NLP Therapy: What Is It and What Are the Drawbacks?

If you’ve been exploring NLP therapy, you might be surprised to hear what one of the world’s most respected NLP trainers discovered after spending years at the very top of the field.

Michael Neill started out as an NLP practitioner, became a master practitioner, then a trainer, then a master trainer. He went on to become one of the leaders of the largest NLP training organisations in the world, working alongside one of NLP’s founders. He and his colleagues were doing extraordinary things with people, helping them overcome phobias in half an hour or less, addressing habits, teaching people to work with their own thinking in ways that far surpassed anything he’d come across in the self-help world.

And yet something was off.

Not because what they were doing wasn’t working. But because the scope of it wasn’t what it seemed like it should be. As Michael put it, if NLP really was the secret to everything, if learning to control your thinking in just the right way was the key to an optimal experience of life almost all of the time, then the people who knew it best should have been the happiest, most successful people in any room they walked into.

They weren’t.

They did fine. They were pretty successful. Kind of happy some of the time. But in other ways they kept bumping up against their thinking.

That observation, from someone at the very top of the NLP world, is one of the most honest and illuminating things I’ve come across about what NLP therapy is, what it can do, and where it has its limits.

What Is NLP Therapy?

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the study of the structure of subjective experience. In straightforward terms it’s a behavioural approach that explores how language and thought patterns shape our experience of life, and how changing those patterns can change how we feel and behave.

NLP therapy uses techniques like anchoring, visualisation, parts integration and submodalities to help people overcome phobias, break habits, manage anxiety and shift limiting beliefs. It tends to be future-focused and goal-oriented, often making it shorter-term than traditional therapeutic approaches.

How Does NLP Therapy Work?

NLP works primarily at the level of conscious and subconscious thought patterns and behaviour. It gives you tools to reframe how your brain processes information, to change the structure of a memory, interrupt a habitual pattern, or associate a different feeling with a particular trigger.

But the real leverage for change in human beings lies in an understanding of thought, not from trying to control your thinking, as Michael Neill himself arrived at that conclusion after years at the top of the NLP field.

What Are the Criticisms of NLP?

The most significant criticism of NLP, and the one that Michael Neill identified from the inside, is that it focuses on managing and manipulating thinking rather than understanding the nature of thought itself.

There’s a difference between those two things. Managing your thinking assumes that your thoughts are the problem and that the solution is to get better at controlling them. Understanding the nature of thought points to something deeper, that thought is a system, that it is always in motion, that it is the mechanism through which we experience everything, and that our relationship with thought matters more than the content of any particular thought.

This is something I recognise deeply from my own journey. I came at it from a different direction, as a hypnotherapist and solution focused psychotherapist, I was already working at the unconscious level rather than the behavioural level. I went on to train in EFT, theta healing and the MAP Method.

Each of these approaches is powerful in its own right. Each one goes deeper than NLP in the sense that they work with the body, the nervous system and the unconscious mind rather than purely with conscious thought patterns.

But when I came across the Three Principles, the understanding developed by Sydney Banks, something fundamentally shifted for me too.

What Are the Drawbacks of NLP?

Michael Neill found his answer to the limitations of NLP when he came across the work of Sydney Banks, a Scottish welder who had a spontaneous insight into the nature of mind, consciousness and thought, and whose understanding became the foundation of what is variously known as the Three Principles, the Inside Out Understanding, or Psychology of Mind.

What Banks pointed to was simple but profound. We are not insecure. We just think we are. Our experience of life, all of it, including anxiety, our limiting beliefs, our sense of who we are and what’s possible for us, is being created in the moment by thought taking form through consciousness.

Not by our past. Not by our circumstances. Not by the content of our thinking. By the fact that we are thinking beings, and thought is always creating our experience.

This isn’t the same as positive thinking. It isn’t about changing your thoughts or learning to think differently. It’s about understanding what thought actually is, and when that understanding lands, something shifts that no technique can produce.

I see this with my clients regularly. One client came to me with high anxiety, a deep belief that he wasn’t good enough, a conviction that he couldn’t change, and a history of trauma and bullying that had shaped how he saw himself for decades. We worked together using hypnotherapy, EFT and MAP, processing the trauma his nervous system was holding, loosening the survival-based thinking that had become his identity.

But what also shifted was his understanding of thought itself. I remember him telling me he’d been out walking his dog, tangled up in the same old repetitive habitual thoughts, when suddenly he had an insight. He saw, really saw, that this was just his thinking. And in that moment the thoughts simply vanished.

That’s not a technique. That’s insight and realisation.

Why Is NLP Obsolete | Is There Something Better?

I wouldn’t say NLP is obsolete. I would say it’s incomplete.

It points in the right direction, toward thought as the source of our experience. But it stops short of the deeper understanding that makes the difference between managing your experience and genuinely transforming it.

What I’ve found in over a decade of working with clients is that the most profound and lasting change happens when we work at multiple levels simultaneously. Processing what the body and nervous system are holding through approaches like hypnotherapy, EFT and MAP.

And at the same time pointing clients toward a deeper understanding of the nature of thought, so that the insights they have in sessions don’t just produce temporary relief but a genuinely different relationship with their own minds.

This is what NLP, in my view, doesn’t do. And it’s what Michael Neill, having spent years at the very top of the NLP world, ultimately found was missing too.

Which Is Better – NLP or CBT?

This is a question many people ask when they’re trying to decide on a therapeutic approach. Both NLP and CBT work at the level of thought and behaviour. CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, helps people identify and challenge unhelpful thought patterns and replace them with more helpful ones. NLP works with the structure of subjective experience to shift patterns more rapidly.

Both have their merits. Both also share a fundamental limitation, they approach thought as something to be managed, challenged or restructured rather than understood at a deeper level.

The question worth asking isn’t which is better, NLP versus CBT. It’s whether managing your thinking is really the answer, or whether there’s a deeper understanding available that changes your relationship with thought entirely.

In my experience, and in Michael Neill’s, it’s the latter that produces the most profound and lasting change.

Ready to Experience Something Deeper?

If you’ve tried NLP therapy, CBT or other approaches and found that the results didn’t last, or if you’re at the beginning of your journey and want to work with someone who goes to the root rather than the surface, I’d love to talk.

Book your free consultation and let’s explore what’s really possible for you.

Sara Maude

Sara Maude provides Hypnotherapy for Anxiety and Trauma Therapy for professionals who are looking to break the cycle of anxiety and find freedom from the past to feel calm, confident and in control. Sara has worked privately with individuals for 14 years, held over 5,000 sessions, and is also the founder of the award-winning global workplace wellbeing training company, The Mind Solution International Ltd.

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