Lewis, I would say there is a wide overlapping of CBT and NLP application, I think you and Mike Yapko are right.  Sometimes things develop interesting parallels at the same time, and sometimes there's an interbreeding.  A systematic questioning process talked about in a book by Aaron Beck's daughter, sort of an intro to CT, is suspiciously similar to the Meta Model, for instance.  But since CT and CBT are part of the *official* "psychology," all of its elements are statiststically tested a piece at a time, and then recompiled.  One of my arguments against this process is that it has a profound effect on the aesthetics (there goes that word again) of the over-all design.  Since state management is, or is at least similar to, a form of aesthetics, itself, the design process will always somewhat determine the change process.  And perhaps my point is too Rouseauian or even Taoist, but what I believe is missing from CBT is an elegance which seems to be at the highest level of NLP values.  This is true with analysis, as well.  Another commonality between analysis and NLP is that the change agent does an enormous amount of themselves before touching anyone else, which is not something I hear happening in PhD programs, where CT and CBT are religion. My analyst friend already thought I was a fine analyst, but lost faith in me once I started learning that "Tony Robbins stuff."  But he's read some Erickson, at least, and has begun to appreciate the ideas a bit, which makes sense, since I think most of his work is a metaphor exchange -- what they call "free association." best, JS