Me and NLP

Further adventures in Tarot

It’s been a hot minute.

Life be lifing quite hard right now, but I have a holiday hoving into view and a moment to breathe, so things are good.

If you’d like a reading with me, you can book a session with me here.

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Last time I wrote, I was picking up key skills from my classes in psychic protection, which were helping me in all kinds of ways. Not only was I able to stop the constant flow of unwanted information in my day to day life, it was also helping me to give my undivided attention to clients when I was working.

The fact that I could create quiet head space not only helped me figure out what things I was thinking and feeling actually belonged to other people, it helped me start to define what the things that I was left with looked and felt like. I was suddenly able to discern the distinct shapes of my feelings and the patterns of my own thoughts, which was helpful not just to my work but in my personal life.

We all take for granted that people speak and behave differently to each other in the external world, but it had never occurred to me that this translated across into my interior life too. The ability to know, for example, that the voice in my head telling me horrible things about myself, wasn’t actually mine because it didn’t speak like the voice I had begun to recognise as my own was a deeply liberating experience.

It meant that I could begin to interrogate those voices. I could ask who they did belong to and evict them. I could question their motives. I could ask myself if I believed those voices, and I could believe the voice I knew to be mine when I answered. This gave me a previously inaccessible agency in certain situations where I had been used to feeling hopeless and helpless.

It also helped me to recognise when I was working in a psychic capacity with someone, the difference between what my conscious brain knew about them and what my psychic skills were telling me because the voices were different.

I made a decision early on that I would always be clear with clients about that differentiation if that divide came up in the work. If I know something about you from real life I will never try to pass that off as my psychic skills. Equally I made a pact to be honest about what I don’t know. I’m never going to do what I had seen psychics do at church: ‘Do you know a man? Well, this must be for you. Is his name Geoff? Andrew - that’s close enough. It’s definitely a message for you.’

The ability to create quiet and space in my life and thoughts was something I was able to pass on to the people who were coming to me for help. I knew that if these things were true for me, and were helping me, they could do the same for other people. The minute we have time to think and space to act, we become better resourced and more able to do the things we want and need to do.

All those years of being around people with psychic skills and their messages had clarified for me that in order for this gift to work for me there had to be a point to it that went beyond people thinking I could do neat party tricks.

By this stage I had been picking up unwanted information for months and I was being driven mad by it. If I couldn’t deal with it, I didn’t see why I should lumber anyone else with what had been an increasingly heavy burden. The only reason I could see for doing the work was if I could use what I knew to help the people it concerned.

Apart from the psychic protection, the other thing that was helping me during this time was my husband’s exploration of Neuro Linguistic Programming.

NLP was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the Seventies. They began to explore how people who were excellent at certain things came to be so good at what they did. They realised that a lot of sweeping generalisations were used to explain how skilled people achieved excellence. Words like innate, gifted and genius get bandied around and those words can act as gate keepers that stop other people learning to skill up. You can’t, for example, learn something that is innate. You either have it or you don’t. This seemed counter intuitive to them, so they decided to investigate what our brains do when we learn and see if they could replicate it.

Bandler and Grinder created a toolbox of pre-existing models, practices and ideas and put them together to offer fresh insight into not only how people think and behave but what might be getting in the way of them changing their thoughts and behaviours. They applied it not only to people who were good at something but who wanted to excel, but also to people whose behaviours and thoughts stopped them from functioning.

My husband was obsessed with NLP. Over the next few years he went from learning it to teaching it and offering accreditation in it. He built a business training it, and it all ran from our house. I was around NLP as a concept, as a practice and embodied by dozens of human beings in and out of my house all day long.

I did not love NLP, but I did what Bandler and Grinder had done when they created it, I took the bits I liked and added them to my own, bespoke tool kit. I used it exactly as it was meant to be used. I paid attention and learned how to skill up by studying my thinking and dissecting what worked and what didn’t.

They had been very influenced by the work of psychotherapist Virginia Satir and her book Peoplemaking, which explored the psychology of family dynamics and how they work or don’t. It was a book I only discovered because of NLP, but it is one that has helped me both personally and in my work ever since. It gave me a language to begin to explain the things I was seeing in the cards in a way that might be useful to people.

I really enjoyed the close examination of the nuts and bolts of language that NLP explored, largely due to Grinder’s background in linguistics. I began to experiment with using clearer, less emotionally loaded language that didn’t shame or obligate people. I started by working at evicting words like ‘could’ and ‘should’ from my repertoire and went from there.

