Richard Bandler

Therapy is everywhere today, but in the 1970s, therapy was still controversial.

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

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

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.

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 Debra what exactly they were working on.

She said it was not light stuff.

It was serious psychic pain, insecurity, and trauma.

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

This is one of the techniques they got from Virginia Satir, 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.

People like Debra were getting results.

And somehow, this experimental therapy clique became cool.

But another NLP-er, Dawn McCormack, said they were kind of insufferable.

Jim Eicher, another early NLP guy, remembers the group had a certain mystique by the time he arrived at Kresge in 1973.

People came out of sessions raving about the revelations they were having.

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

This is pretty shocking.