Does significant and lasting change require extensive psychotherapy, understanding of the origin of behavioral problems, and years of grueling self-examination? Richard Bandler says no. Co-creator with John Grinder of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), Bandler has spent the last 40 years helping people with serious behavioral and mental disorders achieve extraordinary changes in their lives, by altering the way the brain processes information. The process is fairly simple and straightforward, and much of the time, people see results in weeks or months – not years.

Bandler began his career as a student of mathematics; he was introduced to the work of Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Satir, the highly regarded family therapist, in the mid-1970s. In 1974, Bandler, then a student at the University of Santa Cruz, met Grinder, a professor of linguistics who specialized in transformational grammar.

In 1974, the two began studying language patterns used in the work of Perls, Satir and hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson, in an attempt to understand how language influenced the success of these therapies. Their creation of a model for therapy – called the meta-model – and their subsequent book, The Structure of Magic, Volume I, formed the basis for NLP. Working with phobias, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Bandler has found that NLP has little to do with understanding where our problems come from, and everything to do with how to solve them. Here, he talks with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about how fears and phobias can be released, ways in which neural pathways can be repatterned, and the extraordinary potential of the human brain.

RD: You created Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) with John Grinder four
decades ago. How did that come about?

RB: I was a mathematician by training, and my background was pretty much in science. I was working with computers - in those days, what they called information science – and my job was to get machines to do what human beings did. When I was a grad student, I moved into a lovely country home owned by a psychiatrist, and Virginia Satir came to stay in the house for a while. Her work was intuitive, but it made perfect sense to me as a scientist. Intuitive behavior may be unconscious, but that doesn’t mean it’s indiscernible.

The house I was living in must have had a couple of hundred books about psychiatry; I read them all, but they didn’t talk about anything you could do other than give people drugs. There was a book by a guy named Albert Ellis, where he yelled at people and told them that they shouldn’t be behaving stupidly. But I think most people already knew that. There was a book by Carl Rogers where he repeated everything that people said and put the words “I feel” in front of it. But that doesn’t necessarily tell people how to make neurological change. Virginia’s work, on the other hand, was different. I think it induced in people altered states that allowed them to make profound changes. She took people who were absolutely terrified of people, social phobics who simply couldn’t communicate, and 12 hours later, they would be sitting around having conversations. I’m very result driven, and that impressed me.

RD: How did this lead you to NLP? When did you first know you were onto something?

RB: It started when we began working with phobias. With phobias, you get a clear demonstration of when a technique works and when it doesn’t. After treatment or therapy, people who are terrified of escalators either get on them or they don’t.

You don’t even need an escalator; you can just talk to someone with an escalator phobia about escalators, and they become terrified - which told me the fear wasn’t in the escalator. The fear was in their head.

We started sequencing ideas. We found that if you took people through some fear or fearful memory, but you started them at the end thinking of their worst phobic experience and literally run it backwards, very quickly, we could dispel the phobia. We had people start at the end of a horrible memory, and run it full in reverse - which, of course, changes the meaning. You pop out of the river and go to safety.

Here’s an illustration: I recently worked with a woman who was in the 7/7 bus that blew-up in London, the one that was part of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005. She watched people blow-up. After that, she’d get on public transportation - because you have to in London - and she would go nuts. She lived in fear every day; she couldn’t make plans for the future, and was absolutely sure she was going to die at any moment.

We had her go back on the bus in her mind, but we had her start with it already exploded and watch the bus come back together and roll back to her house. It sounds silly, but in a matter of moments, the fear stopped working on her.

Over the years, we’ve found many of these kinds of formulas and techniques. These formulas neurologically change the automatic sequences that form the negative habits causing people to feel bad about things, whether it’s dwelling on bad memories, or experiencing post stress syndrome.

Psychology studies how those disorders and fears get there; all I’ve ever looked at is, how do they go away? We look at these disorders not as mental problems, but as over-learning. Therefore, all we have to do is give people lessons in how to forget things. And if it’s one thing humans are good at, it’s forgetting.

RD: When you first came out with NLP and therapists were using it to rid people
of phobias and other disorders, it must have had quite an impact on the field of
psychotherapy.

