Category Archives: Case studies

When the NLP fast 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 change very quickly, therefore it’s indeed essential to do some processes in a high-speed as it’s the key to destabilize old running patterns. A lot of clients get rid of their phobia with a basic NLP approach, however sometimes a client might need a few different processes to completely overcome the complexity of their phobia.

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 – the normal 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.

 

Feeling safe

When I trained to be an NLP practitioner, I’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for clients wanting to be safe, secure or protected; those outcomes are ill-formed in the sense that they unconsciously trigger the question “safe/secure/protected from what?” therefore drive the client to access the very negative thing they’re actually trying to run away from. I think that’s a very important point when you’re gathering information during your case history.

 

So for many years when I was doing a part integration or a core transformation process, when my client came up with those outcomes in the positive intention chain, I made sure I moved them towards a more positive outcome.

 

Until Jane came into my practice. Jane’s history is one of physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, and she had been understandably deeply affected by that all her life. I spent a few months working with her until we could even begin addressing the abuse issues, and one day we were doing a core transformation process and during the elicitation of the intention chain, Jane kept looping between safety, security and protection. I didn’t manage to bring her to a higher level and that’s when it hit me.

 

For survivors of abuse, actually, safety is one of the key outcome. Because as a child, safety is one of the first fundamental need, and when you’re a victim of that kind of trauma,  it’s taken away from you. And no matter if it’s an ill-formed outcome for some NLP practitioner, I’ve learnt with Jane that even before you can aim for higher or more positive core state, you need to help your clients to fulfil this essential need that wasn’t met as a child.

 

This realisation helped me to change my approach. I still agree that safety, security and protection are what some people call sometimes “away-from” and I do challenge them in my coaching sessions or whilst eliciting the well-formed outcomes.

 

However it’s a completely different matter when addressing trauma and abuse, and I do stress the importance once again in focusing on your client needs when appropriate, over following some rules you’ve learnt during your training. As sometimes, like in my experience, you could miss out on the key element that could make all the difference.

 

So when working on those issues now, I tend to first start with fulfilling those unmet needs with some re-parenting using a transactional analysis approach for example, and a lot of timeline work or rewriting the past before moving my client to higher outcomes using some more traditional NLP and Hypnotherapy techniques. I found that it is much more effective in creating deeper and significant changes. Have you had similar experiences? let me know your thoughts!

 

Quick fix or temporary fix?

One of the common theme I find when looking at the NLP world is the quick fix approach. I was reading today a blog by one of the most respected NLP pioneer, Steve Andreas, on resolving hate and anger. And his first case study got me thinking, once again, about the danger of the quick fix NLP approach.

Through changing submodalities, Steve Andreas helps his client to change the unwanted submodalities of the angry image and voice to the most resourceful ones. And get a pretty good result in a very short period of time. However, when he checks on his client a few weeks later, Fred reports that he hasn’t been able to maintain the changes in relation to his father. And Andreas to conclude that sometimes the sessions reveals “some other aspects of the problem that need to be addressed.” I totally agree with that conclusion.

The problem being that a lot of the time, clients won’t get back to you if the process hasn’t worked, or won’t have the courage to admit it didn’t work if you’re thorough in your following up with them. And most practitioners anyway don’t follow up on their clients. So they’re left believing they did a wonderful job with their clients during the session when actually, they only witnessed a temporary shift.

In the person centred approach and in my own practice, I insist in taking the time to get to know my clients well, to build rapport, to take quite a deep and profound case history before even moving on to the processes. Not only do I do this to gather more information, but also to get a sense of who my client is. To learn to read their non verbal communication. To build the trust, so that if the processes don’t work on them, they’ll feel confident enough to let me know so we can improve their situations.

In addition, there’s something else that I feel is worth reflecting on. I know that NLP is a solution-focused approach and not a problem-focused approach like other traditional therapies. However, when someone comes in with deep anger issues, and in the pure NLP style you only focus on changing this anger with submodalities or parts integration, you might miss out on the core of the problem.

I believe feelings are here for a reason. I believe they’re here to tell us about boundaries violation or unmet needs, for example in the case of anger. And wanting to cure the anger too quickly might prevent you to work on the real issues, which would be deeply rooted in the past. And in my experience, at the end of the day, you’ll eventually have to come to work on those roots otherwise the changes won’t last anyway.

