In reply to your statement, ‘do we need to always mirror the person in front of us to achieve rapport?’
The era post the ‘decade of the brain’ is the era of neural application, where NLP terms for “mirroring and matching” now have much more meaning. Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron fire in your brain allowing you to “read” and understand another’s intentions, and so develop a sophisticated “theory of other minds.” (Rizolatti and Craighero, 2004)
Modern neuroscience indicates that the ‘person’ of the therapist is more important than their knowledgebase or their ‘tools of trade’, such as hypnotic language patterns etc. Research shows that the therapeutic alliance and limbic mirror neuron effect are far more crucial. Siegel (1999) suggests that what is important is the attunement of the therapist to the micro moments of the interaction with the client-tone of voice, facial expressions, posture, motion, eye gaze etc. Schore (1994) calls this right brain to right brain connection, the “implicit nonverbal affect-laden communication [that] directly represents the attachment dynamic”. These right brain-to-right brain intersubjective transactions lie at the core of the therapeutic relationship and are what Sander (1992) calls ‘‘moments of meeting’’ between patient and therapist.
Erikson instinctively was ahead of his time in this regard and I believe that this is his legacy that is important, far more than that which is deemed “Eriksonian Hypnotherapy”.

Rizzolatti, G., Craighero, L., 2004. The mirror-neuron system. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 27, 169–192.

Sander, L. (1992). Letter to the Editor. Discussion of Evelyne Schwaber’s “Countertransference: The analyst’s retreat from the patient’s vantage point.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73, 582– 84.

Schore, A. N. (1994). Affect regulation and the origin of the self. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind. New York: Guilford.

Thanks Matt, valued input.

I once spoke to a previous student and a man he worked with as a case study. The case study man had some basic NLP training and fed back to me that the trainee hypnotherapist was trying to get rapport by matching and mirroring and he was put off by it. When I spoke to the student afterwards, he stated that he did not believe in matching and mirroring and never employed it purposely. Any mirroring that had occurred would seem to have happened naturally – but a little knowledge of it by the case study client, ended up harming rapport that had been developed very nicely… Oh the irony!

Cheers.

I very much lean towards the idea that matching and mirroring is no more effective at building rapport than simply being an open, genuine and well socialised human being. Since becoming a student, I have worked on this several times in several situations. I tend to find that as I am trying to match and mirror it is sometimes detrimental to rapport because I am so busy doing this that I actually fail to pay attention to the meaning that the speaker is communicating with me regardless of whether i hear the words. In this respect, I feel that the speaker might perceive me as being disengaged or disinterested. However, when I let myself go naturally… well I seem to be able to create rapport quite easily. One point that I feel is useful though is to ensure we match the ‘pace’ of the communication. Certainly if someone comes speaking to me at 100mph in an over excited tone, but I am feeling in a rather introverted mood, this is more likely to annoy me than build rapport with me. I think establishing balance is the key.

If it feels unnatural, it will look unnatural.

Thank you for your reply Paula.
The main reason so many facets of hypnosis go hand in hand with NLP is because (as you’ll know) NLP was modelled on Erickson’s hypnosis work. However, most things in NLP were modelled from elsewhere and can be found originating in many other disciplines.
The field of hypnotherapy is a very different one to that of Erickson hypnosis and has hugely more to it than Erickson’s work, some of which does not stand up well to researchers scrutiny. However, the language he used may not prove to be any more efficacious for therapeutic results, I do love it and incorporate it in much of my own work.
Great hearing from you, I send you my very best wishes, A.

I am a hypnotist, and was trained in Ericksonian hypnosis by two wonderful NLP experts, but I am still skeptical about NLP. ,NLP and hypnosis seem to go hand in hand in this field–it’s hard to find a hypnotist who doesn’t dabble in it. I look forward to reading Heap’s paper.