Positive Health Online: ME/CFS, NLP and the Lightning Process in the Looking Glass

[JemPD]

Wikipedia disagrees:


More discussion and the sources are in the wikipedia article.

I'm no great fan of NLP but @Nancy Blake 's interesting response to the wikipedia article about NLP is here.
http://www.positivehealth.com/article/nlp/nlp-cult-or-cure-neither-actually

Given that she reports rather similar issues with wiki editing as we do for the ME/CFS pages I think at least reading it might be fair. (not saying you or anyone particularly should read it @Valentijn just that given how we know wiki talks BS about our own disease & we cant seem to get the facts on there, it's worth considering)

My brain is mush atm & I was harmed badly by the practise of unethical NLP pre-ME so am not keen to read it all to avoid triggering unhappy memories but the first bit of the article at least looked not unreasonable.

 

[Nancy Blake]

I am interested in the commentary about NLP, and sad to learn of someone harmed by misuse.

The starting point is that it is a pragmatic set of ideas/practices based on ‘what works’ rather than getting into arguments about what is theoretically ‘true’.

In that spirit, I presented, in my article, a few things that the reader could try out for himself, and I hope that the objective reader will try out what I have described and on the basis of his own experience, make up his own mind about whether the NLP ideas being mentioned ‘work’.

Doing conventional groupwork with mentally ill patients, it was heartbreaking to hear tragic histories from brave and determined suffering people, and know that it could take months or years of therapy for any hope of improvement...and the methods didn’t always work as they were supposed to.

When I first heard of NLP, on a socialwork placement in California in 1981, I was horrified by the intrusive, controlling concept of making direct changes in people ‘unconscious’.

But I got the books, read them, didn’t really understand them, but began to notice that patient progress that I expected to take two years was happening in about six weeks.

And I didn’t have to be ‘the great I Am’, dishing out interpretations from a great height...

I could just teach someone how to take that cruel, self-critical voice that was tormenting them, and move it away, make it silly, inaudible, or loving. Cutting through the first layers of depression in about 20 minutes.

But first I made sure it was depression, not hypothyroidism...or ME... that I was dealing with. If there was no story that made sense of depression, then I sent them to get diagnosed by a doctor.

And no doctor should ever tell someone that they ‘must be depressed’ just because they have physical symptoms the doctor doesn’t understand. How dare they....

 

[Barry]

I would imagine @Nancy Blake that you have to be very careful even with depression, given in many cases of clinical depressions there is likely an organic cause underlying it. But I can identify with the situation where someone's problems (or a significant component of their problems), are genuinely down to badly skewed perceptions of themself, of others, and of how they interact with others. From my experience it took vastly longer than 6 weeks, well longer than 6 years in fact. I don't know if NLP formed part of what I applied or not, just some things you said rang true ... albeit not the short timescales. And of course as you say, any claims to fix physical issues would be ludicrous.

 

[Nancy Blake]

Hi, me again..lol....
Barry, if Bandler (yes, he was a very mixed bag...) met you, he would be very interested in learning from you how you had achieved the success you had in sorting out your problems...he would want to know what the processes were that worked for you, so that others could learn from that and be able to do the same things to help themselves. That’s how it all got started...they went to the most successful psychotherapists of the time and tried to figure out what they did to get the results they got...

In terms of ME/CFS, there is one fundamental NLP concept that we all need to adopt:

‘Reframing’ refers to the fact that something that happens or something we believe can be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on the context.

The story used to illustrate this is the Japanese peasant farmer who had a son....the son was given a horse and everyone said that was great, the farmer said ‘maybe’. Then the son fell off the horse and broke his leag and everyone said that was terrible, and the farmer said ‘maybe’. Then the army came along to conscript the young men, but they didn’t take his son, becase of the broken leg....and so on.

Exercise is good for your health, yes? One of the most powerfult themes in contemporary culture. You must ‘fight’ illness, ‘carry on regardless’, ‘not give in’. We all know that in ME none of this works, and in fact these ideas are why many of us make ourselves worse.

For ME, it is really important that we ‘reframe’ exercise as toxic, actually dangerous. The earlier in the illness we recognise that exercise will do us harm, the better our chances of ultimate improvement.

Ramsay and Acheson observed that complete rest gave the best chance of improvement or recovery. In the age of antibiotics, we think that it is the medicine that makes us better...forgetting that recovery from anything requires a well-functioning immune system, and that our immune system requires a lot of energy. But in recent years, ‘too much’ rest is now coded as dangerous. Or just being lazy, or just trying to avoid responsibility.

We need to ‘reframe’ rest as the most effective treatment we have, as yet for ME/CFS.

I believe that, while we are doing all we can to fund and support proper research for treatments, helping people with ME to reframe exertion as toxic and rest as curative, and to shape their everyday lives and behaviour around those ‘new beliefs’ is the best that any form of psychological therapy can offer.

