Depression and NLP
Apr 9th, 2008 by spaceagesage
In February I wrote a post about depression where I mentioned how self-limiting thoughts become stuck in the subconscious mind from childhood, thoughts such as “Don’t get close to anyone, or they will die and leave me like my dad and sister.”
NLP (Neuro-Linguistics Programming) helped me uncover many of my “stuck” thoughts and deal with them. I don’t proclaim expert status in the field of NLP, but I have used it for my husband and myself with astonishing success. Here’s my attempt at explaining how NLP works:
A trauma affects the brain in such a way as to alter the usual filing process for the stressful event, filing which usually happens during REM sleep. Instead, the mind creates its own ongoing “computer sub-routine” to cope.
For example, a child who is never allowed to show anger in his family tries several times to show that powerful emotion, but his attempts are brutally beaten back with a verbal barrage of “Shut up and don’t talk back.” The young child handles the situation the best he can by creating a deep mental message or “computer sub-routine” in his mind that says, Getting people angry makes me feel horrible and afraid, so I will become a people pleaser, no matter what.
For the child, this underlying drive to act as a people pleaser out of fear becomes a way of life all the way into adulthood because he has no mechanism to recognize and re-code the sub-routine message. The message often creates other problems and issues in the areas of self worth, trust, and anger.
NLP helps the mind transform the computer sub-routine into something positive and releases the person from the self-limiting message. This has worked for me on major issues in sessions of less than 60 minutes. I don’t have to revisit a past incident, necessarily, I just need to find the inner message and re-write it with NLP techniques. I have worked with a Master Practitioner of NLP and would not recommend just finding anyone to do the work with you.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
~ Anais Nin ~
I am a very huge believer in NLP and hypnosis. I have a site on each at Squidoo.com. They both have helped me tremendously. Those things you speak of are stored in our subconscious mind, many of which we are unaware of consciously, however, they sure can take control of our behavior.
Very good article.