Of all the gurus who thrived during the Californian New Age gold rush of the 1970s, Bandler nowadays has by far the biggest influence, on millions of people, most of whom know nothing about him or his extraordinary past. These days nobody bothers much with naked hot-tub encounter sessions, or primal screaming, or whatever. But Bandler’s invention—NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (he’s actually the coinventor with the linguistics professor John Grinder)—is everywhere.
The training manual we delegates have been handed describes NLP as “a methodology based on the presupposition that all behavior has a structure that can be modeled, learned, taught, and changed.”
The rest of the manual is a confusing mix of psychobabble and diagrams marked “submodalities” and “kinesthetics,” etc. But from what I can gather, NLP is a way of “repatterning” the human brain to turn us into superbeings—confident, nonphobic, thin superbeings who can sell coals to Newcastle and know what people are thinking just by their eye movements. It is the theory that we are computers and can be reprogrammed as easily as computers can. You were abused as a child? That makes you a badly programmed computer who needs a spot of instant reprogramming. Forget therapy: Just turn off the bit of the brain that remembers the abuse. You aren’t selling enough houses? NLP can instantly reprogram you to become a great salesperson, or public speaker, or whatever. NLP teaches that, like computers, we are a tapestry of telltale visual and auditory clues to what’s going on inside our brains. Our winks, our tics, our seemingly insignificant choice of words—it is all a map of our innermost desires and doubts. It is the secret language of the subconscious. NLP can teach the salesperson how to read that map and act accordingly.
Some people hail the way NLP has seeped into training programs in businesses across the world. Other people say terrible things about NLP. They say it is a cult invented by a crazy man.
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I FIRST HEARD of Richard Bandler, NLP’s inventor (he actually coinvented the technique, with John Grinder), in 2002 when a former U.S. Special Forces soldier told me he’d watched him, two decades earlier, bring a tiny little girl into Special Forces and reprogram her to be a world-class sniper in seconds. Intrigued, I tried to learn more. This is when I heard about the good times, how Bandler’s theories were greeted with high praise in the 1970s and 1980s, how Al Gore and Bill Clinton and practically every Fortune 500 corporate chief declared themselves fans, and then there was the descent into the dark side. Reportedly, during the 1980s, the coked-up Bandler had a habit of telling people he could dial a number and have them killed just like that. Then came the murder trial. In 1988 Bandler was tried and acquitted of murdering a prostitute, Corine Christensen. She’d been found slumped over a dining table, a bullet in her head. Her blood was found sprayed on Bandler’s shirt. And then there was the renaissance in the form of Bandler’s unexpected partnership with the TV hypnotist Paul McKenna, and the fact that they were going to be teaching a course together this week at the Ibis Hotel.
In the end I will get to meet Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna, and extraordinary things will occur when I do, but the road to those meetings will prove to be a rocky one.
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EARLIER TODAY I had coffee with Sue Crowley. She’s been friendly with Paul McKenna for years, since back in the days when he was touring regional theaters, hypnotizing people into believing they were kangaroos. Before that he was a DJ—at Topshop, then Radio Caroline, and finally Capital FM radio. Back then the idea that he’d one day hook up with Richard Bandler would have seemed as likely as David Copperfield becoming business partners with L. Ron Hubbard. But, Sue said, “Paul was like a dog with a bone when he first learned of Richard. He studied him at seminars. He modeled Richard like nobody’s ever modeled anyone before.”
Modeling is a practice at the heart of NLP. This is how McKenna has described Bandler’s invention of modeling: “If someone’s got a skill that you want to master, you ‘model’ that skill so that you can learn to do what they do in a fraction of the time it took them. Say someone’s a master salesperson. They’ll be doing certain things with their body, and certain things with their language. So you ‘model’ that. Study it, break it down, work out the thinking behind it.”
Sue said Paul McKenna was incredibly nervous about approaching Richard Bandler before he finally did, in 1994, to suggest they go into business together. Since then, NLP has—thanks to McKenna’s skills—become bigger than ever, a vast empire that’s making everyone millions.
“Paul is an unexpected protégé of Richard’s,” Sue said. “The squeaky-clean DJ and the . . . uh . . .” She paused, not knowing which bits of the Richard Bandler life history to mention, in case I didn’t know the full extent of the horror. “The . . . uh . . . Hells Angel, up for God knows what, CIA . . . But Richard Bandler is a Leonardo of our times. He is one of our living greats.”
(Much later, by the way, after this story appears in the Guardian, I’ll chance upon a flier advertising a Richard Bandler seminar. It’ll read: “Richard Bandler is a Leonardo of our times. He is one of our living greats—The Guardian.”)
Now “Purple Haze” booms through the speakers and Richard Bandler climbs onto the stage. He hushes the crowd. They sit down. I am momentarily lost in my thoughts and I remain standing.
“ARE—YOU—GOING—TO—SIT—DOWN—NOW?” hisses a voice in my ear. I jump. It is one of Paul McKenna’s assistants. I hurriedly sit down.
“I marched up the Amazon,” Bandler tells the audience. “I threatened gurus to get them to tell me their secrets. They’re pretty cooperative when you hold them over the edge of a cliff.”
There is laughter.
“There was one Indian guru,” Bandler continues, “I was holding him over the edge of a cliff. I said to him, ‘My hand is getting tired. You have seven seconds to tell me your secrets.’ Well, he told me them fast and in perfect English!”
I have to say that had I been tried for murder, I would be less forthcoming with the murder gags. Practically every one of Richard Bandler’s jokes is murder- or at least violent-crime related. I hope—when I finally get to meet him—to ask him about the murder trial, although I’m nervous at the prospect of this.
Suddenly, we hear a loud noise from somewhere outside.
“A ghost,” Bandler says. “I do have ghosts that follow me around. And they’re angry ghosts. But I don’t care. The truth is, the ghosts are more afraid of me than I am of them.”
He is mesmerizing. Two hours pass in a flash. He talks about childhood trauma. He puts on a whiny voice: “When I was five I wanted a pony . . . my parents told me I was ugly . . . ‘Shut the fuck up!’”
He gets the audience to chant it: “Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” If you hear voices in your head, he says, tell the voices to shut the fuck up. “If you suffered childhood abuse, don’t go back and relive it in your mind. Once is enough!”
He says psychotherapy is nonsense and a racket: Therapists are rewarded for failure. The longer a problem lasts, the more the therapist is paid. Who cares about the roots of the trauma?
“Don’t think about bad things!” Bandler says. “There’s a machine inside your brain that gets rid of shit that doesn’t need to be there. Use it! I can give myself amnesia. I can just forget.” He clicks his fingers. “Just like that.”
This seven-day training course is costing delegates £1,500 each. Which means Paul McKenna’s company will rake in almost a million pounds for this one week’s work. The tea and biscuits may be free but we have to buy our own lunch. For all the hero-worship of McKenna and Bandler, there’s still a lot of grumbling about this, especially because whenever we traipse out into the rain to try and find somewhere to eat in this crappy part of town, we’re compelled to traipse past Paul McKenna’s immaculate chauffeur-driven silver Bentley, number plate 75PM, parked up in the ugly forecourt, waiting to swish Richard Bandler off somewhere unimaginably fancier.