NLP and Plato’s allegory of the cave: how changing your perspective can make all the difference

I recently received some beautiful words from a client, who expressed, far better than I could, how NLP had helped her to come to terms with some issues on her fertility journey:

‘You have really hit on some issues and managed to make me re-look at them from a different perspective, the negative barriers I thought I had were acts of love, protection and survival.
 
 The love for my daughter has got me through the darkest days, she was very much wanted and loved from the moment I was pregnant. I know I shouldn't put so much responsibility on her but I really don't know how I would ever have got through my 4 losses without her.
 
 I wish I had heard your words of wisdom earlier so I wouldn't have punished my body - instead I would have nurtured and appreciated the miracle it performed - to conceive and deliver a perfect baby. 
 
As for my ‘more’ list, forgive myself, nurture myself and use positive language to remind myself how strong I am. My list has been added to and these have become my priority.’ 
 
There is a saying in NLP, ‘Perception is projection’ which reminds us that what we perceive to be reality is always distorted by our own experience of the world: our language, our beliefs, our memories, attitudes etc.
 
You are probably aware that our senses, through which we perceive the world, are limited to begin with. Dogs, for example, can hear sounds that we are not capable of hearing and butterflies can perceive ultra-violet light.
 
Never-the-less, our five senses take in approximately 2 million bits of information per second. These pieces of information then pass through a number of perception filters where they are deleted, distorted and generalised until we are left with roughly 134 bits of information per second from which we construct our ‘truth’. I’m sure you’ll agree that this doesn’t provide us with a very accurate perception of reality.
 
Plato, in ‘Republic’, describes the effect of education, using the analogy of a group of people who have lived all their lives chained to the blank wall of a cave. These people watch the shadows cast by things which pass in front of a fire outside the cave’s entrance. They give names and meaning to these shadows. This is as close as they get to the ‘truth’ of their reality.
 
To Plato, the philosopher was like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows do not make up reality at all. He believed it was possible to perceive the truth of reality once your eyes adjusted to the light of the sun.
 
I don’t believe that NLP offers the ‘truth’, but it offers techniques which can allow you to see things from a different angle, to find solutions where none seemed possible, find paths where there had previously been dead ends. As my NLP trainer wisely told me: ‘If perception is projection, you might as well focus on the good shit!’