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This book takes an extreme and extraordinary position with regard to the NLP presuppositions:
“... we find the so-called presuppositions of NLP are, at best, a pedagogical device to assist people new to the adventure called NLP in making the required transitions in their thinking to the new forms of perception and thought implicit in the technology. Unfortunately presuppositions, like beliefs, are ultimately filters that reduce the ongoing experiences of their possessors. We personally do not find any value in the enumeration of such rationalizations (the so-called presuppositions of NLP).” (p. 202)
Yet the book also states:
“Many students of NLP, especially in their initial enthusiasm for the effective use of the patterning, seize upon an epistemologically peculiar (and impossible) goal. The task they set about to accomplish is to free themselves from all perceptual filters, often stating that thereby they will appreciate the world without distortion. Such a naive project is surely incoherent.” (p. 247)
Like it or not, we all do have presuppositions. Knowing what they are, and that they are arbitrary choices, allows us to choose to change them contextually, in order to create multiple perspectives and understandings. Attempting to dismiss them would not eliminate them, but only blind us to the perceptual and behavioral biases that result from them!
The book also says:
“Allow us to offer an extended example of one of these differentiators: specifically, the fourth;
- neither the agent of change nor the client is required to believe any set of assumptions to utilize NLP patterning effectively.
In particular, for example, there is no need to subscribe to the so-called presuppositions of NLP in order to benefit from an effective application of the pattern to some problem or challenge. Normally, these presuppositions include statements such as,
Having choice is better than not having choice.
All the resources necessary to make the change the client desires are already available within the client at the unconscious level.” (pp. 201-202)
Yet elsewhere the book states:
“Further, these patterns [The “chain of excellence”] had in common a deep trust that unconscious processes when properly organized and constrained would produce deep, long term ecological changes in spite of, for example, a client’s declared conscious beliefs that such changes were impossible... the ability of the unconscious to assess the longer-term consequences and then, based on this assessment, to make such selections (desired state, resource or replacement behavior) greatly exceeds that of the conscious mind.”(p. 236)
This statement (and the new code format itself) certainly appears to assume that “All the resources necessary to make the change the client desires are already available within the client at the unconscious level.” There are many other places where the book presupposes that having choice is better than not having choice.” (pp. 231, 247-248)
Moreover, the presupposition of unconscious positive intent, which is included in every list of the NLP presuppositions I have ever seen, is a fundamental basis for six step reframing, which the book describes as the bridge to the “new code.”
“... the Six Step Reframing format that we are proposing creates the bridge from the classic code to the new code. In the new code, we find that: ...
- There are precise constraints placed upon the selection of new behavior(s); more specifically, the new behavior(s) must satisfy the original positive intention(s) of the behavior(s) to be changed;” (p. 236)
So while the “presuppositions of NLP” are dismissed summarily, several of them are used as essential parts of the “new code!” These contradictions cast a long shadow of doubt over the rest of the book—does the right brain know what the left brain is doing?
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