Letting Fear Out of the Box - by Matthew Wingett

Matthew Wingett gives a firsthand account of how the training he underwent at NLP Life made it so easy to say just the right thing at just the right time, when a session he was doing with a claustrophobic client took an unexpected turn.

The great thing about the seminars and courses run by Richard Bandler and his trainers at NLP LIFE is that they are specially designed - through the use of high level NLP-based training - to teach you unconscious competence in whatever you are learning. There's no doubt about it, when you are taught NLP  in the way that Richard always intended, you emerge from the courses competent and confident, with a "Can Do" attitude. 

Exactly this scenario was brought home to me recently when I saw a client who had a case of claustrophobia that she had suffered from for many years. My client was a solicitor who was most deeply offended by the way that the phobia affected her. It was, she said, highly illogical, and it was this which annoyed her about it more than anything, it seemed.

She told me that the phobia had worsened of late. For example, recently she had undergone a panic attack because she had been stopped by traffic lights underneath a bridge. She dreaded going to the toilet because she would have to be locked in the room when she went.  For this reason, she would spend several minutes assuring herself that the lock on the door worked properly before she would commit to going. Indeed, even the fact that I was sat in front of her, with a low table on either side of her made her feel like she was desperate to escape (I don't think this was any reflection on my appearance!), and she had identified the boiler cupboard in the corner of my office as a place where she might possibly "be locked up". So, she was a fairly strong claustrophobic.

We worked on the phobia with her in the usual way, employing reframing, submodality work and the fast phobia cure - basically teaching her brain that she was doing this from the inside and showing her how to change it. The work was slow. I found that she was doing the phobia extremely persistently - but after a dedicated and fun four hour session, I had installed in her a sort of impatience with her phobia - and also an amusement with it. We broke for a moment for her to go to the toilet. When she came back in, she was grinning from ear to ear. "I didn't test the lock!" she said to me. "I completely forgot to test the lock!" I was well pleased with this result, but puzzled by her insistence that the phobia was not yet gone. I asked more questions and found that when she thought of other situations, she was still extremely uncomfortable. There was something else going on in her, that up to then I had missed.

We sat and talked over a cup of tea, as I decided to find out a little more detail, to see if she could remember a "seed" event that had set her phobia off.  Over the course of the talk, she revealed something that she had been denying to herself for quite a long time.  She looked at me with big eyes with a look of realisation on her face and said:  "Something else happened.  I remember it now.  Something that is very painful and that I have shut in a box for years.  This is the first time I have remembered it."

From her body language I could see that this was a big deal. When I asked her about it, I told her I didn't want any detail, but asked instead whether she could supply five adjectives that would be appropriate to it. She gave me these:  

"Constrained, violated, held down, forced, helpless."  

She told me that this thing had happened to her when she was 14 years old. Her eyes were glistening with the emotion she felt and I quickly worked to take her back to a more useful and joyful state.

When I had done this, I considered what to do next. She looked at me with an imploring look on her face, recalling all the work we had done so far and said: 

"Please, no visualisations on this one."

I could see her point. She didn't want to be reminded of this - it was too raw for her and, to give her protection from it, she had a very strong anchor of pain and helplessness attached to it, even when double disassociated. I was, I confess, for a few brief seconds, a little stumped. Then the training that I had done with NLP LIFE kicked in and did its magic.

On the NLP Practitioner course I had gone on, Michael Neill had taught our group a particular technique known as "Neuro Logical Levels", or "The Sacred Journey Process" (to see this process in full, please see Michael Neill's article: A Life Changing Experiment). Now, as I considered my client's needs, I found myself slipping into a relaxed state, and suddenly, a memory of Michael Neill sprang up in my mind.  The movie I ran was of Michael at the Licensed Practitioner Course, taking someone through the process. I could remember the levels, the procedure, everything word for word - despite the fact that I had witnessed the procedure only once, more than a year before.

I took my client through the process, and then strengthened it with a trance in which I changed her personal history.  She came out of the trance extremely relaxed and happy. I asked her what she felt about the initial event that had fired off her phobia. Her reply:

"I had always thought that I needed to shut this memory in a box and keep the lid on tight. But I don't need to. I'm not going to shout about it to anyone, but it happened. It happened in the past, a long time ago. It can sit on the shelf, out in the open, with my other memories - some good, some bad. You know, it's strange. It just doesn't have the emotional power it had before."

As I always do with my clients, I rang her a few weeks later to check how she was doing. She told me that on the weekend prior to the call she had been around a friend's house who had a faulty lock on their toilet. She got locked in because she hadn't checked that the lock worked. "And you know what?" she asked. "I didn't panic. The family were at the bottom of the garden, so they wouldn't have been able to hear me shouting.  Normally I would have been on the phone to someone to get them to let me out. But not this time. I just said to myself: bloody silly woman, getting locked in like this - and I played with the lock till I got it loose. No problem at all!"

No, no problem at all. The truth is she didn't need to worry about getting locked in a box with her fear. She'd let the fear out of the box at last, which meant she could get into it, whenever she chose.