Neuro Linguistic Programming

Chapter 3: Discovering Who’s Directing Your Life 43

Employing the NLP Fast Phobia Cure................................................

The NLP Fast Phobia Cure allows you to re-experience a trauma or phobia

without experiencing the emotional content of the event or having to face the

trigger that normally sets off the phobic response. You need to ensure that

you work on this process in an environment where you know yourself to be

completely safe, in the presence of another person who can help to keep you

grounded if you begin to panic.

This process ensures that you examine an experience while you’re doubly

dissociated from the memory, creating a separation between you (in the

now) and the emotions of a trauma or a phobic response. In the following

list, the double dissociation is done through having you watch yourself in a

cinema (dissociation), while watching yourself on a cinema screen (double

dissociation) (you can find more on dissociation in Chapter 10):

1. Identify when you have a phobic response to a stimulus or a traumatic
   or unpleasant memory that you want to overcome.


2. Remember that you were safe before and are safe after the unpleasant
   experience.


3. Imagine yourself sitting in the cinema, watching yourself on a small,
   black-and-white screen.


4. Now imagine floating out of the ‘you’ that’s sitting in the cinema seat
   and into the projection booth.


5. You can now see yourself in the projection booth, watching yourself
   in the seat, watching the film of you on the screen.


6. Run the film in black and white, on the very tiny screen, starting
   before you experienced the memory you want to overcome and run-
   ning it through until after the experience when you were safe.


7. Now freeze the film or turn the screen completely white.


8. Float out of the projection booth, out of the seat, and into the end of
   the film.


9. Run the film backwards very quickly, in a matter of a second or two,
   in full colour, as if you’re experiencing the film, right back to the
   beginning, when you were safe.


10. You can repeat steps 8 and 9 until you’re comfortable with the
    experience.


11. Now go into the future and test an imaginary time when you may have
    experienced the phobic response.