Tag Archives: part integration

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.

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… ;-)