As Judy Delosure was a religious studies major in the early nineteen seventies.

She was used to reading about miracles, not seeing them go down in her living room.

But one night, Judy witnessed something that sounds impossible.

So this guy had a problem.

It was like maybe one leg was slightly shorter than another, and so they had kind of convinced him that his legs were the same, and he walked fine.

Judy is living in a house in the mountains above Santa Cruz.

It's the sight of some unusual gatherings, experimental psychology groups run by a volatile twenty something and a radical young professor.

Judy is at one of these workshops and the leaders are working on someone who limps because his legs are different lengths.

It doesn't seem like a psychological problem.

But when they finish, the guy is walking fine.

And everybody's like so serious, and I was cracking up laughing.

I thought, this is the most hysterical thing I've ever seen, that these guys are, will you know getting away with this?

What was so funny about that?

Well, it was just funny that it was kind of outside the framework of my reality.

I think I was skeptical when Judy told me this, but she swears she saw him walk out of that door, magically cured by talking, magically cured by neurolinguistic programming.

It was kind of like a miracle, And I think that's probably what made me laugh, was going, that's pretty amazing.

You know, that's crazy.

Wait, how does that work?

Though?

How do I don't know, but I'm curious to find out.

Take a deep breath in.

And breathe out.

Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can speak privately on your unconscious mind.

You can notice that you feel rested, more alerted.

Content from Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.

This is Mind Games Episode two.

I'm Zoe la Scos and I'm Alice Hines.

You don't know how you did it.

You did.

You go into a little time as Tarsia state, and you're out of it.

What was going on at Judy's house was one of the very first NLP workshops before NLP was NLP, before it was considered a human technology.

NLP would become a teachable set of mental and verbal techniques that were honed to change your beliefs and behaviors.

But back then it was an experiment, a group of college kids trying stuff out on each other.

You're going to hear from a number of them in this episode telling us about this heady time when they were open to trying new things and trying to heal themselves.

NLP didn't just come out of nowhere.

It emerged from a specific time and place, Santa Cruz in the nineteen seventies.

Once a sleepy resort town, the city had become a magnet for mystics, surfers, rolfers, organic farmers, and Kundalini experts.

So when Judy saw her friends magically linguistically fix a man's legs using words in her living room, it was definitely outside the context of her reality.

But new realities were business as usual in Santa Cruz.

One of the guys leading the workshop in Judy's house was none other than our very own Richard Bamler.

We learned about Bandler, the co developer of n L in the last episode.

His techniques are controversial but seemingly effective.

He's secured lifelong phobias on stage in twenty minutes.

He's transformed people's lives in a single session.

But figuring out who this guy is or was before he became a quick fixed kingpin is way more difficult than we thought.

We talked to many people who knew and worked with Bandler, and we got wildly different versions of him.

He had I'm a rough, tough guy kind of an attitude.

He is nothing if not confident.

Sometimes you would see he had a caring side.

Richard terrified me.

He just had a presence about him that was very edgy, and I just wasn't comfortable.

He struck me as being incredibly brilliant.

Hearing people describe Richard Bandler, you might think they're talking about completely different people.

He's a healer, he's an egomaniac, he's a genius, he's a predator, and he comes with a lot of lore.

For example, people say he's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist.

Not true, No, not at all.

It seems like he took some college classes in those subjects, but they weren't even his major.

What's funny to me is that today he insists on going by doctor Bandler, which I tried to fact check.

He has a few honorary doctorates wait from where, well, one is from an online holistic University.

Huh.

The best Bandler stories always do come from Bandlor himself.

I heard that he can hear radar.

Okay, what the fuck?

Yeah, that sounds very distracting.

Now my personal favorite is that he said he owned a topless bar at age sixteen and that two years later he was a millionaire.

Also that he has a black belt in karate.

Oh my god.

Wait, so he obviously wants to be perceived as some kind of tough guy.

