Introducing Mind Games

We're excited to share a preview of a new podcast we think you'd enjoy: Mind Games. What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or…. secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want? That's the promise of NLP. Mind Games is an investigation into the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology that has quietly shaped industries, institutions, and belief systems around the world. Part science experiment, part investigation, part true crime thriller, Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples, including the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise. Find Mind Games on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. New episodes out Tuesdays. Listen here: swap.fm/l/listen-to-mind-games

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're excited to share a preview of a new podcast. We think you'd enjoy Mind Games. What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want? That's the promise of NLP. Mind Games is an investigation into the world of neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology that has quietly shaped industries, institutions, and belief systems around the world. Part science experiment, part investigation, part true crime thriller. Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples,

• 0:45Speaker 00

  including the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Richard was my first real therapist.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Devra Cantor Morton was a student and one of their first guinea pigs.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  I actually did quite a bit of my personal work with the both of them. That was extremely powerful.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Devra experienced therapeutic breakthroughs with Bandler and Grindr. But by the end of her time...

• 1:16Speaker 01

  I plotted revenge. I thought of suing them. I thought about putting sugar in their gas tanks.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Devra first met Bandler when they were both volunteering at a peer counseling center, and Bandler was the trainer. Richard Bandler was in there training you. You're both undergraduate students. How did he get in the position where he was training anyone to work on people with real problems?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I have no idea how that happened. There must have been some kind of supervision. God, you'd hope so.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  What were the trainings like?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  It was, um... I use the word wholesome. But I use the word wholesome in contrast to where I feel like it went later.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  When I met them, they knew what they were doing.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Jodi Bruce met Bandler and Grinder when she enrolled in a linguistics course they were teaching together.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  They were developing it with us. I mean, they were, they were doing their research with us.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Jodi joined the workshops Bandler and Grinder were running off campus. The students would arrive and chat a bit, but it wasn't a party. They were there to work. Bandler and Grinder would make a dramatic entrance and ask the group, who wants to make a deep change tonight? A few volunteers would step up. They were the patients. Everyone else became their doctors.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  That's who we worked on. We worked on ourselves with each other, which was pretty brave now that I say that. When I think about it, you know, just these other people, these other students who happened to be interested in the same thing. We were suddenly bearing our hearts to each other.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Therapy is everywhere today, but in the 1970s, therapy was still controversial. So it was pretty radical for these kids to be working on each other, exploring new forms of care.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  And we did do a lot of sharing. The big phrase that comes back to me as I think about NLP is what stops you from doing that? So if I said, I feel afraid, that would be dissected into who I feel afraid of and how and what. I can't tell my father that I'm mad at him. What stops you from doing that?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Jodi Bruce attended the groups with Jim, her boyfriend at the time.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  He was a lot of work because he would just, he was always trying to therapize me, you know, and sometimes I would get frustrated and just say like, we're just gonna have an argument, okay? That's just how it goes. This is, I don't want to be a chapter in your book. And so I think there was that, there was that part of it, that maybe that's where the word culty comes in, is that for some people, for this to work, it needed to be a way of life. Like, I couldn't just say, I'm tired, I'm checking out right now. You know, it would be tired of what, how, you know? Checking out of what, to go to where? And those probing questions.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  What stops you from being a way?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, what stops you from being exactly?

• 4:15Speaker 04

  What was the point of these questions? It sounds kind of pushy.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  It honestly sounds so invasive. They would grill you about why you feel the way you feel about your biggest hangups and issues in front of all your friends. But there was actually a point. And the point was to help you realize that you actually have way more options for how you might feel about something than you might know.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  This is the whole "control your emotional state" thing. Nancy Solzmann, who we met last episode, is a mega fan of this technique. She used it to get herself through prison.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And this is where it all began. The idea that the way you're feeling is just one way you could feel about it. But if you back up, you could choose from a whole range of reactions. I asked Devra what exactly they were working on. She said it was not light stuff. It was serious psychic pain, insecurity, and trauma.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  I remember really stumbling on believing that my father loved or approved of me at that time.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  To help Devra, Bandler and Grinder performed a family reconstruction. This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Sateer, where basically you have people pretend to be the patient's family members, and then the patient can say things to them they might be too afraid to say in real life.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  John was sitting in front of me. He would tell me that he loved me. And then Rich would ask, "Well, do you believe? Do you believe John?" And I'm, "No, I don't." "Well, is there something that he could do that you would believe him?" And it became pretty clear to me that it was the fact that I wasn't believing what he was saying. And the possibility is that maybe my father was telling me that he loved me in lots of different ways that I wasn't perceiving. And it was quite an aha moment. After that therapy, I called up my dad,

• 6:18Speaker 01

  and I told him that I realized that he did love me. He opened his heart at that point.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  People like Devera were getting results. And somehow, this experimental therapy clique became cool.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  They had a community of followers. I think there were quite a few women that were enamored with them.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  But another NLP-er, Don McCormick, said they were kind of insufferable.

• 6:45Speaker 05

  When there was a small group of us who were into this, that's all we talked about. And we laughed about how we were losing all our friends. We became unattractive people to be friends with.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Jim Iker, another early NLP guy, remembers the group had a certain mystique by the time he arrived at Kresge in 1973. People came out of sessions raving about the revelations they were having.

