Magic Valley NLP

I am a schoolteacher and a developmental specialist working with students with special needs. I am also a master practitioner of NLP.  Often I have people ask me questions about a child or a client with disabilities and wonder if I have any ideas or helps.  I decided to write this little piece on NLP and disabilities to answer some of those questions.  I trust that you will get some ideas and insights that will help you, along with me, create a world in which people with special needs want to belong. 

There is an excellent book out that gives parents, any parent - not just parents of special needs children, the tools they need to help their child.  It is a simple book; an easy read and is called:

 1,2,3 Magic: Effective Discipline for children 2-12 by Phelan.  A used book on Amazon goes for as little as $5,

Often what parent’s need are tools. They come to accept their child, and their child does not respond in normal ways because of the way they are wired.  This book will give them effective tools to reach their children.

My first objective, and I talked at NLPU about this, is to accept the children and not try to change them to make them fit their own maps of the world. Their brains truly are wired differently and I have seen people change something and end up with something far worse.  You need to weigh what you want to change and make certain you replace it with something better. For instance: some children may constantly scratch at themselves.  If that mannerism can be changed to twirling a bit of string that may be more socially acceptable, but if you just stop the scratching the child may turn to something else like self-mutilation.

Normally I do not do much counseling as I am a school teacher and I limit myself to one or two clients a week, however I am available on the internet when you want to shoot me questions.  I surely don't know everything, but I have had a great deal of experience and I accept working with these children as a calling at this time in my life.   One year I had five autistic children at my school; this year I have only one.  I find my autistic students a constant delight but others will try to change them and won’t accept them. They miss the delight of the students in their own worlds. If I can enter their map of the world then I find the delight.

Here is my favorite story of an autistic student of mine. 

Three years ago I got a new student. I'll call him Larry.  About three days into the school year he said to me, "Teacher, there is a camera in the hall." 

I agreed with him, as there was a security camera in the hall.  Often he would mention the camera so a day or so later I asked him, “What do you want to know about the camera?”

“Does it talk?”  He queried

“I don’t know, let’s find out.”  I replied and we went out in the hall. 

“What do I do?”

“Well ask it.”

“Do you talk?”  He asked. It was so cute. He was serious.

I replied behind him in a little, squeaky voice, “Yes, I do.”

Larry looked at me.  “I guess it does.”

For days afterwards we would greet the camera and it often said “Hi,” at least when the teacher was around.

One day I asked him if he wanted to see what the camera saw and he did so we went into the office and saw the security monitors and he quite liked that.

Everything went well for a long time and the camera talked on occasion. Then one day the principal came storming into my room.  “One of your boys keeps knocking the camera off the ceiling.  I want it stopped now.”

Now who would do that? I was suspicious.  Who but Larry?  Still I thought, “I don’t think he would be doing it maliciously. He is a good kid. So I approached him carefully.

“Larry, someone has been hitting the camera. Do you know who?”

“I’ve been giving it high fives because it is my friend.”  He said, quite happy to share.

I looked at the principal with a “there you have it” look. 

He was cooling a bit but not fully.  “I want it stopped, now.”

So I said, “Larry, I know you like the camera but you are getting to be a big, strong boy and your high fives are too strong for it. Sometimes the camera gets hurt and the principal has to take it to the camera doctor.  Could you quit giving it high fives so it won’t have to go to the camera doctor anymore?”

“Sure,” He said. And that was the end of that.

Later that year I had a problem with him throwing balls up in the ceiling on the gym.  The gym teacher had had it with the entire thing and asked me to put a stop to it. He was the one who would have to get a little Hyster thing and fish the balls down so he had good reason to want it stopped.  Nothing seemed to work. I would ask him to stop and soon he would be throwing them at the ceiling again.  Finally I told him that the grates ate balls.  Most fortuitously, the very next day a ball got stuck in the grate and was there for several weeks and it made a believer out of him. He now saw that grate eating a ball and no longer threw the balls into the grate.

Rather than getting after him, I entered into his world and this world made perfect sense to him.

Often Autistic children do not know just how to ask for help.  They know that they need something but they don’t know how to put it into words.

Martha had just this problem.  One day she came to me during a field trip with a carton of milk.  On the trip all of the children had been given a carton of milk and the carton was not like any they had seen before. The other children quickly figured out how to open it but she couldn’t and I was not aware.  She showed me her carton several times and I agreed with her that indeed she had been given a carton of flavored milk.  Then I entered her world.  Now I could see the problem. She does not know how to open it.

“Martha, would you like me to open that carton for you and show you how.”  She looked so relieved.  That was exactly the problem and it was easy for me to help once I understood the problem.