I think that's very on purpose.

There's this one story I heard about Bandler.

He denies what ever happened, like a lot of the other stories swirling around his past.

But one guy said Bandler supposedly cured his own speech impediment as a kid.

This is fascinating because Bangler ended up becoming an expert in communication using speech for persuasion.

So the story goes that Bandler was working with a doctor on this issue and the doctor asked him, if you weren't you, who would you want to be?

And Bandler said John Wayne.

John Wayne, the actor who played Uber Mask Cowboys, precisely.

So the doctor tells him to go out and imitate John Wayne, and Bandler spends a month watching old Westerns and mimicking his voice, including quite possibly a movie in which John Wayne cures a kid's stutter.

Listen to me, you whine and little well, you're gonna stop that stutter or get the hell out of here.

You're gonna stop it.

Or go home?

Do you hear me?

You goddamn sun up bitch again.

You goddamn me, son of a bit, You goddamn me, Jenny's sound of a bit.

I wouldn't make it a habit calling me that said.

I actually do think John Wayne sounds like Bandler in this tape.

What's funny is Bandler is kind of the kid and the healer.

He's both ultimately.

But I think what's really key here is the rugged confidence bit.

People have told me Bandler sort of swaggered around.

He did the whole physical stick too.

Richard was a tough guy, you know.

He was a new Joysey guy, and he was a street kid.

He struck me as looking like a speed freak.

He had a straggling long beard, and his hair was a mess and dirty, and he was chainsmoking.

Bandler apparently dressed like a biker minus the bike.

He was skinny and had a long mustache.

One guy told me he looked like Dennis Hopper in the movie Easy Rider.

Bandler liked to imply he'd been in gangs since he was a kid, and even told some people he'd once been knifed so badly he could basically only eat meat.

What he could only eat meat, He could only eat meat.

I don't get it.

Yeah, I don't think this is real.

But the idea is that he got stabbed in the belly and they had to operate and take out some of his intestines, so now he can't digest certain vegetables.

Richard did allude to his highly dramatic past, making a big deal out of taking some medication that he had in his pocket that he needed, said he needed because of doing other things in his past.

I know that Richard had very difficult upbringing, and so we often say people who can act like a bully are usually the most wounded.

They're the most vulnerable, and Bendler was vulnerable.

According to one magazine, he would stuff Kleenex in his lunch bag when he was in elementary school so other kids wouldn't know he didn't have any food.

The same magazine reported that his mother tried to shoot him a couple times.

More recently, Bandler told a reporter for The Guardian that his stepfather physically abused him, but he said he got revenge.

When he was ten years old, Bandler deliberately electrocuted his stepfather.

Bandler said he rigged a booby trap that shocked the guy and he ended up in the hospital for months.

I find it so perplexing, Alice, that Bandlor would go around telling this story, because if it's true, I mean, isn't this the sort of thing that you stuff at a box and bury the box and hide the box and hope people never ever find.

Out unless violent threats are part of your therapeutic persona.

Despite all the wild stories out there, everyone we spoke to agreed on two things.

Bandler was brilliant, and Bandler was unpredictable.

He was very funny, and he could be very empathetic.

And he could also be in a snake.

You know, there are a few things we know for sure about Richard Bandler.

He was born in New Jersey in nineteen fifty.

His dad does seem to have been a jerk and left by the time he was five.

His mom remarried and at some point in the nineteen sixties, the family up and moved to Sunnyvale, California, which is a sort of middle class suburb in what's now Silicon Valley.

That's where Richard Bandler went to high school.

I wanted to understand where he came from, so I traveled to northern California to talk to people who knew him in his twenties.

Sunnyvale isn't far from Palo Alto, and that's where Bandler met the family who would change his life forever.

The Spitzers.

All right, let's meet the Spitzers.

The Spitzers were pretty out there family.

Alice.

Bob Spitzer was one of the first psychiatrists at Stanford experimenting with LSD.

