Tag Archives: person centred

Cellular healing

I was recently reading Deepak Chopra’s book Quantum healing that gives a lot of food for thoughts, especially regarding the cellular healing work I do combining integrative NLP and Hypnotherapy.

There’s an inner intelligence in our body, which makes it so structurally perfect. It’s that intelligence that knows when to produce the hormones and chemicals we need when we need them. Take the flight or fight response. How does the body know how to produce adrenaline and cortisol in the exact amount you need to respond optimally to a threat? When you’ve got a virus, how does your immune system know to send T-cells to identify and destroy the intruder, and furthermore to flag it to recognize it in case of future attacks to protect you better? When you look at the complexity of our bodies and yet the perfect mechanism that keeps it functioning, it is very hard to believe it’s all happening “by chance”, isn’t it? There must be an inner program that makes sure all of it runs like clockwork. That’s what Chopra describes as our inner intelligence, and that’s what NLP calls the unconscious mind. When you look at the primes directives of the unconscious mind, you will find the one that reminds us that it is in charge of running and preserving the body.

Based on the study of our physiology Chopra explains that our body regenerates itself completely every year. Some other sources claim that it happens every seven years. In any case, it means the cells of our ENTIRE body get totally renewed at the worst, every seven years. Structurally, it simply means we are not the same body we were a few years ago. Which raises an interesting question, if our body gets totally replaced at the cellular level, how do people manage to carry non genetic illnesses and diseases for a longer period of time? According to Chopra, less than 5% of cancers are genetic. So how does the body manage to re-create cancer cells that are not programmed in our DNA when those ones have been totally wiped off by chemotherapy?

Chopra introduces the idea of phantom memory. Physicists often talk about muscle memory, where the body learns and remember repetitive tasks we perform. Walking, riding, playing a musical instrument or driving are a very good example of it. Not only do you remember how to do this at the neurological level, but your body also remembers the movements associated with the task, in order to make it easier to perform next time.

However there seems to be another type of memory in our mind and body. A kind of immaterial memory that contains information that gets transmitted to our cells and triggers old physiological responses even when all the cells that used to be deficient have long disappeared. I’m talking about cancer type of illnesses, or even chemical addictions. Where does this memory come from? Our past, our experience, of course. But how does all this chemically alters our body? How does the mental message gets translated into a chemical reaction? There aren’t yet any satisfactory scientific explanation for that.

However I strongly believe that the unconscious mind plays a major role into this process. It is where memories are stored, and it is what controls our body. Therefore it must be the missing link between thoughts, emotions and physical reactions. So if the unconscious mind has got the power to change the chemical structure of our body, what would happen if we reprogrammed the messages the unconscious mind follows? What would happen if we could instruct the unconscious mind to heal the body instead of creating illnesses?

That’s where hypnotherapy and NLP, among other techniques, come in. They allow a direct communication and reprogramming of the unconscious mind, therefore opens up the possibility for cellular healing. I’ve done major work on chronic illnesses, and so-called incurable diseases and observed some very promising results; whether curing an allergy, recovering much quicker from the flu or even working with cancer, M.E or Crohn’s disease. And I’m hoping to continue my exploration of this fascinating field and keep pushing the limits of the possibilities of cellular healing.

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.

5 tips to boost your self-esteem

Having explored the difference between confidence and arrogance in my previous post, and hopefully having helped you to accept the idea that’s is ok to become more confident, let’s look today into how you can increase your self-esteem and self-confidence.

1. Make a list of your qualities and achievements. For example, writing down that you are kind, funny or creative. And recognising achievements such as graduating from school or passing your driving test. Even though those qualities and achievements might seem to you as trivial, they still represent what you are good at. No matter if they are common skills or attributes. When you look at your flaws, you probably don’t dismiss them because others have it too; do you?! So why would you do that for your qualities?!

2. Ask people you love and trust to give you a list of the qualities they think you have. You might be surprised on how much more positively people who love you see you than you see yourself…

3. Look into the negative beliefs you have about yourself, such as “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not loveable”, “I don’t deserve being (successful, happy etc…)”. Where do those beliefs come from? What negative messages have you received as a child and from whom? Start to look for counter evidences for those beliefs in your everyday life, such as for example what you’ve already achieved that show you are indeed good enough. Or how many people love you that prove that you are indeed loveable…

4. Take one of this limiting beliefs and ask yourself: what would it take for this belief to be false? For example, taking the belief “I’m not loveable”. What would it take for anyone to be loveable according to your criteria? How can you then relate this to yourself?

5. Finally if those beliefs are deeply engrained, ask an NLP master practitioner to help you sorting them out. There are many brilliant processes that can help you re-program your mind to get some more positive and useful beliefs.

I hope that helps, looking forward to reading your feedbacks!

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!