So rather than running away from the root causes and quickly move on to finding solution, why not actually taking the time to learn about what happened? Not in too much details, of course, as we don’t want to reactivate the neuro-pathways linked to the problem. But enough so we can work directly on the core issues and by doing so perhaps sorting out the issues quicker than spending weeks trying to work on changing the behaviour rather than healing the wounds…

Which means that instead of only working with submodalities, you might need to explore deeper processes, like reimprinting, core transformation or time line therapy. Whilst combining if needed Gestalt chair work with re-parenting the inner child using a TA approach. And that’s the bit of therapy I’m so interested about. All those brilliant processes you can integrate to the existing NLP approach to go into the depth of the human complexity, into deep root causes and start to help create amazing lasting changes.

It’s not you, it’s me

My client this morning brought an interesting dilemma. He was at work last week and one of his customer asked his opinion on other traders in the field. Having a nice rapport already with that regular customer, my client allowed himself to share his thoughts on that subject, which actually weren’t very positive…

On his way home, he got a bit worried, wondering if he had done the right thing in being so honest on that topic with a customer. He asked his girlfriend her opinion and she got very wound up and angry with him, criticising the fact that “he always talks too much”. My client was puzzled as her reaction seemed overly strong and felt very guilty about it all. He immediately asked me to schedule an appointment.

When John went into details about the story, it seemed he couldn’t find any controversy in what he had shared with his customer, as he was very careful in not mentioning any names and only giving a general opinion. Through some coaching, we quickly realised that John didn’t think there was an issue in him talking too much actually, he had simply adopted his girlfriend’s beliefs that he did something wrong.

Digging deeper it appeared that a few months ago, John had shared with his best friend that his girlfriend had previously suffered from depression. Justine got very upset as she understandably felt quite protective of this aspect of her life ; she probably felt betrayed in being exposed to a third party without her permission. And since that incident, she had been very sensitive every time John was openly sharing some information.

That was quite a breakthrough for John as he actually realised that her criticism had actually not much to do with him, but simply was showing the fact that his girlfriend had some issues – that can be very legitimate – around her depression and him sharing some private information. It is therefore important to recognise the difference between what others believe are right or wrong and what we stand for.

I’ve read a wonderful quote recently that sums up very well the dynamic of this pattern: “When people predict your doom, undermine your dreams or criticise you, remember they’re telling you their stories, not yours.”

We all have a different model of the world and our reactions to external events are bound to be influenced by our subjective perceptions. Our beliefs and values, our past experience and much more will shape how we interpret events and how we respond to them. So most of the time our reactions are merely the mirror of what’s going on in our internal experience rather than a detached response to what’s presented to us.

But too often we mistake the map for the reality and try to impose our beliefs on others by criticising them when they don’t behave according to our standards. Sometimes we may simply forget that they follow their values which are simply different from ours, but as valid…

Have you ever been in such a situation? I’m interested to hear your thoughts!

 

Do you want to play the Unconscious mind game?

There’s a challenge I’ve been facing quite often when working with the unconscious mind using NLP and hypnotherapy. As I mentioned before, I use hypnosis as a door to the unconscious mind, because I’ve found that engaging that part of our mind in making changes is much more effective than just working at the conscious level.

Coming back to the 81 years old client I was telling you about last time, I learnt something very important whilst working with her recently. One of the very powerful processes of NLP-hypnosis is the Part integration process. It addresses the unconscious mind to find the positive intention behind an unwanted behaviour and helps to solve the internal conflict the person is experiencing, between the part of them that’s creating the unwanted behaviour, and the part of them that doesn’t want to have this behaviour any more.

Unlike some NLP practitioners, I like to perform this process under trance, as it allows a deeper connection with the unconscious mind thus deeper changes. So the first time I applied this process with my client, I faced an issue that is quite common. Instead of allowing her unconscious mind to communicate with me, she was only giving me conscious responses. Which can undermine the success of the treatment as we’re not treating the issue at its source. I applied my usual tricks but nothing seemed to work. It can be helpful to get conscious replies, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, especially when like in this case, the issue is deeply rooted in the unconscious mind.

As a result, my client improved, but either the changes didn’t last nor were they significant. At first, I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong, but quickly I realized that being from an older generation and a different culture she didn’t really grasp the concept of the unconscious mind. I then decided to use some more “rational” processes such as submodalities shift or changing her strategies and we then got some brilliant results. However there was always a little part of her that she couldn’t control and that would escape from the brilliant set of NLP tools I was using.

I then asked myself “how can I get her to get familiar with unconscious verbal communication”? It’s quite a tricky one as it is, in essence, unconscious…So I made her do this funny exercise inspired from a game I saw in a famous TV series…I asked her simple questions and she had to answer with the first thing that came to her mind. That way she got familiar with how it feels to let the unconscious mind speak first and since then we’ve managed to do some deep part and core transformation processes!!

Moral of the story? never underestimate the resources of TV series… ;-)

Believing in your clients

I’d like to share with you a case study that illustrates very well the person centred NLP approach, especially the fourth of the six Sufficient and Necessary Conditions for change inspired by Carl Rogers: That the practitioner believes unconditionally that their client can change from within. It also illustrates very well the NLP presupposition that says “you can’t not communicate”.

I’ve got a client who is 81 year old and wants to lose weight. She’s an absolutely incredible woman and has got an amazing energy and joie-de-vivre. In her quest for happiness, she’s decided to fight her binging pattern and to get fit. I must say that she’s not binging much and generally eats healthy food, but she ‘s unhappy not to be in control of herself in those situations.

After having checked that the changes she wanted were ecological, we started to work using different NLP and hypnosis processes. She started to change, and as I got to know her and her learning style, I discovered that in her model of the world, change had to come progressively and be reinforced regularly in order to last. So I adapted my processes in order to match her beliefs and we got very good results: she was gradually improving, reducing drastically the episodes of binging and being much more in control of her eating habits.

One day she burst into my practice with a huge grin on her face and before even sitting down started to tell me how happy she was, as she had just been on a cruise and completely controlled her eating pattern: not once did she have something unhealthy. As she told me about those good news, I couldn’t help feeling sceptical as it just didn’t fit with what I knew from her learning style, and I found quite amazing that she got suddenly such drastic and quick results when we had been working for months achieving baby steps. As I was contemplating all those thoughts, guess what happened? Well, my unconscious communication couldn’t have been more transparent.

And as soon as I realized it I tried to make up for it and consciously support and congratulate her as much as possible. But it was too late. My own beliefs had polluted her experience, and as we had created a great rapport over the months we worked together, she immediately picked up on it. And as a result, completely relapsed and went back to square one. What a lesson learnt!! It is indeed so important as a practitioner to leave your own beliefs and expectations at the door and offer unconditional positive regards to your clients!

Thanks to our good rapport however I managed to reframe positively what had just happened, but it took me another few weeks to get her back on track, as she had developed now the belief that she had failed therefore that she was never going to make it…She is now much better and much happier, and I’ve learnt something very important out of it. Clients are indeed your best teachers!

 

Motion sickness

A lady came to see me back a couple of years ago as she was suffering from travel sickness whenever she was in a car or a bus. We explored in details where this issue came from and it appeared that when she was a teenager, she got in a car accident with her boyfriend, who was a very unsafe driver. Since then she had started developing those uncomfortable reactions when being in a vehicle.

When taking her history, it seemed that we needed to work in depth with this part of her that was obviously generating those unpleasant reactions so I chose a part integration process.

Starting from the NLP presupposition that behind every behaviour there’s a positive intention, whilst in trance I facilitated my client understanding that she created this part a long time ago in a situation in which she needed some help from her unconscious mind. When asking that part how old it was when it was created, unsurprisingly the number 19 came up and related to the car accident we had previously elicited.

It turned out that the positive intention of this part was to protect my client from getting in physical danger, and as it was quite an emotional trauma her unconscious mind created this reaction simply to protect her from getting hurt.

The problem seemed to be that this part got stuck into this protection mechanism, and twenty odd years later didn’t serve its purpose any longer; instead of protecting my client, it was impairing her life now that she had to drive to work everyday. So we worked on actualizing this part and integrated it with the other part of her that wanted to be comfortable in the car, whilst calibrating the submodalities of each part as we moved along in the process.

