This page provides the links to the backnumber issues of the newsletter written in Japanese by Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. Note: This "provocative" title of the newsletter is meant to suggest that Taiten Kitaoka's NLP work is the first attempt for the integrated NLP in the Japanese market. It is not meant to claim that his NLP work is genuine in a more general sense. ************************************************************************ Issue #4: 2003.11.20. 'This is the Genuine NLP!' ************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ "My Encounter with NLP" Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. In the current issue of the newsletter, I would like to mention how I personally came to know about NLP. It was through Western psychotherapy I was studying about 20 years ago that I came across the name of NLP for the first time. I would like to detail below my past individual history: I was affected by cerebral palsy when I was 4 month old, and the left side of my body is still lightly paralysed. When I was 5 and 10, I was put in different institutes for (physically and mentally) disabled children, where I had severely traumatic experiences. After being released from the second institute, I began to go to normal schools including junior high school, but I was not able to start to assure my "social re-adaptation". This feeling of being socially "misfit" continued until after I was admitted into and graduated from a Japanese university. (I used to like Kenzaburo Oe the most among Japanese novelists, when I was a high school student. Especially in his "Nip the Buds Shoot the Kids", he was able to elegantly describe the isolated experience and feelings of kids imprisoned in a closed environment.) My so called "primal experience" which made me want to search for such a psychological tool as NLP was that, when I was a university student, I was not able to walk normally on a wide concrete slope in the university campus where many students were walking up and down, because of my fear of other people's watching eyes, and was forced to use the stairs found on the right side of the slope. I then shouted to myself "I don't think that there would be a psychology which can cure neurosis as severe as mine, but, if I happened to find one, I would be ready to put my life at stake for it". While I was a university student, I read books related to psychoanalysis a la Sigmund Freud and a la William Reich, but I was not able to get what I had been looking for. As soon as my graduation from the university, I went to the Sahara Desert in North Africa, and worked there for a total of 3 years during the early eighties as a French-Japanese interpreter for major Japanese companies. The purpose of my stay there was to change myself for the better by experiencing "meditation" and/or "altered states of consciousness" in the middle of a desert. The life turned out to be very harsh there, but the natural scenery was truly and awesomely ineffable; I was once standing on the top of a more than 1,000 foot high barren cliff, from where I was able to overlook the traces of flows of rivers of the remote past! Indeed, the whole place must have been under water tens of thousands of years ago, because I was able to pick up a number of fossils containing sea shells. Another time I saw a big sun coming up from the east in the middle of the desert dunes, and when I looked at the west there was also a big yellowish moon going down over the horizon. I couldn't help feeling the tininess of human existence in front of such vast nature. Because such meditative experience did not fundamentally solve my biggest problem after all, I decided to next experiment with Western psychotherapy. From 1983 to 1985, I thus participated in an intensive residential 7 month long psychotherapeutic course (a total of 1,700 hour long sessions) held in Oregon, USA. The course was called "Dehypnotherapy", in the sense that we have all been hypnotised since the moment of our birth, and that we have to dehypnotise ourselves if we want to be truly free. It was also an eclectic course, comprising practically all the Western psychotherapeutic schools including Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Humanistic Psychology, Encounter, Primal, Psychosynthesis, Rebirthing, Hypnotherapy, etc. I then felt that I was experiencing the "ultimate" inner space during the course, but one German participant of the course said to me "What we are experiencing here is only a kind of kindergarten game, in comparison with the newly born American psychology called NLP". I then, of course, couldn't believe his words at all, but, a few years later in 1988, when I took part in the workshop held in London by John Grinder and Judith DeLozier and entitled "Prerequisites for Personal Genius", I came to confirm the gentleman's words and totally agree with him. It turned out that NLP is a set of psychological tools of a revolutionary nature. That is, I had until then experienced practically all the most "advanced" psychotherapeutic schools available in the West for over 1,700 hours, but it then turned out that these schools were more or less the same as Freudian Psychoanalysis, in the sense that both are after all content oriented; namely, psychoanalysis tried to solve the clients' traumas by endless verbal expressions (through the "Association" technique), while all of these most advanced psychotherapeutic schools also tried to make the clients remember the very things they want to forget in the first place and revive them as vividly as possible again and again cognitively (in the case of Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, etc.) or emotionally (in the case of Encounter, Primal, Rebirthing, etc.). The definitive difference between all the psychotherapeutic schools before NLP and NLP is pertinently described by a metaphor used by Anthony Robbins, who is the most successful NLP practitioner in the business world, and has a number of followers in Japan. That is, according to Robbins' metaphor, the existing psychotherapeutic schools try to open the lid of the kettle (the client) whose pressure is being accumulated. In this case, the client feels better when the pressure is gone, but she/he has to come back to the same therapist in a couple of weeks again and again, each time the lid is automatically closed, and the pressure is accumulated again. On the other hand, what happens with NLP is similar to the mechanism of a juke box. If the button A is pressed, and bad music is heard, and if the button B is pressed, and good music is heard, why cannot we rewire the inner wiring, so that each time the button A is pressed, then good music begins to be heard? Alternatively, the disk with the bad music itself can be removed, and replaced with a new disk with a good music. What NLP can achieve is exactly such a "rewiring" of the programmings of our human brain. Incidentally, my own favorite metaphor about this same mechanism is with a computer equipped with a CD-ROM (or floppy disk) drive. Namely, unless we are able to know how to change the single disk or CD-ROM which has been used for our whole life since our birth, we will never be able to see the data which we want to see, hear and feel on the computer monitor. That is to say, the scope of our experience that we can have on the monitor is pre-determined by the nature of the inserted CD-ROM (or disk), and if we don't know how to change the CD-ROM (or