The Scooby Doo NLP Session - by Matthew Wingett

A little while ago a client came to me with panic attacks. She kept having a continual fear that she was going to die. The fear was getting stronger and stronger, she explained. She had been to the doctor, and he had sat across the desk from her and told her in no uncertain terms that it was about time she pulled herself together, grew up and stopped being so pathetic.

 

Well, I've heard John La Valle comment that confronting a client can indeed shift their state - but I get the feeling that this wasn't quite what the good doctor had in mind. Unfortunately, since her trip to the GP, things had got worse. Being fairly "old school" in his approach, the GP hadn't even considered referring her. So now she felt helpless and isolated, as well as being scared she was going to die. A nice extra addition to the mix!

 

I looked at her as she sat across from me, and I took in this 30-year-old's pale skin, her face drawn and tight, her red-rimmed eyes, her nails bitten down to the quick, the tone of distress in her voice and the fast and rather awkward movements she was making, and heard her story. 

 

The obsessive thoughts of death, she told me, had got worse and worse over the last few months. They were stopping her from doing her work properly, and stopping her from sleeping. She explained that her boyfriend was very kind and caring about her problem, and tried to support her as much as possible - but that he really didn't have a clue what to do.

 

She told me straight that she had come to me because she didn't know where else to go. She had seen Paul McKenna work with people on the tv, and since I had recently appeared in the local newspaper and also did NLP, she had decided that I was her best, and only bet.

 

I looked at her levelly with a quizzical eye, and told her straight, with a slightly ironic look on my face:

 

"Okay, so I've got some news for you. You are going to die."

 

She looked up at me with a sudden look of shock that I could even think of saying these words to her. But the ironic look on my face threw her. Now I had her attention, I followed up with: "However, you're 30 years old, and I'm 40. So I'm probably going to get there before you. And you know what? I don't give it a second's thought…" I paused for effect. "So, what I'd like to know is: what are you doing in your head that's different to what I'm doing in mine?"

 

Her state changed immediately. She had gone from being a snivelling helpless wretch to a curious individual suddenly intrigued by the conundrum that we were setting out to solve together.

 

It is these sudden shifts in interaction that so often make the sessions go so much more easily.

 

The work that I did on her after we set out on our adventure lasted for about an hour. I confess, I probably overdid it. I wanted to be sure that I had closed everything up so that there was no way that her anxiety would come back.

 

I had a host of techniques to use on her, but as is so often the case with NLP, the simplest thing is often the most effective. So what did I do? Simple, I literally asked her what she did in her head, just like Richard Bandler had taught me to do on the Practitioner Course. When she told me, she let out that she saw a skeleton lying in a grave - and that the skeleton was her own. She started telling me all about how the anxiety really started when she was 7 years old, but I stopped her there and said:

 

"What colour's the skeleton?"

 

"What? White, of course."

 

"Turn it luminous green."

 

She did.

 

"Now make it into a rubber one, like those glowing key fobs that you see children have."

 

She did that, too.

 

And so  I continued getting her to play with the pictures. Then I got her thinking about the Scooby Doo cartoons that she saw when she was a kid. By the time I had the skeleton saying to her: "And I would have got away with it if it hadn't been for you darn kids" we were pretty much at the end of the game.

 

So, what had I done?  I had played with the submodalities, and I had reframed the content and the context while I did it by getting her to think her obsessive thoughts in the frame of fun and childhood. It really was a very simple procedure - all done with a smile and a laugh throughout.

 

About 8 weeks later, I realised I hadn't heard from her again, and wondered how she was doing. I quickly sent her a text. She emailed a reply.

 

It said:

 

 

So there it was: job done.  I reflected on this as I munched a celebratory Scooby Snack, and realised how refreshingly easy it all was.  I had just set the mood music and kept it simple.

 

After all, that's what my NLP training with Richard Bandler was specifically designed to do. To make it easy. All I had to do was JUST DO IT!