NLP and the Modern History of Bilateral Therapies

An excerpt from my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

Walking Your Blues Away

Chapter 4

NLP and the Modern History of Bilateral Therapies

O imitators, you slavish herd!
—Horace  65 BCE–8 BCE

For just over sixty years—from the turn of the last century, when Freud abandoned the practice of moving his fingers back and forth in front of his patient’s faces, until the 1950s, when Milton Erickson and others began to gain acceptance for their efforts to revive the practice of therapeutic hypnosis—the only way a person could use eye-motion therapy to heal from trauma was during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While REM sleep is important and useful, and—as we discussed in the first chapter—is apparently one way in which the normal vicissitudes of life are processed, REM sleep isn’t strong enough to process severe trauma.

         The human potential movement that began to flourish in the late 1960s provided fertile ground for developing new perspectives on how the human mind worked. In the early 1970s, John Grinder, an assistant professor of linguists at University of California Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler, a fourth-year undergraduate involved in Gestalt therapy, teamed up to develop a model for how the mind and body interact. Under the mentorship of Gregory Bateson, the two created the model and system known as NeuroLinguistic Programming, defining a relationship between the mind (neuro) and language, both verbal and nonverbal (linguistic), and suggesting how their interaction might be organized (programming) to affect mind, body, and behavior.

Eye Motion Therapy (EMT) came out of the early work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder. In the process of developing NLP, the founders noticed that each emotional state and each memory a person carried had its own unique sensory structure. A memory will exist in color or in black-and-white, as a still picture or a movie, and it will have a sound element or not. If you ask a person to point to the memory, the person will point in a particular direction and will be able to tell you if he or she experiences the picture of the memory as being two feet away or twenty feet away. Generally, recent and/or emotionally intense memories are closer and more likely to be color filled, and often are seen as if the person was an observer (that is, they don’t see themselves in the picture), while older and less emotion-charged images are more distant and faded or lacking color, and often the person can see him- or herself in the picture.

         Grinder and Bandler observed that people tend to internalize memories of past traumatic events in bright, full color; the memory-sounds are usually loud and the memory-feelings intense. They discovered that when people shifted these structural components of the traumatic memory—the specific visual, auditory, and kinesthetic qualities (which they called submodalities) of their internal mental pictures and memories of events, the emotional charge of those events shifted as an outcome. They deduced that the structural components of memory are part of the mind’s way of organizing and giving meaning to memories and are the key to therapeutically changing them.

         For example, you might remember a past time of embarrassment as a bright color picture on your left side, about five feet away from you. If you move that picture over to the upper right corner of your field of vision, push it twenty feet out, and then turn from color to black and white, the odds are high that the emotional charge associated with the memory will diminish. Bandler and Grinder call this process shifting the submodalities.

         One of the most important submodalities of a memory, Bandler and Grinder found, is position. So early NLP practitioners such as Bandler and Steve Andreas had people move their memory-pictures back and forth and back and forth to see what would happen. The result was that, with minor pains and troubles, this lateral movement of the pictures rapidly “flattened” the picture, reducing the emotional charge.

         This discovery about moving pictures from side to side, Richard Bandler told me, was a fascinating insight into the power of bilateral stimulation and functions. “If you’re just tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand,” he said, “it’s impossible to feel angry, and if you do it while thinking of a problem, often the problem will resolve or solutions will pop into your mind.”

         There was only one problem with the initial system of having people move their traumatic memory pictures from side to side. For big traumas, this “brute force” method would sometimes bring back to people the intensity of the event so strongly and quickly that they’d break into tears or freak out—an experience known as an abreaction. Although Sigmund Freud had considered abreactions generally a good thing and thought it a sign of healing when patients broke down and cried or went into distress during their therapy sessions with him, experience had taught Bandler and Grinder that this was actually often a re-wounding that left people in greater emotional distress than before they experienced the abreaction. (Numerous studies in the past five decades have proven this to be true. Many abreaction-based therapies that were popular in the 1960s, such as screaming loudly or hitting pillows with baseball bats, have been discredited and discontinued because they were so emotionally harmful to some people.)

         This desire to avoid abreactions led to a search for ways to create true structural change in memories without producing a re-wounding response. So, to avoid abreactions, they suggested people hold the memory-picture in one place; then, while the person held the memory-picture in place—say, a few feet in front of them at chest height, which seems to be where most people hold highly traumatic pictures—they’d have the person move his or her eyes from side to side, following the tip of a pen held in the hand of the NLP practitioner.

