The Guardian
20-05-2006
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Don’t worry, get therapy

He used to be a TV hypnotist. Now, together with an American self-help maestro, Paul McKenna makes business people more successful. Jon Ronson joins the devotees at a conference – but can he be cured of his one big phobia?

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Monday May 29 2006

In the article below we described NLP, or Neurolinguistic Programming, as the invention of Richard Bandler. The co-creator was John Grinder, with whom Bandler developed NLP modelling and co-wrote the book Transformations.

It is a Friday in April, and you’d think some crazy evangelical faith healing show was taking place in the big brown conference room of the Ibis hotel in Earl’s Court, west London. The music is pumping and the 600 delegates are ecstatic. It’s true there are lots of damaged people here who have come to be healed, but this is no faith healing show. The speakers are atheists. And the audience is full of people from British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, British Gas, BT, Bupa, Dixons, the Department for Work and Pensions, Ladbrokes and Transport for London. These people have come to learn how to be better in the workplace. Lots of them tell me they signed up because of the TV star Paul McKenna, but the great revelation is the other speaker – the man they hadn’t heard of. Now the audience is jumping to its feet, cheering. I look behind me. I see him passing through the crowd, looking like Don Corleone, square-jawed and inscrutable – it’s the other speaker, Richard Bandler.

Of all the gurus who thrived during the Californian New Age gold rush of the 1970s, Bandler 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 (Neurolinguistic Programming) – is everywhere.

The NLP training manual we delegates have been handed is a confusing mix of psychobabble and diagrams marked “submodalities” and “kinesthetics”, etc. But from what I can gather, NLP is a way of “re-patterning” the human brain to turn us into super-beings – confident, non-phobic, thin super-beings who could 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? Forget therapy: just turn off the bit of the brain that remembers the abuse. You want to become a great salesperson? NLP will reprogram you. Our winks, our ticks, our seemingly insignificant choice of words – they all make up a map of our innermost desires and doubts: read the customer and make the sale.

Some people hail the way NLP has seeped into training programmes in businesses across the world. Others say terrible things about NLP. They say it is a cult invented by a crazy man.

I first heard of Bandler in 2002, when a former US special forces soldier told me he’d watched him, two decades earlier, bring a tiny girl into special forces and reprogram her in seconds to be a world-class sniper. 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 70s and 80s, 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 80s, a 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.

Earlier that day, I had coffee with Sue Crowley. She’s been friends with McKenna for years, since the days he was touring regional theatres making people think they were kangaroos. Before that he had been a DJ – at Topshop, then Radio Caroline and, finally, Capital Radio. Back then, the idea that he’d one day hook up with Bandler would have seemed as likely as Doctor Fox 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 modelled Richard like nobody’s ever modelled anyone before.”

Modelling, invented by Bandler, is a practice at the heart of NLP. This is how McKenna describes it: “If someone’s got a skill that you want to master, you ‘model’ that skill so 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 McKenna was incredibly nervous about approaching Bandler to suggest they go into business together. Since he finally did, in 1994, NLP has – thanks to McKenna’s skills – become bigger than ever, a vast empire that’s making everyone millions. And McKenna no longer goes on the road with his hypnotism show.

“Paul is an unexpected protege of Richard’s,” Sue said. “The squeaky clean DJ and the… uh…” She paused, not knowing which bits of the Richard Bandler story to mention, in case I didn’t know the full extent of the horror. “The… uh… Hell’s Angel, up for God knows what, CIA… But Richard Bandler is a Leonardo of our times. He is one of our living greats.”

Purple Haze booms through the speakers and Bandler climbs on to the stage. He hushes the crowd. They sit down. I am momentarily lost in my thoughts and 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 the 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 Bandler’s jokes are murder, or at least violent crime-related. I hope – when I finally get to meet him – to ask about the murder trial, although I’m nervous at the prospect.

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 mesmerising. 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 course is costing the 600 delegates £1,500 each. Which means McKenna’s company will rake in £1m 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 shuffle out into the rain to try to find somewhere to eat in this crappy part of town, we’re compelled to traipse past McKenna’s chauffeur-driven silver Bentley, number plate 75PM, waiting to swish Bandler off somewhere unimaginably fancier.

It is lunchtime now. I walk past the Bentley. A delegate sidles up to me. “You’re a very naughty boy!” she says. “Richard will be very cross with you!”

“What?” I practically yell.

“You kept writing when Richard was talking even though you knew you weren’t supposed to!” she says. “And you didn’t have a smile on your face. Everyone was laughing, but you were scowling.”

