What Is Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR)?
Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning (NHR) uses hypnosis to restructure a person at the level of the neural pathways in the brain’s cortex. With NHR, people learn to manage their feelings. Most problems people face are things they do and unresourceful states they experience in the moment—these reactions happen automatically, but they weren’t present when we were children. These are learned behaviors, and when you change these patterns in trance, you’re essentially teaching someone not to do what they don’t want to do!
Memory systems always need to have a changeable part so that outdated information can be replaced with new data. So, when you teach someone new ways to respond, it’s actually quite easy, because they no longer fall back into their old unresourceful states. Everything a person has ever learned stays with them, but what’s needed is to create a new direction in the brain’s pathways and teach something new. People are constantly relearning everything they know. The older we get, the more millions of new neural connections we create, and there are countless things we do automatically—like shaking hands, kissing, and all sorts of pleasant experiences. But sometimes, this list includes irritation and anger when it’s inappropriate, or fear when there’s really nothing to be afraid of.
The Origins and Development of NHR
After I created NLP, which was mainly designed to study how someone does something and transfer that skill to someone else, I developed Design Human Engineering (DHE) to explore the limitations people create and then skillfully design things that had never been used before as thought processes. All of these approaches are based on the fact that we once practiced hypnosis, so I returned to creating deep trance states and observing how to help people respond to life situations differently than before.
Think about all the things people do, like fear or depression—these states create a chemical basis in the body that affects what you do. All you need to do is put a person in the moment before they fall into the chemical bath of depression, or suddenly get angry, or become afraid to try something new, or get extremely shy. They need to start feeling embarrassed at a certain moment, and if you could redirect them right before that point, everything would change. This is about using tools to create deep trance states so you can make comprehensive changes to a wide range of behavioral patterns, and teach people the most important thing worth practicing much more often—the ability to feel great—so that it becomes a habit, instead of practicing unresourceful states.
Learning and Applying NHR
If you have some background in NLP, that’s great. If not, I’ve designed my seminars so people can learn to do certain things without having to study everything I’ve ever done or repeat all my mistakes. Even when I look back at what I did that worked well, I’ve found ways to do the same things even better, faster, and easier. I started working on DHE because NLP was mostly about extracting strategies, and most of those were based on unresourceful states—avoiding something. But when you avoid things and walk backward, you’re bound to stumble into something. So, I wanted to learn how to change experience so we focus on the main human instinct—the drive to feel good. Because when someone feels bad, they make poor choices and bad decisions. But when they feel great, they make much better decisions. The ability to know the difference between a good and bad decision, and to choose not to make bad decisions anymore, is what I’m talking about.
Nothing is truly difficult—the only requirement is to be someone who can experience pleasure. The important question that often remains unexplored is: how much pleasure and enjoyment can I feel, how much ecstasy and excitement can I live with, and how much more successful can I become? Because if you put yourself in a good state, there’s nothing you can’t do. People have climbed the highest mountains, flown to the moon, and done things that once seemed impossible. The things we haven’t learned to do yet don’t mean we won’t do them. It’s all about recreating the way you connect with yourself—physically, mentally, and in some ways, spiritually.
Hypnosis in Everyday Life
No matter how you make your living, if you interact with other people, you’re already using hypnosis to some extent, whether you realize it or not. That’s how language works. It’s not some separate process—it’s a skill of precision. We’re not talking about swinging a watch back and forth; we mean gaining a kind of control that was once only available to yogis or monks. Most people don’t spend much time getting their brain and body into the best possible state.
Translated from the training materials of “The Best of Dr. Richard Bandler: Latest Developments in NLP Introducing and Utilizing DHE and NHR,” Amsterdam, May 2010.