Georgia was a doll of a girl.  When she came into my room I was told that she was both blind and deaf.  I did not believe it.  We put a can of Coke 30 feet from her across the room. She found it swiftly.  It was not that she was blind; it was that nothing interested her in her autistic world. 

I still treasure the day when the principal walked into my room and started to wipe tears from his eyes as he watched Georgia take a crayon and color on a paper.  The autistic girl they had told me was blind could color, string beads in patterns and feed herself.  I was sad to see her grow and leave for high school and when she left I made sure they knew she could see and hear.

I have learned that the presuppositions of NLP are guiding principles for me in working with my special needs students.  Here they are with some explanation.  Please remember that different NLP organizations teach different and assorted presuppositions so some may be from one and some from another. They all work for me and that is what matters to me.

• The map is not the territory. This has become a guiding principle for me. If I can see their map and compare and contrast it with a map closer to reality I will better understand their world.  Their map is not wrong.  Each map has a particular use whether it is a Mercator projection, a precipitation map, and map of the city or a globe of the world.  One map in not wrong and another right. They all are good maps for what they are needed for and our special need students create the maps they need to survive. 

• People (Autistics) have all the resources necessary to make any desired change.  It is my job as a teacher to help my students find those resources and access them in a positive manner.

• Behind every behavior there is a positive intention.   Trust that your child with autism has a positive intention and enter into the map.  Often you will be delighted.

• The person with the most flexibility wins, and it is flexibility that will win for you as a counselor, parent or teacher of a child with autism.

• If something does not work do anything else.  People keep trying the same things over and over, and then say the autistic (Or person with down syndrome or etc.) is stubborn, not looking at themselves as being a part of the problem. 

• Energy flows where attention goes. Put your attention on what you want for the child. If you put your attention on what you don’t want, guess what you will get – what you don’t want.

• Anything can be accomplished when the task is broken down into small enough chunks.  (Experience has a structure)  This is another great one. In 2004 I trained as a Developmental Specialist. During the course work we were taught how to break or chunk down a task into very small steps. I have broken down tying a shoe into 20 steps and using those 20 steps taught a child who had been working on tying for 6 years how to tie in just a month or so.  NLP does the same thing. We break down excellence into small chunks and teach it.  This is what first sold me on NLP.  If I can break excellence in tying a shoe down into small steps and it works, then breaking down excellence in other areas must work also. I read where leaders of my church had counseled us to model the Savior, Jesus Christ and I realized that modeling is a basic learning strategy.   I have also learned that we have neurons called modeling neurons whose purpose it is to model and by modeling to learn.

• There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.  To me this reminds me that if I fail at something I can use the failure as a springboard to future success.  I may not have been effective in teaching the student what I wanted the student to learn, but I can use the knowledge I gained to try a new technique. In other words, failure can lead to success if allowed to apply the knowledge gained.

• Every behavior is useful in some context. When the child behaves in a way we do not like there is a reason.  The child is not being naughty; there is an underlying cause.  Is the student trying to avoid something?  (Usually work)  Is the child trying to get something?  (Usually attention)  Enter the child’s map of the world and find what use the behavior has then one is able to be flexible in how one handles the behavior.

• The messenger never rests until the message is delivered.  In other words, if you don’t “get” what the child is saying the behavior will continue and if you stop that behavior another one will surface because the message will be delivered. 

• Choice is better than no choice.  Accepting this as a presupposition, I choose to give my students choices whenever possible.  I find that if I can be one step ahead of them then I can offer two choices - both of which I am satisfied with. For Instance, “Would you like to do your timed test first or your math page first?”  “Would you like to do your phonics now or would you like to do it in the office during PE time?” 

• Children always make the best choice available to them at the time.  The interesting thing is that, as children and especially as special needs children their maps may not include all of the choices available.  “Johnny hit me so I will hit him back because I have no other choices of what to do.”  I can teach Johnny some new and more acceptable choices and then future pace them.  Then he will have more choices available and will make the best choice. I recently used this with a Special Olympics athlete who kept cutting herself. We drew up more ideas of what she could do when she was frustrated such as write a poem or listen to music. With more choices she is becoming quite an accomplished poet.  Others had told her to quit cutting.  I told her let’s find some more choices of things you can do that will fill the same need as cutting does.  It is working.  Her incidents of cutting are way down.

It is interesting to me how the presuppositions fit so well into the Special Needs world.

I have been truly blessed to stretch my teaching talents with the special needs population.  I hope that my fire kindles a fire in you, the reader, to enter and explore the maps of those with special needs. Then having entered and experienced their maps, I hope that you will help them expand their map, add color and life and help them build a map that will allow them to work with the rest of the “normal” world.