Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Alcoholism Treatment

Bruce Carruth, Chelly M Sterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317837916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Conseil en psychothérapie

Here is a practical and clearly written guide to the use of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions. This comprehensive volume illustrates how the focus of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) on the individual and the family increases the effectiveness of counseling by targeting the uniqueness of each individual and his or her family system. Professionals will also learn how NLP facilitates effective interventions and helps alcoholics create internal coping skills to begin and maintain the recovery process. Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Alcoholism Treatment is a wealth of innovative, state-of-the-art information on the history of NLP, basic NLP assumptions, concepts for establishing rapport with clients, and essential family participation in NLP.Each chapter directs itself either to a specific NLP technique, featuring clear case demonstrations and a step-by-step outline for applying the technique to the development of the counseling process in working with addicted systems, or to a particular group affected by addiction, such as alcoholics, children of alcoholics, or the addicted family as a unit. Clinicians focus on alcoholism and other addictions as treatable conditions, applying specific strategies and techniques--initially developed in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Hypnotherapy--adapted to meet the demands of alcoholism and addiction treatment specialists. This important volume allows for a substantial increase in the repertoire of treatment choices available to professionals and enables clinicians to individualize treatment. An extensive bibliography is included to further assist readers in gaining additional skills in the treatment of alcoholics and other addicts.

Chapter 1

Neuro-Linguistic Programming as a Conceptual Base for the Treatment of Alcoholism

Chelly M. Sterman, MSW, ABECSW, CAC

INTRODUCTION

The title of this monograph, Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Alcoholism Treatment, indicates that this work has been written with the intent of adding choices to the collection of treatment modalities in the field of alcoholism and other addictions, a field that has undergone such a rapid expansion over the past twenty years.

The purpose of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is to reflect, as an individualized rather than general process, the needs of each client, and to have the capability to respond with treatment that specifically addresses these clients’ unique needs. An expression of this concept, “The way you holler up the mountain is the way your echo comes back to you,” accurately represents this concept.

As a therapist, having worked in the field of alcoholism for over fifteen years, the significance of an extensive repertoire of treatment skills, strategies, and techniques which matches the needs of alcoholic clients and their families has time and again presented itself. Even though individuals as well as families involved in an alcohol addiction process have many commonalities it is equally true that each individual has his own set of fingerprints, his uniqueness as a human being. Therefore, the more treatment can be directed specifically to a particular alcoholic individual or family, taking both generalities as well as individualizations into consideration, the more effective alcoholism counseling is. If “hollerin’ up the mountain” is the therapist’s set of treatment interventions, and if “the echo” is the result, the outcome of these interventions for the client, the contribution NLP makes to alcoholism treatment is the creation of a requisite variety of “hollering” adapted most accurately to the desired “echoes.”

The purpose of NLP is not to replace any existing knowledge or effective treatment methods of therapists, but to add to the therapists’ existing repertoire of treatment modalities in order to create an extensive set of skills and strategies for increasing this effective treatment. NLP has very little content beyond some basic beliefs about human values and complete respect for each client. It primarily has a process orientation, which makes it exquisitely adaptable to the framework within which each individual therapist functions. In the five years that I have applied the NLP skills both to the treatment of alcoholic individuals as well as to the extensive training of alcoholism counselors, I have always found a real match with any concurrent treatment philosophy. In other words, NLP’s process orientation allows for a complete integration with preexisting frameworks clients and counselors have used to obtain and maintain sobriety.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

According to its founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, NLP as a therapeutic process was originally in part based on the psychological, emotional, or behavioral developments of three recent great innovators in the field of psychotherapeutic treatment, and in part on these individuals’ personal style and almost magic ability to heal their clients. These people were Virginia Satir with her great innovations in the field of family therapy, Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt Therapy, and Milton Erickson, who made some of the most significant contributions to hypnotherapy, the exquisite marriage between hypnosis and therapy which allows for full use of all available conscious and unconscious resources of human beings.

