Well, since no one else seems to want to flame me for this, I almost feel obliged to flame myself. Or at least to clarify things a little, because the way this was written, the idea of someone with no real training in psychotherapy (NLP training is very different) doing therapy with someone by email is, in my opinion, a little scary and I don't want people to get the idea that I'm recommending this.

In addition to in the difficulty I might have in knowing whether I might be harming the client, some other obvious concerns are as follows: How could I be sure, especially with someone I've never met in person, that this person is not seriously mentally ill? And since this person already had a therapist, how could I know that I was not sabotaging some very carefully planned long-term approach of her regular therapist?

If my correspondent had originally asked me to do "therapy" with her, I think these concerns would have stopped me. And at the least, I would have explained that as someone with NLP training, I am not trained in dealing with mental illness and I do not do what I normally think of as "therapy," and I never do long-term work in any case. On the few occasions when I work with people anymore, I work with the "worried well" in dealing with real-life problems, and usually never do more than three or four sessions with someone and usually expect to bring about some significant changes in every session.

In the interests of confidentiality, in my previous article I was very vague about what happened. (For me, confidentiality means more than simply not revealing names. I'm not like those psychoanalysts who feel that it's perfectly okay to write books about their clients if they change the names.) But I think I can say a little more without exploiting my correspondent.

She sent me email a few years ago saying that she wanted to find an NLP practitioner to help her understand "Why I am so deathly afraid of relationships." When I read what she wrote, I immediately thought of several simple techniques for dealing with fears and anxieties and suggested that if she couldn't find an NLP practitioner, she might try them herself on a self-help basis. I think I suggested some books where they were described more fully than I was willing to do by email.

But after we exchanged a couple of more letters, my NLP instincts plus my own experiences with therapists caused me to realize that it might be naive to simply accept at face value her statement about being afraid of relationships. I thought that maybe this was a line that her therapist was selling her ("Well, obviously you are afraid of relationships since you avoid them so consistently") and that what was actually happening was that her inability to get into relationships was simply due to a lack of certain skills or to having inappropriate values ("criteria," we NLPers would say).

I've had experience myself in dealing with therapists who have cause-effect beliefs of this sort which they take as axiomatic and never bother to check out with the client in front of them. In fact, in my experience most conventionally trained therapists simply do not know how to ask intelligent questions. (Maybe they've been so thoroughly trained in looking for deep hidden meanings that it never occurs to them to check out the obvious.)

In answer to my question, my correspondent said she was not really sure and that in fact she had wondered herself whether "fear" was the correct word to describe her problem. And so we started talking about her feelings about relationships, her past history of getting into relationships, her strategies for getting to know men, choosing men to date, and what she was really looking for in a relationship.

One of the things I did was to assign her the task of doing something nice for another person every day, preferably a comparative stranger. My intention here was to help teach her to put attention on other people, because I believe that most of the time when people have problems in making friends or in approaching those they want to meet it is in large part because they put their attention on themselves rather than on the person they're interacting with. (This is one of my own axiomatic cause-effect beliefs.) In any case, it turned out that simply attempting to perform my assigned task had a major impact on my "client."

I don't want to say anything more about the specifics of our interaction. Certainly in the beginning it never occurred to me that this sort of relationship counseling might be something called "therapy." In any case, the point I wanted to make in my previous article was not that I recommend this as a way of doing therapy, but that it is in fact possible for interactions via email to become very intense and very intimate and to result in significant changes.