I missed yesterday’s session, which is perhaps why everyone is so far ahead of me in the frenzied adoration stakes. In fact, earlier today Bandler said he had no unhappy clients. His exact words were, “The reason why all my clients are a success is that I killed all the ones who weren’t.”

He and McKenna have made particular headway in the business world. In fact, Ian Aitken, managing director of McKenna’s company, says the individuals looking for a cure for their phobias are now in the minority. I ask him what is it about NLP that attracts salespeople. Bandler, he replies, teaches that everyone has a dominant way of perceiving the world, through seeing, hearing or feeling. If a customer says, “I see what you mean,” that makes them a visual person. The NLP-trained salesperson will spot the clue and establish rapport by mirroring the language.

“I get the picture,” the NLP-trained salesperson can reply, rather than “That rings a bell”, or “That feels good to me”.

After lunch, we split into small groups to practise NLP techniques on each other. I pair up with Vish, who runs a property company in the Midlands. “What did I miss yesterday?” I ask.

He is mesmerising. 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 course is costing the 600 delegates £1,500 each. Which means McKenna’s company will rake in £1m 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 shuffle out into the rain to try to find somewhere to eat in this crappy part of town, we’re compelled to traipse past McKenna’s chauffeur-driven silver Bentley, number plate 75PM, waiting to swish Bandler off somewhere unimaginably fancier.

It is lunchtime now. I walk past the Bentley. A delegate sidles up to me. “You’re a very naughty boy!” she says. “Richard will be very cross with you!”

“What?” I practically yell.

“You kept writing when Richard was talking even though you knew you weren’t supposed to!” she says. “And you didn’t have a smile on your face. Everyone was laughing, but you were scowling.”

I missed yesterday’s session, which is perhaps why everyone is so far ahead of me in the frenzied adoration stakes. In fact, earlier today Bandler said he had no unhappy clients. His exact words were, “The reason why all my clients are a success is that I killed all the ones who weren’t.”

He and McKenna have made particular headway in the business world. In fact, Ian Aitken, managing director of McKenna’s company, says the individuals looking for a cure for their phobias are now in the minority. I ask him what is it about NLP that attracts salespeople. Bandler, he replies, teaches that everyone has a dominant way of perceiving the world, through seeing, hearing or feeling. If a customer says, “I see what you mean,” that makes them a visual person. The NLP-trained salesperson will spot the clue and establish rapport by mirroring the language.

“I get the picture,” the NLP-trained salesperson can reply, rather than “That rings a bell”, or “That feels good to me”.

After lunch, we split into small groups to practise NLP techniques on each other. I pair up with Vish, who runs a property company in the Midlands. “What did I miss yesterday?” I ask.

Finally, exhausted, I reach McKenna. I introduce myself and ask him, “How did you end up in business with Richard Bandler?”

“I know!” he says. “It seems incredible from the outside. But he’s one of my best friends…” Then he excuses himself to do a spot of speed healing on an overeater.

An hour later, McKenna’s PR, Jaime, tells me in the corridor quite sternly that I am not to hang out with Paul or Richard before, between or after sessions, because they’re far too busy and tired. I can meet them next Wednesday, she says, when the course is over.

I go home. I don’t think I have ever, in all my life, had so many people try to keep me in order in one single day. Advocates and critics alike say attaining a mastery of NLP can be an excellent way of controlling people, so I suppose the training courses attract that sort of person. Ross Jeffries, author of How To Get The Women You Desire Into Bed, is a great NLP fan, as is Duane Lakin, author of The Unfair Advantage: Sell With NLP! (Both books advocate the “that feels good to me” style of mirroring/rapport building invented by Bandler.) But still, the controlling didn’t work on me. Nobody successfully got inside my head and changed – for their benefit – the way I saw NLP. In fact, quite the opposite happened. This makes me wonder if NLP even works.

Emails and telephone calls fly back and forth. I tell Jaime the PR that I don’t want to be kept away from Bandler during the sessions. Finally, it is agreed I can meet him before he goes on stage on Monday.

Over the days that follow, things start to improve. I corner McKenna and tell him his assistants are driving me crazy. “You have to make them leave me alone,” I say. He looks mortified, and says they’re just overexcited and trying too hard. But, he adds, the course would be a lot worse without them energising the stragglers into practising NLP techniques on one another.

On stage, Bandler and McKenna cure a stream of delegates of their phobias and compulsions. There’s a woman who’s barely left her home for years, convinced the heater will turn itself on when she’s out and burn down the house.

“Do they pay you to think like this?” asks Bandler. “It seems like an awful lot of work. Aren’t you fucking sick of it?”

The woman says a bossy voice in her head tells her the heater will do this.

