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- [00:06]
A
Before we get started, I want to take a minute to introduce you to a podcast we think many of you will find genuinely fascinating and unsettling in the way only a good investigation can be. If you listen to Sequestered, you know, we're interested not in just what happened, but how it happened. The systems, the psychology behind things, the power dynamics, the moments where something meant to help Qu crosses a line. Mind Games follows that thread all the way down. It's an investigative series about neuro linguistic programming, or nlp, which is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology that promises transformation. It's control over your emotions, control over your life, and in some cases, control over other people. What begins as an experimental therapeutic movement in the 1970s slowly expands into something much bigger, touching self help culture, corporate training, high control groups, and eventually a murder trial that raises serious ethical questions about influence, consent, and power. The episode you're about to hear explores the early days of nlp, when therapy itself was still controversial, boundaries were loose, and young people trusted authority figures who claimed they can change lives overnight. For some, those experiences felt profound. For others, they were deeply unsettling. Like the storylines in Sequestered, Mind Games doesn't rush to easy conclusions. It listens closely to the people who were there, asks hard questions about harm and intention, and lets the complexity sit where it belongs. This is a special preview of Mind Games, and if this episode pulls you in, trust me, you'll want to hear the others. New episodes drop Tuesdays, so be sure to follow Mind Games wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get into this preview episode.
- [02:18]
B
Richard was my first real therapist.
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C
Deborah Canter Morton was a student and one of their first guinea pigs.
- [02:25]
B
I actually did quite a bit of my personal work with the both of them that was extremely powerful.
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C
Debra experienced therapeutic breakthroughs with Bandler and Grinder, but by the end of her.
- [02:37]
B
Time, I plotted revenge. I thought of suing them. I thought about putting sugar in their gas tanks.
- [02:46]
C
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?
- [03:05]
B
I have no idea how that happened. There must have been some kind of supervision. God, you'd hope so.
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C
What were the trainings like?
- [03:16]
B
It was. I use the word wholesome, but I use the word wholesome in contrast to where I feel like it went. Later.
- [03:28]
D
When I met them, they knew what they were doing.
- [03:30]
C
Jodi Bruce met Bandler and Grinder when she enrolled in a linguistics course. They were teaching together.
- [03:36]
D
They were developing it with us. They were doing their research with us.
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C
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.
- [04:03]
D
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.
- [04:20]
C
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.
- [04:30]
D
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?
- [04:53]
C
Jody Bruce attended the groups with Jim, her boyfriend at the time.
- [04:57]
D
He was a lot of work because he was always trying to therapize me, you know, and sometimes I would get frustrated and just say, look, we're just gonna have an argument, okay? That's just how it goes. 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.
- [05:29]
C
And those probing questions, what stops you from being awake?
- [05:33]
D
Yeah, what stops you from being exactly.
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E
What was the point of these questions? It sounds kind of pushy.
- [05:39]
C
It honestly sounds so invasive. They would grill you about why you feel the way you feel about your biggest hang ups 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.
- [05:59]
E
This is the whole control your emotional state thing. Nancy Salzman, who we met last episode, is a mega fan of this technique. She used it to get herself through prison.
- [06:10]
C
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.
- [06:31]
B
I remember really stumbling on believing that my father loved or approved of me at that time.
- [06:41]
C
To help Devra, Bandler and Grinder performed a family reconstruction. This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Satir, 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.
- [06:57]
B
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? 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 and I told him that I realized that he did love me. He opened his heart at that point.
- [07:45]
C
People like Devra were getting results. And somehow this experimental therapy clique became cool.
- [07:53]
B
They had a community of followers. I think there were quite a few women that were enamored with them.
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C
But another NLPer, Don McCormack, said they were kind of insufferable.
- [08:06]
B
When there was a small group of us who were into this, that's all we talked about.
- [08:13]
C
And we laughed about how we were losing all our friends.
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B
We became unattractive people to be friends with.
- [08:21]
C
Jim Eicher, 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. Wow, what just happened?
- [08:35]
D
That was the most amazing understanding of.
- [08:37]
C
Behavior I could ever imagine. Like learning how speech is so pattern.
- [08:42]
D
And it reveals how I think and how I learn.
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C
NLP trainer Robert Diltz said the confidence Bandler and Grinder exuded was infectious.
- [08:50]
D
Whatever they would suggest, we would go try it, and. 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.
- [09:09]
E
That's exactly what Bandler and Grinder tried to do. Bandler and Grinder actually brought their experimental therapy to Napa State Hospital, a psychiatric facility with thousands of patients.
- [09:24]
C
This is pretty shocking. They were given free reign to test their ideas out on extremely vulnerable people.
- [09:31]
E
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.
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C
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.
- [10:06]
E
But others felt Bandler and Grinder sometimes did more harm than good.
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B
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.
- [10:40]
C
Deborah had her criticisms of Bandler and Grinder, but she clearly wasn't completely immune to the confidence they gave off. Both Debra and her friend developed a crush on Bandler, and they made out with him together after one of their sessions.
- [10:53]
E
Okay, so just FYI, making out with a client as a therapist is a huge ethical breach.
- [11:01]
C
It does seem like almost everyone in these therapy groups was somehow romantically entangled.
- [11:07]
D
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.
- [11:16]
C
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.
- [11:26]
B
I made the assumption that it was just a regular Christmas party, so I got myself ready for that by taking some mushrooms beforehand.
- [11:40]
C
But this was the night it went way too far. The night Devra walked away from Richard Bandler, John Grinder, and what would become NLP Forever.
- [11:52]
B
When I got to the party, I found out that it was not the kind of party I thought it was going to be.
- [11:59]
C
The party was just for the people in Bandler and Grinder's therapy clique. And they had prepared an unusual gift for each guest.
- [12:06]
B
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.
- [12:18]
C
Most of the gifts were playful. Bandler and Grindr had Devorah's friend, who's a little cocky, chant omm. 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. Bandler and Grindr stood on either side of Devra and began speaking simultaneously into both of her ears.
- [12:45]
B
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.
- [13:01]
C
And then they led her, still blindfolded, outside. 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.
- [13:16]
B
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.
- [13:44]
C
Remember, Devra was tripping throughout this. Somehow she got her blindfold off, and what she saw freaked her out.
- [13:53]
B
All of the people that were in the training workshop were standing below me in a half moon, holding candles.
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C
Freakier still, they were placing logs below her feet and dousing them in lighter fluid.
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B
I was prompted earlier in the evening, trust somebody to keep something that I would need later.
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C
Devra picked someone she didn't even know. And Bandler and Grinder gave that person.
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B
Her gift, which was a knife.
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C
A knife. Someone struck a match and set the logs on fire. Just then, Deborah managed to cut herself free.
- [14:44]
B
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. 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. Ethically, it didn't seem right. They took my permission as my therapist to go too far.
- [15:47]
C
Debra 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.
- [15:58]
B
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.
- [16:11]
C
It should be noted this is Deborah's version of events, although Terry McClendon, 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, 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.
- [16:49]
A
You've just heard a preview of Mind Games, an investigative podcast that digs into the origins, impact and dark edges of neuro linguistic programming. If this episode raised questions for you about therapy, power, influence, or what happens when curiosity turns into control, you're not alone. That's exactly what this series is designed to explain, explore, and we highly recommend you give it a follow. You can find Mind Games on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. They have new episodes out every Tuesday. We've even included a link in the show Notes to make it easy. We'll be back soon with a brand new season of Sequestered and we cannot wait to share what we've been working on. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.