TIR Traumatic Incidence Reduction

Traumatic incident reduction is a brief, one-on-one, method which is said to permanently eliminate the negative effects of past traumas. It involves repeated viewing of a traumatic memory under conditions designed to enhance safety and minimize distractions. As with NLP it seems to have been developed from Scientology auditing. The therapist or counselor offers no interpretations or negative or positive evaluations, but only gives appropriate instructions to the client to have him view a traumatic incident thoroughly from beginning to end.

NLP interventions add more to the process by having the client rewind the "movie" whilst saying "whiiiiiizzzzzzzz" (in order to add the auditory sense to the ritual). Note - NLP does not use the term - sense -, instead they use the pseudoscientific obscurantism - "representational system". The idea is that the "engram" is removed or dispelled from the neurology of the client.

There's no credible evidence to support the intervention according to the empirical research. There is an interesting historical pattern emerging especially in the use of jargon (obscurantisms) among these "power therapies".

Neurolinguistic Programming: New Age Pseudoscience

I've been investigating NLP for some time in order to see what if any validity lies therein.

My first encounter with NLP was through the internet. There are a lot of sites to search for, including ones on business NLP, communication, NLP therapy, NLP timeline therapy, NLP for seduction, NLP and magick and so on.

Its clear from even a cursory view that NLP is a new age development, or at least thats how NLP is categorized in bookstores and by empirical research.

Going deeper into the subject via reading the research into the subject I was reassured that it is indeed a new age therapy. The claims are quite extreme in even the business oriented books on NLP. "NLP is probably the most powerful integration of psychology techniques in the new millenium", NLP is "the difference that makes the difference", "A powerhouse of neurologically sound persuasion techniques" and so on.

I did manage to find the actual research reviews on NLP, and the recent material on NLP from Proquest searches. The independent reviews say that NLP failed a battery of tests back in the 1980s. The most recent reviews of NLP don't concern themselves with testing as it had all been conducted before. They investigated NLP in relation to other new age followings and tended to hold it up as an "archetypal pseudoscience" ether because its not testable, or because its core ideas have failed tests.

Here is a useful link

http://knol.google.com/k/joe-greenfield/neurolinguistic-programming/2j6nlcky7q5vo/2#

I looked into the actual beliefs of NLP and they also seem to be pretty anti-scientific in a new age kind of way. "The map is not the territory" is one NLP belief that seems to have been translated as "you create your own reality" which of course is a core new age ideal. Unlimited potential is similar, though this is more to add outlandish ideas of potential ability rather than flexibility to an individual.

NLP is promoted by various psychological bodies. In the later research this seems to be something that researchers are quite concerned about. For example, this site details the dangers of new age techniques being promoted by unsuspecting bodies. There are quite a few that overlap also. NLP's timeline therapy seems to overlap with Scientology, and there are therapies such as TFT and EFT that include NLP. All of these are pseudoscientific according to source research.

So in sum, there doesn't seem to be any validity in NLP as a communication technique, a therapy, or a self management method. NLP really does seem to be a new age pseudoscience. Next I will investigate the various misconceptions that NLP promotes.