In examining the different systems of treatment, Bandler and Grinder found much that explained the healing qualities of these therapies, but did not account entirely for the great success these individuals personally achieved in their own work with clients. The founders of what became NLP examined the styles of these three masters and discovered a number of commonalities which were, until then, largely ascribed to “intuition.” All three apparently had exquisite ways of “reading” the client–what NLP later called “calibration” – on a less than conscious level, even before the client was aware of particular “cues” in himself. One of these “discoveries” involved “eye patterns.” Some other commonalities involved what NLP calls the meta-model, specific use of rapport skills, and use of language, particularly predicates, and somewhat later on, the use of submodalities. In this chapter, some of these elements will be demonstrated in relation to their use in alcoholism treatment, some will be extensively examined in other chapters and for some a referral will be made to the literature described in this monograph’s bibliography.

Steve Andreas, in Frogs Into Princes, states:

In one sense, nothing that NLP can accomplish is new. There have always been “spontaneous remissions, miracle cures and other sudden and puzzling changes in people’s behavior and there have always been people who somehow learned to use their abilities in exceptional ways. What is new in NLP is the ability to systematically analyze these miracles and use these strategies to implement them in individuals who for some reason do not have spontaneous access to these resources.¹

NLP has made substantial inroads in making strategies, skills and techniques available that used to be considered magical or intuitive.

RATIONALE

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) presents itself as an artful technology for studying the structure of subjective experience and the limitations these subjective experiences impose on each individual. With as much precision and reliability as is available to this young field today, NLP has developed methods, skills, and strategies for increasing and expanding these internal representations of human beings to allow for the construction of an effective repertoire of internally generated choices in people’s multitudinous life situations.

As is the case with any major dysfunction or illness, alcoholism, or the process of being an alcoholic, erodes this internal repertoire of choices, until life becomes determined by basically one primary factor: access to alcohol. Stated in a different way, the use of alcohol determines the lifestyle of an alcoholic, imposing severe limitations on the individual’s subjective experience. Thus, presently existing treatment modalities such as inpatient treatment day programs, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), etc., are appropriately geared toward dealing with individuals whose internal choices have been brought to a minimum. Each successful program provides a firm, clear structure with plentiful information on “how to” restart life in the context of nil-choice. Each program not only teaches lifeskills, but also specific values and beliefs and proclaims the absolute necessity for clients to live their lives by these beliefs. One frequently hears when an alcoholic has a slip: “If only he had – gone to a meeting – taken one day at a time – followed: easy does it – listened to his sponsor – turned it over (to God), etc.”

All of the above, of course, is true, and the recovering alcoholic knows this as well as anybody else. Why then do some follow paths that lead back to alcohol abuse and to pain, often destruction? NLP believes that the answer lies in internal lack of choices and that the bridges from alcoholic drinking “to getting sober” to “staying sober” is the creation of sufficient internal variety of coping skills. Thus, NLP presents methods for constructing individual’s unique, distinctive internal road maps for dealing with the world. The belief of each individual’s uniqueness, his set of fingerprints is the basis for NLP’s treatment modes. The therapist discovers how his clients receive, filter, and organize sensory information in the cognitive-perceptual patterns that result in emotions and behavior. NLP is in the process of developing “technology” for therapists to deliberately internally “install” various processes, allowing individuals “requisite variety,” the choices needed for that person to move toward well being in a consistent way, having the means to internalize all the appropriate information he learns during his ongoing recovery process.

NLPs BASIC CONTRIBUTION

NLP, though presently expanded to an extensive set of contextual beliefs about human beings with an ever-increasing repertoire of specific skills and strategies geared toward moving clients toward their compelling futures, has two basic premises for calibrating information and then using this information in “designer” treatment modes.

The first discovery involves the pattern of eye movements. In Applications of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Robert Dilts states:

Human beings reflect their internal sensory processes not only by the sensory-based words that they us, but also by certain behavioral cues. Eye movement patterns are one of the most readily detectible behavioral cues. The following eye-movement patterns in most right-handed individuals are indicative of the following internal processing.

Eyes up and to the left … remembered imagery(Vr)

Eyes up and to the right … constructed imagery(Vc)

Eyes defocused … unspecified imagery

Eyes down and to the left… internal dialogue(Ad)

Eyes level to the left … remembered dialogue (Ar)

Eyes level to the right … constructed sounds(Ac)

Eyes down and to the right … kinesthetics (feelings, emotions) (K)²

A simplified visual representation is shown (see Figure 1).

