-Removed-At risk of rerouting your thread I think there's different kinds of bollox.
There's total bollox that speaks for itself. Then there's the kind of bollox that is shown to sometimes do something significantly helpful, but the theory as to why it has been effective is bollox and full of pseudoscience, when all that is probably important is that the rituals and the practitioner are believed in.
Because there is reasonable evidence that NLP has helped people with post traumatic stress it is not the first kind, but I do suspect it might be the second.
Now some people practice the second kind in good faith because it is doing something good so I should probably hang my head in shame, but some latch on to the latest trend because that is where the money will be and that's the worst kind of bollox.
If asked I could give you a more detailed alternate theory as to why NLP might sometimes be working in PTSD that comes from more established and evidence based psychology and does not require what are in my opinion pseudoscientific explanations.
-Removed-There is very solid evidence (numerous studies in quality peer reviewed journals) that for any therapy, the personal characteristics of the therapist are a far more powerful predictor of outcome than the model that the therapist believes they are following (as much as ten times more powerful). I've never seen model versus extent of the belief in the model which would be very hard to design.
It is also interesting to consider the case of acupuncture, where there is clearly an effect that has been reproduced time and time again, but is there any science to be found in the theories that come with it? Does acupuncture still work if you secretly do it wrongly? Is it that something real is happening that requires it to be done right, but arguably the reason is wrongly explained through scientific eyes? Of course such is the extent of the belief in the explanations, writing 'wrongly explained' becomes controversial and would cause some people an intensely negative reaction.
@divegeester
There is solid evidence that PTSD is linked to the way traumatic memories are stored. They are not well integrated.
Well integrated memories are stored in a similar way to the folder system in a computer's memory. If I see a tree that reminds me of a park in Brighton I can open that folder of trips to that park. In that folder I might open a specific visit etc. At any point I can stop opening further sub folders within the folders and I can move on to something else without need to revisit something nasty that might have happened in one of the visits. I can even know where the different folders might take me and let that inform my choices.
However, if I have a traumatic experience I might immediately disconnect from it such that it does not become well integrated. It's a bit like shoving it under the bed whole and gone from my mind rather than breaking it down into it's component parts and putting them into connected folders. Problem is it can now only be accessed in an all or nothing way. It is either completely out of mind or the least component pulls it out whole and vivid to the point of being like a waking dream or hallucination.
You can't make the memory be gone for somebody, but by getting it better integrated, you can help them live with it more easily so that they can begin to have a bit of it triggered without the whole thing coming back out at once as if they were living it all over again.
So if the memory needs to be held in mind to be integrated and put away in the natural manner then the solution is to provide a safe enough environment and to be a trustworthy enough person for the person to bring these memories to mind and keep them there. This is of course really hard to achieve because these are seriously unwanted memories, to have gained them the person will also often have good reasons not to trust and they will force them out of mind no sooner than they are remembered and probably not wish to return to the room where this remembering took place.
So if NLP rituals allow people to believe that there is something safe about the practitioner, returning to the room and holding the memory in mind for longer then they can offer something. This, however, has nothing to do with the theories that are given by NLP. I would also be way more interested in the qualities of the person than their model if I was going to feel safe to revisit traumatic memories. Of course some practitioners will give off better signals because their belief in what they are doing allows them to feel safe and competent.
-Removed-Yes, the longer you have been doing it the more often you have seen the latest medicine show roll into town. The danger of course is feeling so jaded that you throw the baby out with the bath water, so the problem becomes finding the middle ground between thesis and antithesis. That idea seems as old as spiritual philosophy itself and seems to survive the test of time far better than the idealisation of the latest thesis. Perhaps new religions drive into town just like medicine shows, but that idea belongs elsewhere.
@divegeester
Embarrassing confession time. I'll attribute this to too many years retired. So far as I know NLP doesn't have any proven value for PTSD. I mixed it up in my mind with an equally pseudoscientific new kid on the block EMDR. Not even aware of any proven efficacy of NLP. 😳😳😳