 

[Barry]

For ME, it is really important that we ‘reframe’ exercise as toxic, actually dangerous. The earlier in the illness we recognise that exercise will do us harm, the better our chances of ultimate improvement.

Fully agree. And of course that reframing needs to also embrace those people without ME, in all areas of society, government, science, medical professions, etc.

Edited for clarity.

 

[Wonko]

I survive by reframing virtually everything as "Meh"

My shoulders killing me - Meh
I've just broken a toe - Meh
I can't read - Meh
Some gits put my head in a vice - Meh
etc.
etc.

 

[TiredSam]

@Wonko I think that's called "acceptance". I substitute "Meh" with a swearword, but it's much the same thing.

 

[Barry]

@Wonko I think that's called "acceptance". I substitute "Meh" with a swearword, but it's much the same thing.

I sometimes find a string of swearwords more acceptable.

 

[Nancy Blake]

And of course that reframing needs to embrace those people without ME, in all areas of society, government, science, medical professions, etc.

...wow, how misunderstandings can arise...I thought you were being critical, and just realised that you are supporting what i was saying....yes, we won’t be helped until everyone around us understands that our quickest route to regaining some of our health is allowing ourselves to act like invalids at the start.

 

[TiredSam]

we won’t be helped until everyone around us understands that our quickest route to regaining some of our health is allowing ourselves to act like invalids at the start.

The word invalid has two meanings, depending on how you pronounce it. At the moment we are being categorised as the wrong one.

 

[Barry]

...wow, how misunderstandings can arise...I thought you were being critical, and just realised that you are supporting what i was saying....yes, we won’t be helped until everyone around us understands that our quickest route to regaining some of our health is allowing ourselves to act like invalids at the start.

Edited my post to hopefully avoid ambiguity.

 

[Dolphin]

Now suppose you have a broken leg, and I am so good at NLP trance induction that I can stop you feeling the pain.

If I do this, so you start walking on it and don’t bother to get it set and in a cast, you are going to end up with a terribly deformed and constantly painful leg. Ethical?

If you use NLP techniques to get rid of a headache that is caused by a brain tumour, your ‘help’ may mean the patient doesn’t bother to get it properly diagnosed, and could cost him his life.

I think these are useful distinctions.

The judgement about the use of NLP for the treatment of ME/CFS hinges on whether we believe the psychiatric model…that the original viral illness is completely over, and exercise is avoided because of irrational fears…or the medical model which observes the continuing relapses following exertion and concludes that this is evidence of a continuing latent infection.

 

[Dolphin]

The presuppositions of the Lightning Process™ are the ones which underpin Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Graded Exercise Therapy: that ME/CFS involves only thoughts and beliefs which, if changed, can result in recovery. The patients’ belief that there is an underlying physical cause, and that exertion can do actual damage is considered to be false. Treatment, therefore, can be successful if (and only if) this belief can be eradicated.

The Lightning Process differs from CBT/GET in that adds the use of NLP techniques to change beliefs and encourage the patient to give up his protective energy-conserving behaviour, his physical aids, and enthusiastically engage in exercise.

This would make it very effective indeed if the patient’s symptoms were caused only by unhelpful thought processes.

It makes it potentially harmful if the patient’s problems are in fact caused by a pathogen which is stimulated by exertion, and which the immune system can only fight effectively if the patient rests so that all his physical energy is available for the immune system.

 

[Dolphin]

In relation to ME/CFS, what are the ‘impossible things’ one must believe (and what must one refuse to believe) in order to maintain the view that ME/CFS is, in Simon Wessely’s words, “nothing more than the belief that one has (ME)”?[4]

[..]

You have to believe that people with no previous history of a mental health problem or of undue complaining about their health, and no preceding traumatic event other than a mild flu can become completely incapacitated within days, and continue to be so, simply because of negative thought patterns about minor symptoms.

You have to believe that intelligent, highly educated, successful professional people, including professional athletes, can suddenly, for no apparent reason, become extreme hypochondriacs, whose reports about their illness are either false or exaggerated.

You have to believe that for such people, the ‘secondary gains’ of assuming the role of invalid are somehow greater than loss of their profession, their income, their home, and often their families.

You have to disbelieve what patients report about their experience, even though patient descriptions of this very complex disease are similar across historical periods and disparate geographical locations. Patient experience, although varied in some ways, consistently reports that exertion brings on worsening symptoms, and that continued exertion brings on more permanent and serious relapse.

You have to believe that encouraging or coercing patients into doing something which is known to make them worse is a ‘safe and effective’ way to cure their illness.

 

[Barry]

@PhysiosforME, I think you might find this thread interesting. Particularly @Nancy Blake's article linked to in the first post of this thread.