In nineteen sixty seven, he spent ten days in jail for blocking the Oakland Draft Center.

His kids grew up going to rock festivals like Altamont, where the Hell's Angels fatally stobbed a member of the crowd.

One of those kids, Daniel, wanted to play the drums, so Bob hired a local team to give him lessons.

I was I think his first drum student.

It was really funn He took a totally different approach to teaching drumming.

And guess who that teenage teacher was, Richard Bandler.

That tracks yep, so does the fact that Bandler showed up to the lessons with a whole bunch of knives.

He actually carried them in his pocket, and he showed me a few at different times.

He had a buck knife, a bowie knife, a switchblade.

I didn't really know what to make of it.

I'd never seen a fighting knife up close at that point in my life.

It seemed more like a pose.

Bandler was an unorthodox teacher, but he got results.

He had this kind of brash, bold way of approaching a lot of things, and I was I think his first drums student.

Daniel looked up to Bandler, which is why he found it odd that Bandler, this older kid, was working so hard to impress him.

He had a chip on his shoulder, and most of my buddies in the sixth grade didn't have chips on their shoulder like that, and I was surprised that an older guy felt the need to impress me.

And some of it impressed me, and some of them made me wonder what was going on with him.

At the time, Daniel's parents also began to wonder about Bandler.

They sort of adopted him.

I'm struck by the fact that this family adopts Richard Bandler, who, even as a teenager, seems like kind of a weirdo.

I get the impression they were kind of in the habit of taking in talented strays.

And Daniel's mother reportedly had a huge heart.

She saw right through Bandler's tough guyantics and recognized how bright he was and basically wanted to nurture him and his knives.

Knives and all Bob owned in importance psychology, press and Bandler began working in the warehouse.

He also got a new place to live, the Spitzer's Commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Of course, these people had a commune.

They had a full fledged commune.

There were artists, there were musicians.

It was also the headquarters of the Gorilla midwifery movement.

Fascinating.

Yeah, this one radical woman who lived there, Raven Lang, helped launch the home birthing movement in California when that was essentially illegal in California.

Okay, so all of these people are living together on this property.

They're living together, they're raising chickens together.

They're farming together.

So when we bought the place, it was at actual a commune.

It was a nudist colony.

And I remember being thirteen and I'm like, yeah, Daddy, buy it, and always naked people left.

I was too bad.

Bob Spitzer's daughter Mandy showed me around the property, pointing out geodesic domes and former gardens.

Walking it was easy to imagine this gaggle of renegade geniuses all living together.

This was his magic place where he would come and smoked up, and he had wonderful ideas, my father did.

Some of them came to Fruition and really did great changes, and then other ones just kind of spun out and got a little too out there for anybody to grab.

One to like what like the University for becoming more fully human that was going to take place.

He had a group of young men here that made pretty terrible music and they were called the Mysteries.

And another guy, Jupiter it was his name, and he just flung paint everywhere.

Yeah, and my dad sponsored a lot of this, and Richard was one of those ideas.

So this place was basically a startup incubator for every out there new age trend of the sixties, all paid for by this guy, Bomb Fitzer.

What's crazy is Bob somehow juggled this menagerie of wacky passion projects with his official role in the psychiatry world.

He was friends and colleagues with all these luminaries rethinking what therapy could be at the time.

And for Bob Spitzer, Bandler wasn't just another larky experiment.

He was a protege.

And that's how Bandler got into psych It's how he started NLP.

It's nuts.

Of all the families who could have semi adopted Bandler, the Spitzers were the rare people who could give him some tools to deal with his issues and introduce him to giants in the field.

They basically gave him a new identity.

Which was becoming a therapist.

Yep, tortured kid and alleged cowboy turned after school drum teacher slash knife enthusiast, Richard Bandler reinvented himself yet again, this time as a therapist.

For better or worse.