Bandler gets her to turn down the knob in her brain that controls the volume of the bossy voice. Then he gets the bossy voice to tell her, “If you keep worrying about this heater, you’re going to miss out everything good in your life.” This, Bandler says, is an invention of his called the Swish technique: you take a bad thought, turn it into a radio or TV image, and then swish it away, replacing it with a good thought.

“I don’t care about you any more, heater, because I want to get my life back,” the woman says, and the audience cheers.

I still don’t quite understand the Swish technique, so I make a mental note to get McKenna to do it on me when I meet him at his house on Wednesday. I have a whole potpourri of bad thoughts I wouldn’t mind swishing away.

Yesterday, Bandler cured someone who had a fear of doctors. Now he gets him to stand up. “Are you scared of going to the doctor?” he asks.

“I… uh… hope not,” the man replies quietly.

“Boo!” shouts the audience, only half-good-naturedly.

Suddenly, I feel a poke in my elbow. I spin around. It is Vish. I catch him in the act of giving my elbow a second poke. “Did that make you feel good?” he asks.

“It made me feel confused.”

When someone appears cured, Bandler and McKenna seem quietly, sincerely thrilled. And the room truly is scattered with NLP success stories. There are the shy salespeople who aren’t shy any more, the arachnophobes who swish away their spider phobias and stroke the tarantulas that McKenna provides one afternoon.

On stage, McKenna is a mix of entertainer and college lecturer. He tells a joke and then says, “What was I just doing?”

“Reframing!” the audience yell as one. (Reframing is NLP’s way of putting a miserable person in a good mood. If someone says, “My wife’s always nagging me”, the NLP-trained therapist will “reframe” by replying, “She must really care about you to tell you what she thinks.”) It’s obvious that making people think they were kangaroos was never going to be enough for McKenna. This is what he loves: being a boffin. A multimillionaire boffin.

I sit in the audience and watch all this, and back at home in the evenings I talk to friends who, it transpires, secretly listen to McKenna’s CDs and get cured. I still don’t know how it works. Maybe it’ll become clear when I ask him to cure me on Wednesday.

There’s another speaker here, the life coach Michael Neill, who asks me if I can spot the covert intelligence officers in the audience. “I’m not joking,” he says. “There’s always one or two… Most people who want to get inside your brain,” says Michael, moving closer, “have negative reasons.”

McKenna, standing nearby, comes over. He scans the room. When the 600 delegates graduate in a few days, they’ll be given Licensed NLP Practitioner certificates. Some will set up their own NLP training schools. He says he cannot guard against what happens next.

“Some people teach NLP in a way that makes it sound highly manipulative and coercive,” McKenna says. “You know, ‘I will give you power over others.’ And the people who end up going to those are people with very small penises, frankly. People who think, ‘Oh my God! I’m not enough! I’m so out of control! Maybe if I learned how to have power over other, I’ll be a better person!’ So, you see, criticising NLP is like criticising a hammer.”

I tell him I’ve read terrible things about NLP on the internet – that some scientists call it nonsense – and he says, “I know it’s not scientific. Some of the techniques will not always work in the same way in a laboratory every time!” He laughs. “But Louis Pasteur was accused of being in league with the devil. The Wright brothers were called fraudsters…”

On Monday, I spot Bandler by the stage, surrounded by fans. “Wow,” he says as a woman hands him a rare copy of his book, Transformations. “That goes for, like, $600 on eBay.”

“That’s where I got it,” the woman says. He autographs it.

Everything is going fine until someone hands Bandler a blank piece of paper to sign. “What’s this?” he asks. “I just don’t sign blank paper.” He pauses. “I have a thing about it.”

Misunderstanding, the woman hands him different blank paper. “No, no,” he says. “I just can’t sign blank paper.”

Some of the fans laugh, as if to say, “How can you hand him blank paper after he’s just told you he doesn’t sign blank paper? Are you nuts to expect him to sign blank paper?”

But, really, it is a strange moment: Bandler has just spent the past few days convincing us that phobias are nonsense, and here he is, phobic about signing blank paper.

The moment passes. A woman kisses him and says, “From one child of the 60s to another.”

Bandler laughs and replies, “They called us the fringe. We’re fucking mainstream now!”

Then I introduce myself, and we go upstairs.

Richard Bandler was born in 1950. He grew up in a rough part of New Jersey. I don’t expect him to talk much about his childhood because several profiles say he never does. The one thing known for sure is that he had language problems, and barely spoke until he was a teenager. So I’m surprised when he says, “I was a compulsive kid.”

I’m sitting on a low sofa. He’s standing above me.