         NeuroLinguistic Programming researchers discovered that if the tip of the pen the person was following with his or her eyes didn’t “touch” the picture, there was no abreaction and the intensity of the picture would gradually diminish. When the EMT practitioner did this several times for a few minutes each time, until the pen-tip had moved back and forth over the top of the picture enough to reduce the emotional intensity of the picture by at least 50 percent, then the person would not experience an abreaction when the practitioner finally did move the pen (and thus the person’s vision) into the area that the memory-picture occupied. When the pen finally “punctured” the picture, the resolution of the trauma was rapid and complete, often within a single session.

         This discovery of an NLP system for dealing with trauma was, in effect, a rediscovery of Mesmer’s 1780 techniques that had been used by Freud and hundreds of other psychotherapists up until the hypnosis scandals of the 1890s.

EMDR

<TNI>In the 1987, Francine Shapiro was out for a walk one day when she noticed that side-to-side eye movements seemed to decrease the negative emotions connected with certain traumatic memories that she held. Shapiro carried this insight into her PhD thesis in psychology, and from that developed what she called Eye Movement Desensitization, a technique by which she waved two fingers from side to side in front of a patient’s eyes while having the patient call to mind a traumatic event. Her early experiences with this work convinced her that her technique could quickly heal trauma. She added to the practice a few classic psychological techniques for and renamed the system Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing has now been taught to tens of thousands of professionals and has been the subject of numerous studies demonstrating its efficacy.

         Advocates of the system suggest that EMDR may be effective because bilateral stimulation of the brain brings about some sort of neurological integration of emotional and intellectual processes involving the hippocampus, corpus callosum, and the two hemispheres of the brain. Others have suggested that a variation on Mesmer’s original theory is more correct. While not using Mesmer’s term of animal magnetism or Braid’s hypnosis, what has emerged in the past two decades are numerous systems that purport to use bilateral stimulation in various forms to manipulate the body’s so-called energy field in ways that heal trauma.

         Roger Callahan developed a system called Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and The Callahan Techniques to help clients resolve trauma; he claims that the field he works with is “an invisible structure in space that has an effect upon matter.” His system involves tapping classic acupuncture points on one side of the face, then on the opposite side of the torso, and then tapping on the wrist while watching a therapist move his or her hand in a large circle, then alternately humming and counting (right brain and left brain functions).

         In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gary Craig developed a system called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for treating trauma that draws on classic NLP systems of submodality shift, as well as on Freud’s pre-1895 techniques of bilateral tapping on the face and body and back-and-forth eye movements. The EFT Website also lists numerous “cousins” of his energy-therapy system, including WHEE, TAT, NEAM, EDxTM, GTT, BSFF, WLH, MMT, PET, and others. What all have in common is that they all claim to heal trauma, using some form of bilateral stimulation of the eyes, ears, face, or body in the process. All have success stories and claim to be able to easily prove their efficacy.

         Another system that relies on bilateral movement and coordination is called Educational Kinesiology, or Brain Gym. Studies in Europe and the USA have shown that many of the Brain Gym exercises that use bilateral movement – rhythmic coordination of the right and left sides of the body – both help heal people of emotional disturbances and improve their memory, learning abilities, and general functioning.

         As NLP co-developer Richard Bandler casually pointed out to me during a training years ago, it’s impossible to get upset while you’re tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand. There is something very psychologically significant about bilateral movement.

EMT in Action: A Profile of an EMT Session

Stephen Larsen, Ph.D. is a longtime friend of mine and the biographer and former protégé of Joseph Campbell. Now retired from university teaching, Steven and his wife, Robin, run the Center for Symbolic Studies. As well, Stephen has a private psychology practice at the Stone Mountain Counseling Center in New Paltz, New York.

         It was in this context that Stephen invited me to co-teach a weekend workshop with him at the Stone Mountain Counseling Center. His topic was broadly based in the ancient psychological, emotional, and spiritual healing systems of shamans, and mine was the modern systems designed to produce similar results through techniques such as NeuroLinguistic Programming.

         Our course, titled “Hunters and Shamans,” was designed principally for therapists, although every year that we presented it a few well-informed lay people would show up. This particular year, one of them was a fellow who I will call Ralph, a man who had been suffering for decades from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

         Ralph was both curious about what we had to say and hopeful that one of us would demonstrate the techniques we were discussing on him, and thus perhaps heal his PTSD. Nothing else he had tried, from psychotherapy to drugs to biofeedback, had helped Ralph; several times each day in the course of the preceding thirty years he would spontaneously and uncontrollably experience an eruption of panic, accompanied by an outburst of tears. These severe symptoms had rendered him unable to hold a job. He was distressed by his inability to earn a living and his need to survive on disability and Social Security payments.