You know, they wouldn't give me a license to do therapy because I'm not qualified.

I think that's wonderful.

I've been researching Bandler's early influences in psychology.

What happened was that Bob Spitzer introduced Bandler to his friends and colleagues in this alt psych movement.

And it's here that Bandler found a new identity.

He began to imitate famous therapists.

Some of them lived at this place called Esslin and Bigser just down the road from Santa Cruz.

It was the headquarters of the Human Potential movement.

That's a new age effort to remake mankind for the better.

It was basically a therapy commune therapy cult.

Therapy commune therapy cult.

Okay, I think this might be a yes, and let's go with cult adjacent therapy commune.

Okay.

So one of the therapists at Esslyn was Fritz Pearls.

Bandler began listening to tapes of Pearls's therapy sessions like this one.

What do you feel physically?

Hammer hammer hammer hammer Right.

There, gnasituate is hammer hammer hammer mcnises.

Here Pearls is treating a student with stage fright.

He tells her to talk to different parts of herself to reintegrate them.

That was the cornerstone of Gestalt.

Pearls is School of therapy.

It was designed to heal the so called fragmented self.

I want to crack my coast.

I feel confined by the sandals.

Now let your toes talk to the settles.

I feel confined by you.

Let me grow, let me go, let me Bandler became obsessed with Pearls and techniques like this one.

He started imitating Pearls's German accent and mannerisms.

But Bandler didn't stop there.

He also began mimicking an experimental psychotherapist named Virginia Satyr.

Satyr's big thing was role playing.

She called it family reconstruction therapy, and she'd guide groups to dramatically re enact family issues.

And I wonder how you would feel just moving up to the son of yours and saying to him, thank you, gotcha now, to take both his hands, and to tell him that I'm.

Not gonna let you see your mother anymore.

Erin because she heard you, Setier got seemingly magical results.

Families who'd been fighting for years or were traumatized rebonded.

Bandler was dazzled.

Here Satyr is on a public accent that show called Thinking Aloud in nineteen eighty eight, Well.

You focused quite a lot in your lifetime on human potential, on dealing with people who come from tormented families.

You feel very hopeful that a person's life need not be conditioned by their past.

Let's think that the human being has countless number little jets, and if our energy were free to flow, then these jets were all open and our possibilities, and that when we allow that to happen, then we become in a totally different place because we then can have harmony moving and we have the total force of the energy that's possible.

And that's all I've done with people is open.

You can see how these ideas that abuse doesn't define you and that feelings can be transformed to unlock new human potential would appeal to a young Richard Bandler and they helped form an LP.

Ndler would start putting all of these radical psychotherapy influences together as an undergraduate student, and he added his own special sauce.

Richard Bendler arrived at Kresky College in the early nineteen seventies.

The school was brand new.

It wasn't just some place to get a degree.

It was a radical community experiment.

I've been researching Kresky and went there on my trip to California.

At the school, there were no grades or academic honors.

Some teachers wore jeans, walked around barefoot, and others taught cross legged on top of their desks.

Everyone participated in mandatory tea groups, unstructured forums for sharing and conflict resolution.

It was weird, even by Northern California standards.

Other colleges at UC Santa Cruz called it the touchy Feely School.

It looked different too.

The campus was designed like a little village on a winding path through the redwoods.

Most students lived in apartments, others got lumber to build their own dorms.

Naturally, there was no hierarchy at Kresgy, which may explain why an undergraduate with no formal training or certification in psychology was allowed, maybe even encouraged, to practice therapy on his peers.

Bandler began running gestalt therapy groups after hours, cribbing heavily from Fritz Pearls and Virginia Cityer.

He got surprising results.

Fellow students cried and had big life altering breakthroughs, but Bandler had no idea why.

And that's where linguistics professor John Grinder comes in.

We heard he had been in the CIA, or at least that he consulted with them.

