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XPeggy Guglielmino E-mail: peggy0027@googlemail.com Web Site: http://www.lifetherapycentre.com Info: Posts by the author (4)

NLP Case Study #1: working with trauma

(This is a real case study – names have been changed)

My first client today was Carol, a lady suffering from depression and high level of stress, who has been coming to see me for a few months. Carol had been recommended to me by her husband, Peter, who had weight issues and got amazing results in only 4 sessions (he lost two stones in a month.)

Carol had been abused physically and sexually as a child and suffered all her life from the aftermath.It quickly appeared that Carol’s core issues were lying in her sense of self-worth.

Very often young victims of abuse develop a sense of guilt and question their inner worth as a survival mechanism and carry this burden into and throughout their adult life. It affects their relationships and their health, like Carol, for example, who put on a lot of weight after the trauma to unconsciously appear unattractive and avoid further abuse.

Carol’s case is one of the most complicated ones I had to see in my practice as there’s a complex underlying net of core issues that are deeply embedded.

Robert Dilts reimprinting process was extremely useful when working with Carol, as it involves rewriting the past at the unconscious level whilst injecting in it the resources that were missing at the time.  However, Carol saw another hypnotherapist a few years ago who wasn’t careful enough and allowed her to associate into her trauma (something obviously strongly not recommended).  As a result, Carol developed a phobia of facing her past, which can be tricky when you need to work on it!

I decided to do Bandler’s quick phobia cure on her and in one session her long standing phobia was gone.  We could then work much deeper and start to create some significant changes, using processes such as Dilts’ reimprinting, or Connirae Andreas’s core transformation. It took a few months to tackle all of Carol’s issues linked with her trauma, but a few weeks ago Carol came in very excited as the previous session had been a turning point in the therapy;  She told me she had never been as happy as she was now and felt her issues were deeply getting sorted out. Today, Carol is a really different woman, setting her boundaries, not allowing anyone to step on her feet and she’s learning to respect her needs and love herself. Her personal relationships are much healthier, she handles the pressure at work much better and she’s able to do things she hadn’t been able to do for the past 20 years. We’re currently devising a plan for her weight loss as she now recognizes that she no longer needs this unconscious protection.

This type of results is very rewarding, especially when you’ve built a strong rapport with a client. I’ve rarely felt a stronger satisfaction than seeing in the eyes of someone who had been suffering for years a glint of hope and happiness. NLP is not just a quick fix tool for stop smoking or lose weight. It can also be used as a deep therapy technique, in combination with other processes, to work on complex cases in a much briefer way than traditional therapy.

One of the most interesting aspects of this work is to be able to help people; everyone is different, and everyone needs a different approach to their issues, and as a practitioner you never know what will work for a specific client. It keeps you on your feet, creates some new challenges and allows you to develop a great deal of creativity and intuition. It’s definitively the most gratifying job I’ve done so far!

Filed Under A Day in a Coaching Life

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