My client reported happily a few days after that the symptoms had completely disappeared, but was also amazed that the ear infection that she had been having for the past few months also cleared up… That shows how the mind and the body are connected, and how surprisingly some symptoms that seem unrelated stem from the same source as other patterns.

This lady came back to see me few months later for some help with fertility issues, and confirmed happily that no longer suffered from those debilitating symptoms. And she felt pregnant after our second treatment, but I’ll tell you about that in another post!

 

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 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 let go fully 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!

Relationships change

One of my clients this week came into my practice and brought up an interesting issue. We have been working during the last few sessions on her self-confidence and self-esteem and as a result of that, she was pleased to notice that she manages to be much more herself in public. She is more assertive, lets others know of her opinions and takes the risk to disagree with her close ones.

However, she’s struggling in her marriage. One of the patterns I’ve often observed in people suffering from low self-esteem and codependency is what is called being a people-pleaser. That means that they tend to do what they believe others expect them to do, to gain their approval and their love, rather than focusing on what is best for themselves.

What is often seen in the early days of relationships is the emergence of a dynamic: that’s the way people relate to each other, or in TA terms, “the game they play”. The longest the relationship lasts, the strongest those patterns get engrained, and it becomes then very difficult to change them. Continue reading →

I don’t want to see you anymore: I’m happy

I’m very pleased to say that this morning I saw one of my client for the last time. The reason being that this person first came to see me a few months ago because he was suffering from depression. We looked in depth of what was going on for him and discovered that his past was haunting him, leaving tracks of very limiting self-beliefs, low self-esteem and poor self- worth.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started working with him asking what was depressing him, to pinpoint his issues concretely and find the right path of action. I also taught him how our language can have a strong impact on our inner world. For example, how saying “I don’t want to be depressed” can be detrimental. The unconscious mind doesn’t process negatives, so if I tell you “Don’t think of an apple” what did you just think about?! So when you keep saying “I don’t want to be depressed” your unconscious mind keeps hearing “I want to be depressed“. Scary, hey?!

As I talked about previously, our neuro-pathways are deeply engrained and depending on how we use them, they get reinforced or weakened. When you express what you want by actually stating what you don’t want, you’re actually involuntarily reinforcing what you’re trying to get away from. Continue reading →

Allowing your client the space they need

A lot of coaches and solution-focused therapists are taught almost from the word “go” that it’s not good for the client to talk about their issues. That the session should focus on creating goals and solutions, rather than dwelling on problems.

I totally agree with that. To a certain extent. But let me first tell you why I think it’s important to stay in a solution-frame rather than a problem-frame. To begin with, when clients look for help, it’s safe to assume that by then they have recognised that they have an issue. Therefore they must have thought about it a lot, perhaps talked about it even more, with friends, family or a counsellor. And if they’re still coming to see you after that, it means that all that dwelling hasn’t necessarily helped…

So it’s time to do something new. Through some skilful questions, we allow the clients to explore new possibilities and start to discover some routes they may have not been aware of before. Continue reading →

Losing weight with NLP

Summer is almost here, as the weather shows…finally! So you might have planned some sunny holidays soon, and it’s time to think of getting in shape to parade on the beach :-)

I often hear people talking about dieting a few weeks before going on holidays. And perhaps, you’ve noticed as well that diets don’t really work…Because eventually, you’ll put back on the weight, and will have to do another diet before your next holiday before you put on weight again etc. You get the picture.

With NLP, I’ve found a very good way to avoid turning into a yo-yo and staying fit all year long. Because it’s not about dieting, it’s about having a different lifestyle. So how can you use NLP to make sure you stay on track and healthy most of the time?

