One of the pillars of NLP is: Flexibility. The absolute truth of this was once again proved to me on a recent NLP course while demonstrating the NLP Phobia cure.
I was demonstrating this technique to the delegates attending and the specific phobia we (me and the delegate) were working on, was a fear of moths. It seemed relatively easy and I was quite confident because I have done this technique hundreds of times with clients with great success. A part of the technique consists of taking the client into a state of double association into a theater visualization where the client is watching the younger self going through the event, high up (dissociated)from the projection booth while holding a safety anchor. (For those of you not understanding all the jargon; it’s perfectly OK, just keep on reading). For some reason – I still don’t understand up to now- , I decided to simulate the sound of the projector as an extra (anchor) to make sure the client stays in the visualization of the projector room and not associate into the fearful event.
My words were something like: “And as you are up here in the projector room right now, looking down to yourself down there in the theater and looking at the movie out there in the distance; a small movie on a big white screen …….. and as you are hearing the sound of the projector ……….rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…………………….” making the sound of the projector with my tongue. I saw the sudden head jerk of the client and the facial color change and instinctively knew that something had happened. I completed the technique and it was only afterward that she told me the fascinating story of what had happened when I made that sound.
When I made the sound she was pulled right back to a time and place of a war. “Everything was grey and barren, just like the colour on a moths’ wings” she said and “I was on a wagon – heavily wounded in the stomach – being pulled by a tractor making that brrrrrrrrrrr sound. It was the most intense memory I have ever had” she said while her whole body was still shaking from shock. Her friend in that scene was also seriously wounded and she felt a great sense of fear and guilt that she was not able to help in any way. The last memory before she died was the barren landscape and the brrrrrrrrr sound of the tractor. “I have had stomach ache my whole life, bleeding sometimes without any reason and doctors could never find anything physically wrong with me”, she said. “Now I know why.”
I had to be flexible enough to know that we had to clear the event with a VK dissociation and Time Line techniques to help her to come to terms with the emotional impact of it. What had started out as a ‘moth’ memory was now a traumatic war memory with much greater impact. After we had done this I asked her if she perhaps had any birth mark on her stomach. She looked surprised and said that this was indeed the case. I explained to her that whenever these sort of violent death memories reemerged in this lifetime the body often ‘remembers’ it in the form of a birth mark.
Not wanting to put a specific meaning on this event the most important what I want to share from all of this is that the bleeding has stopped and the stomach ache is gone. We know today that memories are not only stored in the brain but also in every cell in the body and also in morphogenetic fields outside of the body. Isn’t it also possible and plausible that high impact emotional events of other times can be remembered by a body? If traumatic events from birth can have a influence on a person’s life many years later, how possible is it that high impact emotional events from other times might also be ‘remembered’ in some way?
Coming from a strict religious background these are the type of events which I would not have even considered even possible before I started on my NLP and hypnotherapy journey. And as they say….. there is always more………