I looked at using more simple, powerful and empowering language. Just using the phrase ‘you can,’ is an incredibly effective tool. You can use ‘You can,’ to tell someone not only do you believe that this thing is possible for them, you are sure that they have the tools and ability to do whatever it is. ‘You can’ says that you see in them the ability to master something. The other power in the words is that you are not imposing your will on them because can is not a directive or an order, it’s a word that posits the idea of choice. You’re not ordering them to do something. You can do this thing, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to, is what it actually says. You’re not taking agency away from anyone, you are offering them their own agency back and telling them that you trust them with it. A well placed ‘you can’ is a beautiful thing.

NLP helped me not only pay attention to what I was saying, it also helped me pay attention to what people were saying to me. An example would be someone switching to the present tense when telling me about a past trauma. I also began to notice body language. Sometimes people would talk about a past event while simultaneously using their hands to drag it into a space in front of them and locking eyes with it. Even if they accepted rationally that this thing happened then and not now everything they were saying and doing suggested otherwise.

I was particularly fascinated by this spatial placing because the world in which me and the tarot cards were operating was somewhere between me and the person I was reading for. It became clear as I paid more attention that a lot of people’s minds, emotions and thoughts are too big for their corporeal body, and their unconscious mind has absolutely no problem with reaching into that liminal space, even if their conscious mind might not acknowledge it.

It gave me more confidence in passing on the information I was receiving because even if most people are unaware of it, they demonstrate in other ways that their unconscious understanding of the world and their place in it is not limited to what we think of as our daily reality. Some part of them gets it, even if the conscious part of them refutes it.

This duality offers potential for communication with the unconscious mind which the language patterns of hypnosis can help with. Bandler and Grinder had been influenced by the hypnotic work of Milton Erickson and the language patterns he used, and I found them very helpful. A lot of hypnotic technique relies on story telling, something which I had a fairly robust grounding in already. Story telling is powerful juju, it’s why we use it on babies and it’s so often wasted on grown ups.

Human beings are primed to respond to story. The most effective ways to teach children anything is through story and play, and play is just story in three dimensions. Stories demand and receive an open mind and a willingness to learn. Stories are non threatening because they’re not about us. The action is happening ‘over there,’ in that liminal space between me and you, where the boundaries of reality are soft and porous, where anything is possible. Of course, in that liminal space where anything is possible and you’re hallucinating hard, making the words I’m saying real for you, we can jump from this story being about ‘this’ and ‘them’ to this story being about you. Suddenly you’re learning all kinds of things that may be useful to you, and your conscious mind isn’t fighting it in the way it would if I was testing you on your times table, because this is just a story that isn’t even about you except that it is.

Maybe you’re learning not to go off the path into the dark wood with strangers with suspiciously pointy teeth. Maybe you’re learning that you’re not an evil person and you did what you had to do to survive because survival is your number one job. Maybe you’re learning that you are far more powerful than you imagine. Maybe you’re learning that you are so much more than your conscious mind.

Stories are a Trojan horse. The Trojan horse is a story about history and subterfuge and power. The Trojan horse is a story that tells us about how story works. This demonstrates why story telling is such a powerful hypnotic tale. I’m telling you a story about hypnosis by telling you a story about a Trojan horse, which is also a story about how stories and hypnosis work. You may not consciously be following the story paths I’m opening here, because by now I’m about three layers deep and still going, but your unconscious mind 100% gets it and that’s magical. It’s also deeply hypnotic.

Hypnosis is a word that still panics people. Nobody wants to be doing the chicken dance on film with Derren Brown, unless they do. And that’s the point of hypnosis. Hypnosis only works if you want it to. Hypnosis is a ‘you can,’ deal. You can be hypnotised if you want, but also you don’t have to if you don’t want. Hypnosis is just a way of bypassing your conscious mind and talking directly to your unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is the one causing trouble. Your unconscious mind is the one saving you. It will never allow you to do something it thinks will put your survival in question.

I don’t hypnotise people when I read their cards, but I do tell them stories and have a little chat with their unconscious mind in the space between the words. I don’t use straight NLP when I read people’s cards but I do use the techniques to make my language as clear and kind as possible. I don’t practice psychotherapy because I’m not a psychotherapist but I do use some of the stories of psychotherapy to help narrate what I see going on for people in a way that hopefully offers them resources and agency.

I don’t cold read people, but I do everything I can to be a good listener and observer because truly witnessing people, seeing and hearing them and loving and accepting them both where they are and believing that they can get where they want to be is a gift that is in my power to give them, and everyone deserves that.