NLP brought up some childhood feelings!

[Movingforward123]

There was a lot of violence in my childhood between my parents. Today I went for hypnosis and NLP for weight loss, I am not massively overweight.

I was asked some questions said I'm not great with emotions etc and I comfort eat.

He told me to go back in time blah blah and it brought up feelings of being scared as a toddler which I couldnt remember. But they were very vague.

I am thinking I will have more NLP sessions but would like to know if something like this has happened to anyone else?

And if going back and finding out about it helped you in anyway? Or if it caused you problems from bringing it all up?

There are problems with doing rigorous tests, as NLP is a lot about individual differences. However, there are some academics who know NLP who are trying to provide experimental verification.

Plenty of references here:

donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/nlp-no-longer-plausibe.html?m=1

I have a Practitioner and Master Practitioner training in NLP, and have mixed feelings about it. NLP encompasses a lot of different tools within its approach. I found some of them to be useful and powerful and not any more likely to bring up painful childhood memories than others. Some didn't really work for me, and others seemed to be mucking about with stuff that I didn't feel qualified to be doing as I'm not a trained counsellor or similar. I use the former but not the latter two. I know some great therapists who I trust who use the 'deeper' tools as well in their work and believe this can be powerful and appropriate in this context. I have also met both NLPers and therapists who I wouldn't go to or refer to with a barge poll as they just don't feel right or trustworthy to me.

In terms of academic references, Paul Tosey's book is excellent, and balanced. I was a bit suspicious of NLP as a whole having done my training, mostly because it wasn't approached with a 'critical thinking' approach - ie outlining cons as well as pros. Tosey's book looks at it in this way and left me much more convinced about the value of the pros as it gave proper consideration to critiques. People often cite academic references on a subject as some kind of absolute 'truth' one way or another. In reality though I find when you get into the research it tends to be greyer than that, with debates raging on both sides. And some things can't really be 'proved' mathematically, there are so many variables or they just don't fit into being explained by numbers only.