RB: Actually, it still does. It’s gone even further; in England, we have something called the "Durham Project," in which we proved that using NLP in the educational system can have a profound difference immediately. In England, learning NLP is part of the training to be a medical doctor. NLP doesn’t have applications only for psychotherapy. But, of course, we do have loads of psychotherapists who practice NLP.

People have asked me over the years if I’ve encountered resistance from the field of psychology. Quite the opposite is true. There are always a few psychiatrists who just refuse to look at anything, but for the most part, psychiatrists have helped me immensely, including having access, for example, to schizophrenics. What they got back in return was ways of treating their patients that actually worked. The fact that they could get somebody who walked in with a phobia to walk out without one delighted them to no end.

RD: With NLP, you’re helping people change. How do belief systems fit into this? In your book, you say that people may recognize that they have beliefs that don’t serve them, and they think it’s nearly impossible to change those beliefs.

RB: People change their beliefs all the time, they just typically don’t change them the way they want to. But there are things we believe strongly, and to our minds, they look different from weakly held beliefs. They’re in a different location in our head, they speak through a different voice, and a different set of feelings define them. Then there are things we’re just uncertain about, and we store those in our mind totally differently. We have a different kind of image and a different kind of voice and different feelings. And being able to switch a belief from one to the other really isn’t that difficult, if you know how to do it.

Beliefs are important. When you start helping people get over a fear, you also have to make sure they don’t end up supplying new fears. So they have to change their beliefs about what life is going to be like; they have to believe that life can actually be happy and productive, and you can manifest good things and enjoy yourself. There are some people who believe that if things start going well, it means something bad is about to happen. They’ll even make something bad happen if you don’t change that belief.

RD: It’s ironic that, for most people, the potential for happiness occurs almost continually. They’re hungry, they eat. They’re tired, they sleep. They want company, they talk to somebody. They need a little movement, they walk around. We’re constantly doing things that are satisfying basic needs. If we were dogs, we’d be pretty happy. What is it about the way our minds filter an essentially very pleasurable experience through our expectations and beliefs?

RB: I’m sitting here looking at my dog, and she’s happy as a lark just staring out the window. There’s not even anything out there. If I gave her a cookie, she’d be delighted. And when my wife comes home, she’ll be thrilled for ten seconds. Dogs wear everything on their heart, but they don’t have a sense of time. They’re not thinking about a week from Thursday, and they’re not thinking about two years ago.

One of the things that separates our consciousness from other beings is our sense of continuity. Whether it’s accurate or inaccurate, it doesn’t matter. The fact that we’re capable of conceiving of the future or of the past, means we can do that in a way where we’re enjoying ourselves more or enjoying ourselves less.

A psychologist once told me that some people are inherently happy. They simply use their consciousness to enjoy the fact that they’re doing fine. They stay more in the moment and enjoy the moment, and make sure they make good plans so that they go in good directions. Another way of saying it is, if you’re looking for what can go wrong, you’ll find it, and if you’re looking for what you can enjoy, you’ll also find that. I’m very fond of saying that disappointment requires adequate planning.

The book I’m working on now is called The Guide to Cheerfulness. I think people are way too cranky most of the time. They are unpleasant to be around. I would imagine if you’re the person being cranky, it’s even worse; you can’t get away from yourself. The people who are happier think differently than people who are unhappier, just like people who spell well think differently than people who don’t spell well. Even if they had three generations of bad spellers in their family, you can still teach them how to spell relatively easily. In the same way, you can teach someone who’s a depressive how to think differently.

RD: In your book Getting the Life You Want, in Part 4, “Getting to Fun,” is the first subchapter. Tell us a little bit about that.

RB: If you start to think of how you’re going to enjoy stuff, and you make plans to enjoy it, it also requires that you know how to manipulate your feelings. Some people have good feelings, but they’re not that strong; however, they have really big bad feelings. Being able to know how to change the intensity of feelings is like having a thermostat in your house. You can easily turn up the heat in a room, or turn up the air conditioning so it’s cooler. In the same way, if you can control the intensity of your feelings automatically, you’ll have more fun. The techniques in this book teach you how to run mental routines that prepare you, so when you’re in situations, you just enjoy yourself better.

