Skilluminati Research

The Bandler Method: Getting Away with Murder, NLP Style

Posted Jul 07, 2007

In the morning Corine Christensen last snorted cocaine, she found herself, straw in hand, looking down the barrel of a .357 Magnum revolver. When the gun exploded, momentarily piercing the autumn stillness, it sent a single bullet on a diagonal path through her left nostril and into her brain.

Christensen slumped over her round oak dining table, bleeding onto its glass top, a loose-leaf notebook, and a slip of yellow memo paper on which she had scrawled, in red ink, DON'T KILL US ALL. Choking, she spit blood onto a wine goblet, a tequila bottle, and the shirt of the man who would be accused of her murder, then slid sideways off the chair and fell on her back. Within minutes she lay still.

As Christensen lay dying, two men left her rented town house in a working-class section of Santa Cruz, California. One was her former boyfriend, James Marino, an admitted cocaine dealer and convicted burglar. The other, Richard Bandler, was known internationally as the cofounder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a controversial approach to psychology and communication. About 12 hours later, on the evening of November 3, 1986, Richard Bandler was arrested and charged with the murder.

To many who knew him, the accusation seemed absurd. For more than a decade Bandler, then 36, had traveled the world teaching NLP to psychologists, salespeople, lawyers, executives, and teachers. His 11 books had sold more than half a million copies, and he had worked as a consultant for major corporations and trained personnel for the army and the CIA. Science Digest had described NLP as potentially "the most important synthesis of knowledge about human communication to emerge since the explosion of humanistic psychology in the '60s."

By November 1986, NLP had grown far beyond Richard Bandler and its California roots. Tens of thousands of people, many of them therapists, had studied its blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and positive thinking at colleges and NLP training centers in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Psychology Today, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications had written about it. A man named Tony Robbins had made himself famous using NLP to teach people to walk barefoot across hot coals; his book, Unlimited Power, had become a best-seller. Yet Bandler had remained a prominent member of the NLP community, revered as its founder, hailed as a great teacher, acclaimed as a genius.

His legal defense seemed disarmingly simple: he said James Marino had killed Corine Christensen. Dozens of colleagues and friends rallied behind Bandler, establishing the Richard Bandler Defense Fund, a newsletter, and a telephone hot line. More than 50 supporters -- businesspeople, psychologists, even a deputy sheriff -- wrote to the court in a successful campaign to reduce his bail. A former Louisiana State University professor suggested Bandler had "possibly improved the lives of more people today than any other living therapist."

But Christensen's death and the ensuing investigation would illuminate a different Bandler -- a man who used large amounts of cocaine and alcohol, a man obsessed with violence. So too would they indirectly shed light on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. For by 1986 NLP had become for Bandler a near-perfect expression of his own troubled life, an extended intellectual justification for his failure to confront the demons that surely tormented him.

Bandler's story is, in a sense, a parable of the New Age. Having rejected many of the boundaries that govern relations among people, he was like a sailor without anchor or sails, adrift in a peculiarly New Age sea. Here the individual was sovereign; problems were solved easily and self-examination was denigrated; the past could be reimagined at will, and morality was relative. Here Bandler could deny not only guilt, but all responsibility for the death of Corine Christensen.

Although Bandler was never a guru in any traditional sense, his supporters showed him a profound trust vastly out of proportion to his character. In the topsy-turvy world he helped create, it was not wrong for a therapist to pull a gun on a student -- if the therapist was Richard Bandler. And in the wake of Christensen's murder, his followers clung to an idea not unlike his own -- that, as one put it, he was simply "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

DOWNLOAD "THE BANDLER METHOD" -- eye-opening Mother Jones article

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