VISUAL / KINESTHETIC DISSOCIATION A phobia is a severe, inappropriate response of fear regarding some person or event in the past. Dissociative Techniques involve shifting the viewpoint and seeing a specific Internal Representation from a dissociated position, “taking the charge off” a negative emotion. Here is one technique to remove a phobia. NB – Acknowledge the ‘one-time learning’. THE FOLLOWING TECHNIQUE SHOULD BE USED BY NLP PRACTITIONERS OR QUALIFIED NLPers.
1. Establish an anchor for the “Here and Now” state. If the client gets associated and stuck in the original event, the “Here and Now” anchor may be used to return the client to the present. 2. Ask the client to remember the first time the reaction occurred. (Time-based techniques such as Time Line Therapy ™ or Memory Re-Solution may be needed to deal with the root cause.) 3. Say to the client “Imagine you are sitting in the middle of a cinema theatre, and up on the screen you can see a black and white snapshot in which you see yourself doing an everyday activity like the washing up or ironing”. This is dissociation. 4. “Float out of your body up into the projection booth where you can see yourself in the middle of the cinema theatre watching yourself on the screen”. This is double dissociation. Select the relevant film and load it onto the projector. Ensure the film starts BEFORE the traumatic event, and finishes at a point when the client was COMPLETELY SAFE. 5. “Press the start button and to run the film forward in black and white all the way through to the end, to the point where you were completely safe. From this completely dissociated position, notice what learnings that younger you could have taken, and which you can take now, to keep you appropriately safe in the future. Freeze it at the end in black and white.” 6. “Now jump inside the film, and run it backwards in colour, very fast, all the way to the beginning, looking through your own eyes.” 7. Break state (in effect, repeating step 4 is a break state – see 8 below) 8. Repeat steps 4, 5, 6 and 7 until the client cannot get the phobia back. Make the process faster and faster each time you repeat it. 9. Test.
Caution: When removing a phobia, please ensure that if the fear served a protective function, appropriate new strategies are installed to keep the client safe.
