Why NLP Doesn't Hold a Candle to TRTP

(And Why You're Not Failing — The Approach Is)

Surface versus structure: cognitive depth

You've done the work.

Really done it. Therapy. Coaching. Mindset courses. Probably a retreat or two. You've read the books, understood your patterns, shifted your perspective, rebuilt your relationship with yourself. You can articulate exactly why you react the way you do, and you've got a toolkit of strategies to manage it.

And yet.

You're still there at 11pm, replaying a conversation with your neurodivergent child, feeling that familiar tightness in your chest. Your brain is doing laps: "Should I have said something different? Did I handle that okay? Did I mess them up?" You've already applied three different reframes, and none of them are working. The affirmations feel hollow when you're this tired.

You're still snapping at your partner over something small, like they loaded the dishwasher "wrong" (which is ridiculous, you know this), because your nervous system is already at capacity. One more demand, one more small thing, and you're done. Toast. Shutdown mode activated. Then you feel terrible about it and spend the next hour in a shame spiral that no amount of self-compassion can actually touch.

You're still white-knuckling through perimenopause, managing everyone's needs but your own, wondering when the mindset work is actually supposed to feel easy. You've got your affirmations. You know about your nervous system. You understand the science. You're literally thinking yourself into calm, breath by breath, minute by minute, day after day. Which is exhausting. And the fact that it's exhausting makes you feel like you're failing at the thing you're supposed to be good at, taking care of yourself.

You're not broken. And you haven't failed.

But I'm going to suggest something that might sting a little: you've been trying to solve a nervous system problem with a cognitive solution. And no amount of insight, reframing, or positive thinking can override a brain that's genuinely convinced it's under threat.

This is why NLP doesn't hold a candle to TRTP. And it's not because NLP is bad. It's because it was never designed for what you're actually dealing with.

The Seductive Promise of NLP (And Why It Works — Until It Doesn't)

Let me be fair to NLP first. It's genuinely brilliant at what it does.

NLP emerged in the 1970s from a simple, elegant premise: if you can change the way someone thinks about something, you can change how they respond to it. Language shapes neurology. Neurology shapes behaviour. Shift the mental representation, and everything downstream shifts with it.

For certain challenges, this works beautifully. Sales performance, public speaking anxiety, habit formation, sports psychology, these are areas where NLP has a stellar track record. And I mean that.

If you're a capable professional who needs to build confidence, reframe limiting beliefs, or develop new thought patterns, NLP is still a legitimate tool. It can help you:

• Recognise how you're mentally representing a situation

• Change that representation through visualisation or linguistic reframing

• Install new neural pathways through repetition and anchoring

• Create behavioural shifts through meaning-making

The problem is, this entire framework assumes something that's often not true for trauma survivors, burnt-out professionals, or anyone whose nervous system has learned to perceive threat:

It assumes you have conscious access to choice.

Where NLP Breaks Down: The Cognitive Paradox (A Real Example)

Here's what actually happens. You're in the school car park waiting to pick up your kids. Your nervous system is already buzzing from back-to-back meetings and then you get a text from your partner: "Can you grab milk on the way home?"

Your first internal response (before any conscious thought): a flash of resentment. Then immediately: guilt for the resentment. Then: anxiety that you're "not coping well." Then the thought loop starts: "I should be able to handle this. It's just milk. Why am I reacting like this is a disaster? Other people manage more than me. I'm so ungrateful."

Now you're applying your NLP tools. You try to reframe: "This is actually manageable. I can stop at the shops. It's five minutes out of my day."

Intellectually, you know this is true. Completely true. And yet your body is still tense. Your jaw is still clenched. You're still feeling that underlying wrongness underneath the reframe.

So you keep trying. You get more deliberate. You visualise yourself calmly at the shops, confidently grabbing the milk, feeling good about being a "good partner" who helps out. You anchor it to a power gesture you learned. You do the work.

By the time you get to the shops, you've successfully talked yourself into a state of forced calm. You grab the milk. You get home. You hand it over with a smile that doesn't quite reach your eyes.

Your partner, perceptive soul that they are, says: "Are you okay?"

And you snap. Not at them. But at everything. Because you've been using your prefrontal cortex to manage what your nervous system is still screaming about. You've created a gap between what you're thinking and what your system is experiencing. And that gap is exhausting to maintain.

