Founder & creator of YourPCM ...

Neuro Linguistic Programming Vs Hypnosis

Is one better than the other?

POSTED BY STEFFI LEWIS ON 08/06/2015 @ 8:00AM

NLP has been a panacea for me. It's helped me with some lifelong confidence issues and allowed me to expand my thinking to come up with sblogit.com. Here I am a few years later and despite some challenging health issues, It's been an amazing journey ...

How do you deal with those locked in thoughts that just drag you down?

Timeline Therapy, Parts Integration, Sub Modality Changes, Anchoring, Linguistics and Reframing; these are all techniques I was taught under the expert guidance of Pip Thomas at Edge NLP.

After four years of using them in my business, on myself and occasionally my friends when they need it, who I am today is a completely different person from who I was before my NLP Practitioner course.

"The most important thing is that I actually love who I am now!"

But it's funny how the mind works, isn't it? Months and even years after a traumatic experience, your unconscious mind throws you a curveball and bubbles up memories into your conscious mind, simply because it believes you're strong enough to deal with what it repressed - as a safety mechanism - when you were going through something traumatic.

99% of the time, a well-honed and often used NLP Toolkit can deal with this easily. A combination of Timeline Therapy on myself and some Sub-Modality changes are the way I usually dispatch these annoying memories and emotions. NLP really is that powerful!

But what can you do when some memory has locked itself into a repeating pattern in your mind? What if you keep on churning and churning the memory, looking for a 'way out' of the emotions and not being able to find one because they're so intense?

In this case, looking at the event in your mind, trying to find the 'learnings' and rising above the emotion is difficult; no matter how much you try to push away the images in your head, or turn down the volume on the words, they just keep sucking you in again because they're so powerful.

"What can you do then?"

I had something like this recently. Some unresolved emotions just wouldn't go away. No matter what NLP techniques I tried and how hard I worked to resolve them, they just kept on churning and churning and I was beginning to feel a dark knot in my tummy. It was really twisting me up.

I can normally change my state to happy (yes, there's a switch and you have one too) by throwing myself into an interesting project at work. Sadly, it made no difference and although everyone in my world was still seeing me as the sparkly, energetic and inspiring girl they expect, when I closed the curtains at the end of the day, I'd slump onto my sofa and - on many occasions - burst into tears. I just couldn't untie the knot and it was consuming my energy just thinking about it.

And so eventually, I admitted defeat. I couldn't stop the images appearing in my mind. I was unable to quieten the words that I heard; the emotions I felt got stronger and stronger and the knot got tighter.

I wasn't prepared to let this fester within me! So I called on Lee Adley at Set Your Mind Free Hypnotherapy for some help ... and she came through for me!

I sat down with Lee and explained my thoughts and feelings often clutching my tummy and explaining about the knot. After an unnerving conversation (because she has to find out what was really going on) we discovered that I had a conflict between my conscious and my unconscious mind.

"I was thinking one thing and feeling something completely different!"

She asked me what I wanted to do. I said "make my unconscious mind accept what my conscious mind is trying to tell it". Now NLP experts may say that Parts Integration could do that, however, I wasn't looking to make the two parts of my mind understand and accept each other's position ... I wanted my head to impose its will on my heart. That may sound harsh, but it really needed doing and I knew hypnosis could do just that.

Lee settled me in her big comfy chair and everything was quiet except for the crackling of the fire and a Robin singing in the tree outside. She started to talk and I drifted down and down until she knew my unconscious mind was ready to accept the lesson for the day ...

I knew it would take a few days to embed fully but I did start to feel better almost immediately. Maybe the realisation that I'd done something about the knot loosened it a little? Maybe. After a good sleep that afternoon I could feel my baseline mood lifting and it was no longer such an effort to be sparkly.

And now, just over four weeks later, I've finished the best month I've had in a long time and know that the next few months will only get better and better. Instead of the darkness of the knot twisting me up, I've filled that space in my unconscious mind with the things I am going to achieve. I visualise them in the same position as the knot used to be and put a lot of light around them.

Like I said earlier, the NLP Toolkit is great for 99% of the challenges life can throw at you and I highly recommend Pip and Edge NLP for giving me the tools I needed to change my life.

But, on occasion, you need to delve a little further into your psyche; and when that happens - and for me it is rare that it does - I go visit Lee Adley at Set You Mind Free Hypnotherapy because I know I will feel better again afterwards.

"Many people will say that NLP is mumbo-jumbo!"

And they think you've got to be really screwed up to go get hypnotised. I disagree completely - both work for me in the right situations. If you've been wondering what they're all about and how they can help you, then maybe now is a great time to find out more from either Pip or Lee?

Love, light and logic ...

STEFFI LEWIS