“When I was a kid, I took up archery,” he says. “I can remember sitting out by the side of the house until 3am, with just a little light bulb, shooting at a fucking target, over and over until I got it exactly the way it was supposed to be.”

“Where did your compulsiveness come from?” I ask.

“From being alone most of the time. I had to be self-motivated. My mother was always out working, and my father was violent and dangerous.” He pauses. “Well, my first father was gone by the time I was five, and he was very violent. My mother later married a guy who was a drunk and a prize fighter in the navy. He was very violent – broke a lot of my bones. But in the end I won.”

“How?” I ask, expecting him to say something like, “Look at me now, I’m getting driven around in a Bentley.”

But instead he says, “I electrocuted him.”

“Really?” I say.

“I didn’t kill him,” he says, “but I could have.”

“How did you electrocute him?” I ask.

“I waited until it was raining,” he says. “I got a wire-mesh doormat. I stripped a lamp cord, put it underneath the doormat, put the other end in the keyhole and put my hand on the switch. When the key went in, I clicked the switch. There was a loud scream. He went over the railing. Six months in hospital.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Ten,” he says.

I remember his advice for people who suffered childhood abuse: “Just forget about it.” Tell the voices to “shut the fuck up”. Is NLP Bandler’s way of avoiding confronting the demons of his past? Or perhaps it’s the opposite – why else would he spend his life mapping the crazy ways people behave, if not to try and understand the senselessness of his own childhood? I ask him this. He shrugs, then replies, “I don’t think too much about my childhood. I just left it behind me. I moved on.”

The family moved to California, where Bandler became “a juvenile delinquent. Then I discovered it wasn’t the Harley that was scaring people. It was the look in the eye.”

He was diagnosed as a sociopath. “And, yeah, I am a little sociopathic. But my illusions were so powerful, they became real – and not just to me.” He says NLP came to him in a series of hallucinations while he was “sitting in a little cabin, with raindrops coming through the roof, typing on my manual typewriter”. This was 1975. By then he was a computer programmer, a 25-year-old graduate of the University of Santa Cruz.

It’s surprising to me that Bandler would cheerfully refer to NLP as a sociopathic hallucination that struck a chord with the business world. I’m not sure he’s ever been that blunt about it before. But I suppose, when you think about it, there is something sociopathic about seeing people as computers who store desires in one part of the brain and doubts in another.

“See, it’s funny,” he says. “When you get people to think about their doubts, notice where their eyes move. They look down! So, when salespeople slide that contract in, suddenly people feel doubt, because that’s where all the doubt stuff is.”

“So where should a salesperson put the contract?” I ask.

“They’ve got to buy themselves a clipboard!” he says. “When you ask people to think about things that are absolutely right for them, they look up! So you put the contract on a clipboard and present it to them up here!” Actually, the idea of a salesperson thrusting a contract right into my face seems pretty scary, too, but these were the kinds of ideas Bandler was typing in Santa Cruz at the age of 25. The book would eventually be co-written with linguistics professor John Grinder and published under the title The Structure Of Magic.

Throughout the interview, I’m sitting on a low sofa with Bandler standing above me. Something suddenly dawns on me. “If I was standing and you were sitting,” I ask, “would I be forming different opinions of you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “of course.”

“So, are you deliberately positioning yourself in my hopes and desires eyeline?” I ask.

There’s a silence. Bandler smiles to himself. “No,” he says. “My leg hurts. That’s why I’m standing up.”

The Structure Of Magic was a huge hit. “Time magazine, Psychology Today, all of these people started seeking me out in Santa Cruz,” he says. “And I started getting interest from places I really didn’t expect, like IBM.” He designed sales training programmes for businesses across the US. They made him rich. He bought a home in Hawaii. He was hailed as a genius. The CIA and military intelligence squirrelled him in, which is how I first heard about him. Had he really smuggled a tiny girl into special forces and got her to “model” a world-class sniper?

“It wasn’t a little girl,” he says. “It was a 10-year-old boy. And that’s not as great as it sounds: you can teach a 10-year-old boy to do pretty much anything.”

But by the early 80s things were spiralling downwards for him. His first wife filed for divorce, claiming he had choked her. According to a 1989 Mother Jones magazine profile, he began to warn associates, “All I need to do is dial seven digits and with my connections with the mafia I could have you all wiped out without even batting an eye.”