RD: What is “running a mental routine?”

RB: Let’s take something simple. A lot of the people I meet don’t get around to doing anything pleasant because they’re too busy thinking about something bad in the past. I was presenting in Las Vegas, and a man raised his hand and told me he had this horrible experience, and all he did was think about it every day. He said “How can I make my life better?” and I said, “Think about it this way. If I came in and hung a wall-sized picture in your house and it was hideous, what would you do? Would you leave it there for the rest of your life and complain about it, or would you change it?” He said, “Well, I would change it.” And I said, “Then why would you leave a big ugly picture inside of your head?” Our mental images, most of the ones that create really bad feelings, are not only life-size, they’re larger than life-size.

You can learn to shrink those images down very quickly to a six-inch circle, and pop up a picture where you see yourself doing the things you want to. If you do that over and over in your head, four or five times very, very quickly, it trains the brain to say “Not this - this; not this - this.” If you get in the habit of replacing bad ideas with good ideas, it starts to happen automatically. When they practice this, people start feeling better more of the time, automatically, just the way they felt bad automatically.

RD: The impression most people have is that their feelings and thoughts simply arise, the way bubbles do …

RB: Yes, I know, but that’s not really what’s happening.

RD: It isn’t?

RB: Not at all. It just feels that way. Everything in your automatic thought pattern feels like it’s out of control; but the job of the conscious mind is to aim our experience, and the unconscious is to just run things. Our ability to reprogram how we feel in certain situations is only out of our control because we don’t know how to do it.

When someone with an overwhelming fear of elevators thinks about elevators, they see this oversized elevator and their heart rate increases, their breathing changes, and they start perspiring. Instead, you teach them to run it backwards, so they’re moving out of an elevator, and you put funny music behind it. When they look at a real elevator, the fear doesn’t kick in automatically. If people can learn to be terrified of water because they almost drowned once at the age of five, then we should be able, within a few minutes, to teach them to feel differently about water. I’ve been doing this for 40 years, so I know
it’s possible.

RD: Some people are afraid of elevators and water, but what’s the biggest fear or phobia?

RB: Public speaking. It’s the most common fear, and not just in the United States. Most people get afraid before they’re actually in front of an audience, usually the minute they’re asked to speak in public. Remember it’s not the audience that scares them, just as it’s not
the elevator that scares them. It’s the idea of it. Even though they don’t think about it consciously, at the back of their mind, they run an image of things.

When you ask people who are afraid of public speaking “What do you think about before you get in front of an audience?” they tell you things that sound like the construction of a horror film. They see an audience full of people with giant heads and little bodies and eyes that don’t blink, silly things like that. Or they hear themselves talking and their voice cracking, and of course they feel as afraid as they would if this was a real event.

RD: You do public speaking all the time; how do you handle it?

RB: I don’t think about scary people and I don’t think about making a fool of myself. The question I ask is, how are we going to have a good time? I want people laughing and enjoying themselves, because I think they learn better that way.

And there are very specific ways to get rid of fear of public speaking, or any other fear. Fear in your body has to move; you can’t hold the feeling still. If you start to pay attention to the feelings in your body, you can manipulate them.

So, what feels like tightness in your stomach is actually feelings rotating forward or backward or clockwise or counterclockwise. If you can figure out which way they’re spinning, you can spin them in the opposite direction, make them bigger and slower. After a few moments, you can look at an audience and you won’t be afraid. You only do the same thing if you do the same thing. If you think differently and feel differently and engage in the same activity, you won’t be afraid.

RD: What exactly do you mean by “moving your feelings?”

RB: If you take your feelings, push them in front of you, turn them upside down, and pull them back in, they will spin in the opposite direction. By moving your body differently than you would normally, it starts to re-code the brain, just like when you take memories and run them in reverse. Since you don’t normally do that, it encodes in the brain differently. It’s the same thing with spelling; you can teach someone to spell better by visualizing the word. Once they start doing it, it will happen automatically. It will get to the point where they don’t even see the pictures. At first you slow it down and you do it in your consciousness, and then it takes on a life of its own. It becomes a learning, and it
happens by itself. That’s why we call it Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

RD: So that’s the “linguistic” part of the phrase?