What is the significance of this discovery for the treatment of alcoholism. To illustrate, a couple of small vignettes are presented here:

1. A counselor asks an alcoholic who has completed three weeks of treatment in an inpatient program, where he will go after his discharge. Before the client answers, the counselor sees rapid eye movement in the visual sphere, from remembered to constructed, back and forth several times, and then the eyes move to down right at which point he dejectedly answers, “I don’t know.” The counselor now has the following information: The client has scanned old alternatives (Vr), tried to make them applicable to new alternatives (Vc), failed and is feeling badly (K); furthermore the counselor knows that if he is going to present this client with options, he must allow the client to form pictures that he feels good about before this client can make a decision.

2. A female alcoholic explains that she may be unable to stay sober once she is back home. The counselor asks what might create a relapse. Right before the client answers, “My husband,” he sees the woman’s eyes move level to the left. Enriched with this information, he can now focus on the client’s auditory representation of her husband, i.e., the tone of his voice, arguments, etc., as possible triggers for relapse. The session focuses on what is essential for this woman’s sobriety, i.e., dealing with auditory triggers emanating from her husband which in the past had produced drinking responses.

3. A counselor discovers that there are times when an alcoholic client is able to refuse a drink and times when she “throws in the towel” and gets drunk. He carefully examines this process with her and discovers the following in the client’s decision making process. When she goes by her feelings (eyes in K), she drinks, but when she is able to take time out to discuss the issue with herself (eyes down to the left-internal dialogue), she generally can talk herself out of it. Counselor and client can now devise a strategy that enables the woman to move to Ad instead of K during risky times.

FIGURE 1

Of course, the examples are unlimited, but it is essential to introduce here the corollary of eye movements, the use of language. Individuals’ internal representations of reality are echoes in their linguistic patterns, denoting primary visual, auditory and kinesthetic modes. Thus, an important NLP treatment tool is the ability to hear sensory based words, primarily the predicates. Dilts states: “A word only has meaning in the individualized primary sensory representations it triggers in the speaker or listener.”³ Some words clearly denote a client’s visual propensity-”Now I see your point,” others have an auditory focus “I hear what you are saying,” and still a third group has a kinesthetic orientation, “I feel that I can do it.” Of course, it is general knowledge that we, as therapists, are more successful when we speak our clients’ language. One reason is that by speaking the client’s language the resulting rapport increases significantly. Following are some examples of the use of linguistic patterns in the treatment of alcoholic clients.

1. An alcoholic client has made little progress and in group complains that he has been trying to focus on his recovery but cannot seem to get a perspective on his life. The counselor, noticing the visual predicates, asks him if he can picture his old pattern. When the client nods affirmatively, the counselor asks him to look more closely, so that he may get a clearer image of his present situation.

2. A counselor states to an alcoholic client: “Something tells me that you resent being here,” and the client responds defensively, “I don’t feel that way at all.” If this discrepancy goes unnoticed, it may become a basis for a mismatch between counselor and client. It is useful for the counselor at a time like this to “translate” his original statement to the level of kinesthetics, feelings, if he is to have a productive conversation with this client.

Use of language and eye patterns for obtaining information, establishing rapport and leading the interventions as quickly as possible in productive directions are some of the basic significant contributions Neuro-Linguistic Programming have made to the field of alcoholism treatment. Much of what was considered intuition or the famous “I don’t know what worked, but something just clicked,” pronouncements counselors make are actually reproducible skills, available at all times to a counselor. Furthermore, the more rapidly an effective intervention takes place, the more likely a client develops sufficient internal resources which will allow him to stay in treatment as well as sober. Effective and efficient calibrations and resulting interventions naturally speed up the treatment and recovery process. Replacing treatment’s hit or miss approach with reliable information and techniques has a number of obviously significant benefits. In the first place, effective treatment moves a client toward well being more rapidly. Just as importantly, it being effective supports the alcoholism counselors in a field that has one of the highest rates of burnout of any profession. It is important for a counselor working with an alcoholic to feel confident in the use of his skills, in the knowledge that these skills are reliable. It is beneficial for the counselor and his mental health and it is an added benefit for the client, who frequently uses the counselor in early recovery as his model. Therefore, the content of the treatment as well as the context can make an effective contribution to the client’s recovery.

For in-depth discussion of these two basic NLP themes, I would like to refer to the literature as extensively described in this monograph’s bibliography.

ALCOHOLISM TREATMENT
WITH NLP METHODOLOGY

NLP gives expanded ways of noticing important information that clients present to the therapist. This allows the therapist to make more efficient and effective interventions. Rather than obtainin...