Treating PTSD: Basic NLP Tenets

Last night a group of us NLP trainees went out to dinner. And then we came back to the hotel and sat out by the pool til all hours with an even larger group. Why am I telling you this? Because it means I didn’t come in at a decent hour and write a post!

Now, I have 20 minutes before the session begins, so I won’t be able to flesh out entire ideas but since I’ve gone through a week’s induction to NLP philosophy I want to begin summing up the basic foundational aspects, which include the following ideas:

Any bad behavior can be viewed as nothing more than a bad decision; decisions can be changed, as can the decision making process, ie. strategy.

Changing our state (that is, our mental and physical sensory perception) changes our perspective.

Feelings aren’t stagnant, they have to move. The point is to move them forward.

Impatience leads to action.

To heal we need to move toward the future not away from the past. As Richard puts is, “If you’re backing up you’ll trip.”

We need to delimit our perspectives.

In NLP speak, PTSD has become a problem we do really well. The goal is to figure out how to redirect the strategy toward something positive. Quick example:

Obsessive compulsives are terrific at obsessing over things to create a sense of security. Usually, they obsess over the wrong things. It’s not the strategy of obsession that makes them diagnosable but the way that strategy is used.

Bandler redirects their strategies toward things that are appropriate which shifts their perspective and makes the strategy profitable. Bandler likes to use the example that obsessive compulsives make great employees because they obsessively check their work.

Of course this is an oversimplification but the point is that Bandler would say he sees PTSD as people who have a great ability to remember things; we just have to change how that strategy is utilized and employed.

When you think of it that way, PTSD sounds imminently healable, doesn’t it?

Tags: Changing Unhealthy Perceptions, neurolinguistic programming, NLP, posttraumatic stress, ptsd, richard bandler