Hello. This thread has been about a principle, which I define as: 1. the subjective connotations of your client's communication, when changed by you, needlessly and undesirably manipulate your client's experience. I might argue principle (1) case-by-case against each person who posts some example of his or her action in therapy.  The following concepts could be useful in each such argument. 2. statement synonymy 3. deductive entailment 4. analytic predication 5. synthetic predication 5. necessary truths 6. contingent truths 7. statement presupposition 8. syntactic ambiguity 9. semantic ambiguity 10. semantic vagueness 11. illocutionary intent 12. perlocutionary intent. Personally, from what I know of Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, it's use can be ethical in the ordinary sense, and understanding of those ethics is well-defined. When I write about ethical hypnotherapy use, ethical in the ordinary sense, I'm referring to use that follows the utilitarian ethical policy: 13. make a decision based on your determination of what will best provide for the interests of yourself and others, given that your interests can't count any more than the interests of anyone else involved in the consequences of your decision, and given that you disregard individual differences between the people involved in the consequences of your decision. Whether or not ethical communication can violate principle (1), I'm predisposed to think that: 14. a therapist should not purposefully divide, reduce, or remove the conscious attention of the client from the therapist's verbal communication content. 15. a therapist should reinforce the propositional content of his or her verbal communication with his or her paraverbal communication content. (in some cases, paraverbals might provide additional propositional content, rather than reinforce verbal content).  Alternatively, the therapist can leave out some paraverbal communication during verbal communication with a client. 16.  A therapist should not utilize metaphorical communication.  I'm against metaphorical therapeutic communication, in the therapy context, simply because I believe that a therapy client will interpret a therapeutic metaphor with less flexibility and reserve than the client needs.  Vague, ambiguous, metaphorical statements need to be interpreted with great flexibility (including the flexibility to reject the metaphor entirely), and greater reserve (including thorough, worthwhile conscious and unconscious checks of the metaphor's suggestions against the client's accurate recollection of the past behavior of the client).  Note that my opinion (16) is not a statement that I'm against code words in therapy.  Code words are fine by me.  My predisposition to have opinions (14), (15), and (16) might change, if my beliefs about the attitudes and capabilities of NLP therapists changed.  I was thinking about my experience and knowledge of NLP therapy practice, to date, when I formed opinions (14), (15), and (16). -nj