Resolving Unuseful Memories & Emotions with NLP
Have you ever seen Paul Mckenna cure someone’s phobia in ten minutes on his TV show? I've just discovered firsthand the technique he uses, which comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). I met a guy (a Certified Trainer & Master of New Learning Programs) through a friend of a friend. You may have heard of him: The Relationship Doctor. He's got his own show on the radio and works with people with their fears and phobias and relationships!
In fact, he invited me to be a guest on his show and try find out more about NLP. Ever curious about human behaviour and communication, I said yes! I knew nothing about NLP beforehand, so when I arrived at his apartment on Thursday morning last, to record the show, I admit, I was kind of apprehensive. I had visions of lying on a big sofa with Owen (The Guy) dangling a large antique chain watch from side to side.... You are feeling sleepy… sleepier and sleepier...resulting in me, with my best zombie voice...droning out... Yes Master your wish is my command... type thing then waking up when he snapped his fingers and remembering nothing! Kind of like a Sunday morning after a hard night on the town! What happened was nothing of the kind!
He welcomed me in to a cheerful bright apartment. His very pretty Personal Assistant popped her head out of the kitchen to say hello, offer me a cup of coffee. He sat me down at his recording desk and explained a little bit about how NLP works… and it's really quit simple. The unconscious is what works away without conscious command. It controls our heartbeat, keeps us breathing, does all the hormone time releasing, and stores our memories and charts our experiences. As we grow in the womb and from infant to child and from child to adult our unconscious mind accumulates everything we experience and stores it. As I understand it, it uses memories and emotions experienced with these memories to pick our way through our ongoing lives! It runs its programmes like a computer does with the intent to keep you functioning. And, apparently, it's always has a positive intention for its behaviour, even though sometimes it helps if the tools (patterns & strategies) it uses get an upgrade! So, if you experience a situation as a young child for example, and the emotion you had with that experience was panic or fear, then it records that emotion as the appropriate way to deal with that situation. When in the future a similar situation arises, the memory of the initial situation and the initial emotion is often triggered! So in this case, panic and fear will take hold. The fear can be mild or strong. Sometimes strong enough to become a phobia!
NLP has a powerful and effective technique (known as Memory Resolution) that allows you to go back to that initial experience in your memory and re-programme the files to remember a different emotion! Let’s say peace and calmness instead of panic and fear. The unconscious mind relearns that memory, and - Hey presto! Reprogrammed! The phobia (or fear, emotion, unuseful belief, etc.) is no more!
Those who study NLP believe that the quality of our lives is determined by our relationships with ourselves, each other and the world around us. Through the various NLP processes we can access the means to communicate with the world and those around us in a much more advantageous way.
This all sounded pretty logical, so I was eager to get to work! Owen reminds me that I don't actually get hypnotised like in to a deeeep sleeeep kind of thing or go in to trance, that I just need to relax into a floaty place and concentrate on his voice and my unconscious will perk up and listen. But first, I need to find a phobia to cure? Like the fear of flying or the fear of water? Thankfully enough, I'm a pretty much a phobia free kinda gal, however, any one who saw the RTE documentary about a rather painful part of my childhood will know I obviously harbour “issues”. Fear of rejection, abandonment etc... but hey don't we all?
Owen asks me to look at any area of my life where things might not be going as smoothly as they should! I think really hard and admit I suffer from a terrible lack of motivation due to feelings of being not good enough or of feeling that (deep down) I’m a very bad person!
This may surprise some people as most people see me as confident and outgoing, which is true most of the time, but it's the little day to day issues with people who I don't know very well that these irrational feelings of fear, guilt and inadequacy crop up. And they do crop up, all the bloody time! Now I'm visualising myself in my unconscious mind as Woody Allen in the movie Manhattan, racked with neuroses! Panic sets in and it feels like an alien is about to explode from my chest! Neurotic crazy lady! But only with little things. With big bad disaster situations I'm brilliant and calm and can run in and save the day, rescuing every one including my self. Honest to God I'd be fearless in an Earthquake, but if some stranger in the supermarket looks at me in the wrong kind of way, my insides turn to jelly. I'm a bad horrible person and they know it!
I tell all this to Owen who assures me that I'll be rid of all this stuff in twenty minutes! We begin a procedure where I relax and concentrate on his instructions, imagining myself in a cinema floating outside my body looking down and pulling out DVD memories that I picture in my mind, stored in files in upright crates like paintings in cold storage and he tells me to go to the first memory, the original event to which these negative emotions were attached - the first time I felt useless or no good and panicked. Way way back, was it in the womb? Birth? Was it after my birth? Yes, and to my surprise it's not when all the drama went down with my parents, but a time earlier when I was a fearful hurting five year old! Suddenly memories of being a tiny baby are very lucid and real! Its daytime and I'm in a white bright room with a big sunny window and my mother has me in her arms and I feel safe and valid. Next thing she puts me down in a white Moses basket and kisses me and walks out of the room. The feelings of panic and fear and separation (which I can remember but fortunately do not feel in the present) are so overwhelming that it's unbearable! I can't understand how I can exist, separate from my mother, and I feel useless and terrified! She comes back and I'm fine again. Wow! Something as little as my mom putting me down as a baby and leaving the room for a very small amount of time could engrave such strong recurring feelings of worthlessness and panic? That's mad I think to myself but it makes sense.
Owen talks me through a process where I change the feelings in the memory and replay it on the cinema screen in my mind, and then I have to rewind the memory again and float into it and re-experience it anew, with the more useful feelings of safety and calm and pleasure of my own existence and being.
And it's worked! The fear is gone! That simple!
We work on a second issue: Guilt! Using the same process and this time he doesn't even ask me what my early memory is, he doesn't need to! I just have to remember it using the same process, and weirdly enough it's a baby memory too but it's a sexual one! It simply involves memories of lying warm and safe and putting my hand on my genitals because this felt safe comforting and good and my hand being pulled away by someone (My Nanny? Mother? Can’t see the face…) saying “Don't do that!” And these first-time felt sensations of guilt and shame flood into this innocent baby's heart! Wow again! Me of all people, one of the most sexually liberated people I know, having deep down feelings of sexual guilt?!?!? Amazing!
And now that I think of it, it sure it explains a lot!
We go through the same process of re-filing these memories with new self-confident, guilt-free emotions and I'm now a fear-free, guilt-free person!
It's a week later and I have a much better handle of the anxiety's I normally get every day over nothing. That sinking feeling in my tummy over little things in life hasn't reared its ugly head yet, which is amazing!
Well you might say, I've simply conditioned myself through affirmation. Whatever has happened, I don’t care - it's worked! I genuinely haven't experienced that erratic guilt or any of those old fears. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if it’s permanent.
My new NLP 'Master,' says that I still have the capacity to feel guilt and fear, but that they no longer have control over me. And who am I to argue? NLP certainly did something pretty positive for me in an hour and a half! Something that I imagine years of conventional therapy would not have succeeded in doing. It doesn't go in to the drama's of the programming and try and change the story, it pulls out the faulty wiring or the wires no longer necessary and re-wires the circuit!
Guilt? Fear? Done and dusted!