By Oluwafunke Allen
People occasionally ask me what “NLP” means after I mention it, usually with a slightly worried look, as if I’m about to hypnotize them into confessing something. Let me put that fear to rest immediately. NLP — NeuroLinguistic Programming — is a communication framework developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, building on earlier clinical work by Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls. I trained in it under Innocent Usar specifically because I wanted more than good instincts in the room. I wanted techniques — and I’ve found several of its tools genuinely effective, practical expressions of truths Scripture already teaches about the mind, memory, and the body. So let’s demystify two of the ones I use most: reframing and anchoring.
Reframing: the meaning was never fixed, only familiar
Here’s the plain version. Reframing is the practice of taking an event and consciously offering it a different, equally true meaning than the one someone has been carrying automatically. It doesn’t deny what happened. It questions the single interpretation someone has attached to it, usually without ever realising they chose it. A husband once described his wife’s need to double-check plans with him before finalising them as her “not trusting him,” and it had quietly wounded him for years. In the room, we looked at it from another angle entirely — that her checking in was, in fact, a form of including him, of treating his input as necessary rather than optional. Same behaviour. Completely different meaning. Nothing about her actual habit changed in that session. What changed was the story he’d been telling himself about what it meant, and the story had been doing all the damage — not the habit itself. That’s reframing: finding the other true thing that was available the whole time, and choosing it deliberately instead of the wound the person had picked by default.
Romans 12:2 says, “be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That’s not abstract theology — it’s the mechanism, named precisely. Transformation in a marriage very often starts exactly there, in the mind, in the meaning attached to an event, before it ever shows up as changed behaviour. Renew the meaning, and the relationship to the behaviour often shifts on its own.
Anchoring: giving your body a shortcut back to calm
Anchoring works differently, and it’s simpler than it sounds. It’s the deliberate pairing of a physical or sensory cue — a breath, a touch, a specific word — with a calm, grounded emotional state, practiced enough times outside of conflict that the cue can later pull the calm state back up during conflict, when you’d otherwise be flooded and reactive. I’ll walk a couple through recalling, in vivid detail, a moment they both genuinely felt safe and connected — and while that calm is present in the room, we attach a small physical cue to it. A hand placed flat on the sternum. A specific word said quietly. Practiced enough times when calm is already accessible, the cue becomes a shortcut back to that state later, in the middle of an actual argument, when the nervous system has otherwise taken over and rational conversation has become nearly impossible. It’s not a trick. It’s training your body to have an exit route back to itself before you say the thing you can’t take back.
Why the tool is never actually the point
I want to be honest about something: these techniques are useful, but they’re not magic, and I’d never want a couple leaving my office thinking a hand gesture fixed their marriage. What both tools actually do is create just enough space — a different meaning, a moment of physiological calm — for two people to hear each other clearly enough to do the real work themselves. The technique opens the door. It doesn’t walk through it for you.
Philippians 4:8 gives the underlying instruction both tools are quietly built on: “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest… think on these things.” Reframing is choosing which true thing to think on, deliberately, instead of the one that wounds by default. Anchoring is training your body to get back to a state where thinking clearly is even possible in the first place.
What this looks like practically
Next time you catch yourself certain about what your spouse’s action “means,” pause and ask whether there’s an equally true, less damaging interpretation available — there very often is. And build a calm-down cue with your spouse deliberately, before you need it, not in the middle of your next hard conversation when it’s already too late to practice.
The line I want you to keep
Neither reframing nor anchoring changes what happened. Both change what you do with it next — and that difference is often the entire gap between a fight that repeats forever and one that finally resolves. The book walks through both of these in far more detail, with the actual scripts I use in session.
