Living Well NLP

What is psychological trauma?

A trauma is a strong, persistent, negative emotional response to a past event, or reminders of it.

Trauma characteristics:

• A trauma is not an experience. It is an emotional response to an experience. If the emotional response is positive, the experience is not traumatic, no matter how harrowing its sensory details. (Think of all the people who pay money to have scary, dangerous experiences such as white-water rafting!)

When you studied NLP, did you learn about “the” kinesthetic modality?

The standard NLP model lumps all “feelings” together as one kinesthetic modality, with one set of accessing cues. These cues include belly breathing, slow speech, use of kinesthetic words and phases (such as “touching base,” “off-balance,” and “warm”), and eye accesses to the (usually) lower right.

This model is simple and easy to learn and use. It’s also obviously inaccurate. Dizziness is not the same kind of “feeling” as happiness, hunger, or warm velvet rubbing across your skin.

That wouldn’t matter to NLPers if kinesthetics all functioned identically when communicating or doing change work. But in fact, subtle distinctions between kinds of kinesthetics often determine whether an intervention will work for a particular person.