RB: It has to do with the way we structure language. If you tell yourself “Don’t think of blue,” bang - you think of blue. The unconscious doesn’t process negation. When you give yourself mental suggestions, you have to know how to do it. If you’re giving other people suggestions, which is my job, the linguistic part is knowing how to phrase things so that people reprogram their neurology.

RD: Give me an example of how you would phrase things to reprogram your neurology.

RB: Well, to begin with, you can’t say to somebody “Don’t be afraid,” because they will. It’s like telling a kid “Don’t spill your milk.” That’s a small part of it; we have lots of linguistic structures.

One of them is presupposition. I’ll say to people “As you shrink down the picture of what you were afraid of,” because this phrasing presupposes that they’re going to shrink down the picture - so they will. If you do that with yourself, it always helps. So you might say to yourself, “As I’m shrinking away my bad beliefs, and popping up good ones.” The way in which you structure language is incredibly important.

Talking to ourselves is one of the ways we give ourselves instructions; it’s important
to know how to phrase language so the instructions you give yourself are productive. You also need to have a decent tone of voice when you talk to yourself. People don’t realize you can control the tone and volume of your internal dialogue; you can make it louder, quieter, pleasant sounding, unpleasant sounding. You can make your internal dialogue sound like your grumpy father, or you can make it sound like Marilyn Monroe. Our ability to take control of our internal processes is limitless once we start taking control and doing it on purpose.

RD: Is there a point where this process becomes counter-productive or problematic? For example, mysticism seeks to find out what’s ultimately true, eliminating all of the misconceptions and overlays, and experiencing in the moment what’s absolutely true. Could trying to manipulate your thoughts and feelings, rather than merely observing them, muddy your view, or make it harder to see what’s true?

RB: I’ve spent a lot of time modeling mystics, because I think they’re very good at altering their states, which is essentially what Neuro-Linguistic Programming does. It’s about finding out what works; to me, that’s going to always be based on finding the ultimate truth. The ultimate truths are, what are the limits human beings are really up against and how many of those limits are self-imposed? As far as I can tell, most of them people have created for themselves. We have no idea what human beings are actually capable of. We’re just at the infancy of exploring the capabilities of our own neurology.

I think many mystics who do amazing things - whether it’s dancing on hot coals or placing their hands on somebody and creating a measurable change—are removing their limitations. I believe mystics are people who are on the edge of discovery. Certainly what appeared to be mystical 100 years ago and called alchemy is now called chemistry. Years ago, Pythagoras wasn’t a mathematician, he was a mystic. He would tell people how tall things were without measuring them.

What’s a mystery at one moment becomes part of science in the next moment. One of the big unexplored terrains is the human brain, and how we can learn to take control of it.

RD: One of your books was about deep trance work; can you talk about that?

RB: As a hypnotist I’ve seen more things in trance than I could ever explain, and all it tells me is that they’re possible. Neuro-Linguistic Programming itself was born from the following phenomenon: I was able to hypnotize people and get them to do things that they couldn’t normally do, and I had no explanation for it. How could I get someone to control their heart rate, their blood pressure, the flow of bleeding, and remember things that hadn’t happened in 25 or 30 years? They could sit on their father’s lap and read from a book when they could barely remember where they lived as a kid. My only explanation for it is the brain can do things that the conscious mind just doesn’t do. NLP was my attempt to get people to consciously be able to do the things that they did miraculously or mysteriously in deep trance.

RD: How does NLP view the idea of mysticism and consciousness?

RB: Basically, in the beginning there was a big bang; everything is stardust, including us. And if a little being like us has consciousness, we’re probably part of something bigger. If something the size of our brains can have consciousness, the idea that something the size of the Earth or the Universe wouldn’t have consciousness seems ridiculous to me.

