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XPeggy Guglielmino E-mail: peggy0027@googlemail.com Info: Posts by the author (9)

Overcoming the seemingly insurmountable – NLP Case Study #2

One of my clients today is a young woman who has been diagnosed with clinical depression. Amy is 34 years old and she’s been recommended from her best friend, Clare, who came to see me for the same problem.

Clare was amazingly easy to work with and completely recovered after only five sessions. She was already doing much better than when she was diagnosed a few months before, and wanted my help to gain confidence she could manage to stay well when getting off her anti depressant tablets. I started with doing an anchoring process, followed by a long detailed future pace, and Clare reported that this first session made all the difference.

In the following sessions, we merely reinforced this very significant change and worked on her limiting belief that getting off the medicine was going to trigger a relapse. I did a lot of reframing around that, and used a few metaphors/embedded commands to allow her to realize it was just a belief and didn’t have to be this way. She left the session pretty convinced that she would be fine and in the update she sent me a few weeks after she was fine indeed! Completely drug free, very happy and confident.

Amy was a different case as her depression seemed to follow some interesting patterns. To begin with, I asked her how often she would say she was feeling depressed and she replied “90% of the time”. I asked her to talk me through in details about those 10%, in order to engage some neurological repatterning.  We reframed her symptoms after checking it was ecological, by pointing out that during these 10% of the time she actually didn’t feel depressed. So rather than saying she had depression, which is according to the Bandler-Grinder meta-model a nominalization, we could look at it from a different perspective and ask “what is depressing you?” instead; it is surely more useful for her to focus on the fact she’s thinking depressive thoughts rather than having depression.

That new approach was a turning point for Amy who suddenly realized that she wasn’t a victim of the illness; she had options and could do something about it as it “only” came from her thoughts! She immediately reported how light she suddenly felt and mentioned that she always had those bouts of depression in her life when she had issues in her relationships….On the second session, Amy told me she was feeling much better and only felt depressed 10% of the time since our last session. She noticed again that those times only took place when she was arguing with her boyfriend.

We discussed in depth those situations as it is obviously her core issue, talked about the possible options she had and created a plan of action. To feel so much more in control, to take it step by step and to realize she actually had a choice regarding how she was leading her relationship and whether she wanted to continue with it completely alleviated her depressed feelings even before we engaged in some deep hypnotherapy/NLP processes.

Sometimes when someone is diagnosed with clinical depression and told to take some anti depressant it puts a huge burdens on their shoulders as they begin to believe that they’re suffering from an irreversible illness. If it is sometimes the case, in a lot of situations it is only a temporary state that could be changed very quickly with proper tools as we’ve seen with Amy.  It is very important to take the time to find out as much information as possible when a client first comes to see you, as sometimes a simple “sleight of mouth” can produce some huge shifts in their beliefs and sort out what seemed an insurmountable problem in the first place!

Filed Under NLP & Hypnotherapy