Grinder had been a Special Forces captain stationed in Europe during the Cold War, but he also seems to have been some kind of.

Spy while he was in the military.

You know, he was one of those guys apparently that would you know, parachute in and get somebody out on the street.

When Grinder quit the service, he got a PhD and his politics did a one to eighty NLP.

Trainer Robert Dilts, got to know Grinder as one of his linguistic students, and.

So, according to John, he went from being a CIA agent to the president of the Communist Party.

The following year, Grinder organized anti war demos in downtown Santa Cruz and streaked naked across campus at least once, but he drew the line at therapy.

Bandler and Grinder met in one of the mandatory tea groups and immediately bonded over their mutual disdain for talking endlessly on and on with no structure or concrete goal.

They thought psychiatrists had no real incentive to cure their patients.

The longer the therapy took the more they got paid, so people never got better.

But Bandler knew the rapid results he was getting were unique and that they might even appeal to Grinder's Marxist principles.

And it was trying to get John to come to these groups, and John kept saying, Oh, I know, that's bourgeois, you know, the people just wallowing in their own problems.

Bandler finally convinced Grinder to come see what he was up to.

But what he saw what Bndler was doing, he was impressed because he could see that they it wasn't just having people wallow in their problems, that he was actually influencing them and their behavior in very how would I say, in a very powerful way.

Bandler needed Grinder, someone who could analyze his ad hoc experiments and therapy LARPs and turn them into a codified method.

John Grinder, the linguist, looked at what Richard Bandler was doing and identified the structure.

Grinder began analyzing what Bandler was saying, how he was saying it, and what he was doing physically to identify effective patterns.

Richard was my first real therapist.

Devor Canter Morton was a student and one of their first guinea pigs.

I actually did quite a bit of my personal work with the both of them that was extremely powerful.

Devra experienced therapeutic breakthroughs with Bandler and Grinder, but by the end of her time.

I plotted revenge.

I thought of suing them.

I thought about putting sugar and their gas tanks.

Devra first met Bandler when they were both volunteering at a peer counseling center and Bandler was the trainer.

Richard Bandler was in there training you.

You're both undergraduate students.

How did he get in the position where he was training anyone to work on people with real problems?

I have no idea how that happened.

There must have been some kind of supervision god, you know, hope.

So what were the trainings like?

It was?

I used the word wholesome, but I used the word wholesome in contrast to where I feel like it went.

Later, when I met them, they knew what they were doing.

Jody Bruce met Bendler and Grinder when she enrolled in a linguistics course.

They were teaching together.

They were developing it with us, I mean, they were doing their research with us.

Jody joined the workshops Bandler and Grinder were running off campus.

The students would arrive and chat a bit, but it wasn't a party.

They were there to work.

Bandler and Grinder would make a dramatic entrance and ask the group, who wants to make a deep change tonight?

A few volunteers would step up.

They were the patients.

Everyone else became their doctors.

That's who we worked on.

We worked on ourselves with each other, which was pretty brave now that I say that.

When I think about it, you know, just these other people, these other students who happened to be interested in the same thing.

We were suddenly bearing our hearts to each other.

Therapy is everywhere today, but in the nineteen seventies therapy was still controversial.

So it's pretty radical for these kids to be working on each other, exploring new forms of care.

And we did do.

A lot of sharing.

The big phrase that comes back to me as I think about NLP is.

What stops you from doing that?

So if I said I feel afraid, that would be dissected into who I feel afraid of and how and what.

I can't tell my father that I'm mad at him.

What stops you from doing that?

Jodi Bruce attended the groups with Jim, her boyfriend at the time.

It was a lot of work because he would just he was always trying to serrapize me, you know, and sometimes I would get frustrated and.

Just say, look, we're just going to have an argument.

Okay, how it goes this is I don't want to be a chapter in your book.

And so I think there was that there was.

That part of it, and maybe that's where the word culty comes in, is that for some people, for this to work, it needed to be a way of life.