disk), or if we don't want to change it, then we will be destined to repeat the same banal experience on the monitor again and again for ever. The psychotherapeutic schools before NLP can then be said to have naively believed (probably to the extent that their naivety may be "criminal") that the traumas which the clients have been suffering from can be automatically solved, simply by making them do catharsis in the process of re-experiencing the past scenes of the traumas again and again on the monitor, which are accessed from the CD-ROM (or disk) where the data has been saved. On the other hand, NLP teaches us how consciously not to insert the CD-ROM (disk) containing the data related to the traumatic scenes into the drive, and/or how to create a plural number of CD-ROM (or disk) containing the data related to the scenes which we want to see, hear and feel, in order to always consciously insert into the drive one of these CD-ROM (or disk) which is the most suitable to the situation we face at any given moment in time. I think that the above discussion may turn out to be simply a mental exercise for the people who have not practiced any of the NLP techniques, but, fortunately, NLP provides a set of tools called "Personal Editing" techniques, which enable our brains' programmings to be "rewired" in a real sense. "Personal Editing" was the term which Grinder and DeLosier used in their workshop "Prerequisites for Personal Genius", and represents a series of techniques which "edit the individuals' personal existing behavioural and thinking patterns, to create different patterns they want". Personal Editing techniques include a wide range of exercises, among them, "Meta Mirror", "Resonance Pattern", "Disney Creative Strategy", "Belief System Integration", "Time Line", "Chart Editing", "Core Transformation", etc. The first four techniques mentioned here were devised by Robert Dilts, whom I consider to be the best NLP technique inventor. The mechanism of how what seem to be purely mental exercises like NLP's Personal Editing techniques can in practice change the wiring of the programmings of the practitioners of these techniques and how they can change their own real life, is paraphrased in a very elegant way by Dilts, in his "Roots of Neuro-Linguistic Programming": - "Epistemological models such as NLP are unique models in that, while they are models about our experience, by the very act of thinking about such models [NB: meaning here "by the very act of practicing NLP's Personal Editing techniques"] they also become a part of our experience." After I was certified as Practitioner and Master Practitioner of the Art of NLP, at GDA (Grinder, DeLozier & Associates), based in the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in the summer of 1988 and 1989 respectively, I entered a so-called "hermit life" in the middle of London, UK, and continued to practice a certain number of Personal Editing techniques almost every day for seven years, until I was trained as a Licensed Trainer of NLP by Richard Bandler (the Society of NLP) in Munich in 1995. This was because I believed that I would have to "cure" myself before trying to save others, and because I wanted to know whether I would become insane by doing NLP too much, though I could have returned to Japan in 1989, in order to spread NLP here. What happened to me during this "hermit" period can be metaphorically described using the TV game called "Packman". That is, in the case of the pre-NLP psychotherapies, there are an innumerable number of characters to be eaten by the Packman, and these characters endlessly revive as soon as they are eaten by the Packman (i.e., the lid of the kettle in Robbins' metaphor is automatically closed again and again). On the contrary, in the case of NLP's Personal Editing techniques, the characters never come to be reborn once they have been eaten, and I was literally flabbergasted to discover the fact that the total number of characters had gradually but stably decreased as they have been eaten one after another. Thus, after several years of practicing the Personal Editing techniques, even the severest traumas of mine which had never been dissolved like large nodes of kite string, have finally disappeared completely and forever. (The characters eaten by the Packman mentioned here can be equated with "Unfinished Businesses" a la Gestalt Therapy.) It is based on this personal experience of mine that I am convinced that NLP, which has enabled me to "overcome these severest traumas of the past", is a methodology that can solve any problem in any human being. But I want the readers of this newsletter to understand that this conviction is based on such a total scepticism that I will throw away NLP into the garbage bin tomorrow as soon I happen to find something better than NLP, and that I am not at all a fanatical follower of NLP, but rather a person who has been forced to come finally to arrive at NLP after eliminating all kinds of other alternatives. Also, I want the readers to study, practice and master NLP, by maintaining a position as sceptical as mine. Incidentally, my NLP experience was decisively shaped by John Grinder in 1988, who then delivered what I thought was a 'magical' or 'miraculous' training for me. On the basis of my personal acquaintance with John for the last 15 years, I am currently talking to him, and plan to act jointly. The above is how I came across NLP. After completely overcoming my past traumas, I have begun to be interested only in helping ordinary people to become "geniuses". This is because I have found that the very same Personal Editing techniques of NLP can both "enable something whose value is negative to transform itself into something whose value is a zero" and "enable something whose value is positive to transform itself into something which has a higher positive value". I myself have been successful in becoming an expert in the areas of NLP, languages, and computer UI operation, by combining NLP with my own methodology for accelerated learning. For instance, using comparatively small keyboards of notebook computers, I can directly translate English text into Japanese, probably two or three times quicker than ordinary translators, and can directly type English sentences which appear to be "syntactical correct sentences which native English speakers would write, with a small number of slight errors". (In the case of typing Japanese, I need to continually and tediously choose correct conversions of Chinese characters based on phonetic transliterations, while I can type long text en mass from the beginning to the end and use the spell checker on the whole text afterwards, which enables me to type English roughly three times quicker than typing Japanese.) For this reason, I am convinced that I will be able to assist other people to achieve as high a level of technical mastery in their own professional fields as my mastery level in my own expert fields, by means of using NLP as a content-free methodology for accelerated learning. The trail I have followed for my own personal development may be reflecting the trail NLP has followed after it was first born as a new alternative school of therapy, then completely transforming itself into a general communication psychology having more universal applications. How did you find this current issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"". (c) Copyright 2003, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved.