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NLP supporters claim it can treat a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, including anxiety, phobias and depression, by changing behaviour through the use of language.

“The unconscious mind does not hear the negative,” Bishop explains. “You learn tricks about never expressing anything in the negative, always express it in the positive.”

She said that she uses NLP, along with hypnotherapy and time line therapy, to help people get to the root of phobias, even delving into past lives.

“Your unconscious mind stores all of your memories on a line and we call that your time line,” she said.

To treat a client with a phobia of dogs, for example, “I would put you into a trance. I would put you on your time line and tell you ‘Go back to the time you first locked in your fear of dogs.’ ”

This fear, she says, could originate even further, requiring what Bishop calls “past-life regression.”

“It could have been in a former lifetime. It might not be from this life. Sometimes people will say, ‘It was from before I was born.’ We go back to how many lifetimes ago.”

Peer reviews studies of NLP have mostly concluded that there is no evidence to support its claims, however.

A panel of the U.S. National Research Council called NLP “an unvalidated technique” and said that studies supporting it failed “to provide an empirical base of support for NLP assumptions … or NLP effectiveness.”

NLP is based on an “outmoded view of the relationship between cognitive style and brain function (and) ultimately boils down to crude analogies,” according to another study.