Combining therapies in one session

As a therapist you will often get a look of bewilderment or curiosity when you mention some of the treatments you may be considering using on a particular problem. I admit to loving the creative approach where you combine being flexible with effective but quick solutions that can often be combined in one session such as emotional freedom technique with nlp tools. I recently saw a gentlemen who had a fear of motorways, in particular the speed and the length of time spent on one. I asked him to think about this particular scene and we did measure out of 10 for fear so we can measure progress on a subjective level which came out at 8 out of 10.

Using NLP - shifting submodalities

I then asked him to picture the scene again but remove himself from the scene by imagining being in a cinema sitting on the back row watching himself on the motorway driving along and by shifting submodalities of that experience such as making the movie black and white, putting himself back into the scene and introducing a comical back seat driver and driving through a cartoon landscape, we can shift a distressing moment to one that is much more fun! We then rewound the scene, made it go forward, turned it into a framed picture, made it smaller and asked the client to replay the scene in their mind about 3 or 4 times until we notice certain changes. The main changes are body languagee, tone of voice and general demeanor of being much more relaxed and at peace.

EFT

To make absolutely sure we had rectified the problem we then did some eft, using just the basic tapping points. For anyone who wants to know more about eft please visit Gary Craig's website at www.emofree.com EFT is a wonderful technique and it is something you can teach a client in about 15 minutes. We then took another subjective measure of fear of motorways which we reduced to 4 out of 10. We then repeated eft oncee more and reduced the fear until we had a scale of 2 out 10. We did both of these techniques in less than 40mins. My client is now able to travel on motorways and has experienced no further problems with anxiety or fear since treatment.

for more information on NLP visit http://www.whitelighthypno.co.uk/neurolinguistic_programming.html