I wish I'd paid enough attention to have some idea of what the NLP practitioner tried, but it didn't work.
In principle, a true practitioner wouldn't give up after just one thing that didn't work. Bandler himself was all about, "if you test right away, you can find out whether something works, and if it doesn't, try something else." Hmmm... a bit like Quirrelmort in HP:MOR, now that I think of it. Actually, Bandler seems to share many other qualities with Quirrelmort, now that I'm thinking of it. ;-)
Do you have ideas about what to do if there are months of repeated words about a problem being unsolvable?
I don't think I understand you. That question is like an equation with lots of terms missing. For example, where are these repeated words? Who is saying them, or are they written?
(One of the reasons I describe NLP's linguistic metamodel as a key rationalist toolkit is because it's a set of challenges that can be applied to statements or questions to identify what it is that you don't know or don't understand about what somebody has just said. Originally, in fact, all NLP was, was the idea that by examining the language people use, you could identify flawed assumptions in their thinking and help them to change it.)
Also, what to you think of Core Transformation?
That one of its key premises is correct: when we do things in order to feel certain basic states, we experience problems in the form of addictive, compulsive, or aversive behaviors. But if we act from a place of already having those desirable states, then we experience choice and preference and motivation instead.
A further premise is also correct: if you also disapprove of your needs, you'll experience a divided self. But the assumption that this then creates "parts" or subpersonalities (Like HP:MOR's inner house members), I think that is incorrect. We don't really have such parts, they are simply a metaphorical way of describing something. It's technically incorrect, and also unnecessary to actually changing things.
For a while I worked with a streamlined version of the Core Transformation process, but later abandoned it in favor of various further-simplified models that address reduced components of the same sort of problems, and which go more directly after the erroneous assumptions or rules that we have about when we allow ourselves to feel certain things.
The practitioner may have tried two or three things, but it was a volunteer from the crowd situation, so I suppose he was trying to cut his losses.
My friend kept repeating roughly the same arguments to me about why he couldn't feel better about his situation. I rather suspect I've done something similar in regards to some of my problems.
In re Core Transformation: I've read the book more than once. It sounds very plausible, but when I try asking myself about my motivations, they form cycles rather than (as the book) a straight line to the basic motivations....
I just heard a comment by Braddock of Lovesystems that was brilliant: All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds. So be careful how you phrase your question.
Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home. You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"
If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like
X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))
and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.
But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like
why people forget things
looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,
"Because you are a moron."
Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.
If you instead ask your brain something more specific, such as, "What can I do to help me remember my security pass tomorrow?", thus requiring its answer to refer to you and actions to remember things and tomorrow, your brain may come up with something useful, such as, "Set up a reminder now that will notify you tomorrow morning by cell phone to bring your security pass."
So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.