*Where The Famous Phobia Cure Came From*
Last week we played with some ideas for beating the credit crunch. This
week, we're going to look at the attitude & perspective that gave rise to
the NLP Phobia Cure, one of the dramatic breakthroughs in the development of
NLP. In this article, you're going to discover how you can take this
attitude & apply it in your own life.
If you've trained as an NLP Practitioner, you're already aware that "curing"
a phobia is usually a relatively straightforward process. But back before
NLP was created, people went to psychotherapy for months or even years,
without any guarantee that they would be freed from their phobia. The
prevailing attitude at the time was that phobias were a reflection of deeper
issues, & that the person had to get "insight" in order to be cured. Believe
it or not, this sometimes worked!
Psychotherapists spent their time & energy working with people who had
phobias, but (as I once heard Richard Bandler say), people with phobias were
the last people to talk to about how to get rid of them.
Bandler & Grinder famously took a different approach. They took an ad out in
a newspaper asking for people who USED to have a phobia but got over it. To
their amazement, lots of people responded to the ad - people who used to
have a phobia then spontaneously recovered. And they all told a similar
story...
"I had this problem for years, then one day I looked at myself & laughed".
This simple statement, echoed over & over again by the people they modeled,
held two of the core elements of what was to become the Fast Phobia Cure. "I
looked at myself (dissociation) & laughed (strong positive state)."
Their approach came from two core NLP ideas:
- that people aren't broken, & don't need fixing - people already work
perfectly.
- if you want to learn how to do something, find someone who already does it
brilliantly & model them.
1) Choose something you've considered to be "wrong with you"
until now.
Think about that for a moment. Anything you've ever perceived as being
"wrong with you" is actually an example of something you (or someone else)
has judged as being wrong. You actually work perfectly. In fact, there are
contexts where the very thing you've been judging as "wrong with you" would
be valuable.
2) Think of something you'd love to be able to do / have / be.
Out there is someone who's started from where you are & now is able to do /
have / be whatever it is that you want to do / have / be.
It's just a matter of finding them & finding out how they did it!
--
Salam Street Smart NLP!
Teddi Prasetya Yuliawan
Indonesia NLP Society <http://indonesianlpsociety.org>