I think getting people to first expand their own brains will make it possible for them to experience what’s called psychic phenomenon. I don’t think psychic phenomenon is psychic. I think it’s evolutionary. The fact that some people can see what’s going on in somebody else’s mind is an evolutionary step. We have auditory in and auditory out, we smell and we can emit smell, but visually, we only have visual in. Where’s the visual
out system?

I think human beings are still evolving, and our ability to evolve in terms of what we can perceive and what we can conceive of is in its infancy. I look at NLP as an evolutionary step. Rather than changing from thinking this idea or that idea with the same machine, we can change the machine that’s actually doing the thinking, which will make it possible for us to conceive of more things than we could have conceived of in a lifetime.

RD: What do you think it will look like 50 years down the road, when we’ve evolved more?

RB: I’m hoping the world will be a more cheerful place. One thing I’ve noticed about all the great mystics I’ve met is they have a great sense of humor and are pretty cheerful people. The Dalai Lama is a pretty happy guy; I imagine a planet where most people could achieve that kind of consciousness as being kind of a fun place.

I think we can get there faster if we start teaching people how to use their brains in kindergarten. If we teach people at a young age how to alter their beliefs on purpose, they’re going to start thinking about what’s worth believing. By the time people come to me, they’re usually in their 30s, 50s, or older. Getting them to become more flexible in their beliefs helps them make a tremendous amount of change in a few years, sometimes in a few days. But if we taught our children to be more flexible with their consciousness and to begin to believe anything can be achieved, if we had a generation of truly optimistic people, especially given the technology that exists now, I have no idea what we could achieve. We’ll probably be floating around the stars. Not so long ago, it was considered impossible for humans to fly, or to go to the moon. Fifty years from now, everybody may have their own planet. And if we’re not cheerful, we’ll never have visitors.

RD: When you’re watching TV, reading the newspaper, observing things like the
financial crisis, do you sort of shake your head or roll your eyes and think “What
are people up to?”

RB: It absolutely amazes me how much stupidity exists, and how many people are willing to fight and die for ideas that I’m not sure they really believe. To me, I think everybody has the right to believe anything they want. But when you start killing for ideas, that’s a different story. Diversity is one of our greatest attributes. Virginia (Satir) once said to me “What do you think is the strongest instinct in human beings?” I, of course, blurted out “Survival,” and she laughed at me and she said, “Nope. The strongest instinct in human beings is to make things familiar.” People will die before they’ll face the unfamiliar. A woman leaves a man, and he can’t imagine a future without her, and he hangs himself in the closet.

For people, there’s a tremendous instinct to make everything like everything else. But I think diversity creates strength. Any geneticist will tell you that too much inbreeding is a bad thing; the more races, cultures, and ideas are mixed, the better off we’ll all be. I think the Internet is a great thing, because we’re going to start sharing ideas all over this planet. Of course, the first tendency is for Muslims, Christians and other groups to each create their own websites, and for people to read opposing views to know what to hate. Ultimately, though, the more we mix up ideas and cultures, the more stability and understanding we create.

RD: So, ultimately, you believe the difference of belief structures is a good thing.

RB: Yes. One of the most enlightening experiences for me has been traveling all around the world, going into different cultures, and meeting people who are completely different. When I went to India, every taxi cab driver turned around and looked at me and said “Are you a Christian?” I finally figured out why; it was because the Christians come over there and try to convert them to Christian beliefs. But if you say to them, “You know, I haven’t really made my mind up yet,” they suddenly feel relieved, and they’ll start taking you to temples and exposing you to ideas that otherwise they’re afraid to.

As far as I’m concerned, beliefs are constructs that we make up in our mind. The map is not the territory. The fact that you believe something allows you to function in the world, but it isn’t the world itself. Our ability to alter our beliefs opens up the possibilities of accomplishing things. My beliefs allowed me to succeed where many clinicians and psychotherapies had failed, because I looked at the world differently than they did. I wasn’t looking to see what went wrong, or necessarily to understand the self; I was looking to find out what worked, and that’s a whole different paradigm. Yes, it’s true that understanding yourself is one way of deciding you want to do different things. But a lot of people already know they want to be different. They just don’t know how to do it.