Very enlightening article. Many thanks.

I am wondering about two things.

1. Situation: a person is having nightmares about a traumatic event (sexual abuse) while also experiencing anxiety and fear during the day. My guess would be that the nightmares would lessen by a significant degree when the emotional charge linked to the memories is treated. Less fear and anxiety about a subject during the day would lead to less dreaming about it. Could you speak.. well type on that?

2. I also read the post by K. Gladstone. From a fellow human being standpoint I feel for her (you if you’re reading). From a practitioners standpoint I’d very much like to know what went wrong and how to prevent it. If possible, keep me posted?

Joy

Thanks for sharing your story. My apologies for taking so long to reply — I’ve been having some health issues. Here are a couple of ideas:

1. Use one or more NLP anti-trauma techniques on an incident when your mother got abused. Once you find something that reduces the emotional overwhelm, use that same technique or combination on techniques on the other incidents. (When dealing with many incidents, I often start with a mild example, which I use for testing. Once I find something that works, I use it on more intense examples.)

2. Get the book Social Panoramas by Lucas Derks (one of the most important books in NLP, but unfortunately not well known in the U.S.), read it, and do the exercises.

3. While it’s not an NLP book (and her attitude isn’t for everybody), I personally liked Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s book Bad Childhood—Good Life: How to Blossom and Thrive in Spite of an Unhappy Childhood and found it helpful.

Remember, what happened in the past is never the problem. The problem is always what is happening now, in the present — whether behaviors, cognitive strategies, missing resources, or whatever. If something “in the past” is causing you problems now, it’s because of how you’re responding now, in the present — and that is what you can fix.

It’s great that you are ready to put the past behind you and focus on your daughter. Best of luck!

Joy

Some years ago, I went to an NLP practitioner for help with traumas. (He said he was a student of someone called Robert Dilts.) He did most of this stuff, and things became significantly worse — and have mostly stayed that way. (The ones that didn’t stay worse … well, they aren’t any better than before I went to him. He was good at making good things better … but it turned out he was also, accidentally I think, VERY good at making bad things worse.)

Since then, I have been looking for ways to undo his mistakes. I found your page, and have been exploring this stuff (on my own: I can’t find anyone hereabouts that I can trust enough to take it to)/ The problem is that EACH of the things listed on this page is either making my traumas worse, or is having no effect. Suggestions?

Thank you for taking the time to read this. You may not reply me, I understand if you don’t.

Thank you.

Kind regards

Hi Joy,

Thank you for your recent posting of your fascinating page of 25 trauma resolution techniques on the Hypnosis Technique Exchange group. I have seen and used many of these, but had never seen them all put together at one location. I really appreciate your work in gathering, organizing and explaining the methods.

Another method touched upon tangentially in your descriptions and worthy of inclusion is the Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) technique.

Quoting from the page below, the instructions for the technique are simple:
http://www.wellbeinghypnotherapy.org.uk/treatments/traumatic-incident-reduction-TIR.aspx

1. Go to the start of the incident and tell me when you have done so.
2. Go through the incident to the end.
3. Tell me what happened.

This cycle of commands are repeated till charge is lessened.

TIR Book:
http://www.amazon.com/Traumatic-Incident-Reduction-Gerald-French/dp/1574442155

This technique is a simple, almost crude workhorse with a range of applications where the reduction of negative emotional reaction to a memory is required. I have used this technique, both with and without the subject providing a verbal description of the scene as they go through it, and have found it to work well either way.

Best regards,
LC

Thanks, I hadn’t heard of this one.

I notice that Traumatic Incident Reduction changes the end point of the memory access by having the person go all the way through to the end, similar to Andy Austin’s technique above. The web page you linked to also suggests asking whether the actual start of the incident was earlier.

Having the person pay attention to the sensory details of the memory is going to tend to make it less of a superstimulus. So will running it in real time rather than compressed into an instant. Elegant!

Joy

I agree that a lot of manipulative and inept NLP does get done. As does a lot of manipulative and inept anything else: psychotherapy, hypnosis, mainstream medicine, alternative medicine, auto repair… Fortunately the value of each of these fields exists independent of the behavior of its worst practitioners. Used well, NLP is very useful set of thinking and mental performance tools that can be used to enhance almost anything. Including trauma treatment.

Best of luck using this information. I hope you will return to discuss the results you get, as I know other change work pros would find what you learn illuminating and useful.

You have made me reconsider my condemnation of NLP (manipulative, flowery rubbish).

I’ll have to re-read this marvellous information a few times to absorb all the techniques.

Thanks so much for this eye-opener.

[Is your name really "Livingwell"?! How appropriate.]