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Why model something anyway? Centuries ago, people used to build barns and bridges any way they could think of. Some collapsed, others lasted until the first big wind or heavy snow, while others endured for centuries. Modeling simply enables us to do things predictably, efficiently, and effectively.
For instance, “solution-oriented” brief therapists persistently refocus the client's attention from problem events to “exceptions” or what we call counterexamples: times and places when the problem doesn't exist (or at least when the problem isn't as severe).
However, since they don't model the structure and process of these exceptions, they have to begin the search anew with each client—and some clients don't seem to have exceptions, or they are very hard to find. By modeling the structure and process of exceptional behaviors or skills, NLP is gradually developing a set of “off-the-shelf” software to teach to a client. Besides being more efficient, this process can study a resourceful exception in one person and offer it to others who (at least apparently) don't have exceptions.
For instance, once you know the NLP phobia cure, and how to test to be sure the person's phobic response is a very rapid response to a set of stimuli (and therefore appropriate for the phobia cure), you don't have to find out the exquisite detail of how the person does their phobia, something which varies enormously from person to person. Some do it by stretching time into an eternity or an endless loop, some by making the threat huge, others by making themselves very small, etc.
The NLP model also enables us to examine other treatments for phobias to figure how (or if) they work. For example Jerilyn Ross treats phobias by asking people to relive their phobias, and as they do this she keeps them moving through the experience by asking, “And then what happened?” “And then?” “What happens next?” By doing this repeatedly, she teaches people to speed up the process and go through the phobic response very quickly. She doesn't actually cure the phobia, but she does teach people how to get through it very quickly. After treatment you can see that the phobic response is still there, but it's very short, so it doesn't bother the person as much.
Brian Weiss treats phobias using past-lives regression. Again, his clients don't actually lose their phobias, but they become less important to them because they learn to experience them against a very long time frame of many past lives and many future lives to come. Seen against this extensive background, the phobic response becomes much less important. After treatment his clients say, “I still hate water, but it doesn't bother me; it doesn't matter.” This is an example of what John McWhirter has described as a “perspective” pattern. In the larger perspective of a long series of lives, the phobic response seems small and insignificant.
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