Like I couldn't just say I'm tired, I'm checking out right now, you know, it would be tired of what how you know, checking out of what to.

Go to where?

And those probing questions.

What stops you from being away from being exactly.

What was the point of these questions?

It sounds kind of pushy.

It honestly sounds so invasive.

They would grill you about why you feel the way you feel about your biggest hangups and issues in front of all your friends.

But there was actually a point, and the point was to help you realize that you actually have way more options for how you might feel about something than you might know.

This is the whole control your emotional state thing.

Nancy Salzman, who he met last episode, is a mega fan of this technique.

She used it to get herself through prison.

And this is where it all began, the idea that the way you're feeling is just one way you could feel about it, but if you back up, you could choose from a whole range of reactions.

I asked Evah what exactly they were working on.

She said it was not stuff.

It was serious psychic pain, insecurity and trauma.

I remember really stumbling on believing that my father loved or approved of me at that time.

To help Devra, Bandler and Grinder performed a family reconstruction.

This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Satyre, where basically you have people pretend to be the patient's family members and then the patient can say things to them they might be too afraid to say in real life.

John was sitting in front of me, You would tell me that he loved me, and then Rich would ask, well do you believe Do you believe John?

No?

I don't, Well is there something that he could do that you would believe him?

And it became pretty clear to me that it was the fact that I wasn't believing what he was saying.

And the possibility is that maybe my father was telling me that he loved me in lots of different ways that I wasn't perceiving.

And it was quite an AHA moment.

After that therapy, I called up my dad and I told him that I realized that he did love me.

He opened his heart.

At that point, people like Deva were getting results, and somehow this experimental therapy clique became cool.

They had a community of followers.

I think there were quite a few women that were enamored with them.

But another NLPR Don McCormick, said they were kind of insufferable.

When there was a small group of us who were into this, that's all we talked about, and we laughed about how we were losing all our friends.

We became unattractive people to be friends with.

Jim Iiker, another early NLP guy, remembers the group had a certain miss.

By the time he arrived at Kresky in nineteen seventy three, people came out of sessions raving about the revelations they were having.

Wow, what just happened?

That was the most amazing understanding of behavior I could ever imagine, like learning how speech is so pattern and it reveals how I think and how I learn.

NLP trainer Robert Dilts said the confidence Bandler and Grinder exuded was infectious.

Whatever they would suggest, we would co try it.

And there was definitely this feeling you could go in and clear out the psychiatric word of a hospital.

So it was very much that.

Kind of feeling that what you're doing here is life changing, in world.

Changing, That's exactly what Bandler and Grinder tried to do.

Bandler and Grinder actually brought their experimental therapy to NAPA State Hospital, a psychiatric facility with thousands of patients.

This is pretty shocking.

They were given free reign to test their ideas out on extremely vulnerable people.

At the time, one of the problems in these facilities was that doctors would just slap diagnoses on people, and then if the treatments didn't work, the patients were deemed incurable.

Right.

Movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest captured the general consensus at the time that psych words and institutions were essentially prisons.

When I asked this one early NLP guy who was involved in these experiments but who's now a licensed therapist, if he thought what they were doing was, you know, a little unethical, he was basically like, hey, at least we were trying something new instead of just giving up on these people.

But others felt Bandler and Grinder sometimes did more harm than good.

It was a game for them to see how they could manipulate and control people, and they could share that laugh with each other when they could do an induction on somebody when they didn't know that they were being inducted.

I could tell that they thought it was fun to have that kind of power over people.

Deva had her criticisms of Bandler and Grinder, but she clearly wasn't completely immune to the confidence they gave off.

Both Deva and her friend developed a crush on Bandler, and they made out with him together after one of their sessions.

Okay, so just FYI making out with a client as a therapist is a huge ethical breach.

It does seem like almost everyone in these therapy groups was somehow romantically entangled.

