Russian Dolls

I was reading a blog this morning on NLP and they mentioned how a lot of practitioners don’t know what process or technique to use with their clients. Because they are focused on the processes rather than being focused on the person’s needs.

When I train my Person Centred NLP/Hypnotherapy course, I remind my students that I’m only teaching them those NLP processes so they can later on draw on them or even more importantly use only part of them to match the needs that their clients bring into the session.

This morning my client came in requesting my help to deal with her recent break up. She was still hanged onto the guy, felt angry with him and didn’t feel she could manage alone to move on. So I thought of doing a couple of grieving processes, such as the De-cording one (invented I believe by Connirae Andreas) as well as a lovely process I call The Cloud that involves identifying what the person got from the relationship and access those resources in a more direct way.

In the middle of the decording process, my client got stuck in her anger for her ex, and decided she needed to let go of that feeling before being able to move further. So I drew part of Dilts’s reimprinting process, giving her inner representation of her ex-boyfriend the resources he was missing in order to be able to symbolically handle the break up the way my client needed.

But as soon as that part was dealt with, she got in touch with the remnant of a limiting belief we’ve addressed last week, that she is not worthy of love. We had performed a lovely reimprinting process on that belief in our last session, got some amazing shifts, and she just needed to recall the new empowering words of her Dad that we had created during that process.

We then went back to the decording process and she felt she couldn’t fully let go of her ex. Because this time she needed the grieving Cloud process, even though I had planned to do it after the decording. So off we went into the Cloud, in order to finish the decording, using bits of reimprinting here and there.

I finished the session future pacing my client, and that’s when we realised she needed to do the re-cording bit of her decording process with the symbolic future man of her life. So we worked on her future timeline, linking her with her new potential partner whilst finishing the future pacing.

I felt I was playing with Russian dolls all along integrating one process in another, and my clients concluded the session feeling much better and able to let go of her past relationship. I don’t believe she would have been able to go there so quickly if I had only used a standard process the way I had been taught. It’s a little bit like juggling; you need different balls in order to make it work.

Let me know your thoughts on which processes you find useful to combine for the good of your clients!

Related articles

• What is Person Centred NLP? (personcentrednlp.wordpress.com)

Confident or Arrogant?

One of the most common issues people bring in therapy is lack of confidence. Whether it’s confidence in themselves or confidence in doing something. And that is generally closely linked with a lack of self-esteem. But what’s the difference between self-esteem and self- confidence?

My interpretation of it is that self-esteem is the ability to recognise one’s qualities and self confidence is the ability to recognise one’s skills and abilities in doing something. I often encourage my clients to first work on their self-esteem as I see it as the door to having more confidence.

When I ask my clients how confident they feel on a scale 0 to 10, at first they rarely reach further than a 6 or 7 at the best. And when we explore what stops them from being confident up to a 9 or a 10, one of the first answers I get is “If I’m too confident I’m scared of becoming arrogant.” sounds familiar? Therefore it’s quite important to explore the differences between arrogance and confidence. How would you describe the difference?

After having asked that question to many clients and to my NLP course students over the years, I noticed that the difference can be summed up in a simple statement: Being arrogant is stating your strength and qualities whilst putting down the interlocutor, whilst being confident is simply acknowledging your strength and qualities. Hence the main difference between being arrogant and confident is the intention behind the statement you make.

It is also very interesting to notice that most people who come across being arrogant are in fact quite insecure and the arrogance is often a smokescreen or a coping mechanism to hide those fragilities.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on that topic; Do you have another way to explain the difference between the two? I’m looking forward to engage in a fascinating discussion with you, so please drop me a line in the comment section!

When the quick phobia cure doesn’t work

Richard Bandler put together his fast phobia cure a few years ago and supposedly in 10 minutes manages to free people from their phobia. In my experience however – and the one of a few of my NLP colleagues, it’s rarely that straight forward.

The brain learns and changes very quickly, therefore it’s indeed essential to do some processes at high-speed as it’s the key to destabilize old running patterns. A lot of people get rid of their phobia with a quick NLP approach, however sometimes a client might need a few different processes to completely overcome the complexity of their phobia.

But first, let’s explore where phobia come from as it might play a role on which approach is needed to cure it. It is fascinating to realise how a life time phobia can sometimes come from a single scary event, and that raises an interesting question as to why in some situations the brain can learn instantly something on a permanent basis when other times it takes ages to learn other things. There’s a saying in french that goes “you need to forget something 7 times before being able to remember it”. When I was learning English, I very often would learn a word then forget it, then learn it again and so on for a few times before it would stick. So why can’t we learn languages or other academics subjects as quick as the brain learns to develop a phobia? The key answer  is the level of emotional response involved in the learning. The unconscious mind will learn from a terrifying one-off event in order to protect us from future threats. The emotions will be then deeply associated with that situation which embedds the learnings extremely efficiently. That indicates cleary that the brain learns best when emotions are engaged.

Sometimes however, the phobia seems to have always been there. I used to suffer from a wasp phobia (those of you who have seen me run around like crazy whenever one was close enough might remember how much fun that was to watch 🙂 ), however I had never been stung by a wasp before developing that phobia. After analyzing the root cause of it, I discovered that when I was a baby, my mum was terrified I could be stung when sleeping in my cot. Even though she herself isn’t scared of wasps. My unconscious mind must have picked up on her fear and as I didn’t have the critical filters from my conscious mind in place yet (the conscious mind’s filters tend to develop around 6 or 7 years old), I fully took on her fear and made it mine without questioning it.

I have been working a lot with phobia recently and also discovered that a lot of people get their phobia simply because their parents or older siblings had that phobia in the first place, and as todlers we learn by modelling our significant others. So if your parents suffer from a phobia, you are likely to become yourself phobic. One of my best friend has got a spider phobia, and everytime a spider appears, she screams. So her daugther learnt from a very early age that the appropriate response to have in front of a spider is to scream and be scared. And that’s how a lot of phobia are developed. So it’s worth considering healing your own phobia before thinking of having children, if you don’t want to pass it on!

Today I saw a client with a spider phobia, and on our first session I mentioned I had a plastic spider in my bag. She panicked and was on the verge of tears at the thought of it. Considering the extent of her phobia, I chose to do first a part integration process in order to address her secondary gain – protection – that appeared to be very strong. If you don’t address the secondary gain before doing the phobia cure, it’s likely not going to work or last.

After the first session, she felt more comfortable but still was quite terrified. On the second session, when I mentioned getting my plastic spider out of my bag, her unconscious communication clearly signalled that she wasn’t ready for it. So I did the phobia cure on her – an extended version, not the fast one, and at the end of it she felt better but I could tell she wasn’t totally sorted.

So I saw her today for the third time. She had managed to stay in the same room as a spider during the past week and her reactions were much less dramatic. So we looked into her unconscious strategy to create the phobia and more specifically her internal visual representation of a spider. And as I suspected, it was completely distorted and exaggerated. The spider was oversized, very close up and out of context, i.e there wasn’t any background in the picture. So we installed a new strategy based on the one she unconsciously uses with insects she’s fine being around, whilst using anchoring and pattern breaking. At the end of the session, she asked for my plastic spider and spent 20mn playing around with it!

Every client is different, all patterns are different, and processes are only crutches to help you help your clients. And the key – and the principle behind NLP – is to first understand the structure of your client’s internal patterns before knowing how to start changing them. So I do believe Bandler’s quick phobia cure works in some instances, but it all depends on the patterns that are running, perhaps also where the phobia come from and it is essential to adapt the treatment to all those variables in order to make it the most effective.