He became a prodigious cocaine user and struck up a friendship with a 54-year-old cocaine dealer, James Marino. By 1986, he was living in a house built by Marino, a few doors from Marino’s girlfriend, Corine Christensen. In early November 1986, Marino was beaten up; he got it into his head that Corine had organised the beating so she could take over his cocaine business. Bandler, caught up in the paranoia, phoned Corine, and recorded the conversation: “Why is my friend hurt? I’ll give you two more questions, and then I’ll blow your brains out…” Eight hours later, Corine was shot in the head at her home; 12 hours after that, Bandler was arrested for the murder.

I’ve been worried about bringing this up. Bandler may be quite brilliant and charismatic, but he also seems overbearing and frightening. And although McKenna himself strikes me as likeable, his team of overzealous assistants scattered around the hotel are forever eyeing me with suspicion. Plus, earlier, Jaime the PR cornered me: “Some people are concerned,” she said, looking me in the eye. She’d heard I’d been asking about banking and finance and didn’t like the idea I might be going to write about how NLP can be misused. What’ll happen if I ask about murder – not the pretend murders that Bandler jokes about on stage, but a real one?

“Tell me about the murder trial,” I say.

He doesn’t pause at all. He tells me what he told the jury – that Marino did it. Yes, he, Bandler, was in the house at the time. He lifted her head, which is how her blood ended up on his shirt. Why do I think the police went after him?

“With me, the DA gets to make a big reputation,” he says. “But if it’s some thug drug dealer, you’re not going to make any mileage.”

The trial lasted three months. On the stand, Bandler blamed Marino and Marino blamed Bandler but Marino frequently changed his story. Plus, as the Mother Jones profile pointed out, who had the greater motive – the man who had been beaten up, or the man who was righteously indignant on behalf of a friend who had been beaten up? Bandler was acquitted. “It took the jury longer to pick a foreman than to decide if I was guilty or innocent,” Bandler says. “The guy was a convicted felon. We caught him lying, falsifying evidence…”

It is at this exact moment that McKenna and the entire upper echelons of his company troop cheerfully into the room.

“The other guy was their stool-pigeon they used to bust dope dealers,” Bandler is now hollering at me. “I mean, excuse me! A lot of very dirty things went on through that trial.”

Earlier today McKenna got a compulsive blusher on stage and cured her of her blush. I am like the blush lady now, sitting on the sofa, Bandler towering over me, yelling about the murder rap, while McKenna looks on anxiously.

I change the subject. I say, half-joking, that being an NLP genius must be awful. “To know in an instant what everyone’s thinking,” I say. “You must sometimes feel like one of those superheroes, ground down by their own superpowers.”

“Yeah,” Bandler replies, suddenly looking really quite upset. “It’s called the supermarket.” He pauses. “You walk into a supermarket and you hear someone say to their kid, ‘You’re never going to be as smart as other kids.’ And I see the kid’s eyes, pupils dilating, and I see the trance going on in that moment… It became a burden to know as much as I did. I went through a lot of things to distract myself. I used just to sit and draw all the time. Just draw. Focus on drawing to keep my mind from thinking about this kind of stuff.” And then he goes quiet, as if he is falling into himself.

I suppose people shouldn’t judge gurus until they need one. Luckily, I do a bit. And so on Wednesday I use my 90 minutes with Paul McKenna to get him to cure me of my somewhat obsessive conviction that something bad has happened to my wife and son when I can’t get hold of them on the phone.

He does Bandler’s Swish technique on me. He gets me to picture one of my horrific imaginary scenes. I choose my son stepping out in front of a car. He spots, from my eye and hand movements, that the mental image is situated in the top right hand of my vision, big, close to my eyes.

“Part of the neural coding where we get our feelings from, and ultimately our behaviour, comes from the position of these pictures,” he says. “Pictures that are close and big and bright and bold have a greater emotional intensity than those that are dull and dim and further away.”

“And Richard Bandler was the first person to identify this?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

He chats away to me, in his hypnotic baritone voice, about this and that: his own worries in life, etc. He is extremely likeable. Suddenly, when I’m not expecting it, he grabs the space in the air where my vision was and mimes chucking it away.

“Let’s shoot it off into the distance,” he says. “Shrink the picture down, drain the colour out of it, make it black-and-white. Make it transparent…”

And, sure enough, as the image shoots away, far into the distance, the neurotic feelings associated with it fade, too. This is Paul McKenna “re-patterning” my brain. He says it isn’t self-help. I don’t have to do anything. This is reprogramming, he says, and I am fixed.

“Oh yeah,” he says, “you don’t have to do anything now. It’s worked.”

Three weeks pass. I don’t have a single paranoid fantasy about something bad happening to my wife and son. And so I have to say, for all the weirdness, I become very grateful that Richard Bandler invented NLP and taught it to Paul McKenna.