Having told us all of this, Ralph said that he had a past trauma that was troubling him and that he’d like to resolve. He said, further, that it was something he couldn’t talk about without falling apart, so was very interested to try something that didn’t involve speaking the content of the event.

         I explained that I was rostered as a psychotherapist in Vermont but not in New York, so anything I did would not be an attempt at therapy but would, instead, be a teaching demonstration for the purpose of showing Ralph and the others in the room the Eye Movement Therapy technique. Ralph came up to the front of the room and sat in the chair next to me that had been occupied by Stephen.

         I told Ralph that, in the way this technique worked, the therapist would first ask the client where the client held the picture of her or his trauma. Ralph said that his memory-picture was right in front of him, about two feet away, in a square area that roughly encompassed his chest. He began to tremble and tears came to his eyes as he pointed at the spot. I told Ralph and the group that it had been my experience that most people with PTSD held their traumatic memories in roughly the same place as Ralph did, and that when memories were located elsewhere they were usually not the source of true PTSD symptoms. I then told Ralph that to do Eye Motion Therapy a therapist would not have the client look in the direction of the traumatic picture, but would instead direct her or his eyes everywhere else. As Ralph looked away from that spot, he regained his composure.

         Ralph sat opposite me, facing me directly, our knees about six inches from one another. I held a felt marker pen just above his eye level and told him that, with EMT, the therapist would ask the client to hold his head steady and just follow the tip of the pen with his eyes. I suggested that Ralph consider the intensity of the emotion he was experiencing right now as 100 on a scale of 0 to 100, and we’d check it again as we went along.

         Then I began moving the pen around in regular, rhythmic patterns, from side to side across the top of his field of vision, going just to the edge of Ralph’s field of vision, as if I were wiping a blackboard at that height. I continued this for about two minutes, then stopped.

         “What’s the intensity of the emotion now?” I asked.

         Ralph glanced down and said, “Around eighty percent.”

         “Fine,” I said, and repeated the process, this time moving through the center of his visual field as well as above it, but always being careful not to move the pen into the area where he said the painful picture was located. After another two or three minutes of having his eyes follow the pen from side to side again, I stopped and asked how he was doing.

         “It’s down around sixty percent,” he said.

         We repeated the process again, and this time he said it went to about forty percent.

         One of the keys to doing EMT and avoiding abreactions is to not enter the picture until the intensity is below 50 percent. When Ralph reported the emotional intensity to be at 40 percent, I again moved the pen from side to side but this time did it across his entire visual field, from top to bottom to top, as if I were thoroughly washing a blackboard. Whenever I noticed his eyes seize up for a moment and interrupt the smooth flow of motion as his eyes followed the pen, I’d revisit that area a few times until his eye motions were smooth at that spot.

After about two minutes of this Ralph took a deep breath as his eyes were following the pen. The he let the breath out, began to grin broadly, and chuckled under his breath.

         I stopped the pen and asked, “What’s up?”

         He looked at me with an expression of mixed amusement and astonishment. “I can’t believe what a dummy I’ve been all these years,” he said.

         “What do you mean?”

         “I should have just let that go and gotten on with my life. Instead, I’ve wasted more than thirty years.”

         “Are we talking about the event that was bringing you to tears fifteen minutes ago?” I asked.

         “We sure are,” he said. “I was with a medivac unit in Vietnam, and after a really nasty firefight I called in two choppers to carry out the wounded. I was pretty sure all the enemy were dead, so after the choppers were loaded I signaled them to take off. They got about two hundred feet up into the air when two rockets came out of the jungle and exploded both helicopter, raining parts and bodies on those of us on the ground.” He shook his head with an expression of regret, although his tone was matter-of-fact. “I blamed myself for the deaths of those soldiers. Every day since that day in 1970 I’ve seen those choppers explode and heard those men screaming as they fell out of the sky.”

         “And now?”

         He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “I still remember it. But while you were doing that last pass there with the pen, suddenly it seemed like the pictures flattened out and took on the quality of an old newscast. And I heard my own voice in my head say, ‘You did what you thought was right at the time. It was a mistake, but you did it with good intentions. You wanted to get those men to medical care, and you saved a lot of other lives while you were in that war. Now it’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s time to forgive yourself and get on with your life. If nothing else, that’s what the guys who died would want you to do, because it’s what you would have wanted them to do if the situation had been reversed.’”

         “And what’s the intensity of the emotion right now?” I said.

         He shrugged again. “Close to zero. I mean, damn, it’s been thirty years. It’s over and done with.”

        It’s been several years since Ralph participated in that teaching demonstration, and Stephen tells me that he’s doing well in his life, has a job, and is no longer tortured by his past. Ralph is cured of his PTSD.