This is the trap of NLP for trauma: it can work. But it requires you to constantly override your nervous system. Which is why you're so bloody tired all the time.

The Neuroscience Nobody Talks About: Implicit vs. Explicit Memory

Here's something most life coaches won't tell you: there are two completely separate memory systems in your brain, and they operate on entirely different logic.

Explicit memory is what you consciously remember. It's narrative, verbal, time-stamped. "When I was seven, my father said I was selfish for wanting something for myself." You can recall that memory, talk about it, understand it contextually. NLP works beautifully with explicit memory because it's accessible to language and logic.

Implicit memory is different. It's pre-verbal, embodied, neurological. It's not a story you remember, it's a truth your nervous system knows. It's the felt sense that you're in danger even when logically you know you're safe. It's the automatic muscle tension when someone raises their voice. It's the physiological shutdown when you face conflict.

Implicit memories don't have words. They can't be reframed. They can't be thought through.

When you were young and learned that your needs made people angry, or your vulnerability was shameful, or your body wasn't safe, that wasn't stored as a narrative memory. It was stored as a nervous system imprint. As a felt truth in your physiology.

Here's a really honest example: You might logically know that your partner loves you and won't leave you if you ask for help. You've reframed this belief a hundred times. You understand where the fear comes from. You've done the work.

But when you try to ask for help, your nervous system goes: "ABORT. DANGER. If you ask for what you need, they will see how broken you are and leave. This has always been true. This is how survival works."

No amount of NLP can convince your amygdala otherwise. Because your amygdala isn't listening to your words. It's running on data encoded in your nervous system from years ago.

This is why you can understand your patterns intellectually and still feel them physically. This is why insight doesn't translate into automatic calm. This is why you can know your child's meltdown isn't a threat to you, and still feel your nervous system react as if it is, heart racing, jaw clenched, ready to fight or flee.

You're trying to update a file that's stored in a language the conscious mind doesn't speak.

The Honest Reckoning: What You've Been Doing Right (And Why It Wasn't Enough)

I want to acknowledge something important here: the mindset work you've done, the therapy, the coaching, it wasn't wasted.

Self-awareness matters. Understanding your patterns matters. Building a stronger sense of self matters. These aren't mistakes.

But those tools were designed to help you manage patterns rooted in trauma, not resolve them.

Think of it this way: if your house is built on an unstable foundation, you can renovate the interior beautifully. You can paint the walls, upgrade the kitchen, rearrange the furniture, install better lighting. It'll look lovely. It'll feel better. You'll be happier in it, genuinely.

But the foundation is still shifting.

Every time the ground moves, perimenopause, a work crisis, your kid's dysregulation, a difficult conversation, someone asking you to do one more thing, the whole structure feels unstable again. Because the foundational problem was never addressed.

Therapy and coaching are invaluable for helping you understand and navigate the interior. They're genuinely useful. But they're not designed to stabilise the foundation. That's not their job.

TRTP is specifically designed to stabilise the foundation, to update the neurological imprint that's been driving everything else.

And here's the crucial bit: once that foundation is stable, all the cognitive tools you've already learned actually work.

TRTP: Resolution, Not Management (And It Actually Requires You to Show Up)

So what does TRTP actually do differently?

The Richards Trauma Process is built on a completely different premise: if the nervous system learned something, the nervous system needs to unlearn it. Not through understanding. Through direct neurological updating.

When a traumatic or overwhelming experience happens, the brain essentially "closes the file" incomplete. It locks in the emotional and physiological response as a survival strategy: "This is dangerous. Remember this. Be ready." The amygdala gets hard-wired to respond to anything even remotely similar with the same survival response.

TRTP accesses that original incomplete imprint, without reliving it, without catharsis, without re-traumatisation, and allows the nervous system to complete the processing. Not by thinking about it differently. By experiencing it as resolved, at a neurological level.

The brain then literally updates its threat file. The amygdala recalibrates. And the automatic reaction simply… stops happening.

But here's the thing that's important to say plainly: TRTP only works if you actually want it to work.

This isn't mystical. It's practical. Your nervous system needs to be willing to update. Which means you need to genuinely desire the resolution, not just think it would be nice to have. You need to be ready to stop protecting yourself with the old patterns. You need to actually want the change, not just want to want it.

This is why TRTP doesn't work for everyone. And it's not because they're broken or resistant. It's because the timing, the readiness, the genuine commitment, these matter. Your system is protecting you with these patterns. Updating them requires a real decision to trust something different.

