Tools for the Trade: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Art of Communication 55 Federal Probation 1991

55 Fed. Probation 11 (1991)
Tools for the Trade: Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the Art of Communication

handle is hein.journals/fedpro55 and id is 13 raw text is: Tools for the Trade:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
and the Art of Communication
BY RICHARD GRAY
United States Probation Officer, Brooklyn, New York

M YEARLY training as a probation offi-
cer starting out in the late 1970's in-
cluded a sheaf of articles purporting to
provide me with tools for use in casework. In-
evitably, the articles offered a perspective heavily
biased by the still prevalent medical model. I
especially remember a four-part series on inter-
viewing skills. Most of us laughed out loud at the
somber tone with which one of the articles de-
scribed the client's shifting feet and inability to
sit still as signs of probable prevarication. We
also sneered at the prospect of developing a rap-
port with the client, feeling that these were skills
for therapists, not probation officers.
These, however, were the skills offered, whatev-
er their ultimate value, and their choice proceed-
ed from the original assumption that probation
was a helping profession. Hence, probation offi-
cers received training from a casework perspective
and were regularly taught the orthodox dogma of
the essential conflict between the officers' dual
roles as law enforcement officials and rehabilita-
tors.
With the recent swing towards a justice model
in the Federal system, and a generally more
conservative law-enforcement bent throughout the
profession, probation officers have begun to give
significant emphasis to the moral responsibility of
their charges and the nature of probation as a
sanction as opposed to a rehabilitative modality.
As a result, greater attention has been given to
methods of investigation aimed at rational assess-
ment of the ability to pay, a more intensive ap-
proach towards surveillance and monitoring, and
an insistence on real compliance. Officers have
received excellent training in completing financial
investigations, as well as new tools including the
ability to regularly obtain credit checks. The
quality of attention to field practices and personal
safety has increased considerably, and where
weapons are permitted, a new concern for safe
and efficient use has resulted in uniform stan-
dards within the Federal system.
Despite the shift in philosophy, probation re-
mains a person-to-person profession. In that pro-
bation officers still deal with individuals, in spite

of these many changes, some recent developments
in psychology may provide tools for investigation,
assessment, helping, and, sometimes, healing.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
In the 1970's, the idea of developing rapport
with clients seemed laughable to some officers.
After all, clients were criminals, and officers were
their punishers; what possibility of rapport could
there be? According to the literature of the times
this rapport was to consist of an emotional trans-
ference, the officer's ability to perceive things
from the client's perspective. More recently, how-
ever, rapport, seen from a slightly different per-
spective has become a simultaneously more use-
ful, and far less innocent, tool. It relates now to
the ability to create a sense of receptivity and
understanding and to control that impression so
as to maximize effectiveness in communication in
any context. It is one of many potentially useful
skills developed by psychologists using neuro-lin-
guistic programming (NLP).
NLP is the brainchild of John Grinder, Richard
Bandler, Robert Dilts, and Judith DeLozier. Grin-
der and Bandler, respectively, a computer pro-
grammer and a linguist, set out with their part-
ners to discover the commonalities, if any, in
effective psychotherapeutic approaches. In their
studies they examined and modeled the tech-
niques used by several influential therapists in-
cluding Milton Erickson, a world renowned hyp-
no-therapist, Virginia Satir, an equally well re-
ceived practitioner of family interventions, and
Fritz Perls, the so-called father of Gestalt thera-
py. At the end of their studies they discovered
certain very specific, transportable skills and
techniques that all three used (Bandler & Grin-
der, 1975). These techniques were apparently the
key to their extensive successes, independent of
their varying, and often disparate, theoretical
approaches. These same techniques can provide
effective tools for the probation officer in every
facet of the work, no matter the officer's orienta-
tion as to law enforcement or rehabilitation.
The name itself reflects some of the basic as-
sumptions of NLP. Dilts et al. (1980, p. 2), pro-

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