Healing with Language differs from what is often called “Talk Therapy” in that it employs specific language patterns to recognize and influence an individual’s mental maps in beneficial ways. It is a more active process than Talk Therapy is usually considered, and the process borrows from linguistics, semantics, cognitive therapy, and behaviorism to achieve results that have been called “magical.”

A Very Brief History

In the early 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder modeled psychotherapists whose skills and success rates were remarkable. The three most closely studied were Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, and Friz Perls. That modeling led to a codified approach to brief therapy that came to be called NLP, an acronym for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

The work of Alfred Korzybski in General Semantics provided the early foundation for healing with language.

Many of the fundamental precepts implicit in the work of Satir, Erickson, and Perls were based on differences between perception (subjective experience or internal reality) and reality objective experience or external reality. Bandler and Grinder recognized that the seminal work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (1933), held an important key to understanding the relationship between the mental maps of human experience and the territory of external reality.

The Meta Model

NLP codified Korzybski’s concept of eliminating the worst deletions, distortions, and unwarranted generalizations in language into what is now called the Meta Model (or Metamodel) because it is the first, most important, or overriding model of effective language usage. The Metamodel employs questions to discover what parts of an individual’s mental map are missing or distorted.

In NLP, missing or distorted information is often called a Metamodel violation. The questions used to recover the missing information or correct the “violation” are variations of “What do you mean?” or “How do you know?”

Statement: No one loves me....

• No one? How do you know?
• What do you mean?
• How long have you been feeling unloved?

The Milton Model

The Milton Model was named in honor of Milton H. Erickson, M.D., who is considered the founder of Modern American Hypnotherapy.

Where the Meta Model uses language to discover greater detail about what and how individuals form their mental maps and create their subjective experience, the Milton Model, uses language to influence an individual’s mental maps in beneficial ways. Erickson referred to his use of language as “artfully vague” because it allowed individuals to determine for themselves how to recreate their mental maps in ways that better served their purposes. The Milton Model uses violations of the Metamodel, presuppositions, metaphor, and a variety of other linguistic strategies to help people change their mental maps in ways that correspond more closely with external reality or otherwise enable them to see things from new perspectives.

Erickson’s artfully vague language encourages people to see things from new perspectives and helps them create more useful mental maps by which to navigate the territory of external reality. When you see things in a new way, your behavior changes automatically.

SCS training in Healing with Language is based on the foundation laid by Korzybski, Erickson, and others (including Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, and Paul Watzlawick). The foundational tools were codified into Neuro-linguistic Programming primarily by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Others—such as Robert Dilts, Judith DeLozier, and Steve and Connirae Andreas—were also among the early contributors.

Your studying NLP—Healing with Language—with SCS ensures that you will learn not only the well-established NLP concepts and strategies, but also the most recent, most elegant approaches to attitudinal and behavioral change available. Our focus is on health and well-being, and while the training itself is not designed to substitute for appropriate therapy, many of those who have earned their certification as Licensed Practitioners or Master Practitioners of NLP through SCS have experienced the profound changes they had desired.

Because the other aspect of SCS is Healing with Energy, we are especially attuned to the needs of those already working in the healing professions. We are comfortable discussing the subtle energies of the Human Energy Field, and we can demonstrate and teach the healing power of combining energy work with the language patterns and other techniques of NLP.

If you’ve always wondered about “Energy Medicine,” NLP training with SCS will give you the opportunity to gain understanding through personal experience. After your training with SCS, you will have an expanded awareness of your own energy and the energy fields of others. You will also learn how to calibrate others based on their energetic responses, which are the first, most accurate responses. The energetic response is first and always truthful; the nonverbal response is second, and the verbal response is last—and the least “truthful.”

NLP is a lot more than eye-accessing cues and matching sense-based predicates. Your training with SCS will give you a whole new spin.... As Emerson said, “The altering eye, alters all.”