We all spent so much time together, we were very aware of the dynamics of each other's The sex lives that the partying whatever else.

Devra, one of Bandler and Grinder's early guinea pegs, was down for the atmosphere for the most part, consenting adults and all.

She was looking forward to the group's nineteen seventy four Christmas part.

I made the assumption that it was just a regular Christmas party, so I got myself ready for that by taking some mushrooms beforehand.

But this was the night it went way too far.

The night Deva walked away from Richard Bandler, John Grinder and what would become an LP forever.

When I got to the party, I found out that it was not the kind of party I thought it was going to be.

The party was just for the people in Bandler and Grinder's therapy clique, and they had prepared an unusual gift for each guest.

Each person was called up to the front to do some work with John and rich and they had a certain task that they had to do.

Most of the gifts were playful.

Bandler and Grinder had Dever's friend was a little cocky chant Oh, and when his mouth was open, they both pied him in the face.

He thought it was hilarious, but when it was Devra's turn.

They blindfolded her.

Vandler and Grinder stood on either side of Devra and began speaking simultaneously into both of her ears.

Because I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing, don't ask for help unless I really need it, because sometime I might really I really want it.

And then they led her, still blindfolded, outside.

She felt them lift her about four feet above the ground.

Her legs were loosely bound and her arms were tied outstretched to something wooden.

I still had my blindfold on, and I opened my eyes and I was standing up there with my legs and my arms strapped on to a cross.

I said, this is Christmas, not Easter.

And I think Richard said for whom?

And I had kind of one of those icky feelings passing through my body at that time.

Remember Dever was tripping throughout this.

Somehow she got her blindfold off and what she saw freaked her out.

All of the people that were in the training workshop were standing below me in a half moon holding candles.

Freakier still, they were placing logs below her feet and dousing them in later fluid.

So I was prompted earlier in the evening, trust somebody to keep something that I would need later.

Deva picked someone she didn't even know, and Bandler and Grinder gave that person her.

Gift, which was a knife.

A knife someone struck a match and set the logs on fire.

Just then.

Devra managed to cut herself free.

And I was angry, just incredibly angry that I'd been put in that position by people that I had trusted, that maybe I shouldn't have trusted.

I met with John and Rich afterwards, and I expressed my anger to them about them putting me in that position, and they maintained that it was an expression of caring and thoughtfulness that they put me in this position because this was what they had intended to help me therapeutically, to take me out of my victim position, and to give me the knife to cut myself out of the victim position.

I was angry at them for doing that to me.

Ethically, it didn't seem right.

They took my permission as my therapist to go too far.

Dev left the group.

She never went back.

Although she became a marriage and family therapist, she says she's never used any of the techniques she helped Bandler and Grinder develop.

I decided that I was tired of the hijinks and the threat to my personal safety, and I decided not to have anything further to do with either of them.

It should be noted this is Dever's version of events, although Terry McClendon, who was there that night, wrote about it in his own book and he told me about that evening during my interview with him.

Bandler didn't respond to questions about this incident, nor did John Grinder.

But NLP was just getting started.

What began as one more new age alternative therapy would grow and change, and in some applications and in some hands, evolve into something more sinister.

Only a few years after NLP developed, it spread beyond the mountain communes of Santa Cruz, and it found a new home in the business world.

Bandler and Grinder began marketing NLP as a persuasion technology that could be used to read people and manipulate them.

How do you recognize how people organize their thoughts and then work with their language in a way to modify their thoughts.

That's sinister, that's next.

Online games mind Games is a Colidius production in partnership with iHeart podcasts.

The series is created and hosted by me Zoe Lascas and Alice Hines.

It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Luk Potts, edited by Kate Osborne, Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Bone.

Fact checking by Aman Whalen from Kaleidoscope.

Our executive producers are Oswaloshin, Mangesh Hattikador, and Kate Osborne from iHeart.

Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etoor