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Comment by desireco42 | Hacker News Reader

One of the recommendations, CBT, is inspired by NLP (heavily). I can say that NLP did wonders for me.

Site is attrocious :)

That's really interesting that neuro linguistic programming helped you so much.

I don't want to inquire into your own experiences as it's personal. But, I used to follow NLP very closely and sort of lost interest over time.

Anyway, I felt it was best suited to 'software' changes in oneself - say at level of beliefs about the world, and how our use of symbols and language can affect our experience and abilities.

ADHD, as condition seems more like a 'hardware' thing. It's intriguing to imagine how conditions like that can be helped with a 'cognitive' approach. Perhaps it's used more to help manage things through techniques and strategies.

Kind of like video card drivers that have patches for specific games to work around issues in the hardware.

I think this hardware/software metaphor is in a way limiting belief :). No, it is a good metaphor but what helped me is understanding that things can be changed and I was able to change fairly drastically my life and how I went about things, NLP way, reprogramming problems and limiting behaviors in my life.

Did I fix everything, no, not at all. I still have serious ADHD issues but compared to where I was, it is night and day and if I had not run into NLP books and studied them and applied, I probably would live pretty limited and miserable life now.

I think you are spot on. As a person in that spectrum, i feel everyone's brain is hardwired in some way, and if you want to fight it with workarounds (with techniques/strategies) you will have to pay a lot in terms of brain power. And not a lot of ADHD people are motivated to do that (thanks to ADHD lol)..

Yeah it's interesting. My entire life is held together by a fragile network of hacks to get myself to almost kinda sorta approximate normal adult behavior. I've managed to take things pretty far with that actually, but I'm very prone to falling off the rails.

Among the many many novelty-seeking obsessions I've had over the years, one of them was meditation. I got REALLY deep into it. Started doing it everyday. That was the closest thing to a miracle cure for my ADHD I've ever tried. I was just practicing two skills: awareness of the contents of my attention, and the ability to shift that attention back to an object of my choosing. At first, I'd get an hour after a 25-30 minute sit where I could just focus and do the things I wanted to do. With daily sits in the 25-60 minute range, I started to get continuous awareness of attention. It was like a superpower. I could actually listen to people when they spoke without getting excited and interrupting them, or getting distracted. So much of my life changed for the better. Then... I ran into some of the dark side of meditation. "Dark night of the soul" kind of stuff where tons of repressed emotions started involuntarily resurfacing, and I started getting tension headaches for the first time in my life. Ultimately I just had to stop.

And now I'm back to where I always was... trying to figure out what to do. Can't do stimulants because my blood pressure runs spuriously high. I need to checkout the non-stimulant meds, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

Can you cite sources that CBT was inspired by NLP? They have similarities, but CBT is evidence-based and NLP is not.

I'd say the two fields are very different. In the case of NLP - they watched very successful therapists in the 1970s, noticed some common themes, and extracted out a model. So for example, Milton Erickson would tell artfully vague stories to his clients, which were clever metaphors for healing, tailored to the individual. It's difficult to run scientific experiments to prove the efficacy of this - it depends on the skill of the practitioner and every client will need something different, so flexibility is key, not replicability of a technique which can be codified and taught.

CBT on the other hand, definitely ticks all the evidential boxes.

I think the two can be complementary - CBT has strong evidence for success, but maybe, the codified, procedural nature of it limits it somehow.

An NLP practitioner could try something completely different outside of any rule book if the client wasn't responding to something.

Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race, just a very curious lay-person with a few favourite classic books on these subjects.

Oh, to be fair, NLP proposed the meta model, which was based on how Virginia Satir would solve people's problems by just getting them to be more specific, in a skilful way. This would highlight how our thinking can change how we experience things, through what they called deletions, generalisations and distortions.

CBT does something very similar with how it focuses on making language more realistic and less emotive.

So there are similarities in that sense.

By NLP do you mean Natural Language Processing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

For whatever reason, I associate NLP with the pickup artist stuff. Can you recommend a NLP primer that's more, um, wholesome?

nlp?

Neuro-linguistic programming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

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