Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies

Neuro Linguistic Programming is becoming more and more popular in the fields of metaphysics, psychiatry, and behavioral psychology.  If you’re reading this, you’ve likely heard the term and perhaps even the basic overall concept but want to really understand how it works.  This is a basic overview of NLP designed to give you the briefest of introductions to this fascinating cutting-edge scientific frontier of the mind.  You can think of it as a crash course or neuro linguistic programming for dummies, though it should be noted that no one is a dummy and this is all quite simple once it’s broken down.

The basics of NLP boil down to understanding the relationship between behavioral patterns and the subjective experiences that spawn and support them from within the mind at varying levels of conscious awareness.  What does this mean?  The way we think of the mind and how it works has evolved quite a bit over the past hundred years or so.  Twentieth century psychology has been voraciously exploring a concept we call the subconscious mind or that part of your mind that lies dormant beneath regular everyday chatter of your normal, conscious, thinking mind.  It is in this murky, mysterious underworld of the mind that the building blocks of human behavior are stacked.

It’s best, given the evolution of our understanding of the mind, to think of it as a computer.  We know that a computer is an operating system that runs on a set of commands that build upon one another for various purposes.  And like a computer, the system can get bogged down by unnecessary programs and patterns being run out of turn or even viruses that we’ve let slip out of our control.  These obstacles are merely clutter in the brain processes and can be cleared away with the right hacking or programming.

Neuro Linguistic Programming for dummies suggests that the entire world you interact with is mediated through language in your mind.  You don’t experience a moment directly like an animal does, based purely on reactive instinct, you filter everything through not only the five main sensory modalities but also the internal language database that decodes meaning and works on problem-solving.  Most psychological road-blocks and unhealthy behavioral patterns stem from a miscommunication in the filtering process.  For example, Sally thinks that everyone hates her because her friends and coworkers are constantly saying snide, rude, and inappropriate slights or insults.  She is an unhappy person because of this.  NLP would suggest that the problem is not Sally’s unpopularity or the meanness of her coworkers, but rather her mind is filtering these experiences through a program that sees everything as a threat.  If Sally can reprogram herself to see the actions of others as harmless, her self-esteem will improve and she’ll let go of the unhealthy worry that others think low of her.  It’s all about how the mind interprets or filters data coming in from sensory experience in the physical world.

NLP functions as a means of unraveling the given filter and reprogramming it based on proper linguistic commands. Since we each have unique sets of personal experiences, thoughts, and mental filters, we each have a unique language inherent to our personal operating system. This language is based on the sensory acuities we associate with most, meaning the senses we rely on most for our data about the outside world. Some of us remember things in images or shapes, others in dialog or sounds, and still others remember or perceive things in a kinesthetic level, feeling the input. A good NLP wizard can assess your speaking patterns and determine which sensory language you respond to best. This becomes the programming language they’ll use to hack into your brain and help you rework the patterns causing you problems.

You can do this yourself by taking these basic neuro linguistic programming for dummies techniques and applying them to your own life. Think of a distinct memory from your childhood or adolescence and describe it to someone who wasn’t there. What words do you use, how do you describe it? Do you see the space, the colors, the people or do you hear snatches of conversation or experience music or words in your ear? Perhaps you just have a sense of how it felt and what the textures were like, the temperature, etc. Take note of these forms because they are the building blocks to your internal computer.

If you’re experiencing a particular hang-up or road-block, like stage fright for example, you can examine how this fear or feeling looks, sounds, feels, or smells depending on your dominant sensory acuity and then reverse the sensation. If you experience the fright in your stomach, you may see that it feels like its spinning clockwise in your gut, this fear energy. So you force yourself to feel it stop and then reverse, to spin counter-clockwise. This is a message to your subconscious that you are reversing the pattern of fear in the belly in relation to being on stage in front of other people. This is a crude example but the subconscious mind works purely in symbolism, in code. So you have to encode your commands and decode your problems to communicate with you subconscious, relying heavily on the sensory acuities you’ve identified.

Patterns of habit and behavior develop over long periods of time or during intense or traumatic experiences so don’t think a simple flyby will be the cure-all. Some people need to work at this reprogramming for a long time to undo the trauma or habitual patterns they’ve ingrained in their minds. Be patient with yourself and continue to explore the deeper levels and complexes of your mind and you’ll take this neuro linguistic programming for dummies to a whole new level for yourself.  There are lots of great NLP books out there that can elaborate.