thoughts is made up of images and voice tone (and tempo, loudness) etc. and even feelings. Not so much the big feelings -- emotions -- but little feelings like the feeling of unease I get when something seems to be wrong with a piece of reasoning but I can't quite put my finger on it, or the feeling of certainty I have that lets me know that I've finally succeeded in understanding something I've been puzzling over. (These feelings are not infallible, any more than any other aspect of thought.)

Sometimes when a subject has problems with a particular thing he keeps saying to himself, the tone of voice is more important than the content. Six-step reframing (a form of hypnosis) can sometimes be effective in recasting the thought into a softer, gentler voice tone.

There are people who don't think in words at all and who don't usually have any kind of internal dialogue (``self-talk'') going on. I had a good friend like this. For her, words were purely things to be spoken, and the idea that one could know what one was going to say before one said it seemed bizarre to her. I've once before briefly posted a description of some six-step reframing I did with her. During this process, when I would ask her questions about her problem the answers would be in the form of images which seemed very strange to me.

For instance, when I asked her ``creative part'' to communicate she said that it was locked up in a steel cannister. When I was horrified at this, she said that it had to be kept that way because otherwise it would explode ``and all go down the black hole.'' (I had learned about that black hole in previous work with her.) At first I thought ``Her unconscious mind communicates with her in the form of images.'' But now I think that those images were actually the basic way in which her mind stored thoughts. Since my objective was to help her change her mental processes, it was more effective to work with them in their original visual form rather than having her translate them into words and then working with the words, which her mind would then have to retranslate into images.

I believe that this is the true foundation for the idea in psychoanalysis that the unconscious mind communicates in the form of symbols.

The other way in which I believe cognitive therapy is less effective than it could be is that the interventions take place much too slowly. NLP seems to indicate that the mind can quickly change much more easily than it can slowly change. I've talked about various NLP techniques that take five/ten/fifteen/thirty minutes to do (partly depending on at what point one thinks the clock should start running), but the actual change seems to take place in a matter of seconds.

The main ``thought stopper'' in NLP (as I see it) is the Swish Pattern. It is described in Heart of the Mind by Connirae and Steve Andreas. One begins with a mental (or sometimes external) image that seems to cue an unwanted thought or behavior. For instance to cure nail biting, the image would be that of the hand coming up to the mouth. Then the subject constructs a positive image to substitute. The traditional instructions are ``Make a picture of yourself as you would be if you didn't have this problem.'' (In other words, I create a picture of what I would look like if I were a person who did not bite his nails. This seems very strange to me, but most clients seem to understand the instruction and it works.)

One then has the subject look at the original image, making it large and bright. And somewhere in one corner they put the replacement image, small and dark. Then, on cue, they have the replacement image grow large and bright, wiping out the problem image. (With some people, distance is a more effective variable than size.) This needs to be done very fast. (The designation Swish Pattern comes because Bandler would say ``swish'' to the subject as he made the switch.) One then has the subject ``blank the screen'' (to avoid installing a mental loop) and repeat the process. Five or six repetitions are usually adequate.

I have used this to help a few people get over romantic obsessions (usually with former partners) with apparent success, although in cases like this I usually combine it with another NLP technique designed for breaking compulsions.

>By definition, thought-stopping is post-experiential. It can't happen
>before a negative cognition or else you wouldn't be stopping anything.

This may seem tautological, but it does not seem to be the case when one uses the Swish Pattern. If the negative image reappears at all, it is stopped so quickly that subjects are not even aware of it.

The videotape called The Swish Pattern put out by NLP Comprehensive shows a standard swish as described above and then also shows an auditory swish. In this case, the cue for the undesired behavior (emotional state, actually) was external and was not visual but instead was a particular tone of voice from the subject's daughter. A follow-up interview after several months indicates that the swish was successful for this particular subject.

Like most of the NLP Comprehensive tapes, the piece of work shown was a demonstration done during a training seminar. This videotape certainly does not constitute proof of the effectiveness of the Swish Pattern, but it gives one a chance to see it in operation. (For evidence of effectiveness, one could always be so unscientific as to simply try it out. I realize that this goes against the grain of many of those who participate in sci.psychology.)