NLP and Mainstream Psychology

In contrast to most mainstream psychotherapy, NLP does not examine people and then decide for them what problems they have, and then decide how they should be “cured.”

Instead, NLP helps people to decide for themselves what their “problems” are, and then tries to help them resolve those problems.

You should be given the respect to decide for yourself what you don’t like about your life, and what you’d like to do about it, if anything.

NLP makes no judgments about the validity of a client’s complaints, nor does it try to invent problems where the client sees none. Any area that a person subjectively decides that they want to change or improve in their life is considered valid and appropriate.

In NLP, the client decides what material might be useful for the therapist to hear. The diagnosis determines what the treatment will be, but every step along the way is open to be steered off in a different direction if that seems to be more helpful for the client’s situation.

The client also decides whether the “treatment” has worked or not, or whether another tack should be tried.
This actually makes sense, since even in mainstream therapy, more often than not it’s the client who makes the initial decision that there is a problem severe enough that therapy is needed.

Actually, NLP shies away from traditional psychiatric terms like “illness” and “cure.” The idea is more to recognize unproductive patterns, and consciously re-pattern them.

The obstacle is that the skills needed to solve that particular problem may be stored in a neural network in your brain that currently has no direct connections established to the neural network that produces the problem.