• 7:12Speaker 06

  Wow, what just happened? That was the most amazing understanding of behavior I could ever imagine, like, learning how speech is so patterned and it reveals how I think and how I learn.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  NLP trainer Robert Dilts said the confidence Bandler and Grinder exuded was infectious.

• 7:29Speaker 07

  Whatever they would suggest, we would go try it. And there was definitely this feeling, you could go in and clear out the psychiatric ward of a hospital. So it was very much that kind of feeling that what you're doing here is life-changing and world-changing.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  That's exactly what Bandler and Grinder tried to do.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Bandler and Grinder actually brought their experimental therapy to Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric facility with thousands of patients.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  This is pretty shocking. They were given free rein to test their ideas out on extremely vulnerable people.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  At the time, one of the problems in these facilities was that doctors would just slap diagnoses on people, and then, if the treatments didn't work, the patients were deemed incurable.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Right. Movies like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" captured the general consensus at the time that psych wards and institutions were essentially prisons. When I asked this one early NLP guy who was involved in these experiments but who's now a licensed therapist if he thought what they were doing was, you know, a little unethical, he was basically like, hey, at least we were trying something new instead of just giving up on these people.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  But others felt Bandler and Grinder sometimes did more harm than good.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people. And they could share that laugh with each other when they could do an induction on somebody when they didn't know that they were being inducted. I could tell that they thought it was fun to have that kind of power over people.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Devra had her criticisms of Bandler and Grinder, but she clearly wasn't completely immune to the confidence they gave off. Both Devra and her friend developed a crush on Bandler, and they made out with him together after one of their sessions.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  OK, so just FYI, making out with a client as a therapist is a huge ethical breach.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  It does seem like almost everyone in these therapy groups was somehow romantically entangled.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  We all spent so much time together. We were very aware of the dynamics of each other's, the sex lives, the partying, whatever else.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Devra, one of Bandler and Grinder's early guinea pigs, was down for the atmosphere for the most part, consenting adults and all. She was looking forward to the group's 1974 Christmas party.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  I made the assumption that it was just a regular Christmas party. So I got myself ready for that by taking some mushrooms beforehand.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  But this was the night it went way too far. The night Devra walked away from Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and what would become an LP: forever.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  When I got to the party, I found out that it was not the kind of party I thought it was going to be.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  The party was just for the people in Bandler and Grinder's therapy clique, and they had prepared an unusual gift for each guest.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Each person was called up to the front to do some work with John and Rich. And they had a certain task that they had to do.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Most of the gifts were playful. Bandler and Grinder had Devra's friend, who was a little cocky, chant "Om", and when his mouth was open, they both pied him in the face. He thought it was hilarious. But when it was Devra's turn, they blindfolded her.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Bandler and Grinder stood on either side of Devra and began speaking simultaneously into both of her ears.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing. "Don't ask for help unless I really need it, because sometime I might really want it."

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And then they led her, still blindfolded, outside.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  She felt them lift her about four feet above the ground. Her legs were loosely bound, and her arms were tied, outstretched, to something wooden.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  I still had my blindfold on, and I opened my eyes. I was standing up there with my legs and my arms strapped onto a cross. I said, "This is Christmas, not Easter." And I think Richard said, "For whom?" And I had kind of one of those icky feelings passing through my body at that time.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Remember, Devra was tripping throughout this. Somehow, she got her blindfold off, and what she saw freaked her out.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  All of the people that were in the training workshop were standing below me in a half-moon, holding candles.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Freakier still, they were placing logs below her feet and dousing them in lighter fluid.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I was prompted earlier in the evening, "Trust somebody to keep something that I would need later."

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Devra picked someone she didn't even know, and Bandler and Grinder gave that person her gift.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Which was a knife.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  A knife. Someone struck a match and set the logs on fire.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Just then,

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Devra managed to cut herself free.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And I was angry, just incredibly angry that I'd been put in that position by people that I had trusted, that maybe I shouldn't have trusted.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  I met with John and Rich afterwards, and I expressed my anger to them about them putting me in that position. And they maintained that it was an expression of caring and thoughtfulness that they put me in this position, because this was what they had intended, to help me therapeutically, to take me out of my victim position, and to give me the knife to cut myself out of the victim position. I was angry at them for doing that to me.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Ethically, it didn't seem right. They took my permission, as my therapist, to go too far.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Dever left the group. She never went back. Although she became a marriage and family therapist, she says she's never used any of the techniques she helped Bandler and Grinder develop.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I decided that I was tired of the hijinks and the threat to my personal safety, and I decided not to have anything further to do with either of them.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  It should be noted, this is Dever's version of events. Although Terry McLendon, who was there that night, wrote about it in his own book, and he told me about that evening during my interview with him. Bandler didn't respond to questions about this incident, nor did John Grinder.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  But NLP was just getting started. What began as one more New Age Alternative Therapy would grow and change, and in some applications and in some hands, evolve into something more sinister.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Find Mind Games on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. New episodes out Tuesdays.