Assuming you do have that desire (and let's be honest, if you're still reading this, you probably do), here's what happens:

This is why TRTP clients report things like:

• "I used to dread those situations. Now I just feel neutral about them."

• "The trigger is still there, but it doesn't activate me."

• "I feel like myself again, I'm not white-knuckling anymore."

• "I can parent my kids without that constant underlying anxiety."

Not because they've learned new coping strategies. Because the nervous system no longer perceives threat.

And — this is important — because the foundation is stable, all the cognitive tools they already know actually work. The affirmations aren't magical thinking anymore; they're alignment. The boundary-setting isn't defensive; it's genuine. The self-compassion practices aren't self-help feel-goods; they're actually nourishing.

That's the difference between management and resolution.

Why This Matters Right Now (For You, Specifically)

There's a particular convergence happening in your life that makes this distinction crucial.

You're perimenopausal. Your body is undergoing massive hormonal shifts that are directly affecting your nervous system regulation. Oestrogen is dropping. That oestrogen was helping your vagus nerve stay regulated. Now it's not. Your baseline arousal is higher. Your tolerance for stress is lower. Everything feels more intense.

And simultaneously, you're managing children, potentially neurodivergent children, whose nervous systems are also dysregulated in ways that directly trigger yours. Their overwhelm activates your survival response. Your survival response dysregulates them further. It's a feedback loop that makes parenting feel like you're defusing a bomb every single day while your own regulation is literally depleting at a hormonal level.

And you're supposed to stay calm and positive about it. (Honestly, the fact that anyone thought that was realistic is kind of wild.)

This isn't a mindset problem. This is a perfect storm of neurobiological factors that no amount of "positive thinking" can override. Your nervous system is genuinely under siege. Not because you're failing. Because you're managing multiple dysregulated systems simultaneously while your own regulation capacity is depleting.

This is exactly the landscape where NLP breaks down and TRTP becomes transformative.

Because TRTP doesn't ask your nervous system to override itself. It updates the threat assessment so you're not fighting yourself.

The Real Talk: You'll Still Need to Use Your Brain

Here's something I want to be really clear about, because it matters:

TRTP doesn't mean you get to bypass all the cognitive stuff. It doesn't mean you never have to think about your patterns again. It doesn't turn you into some zen unicorn who floats through perimenopause and neurodivergent parenting like it's no big deal.

What it does mean is that using those cognitive tools becomes exponentially easier. Because you're not fighting your nervous system while you're doing it.

The reframes still work, but now they land, because your system isn't contradicting them. The boundaries still require you to be deliberate, but now they don't feel like you're being "mean" or "selfish." The self-compassion practices still matter, but now they actually feel nourishing instead of like one more thing you have to force yourself to do.

It's the difference between paddling a kayak downstream and paddling it upstream. The paddle work is still required. But one direction is so much easier.

You'll still need to be thoughtful. You'll still need to make conscious choices sometimes. You'll still need to understand yourself. Those are life skills, not trauma responses.

But the constant underlying exhaustion of using your prefrontal cortex to manage what your nervous system is screaming about? That goes away.

The Invitation (Not the Promise)

I'm not going to tell you TRTP is magic. It's not. It's a very specific neurological process that works for trauma-rooted patterns, and it doesn't work for everything.

And I'm not going to tell you that once you do TRTP, you'll never have a bad day again or that you'll suddenly love perimenopause or that your neurodivergent kids will stop dysregulating (wouldn't that be nice though).

What I will tell you is this:

If you're intelligent, accomplished, self-aware, and still struggling with reactions you understand but can't seem to shift, if you're managing multiple dysregulated systems while your own nervous system is depleting, if you're tired of having to try so hard just to feel okay, if you've already proven you can think your way through things and you're ready for a different approach…

Then the foundation-level work might be exactly what you're missing.

Because you've already done the cognitive work. You've already built the awareness. You've already developed incredible insight into your patterns.

What if, instead of continuing to manage those patterns with willpower and affirmations and reframes, you could actually resolve them?

What if the tools you've already learned could work with your nervous system instead of against it?

What if you could feel like yourself again, not because you've finally figured out the right mindset, but because your system has genuinely updated its threat assessment?

That's what TRTP is. Not magic. Just foundation work.

And sometimes, that's exactly what was missing all along.