  1. Set your goal: specifically, what is your ideal weight? Instead of focusing on how much pounds you want to lose, which might be discouraging, I suggest you focus on the weight you want to achieve instead. Focusing on a positive outcome will indeed motivate you much more.
  2. Take a moment to think of the following: How will you know concretely when you’ve achieved your goal? How will it feel? What will you be saying to yourself? How different will you look?
  3. Examine your current food intake: perhaps get a food diary to keep track of what you eat. Are you eating a lot of processed food? Refined sugar? Carbs? What is the food you recognise as not contributing to you being fit? Once you’ve made a list of the non-healthy food, make a list of what food you would like to eat more of instead. That can include vegetables, protein, fruits…
  4. Use the brilliant NLP tools that are the Swish or changing Submodalities, to start shifting your tastes; you’ll train your brain to want more of the healthy food whilst disliking the junk food.
  5. What about your exercise pattern? Are you exercising regularly? If not, what’s stopping you? Lack of motivation? In which case I recommend doing a spatial anchoring process to get yourself in an exited and dynamic state when thinking of your next session at the gym. I find the spatial anchoring is more effective than a normal anchoring in this case, as you’re actually creating bigger changes at the  physiological level as well as in your mind.
  6. Sometimes there are some deeper underlying causes to over-eating. It may cover up for emotional emptiness, anxiety or even anger…you could use a parts process or a core transformation to discover your hidden secondary gain, and gently allow it to update and resolve. If you’re interested in those processes, feel free to check my previous post on that topic.

I found the combination of those techniques very effective on myself and on my clients; as the brain learns quickly, you might find you’re going to progressively and effortlessly get into a healthy routine. One of my clients from a couple of years ago managed to lose two stones in a month and reported that he didn’t even have to sacrifice anything, he said “it’s as if my tastes had changed”.

I recently bumped into him in the local supermarket and was delighted to see he was still slim and fit! He was beaming when he told me how easy it was for him to stay healthy.

So enjoy those tips, and I’m looking forward to hearing how quickly you’ll shift your eating habits and look wonderful in your swimming suits!

 

 

What is depressing you?

One of my first step when working with depression is often reframing the issue and challenging the nominalization.

What is a nominalization? it’s a term developed by the creators of NLP, Bandler and Grinder that describes how an action has been transformed into a noun. Such as the action of failing, that became the noun “failure”. The ultimate way to figure this out is to use the wheel barrow test: If you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow it’s a nominalization!

What’s the point in spotting nominalizations? When you transform an action into a noun, it gives it permanence and a solid existence independently of you. And when you say “I’m a failure” It defines your identity rather than your behaviour (I failed at something). An action on another hand completely depends on you, as you’re the person performing it, therefore you’re the one who has got control over it. Continue reading →

Do you want to have your cake and eat it at the same time?

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you want something but there’s a part of you that gets in the way? Such as having lots of work to do but procrastinating on social media instead?! Or being on a diet and not being able to resist that chocolate cake?! I certainly do! (especially the chocolate cake one…)

Isn’t it intriguing that we do things that we know aren’t good for us and yet we do them anyway? It’s as if there was this part of us that we don’t control but seems sometimes to be in charge of our reactions and emotions…

There’s a brilliant NLP process called Parts Integration that addresses those inner conflicts. One of the things I really love about this process is how imaginative and elegant it can be. I have mainly seen this technique performed quickly, as it is indeed possible to resolve that type of conflict swiftly. But I found that by giving it a more meaningful approach, the changes my clients were getting were more profound, more significant.

I was working once with a person who suffered from travel sickness and found it very debilitating as he had always dreamt of being an airline pilot. We started to look into the part of him that was producing the symptoms and he realized he had created this part when he was a little boy. He had been stuck in a traffic jam in a car with his dad who was verbally very abusive. As a child he found this situation so unbearable that his unconscious mind started to develop this physical reaction as a coping mechanism. I must say It was actually fascinating to see such an example of mind-body connexion…

So when my client started to understand where his issues came from, it produced a very deep shift and he burst into tears, remembering the despair and pain he had experienced as a child. But as we progressively unravelled the thread of his subconscious, he recognized this part of him was only trying to protect him, and then he was able to develop some compassion and love towards himself. I was very moved by how this person managed to connect deeply with the child within, and I discovered how NLP can sometimes be connected with some other models of therapies, such as transactional analysis in this case. And I realized that through helping people to connect and communicate with the deep parts of themselves they’ve been rejecting for years, some amazing changes can take place that go beyond a simple conflict resolution.

My client called me a few weeks later, thrilled to announce he had started his training as a pilot as he was no longer experiencing any of the symptoms he had been suffering from during the last 30 years…he’s today working with one of the biggest airline company and I will always remember the face of the boy in tears in front of me as he was reconnecting with such an important part of his history…

So I’m wondering, what inner conflict are you currently experiencing that is getting in the way of what you want to achieve?