Category Archives: trauma counselling

Surviving disaster: An NLP based roadmap

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www.cogniscientNLP.com-disasterDisasters, whether they are manmade or natural come with a physical and emotional cost. The true trauma of a disaster occurs after people have recovered from the initial shock. Survivors who continue to live in the disaster zone are burdened with the clean up and the costs: financial, material and emotional.

Take care of yourself

It is critical, for you and those around you, that you take care of yourself. Stress and emotions require a huge amount of energy. If you have insufficient energy life is going to be harder for you, you will have less energy for the clean up, less energy to support those around you, and you may become terse, irritable, emotional or irrational. These responses make a difficult situation much harder for everyone. The solutions in this case are easy. Eat well, sleep well. Try to take time out to do something you enjoy and which relaxes you.

If you have trouble sleeping at night, make sure you do enough physical activity during the day so you can sleep well. You can also take a nap during the day if you are disturbed at night. Stay rested.

www.cogniscientNLP.com-comfortfoodEat comfort foods. This is something which we tend to do automatically when stressed, but it is worth mentioning. We all have some food or beverage which reminds us of better, happier times. Take time to enjoy it. It might be a cup of tea or a particular sweet.

Listen to music. Like comfort food, we all have favourite songs which can throw us back into a good mood. If you are feeling down, put it on. This is no time for parties, but right now we need to stay focused. By looking after ourselves and by staying positive, we can be much more focused and get much greater results.

Talk about it. The chances are you are going to want to talk about your experiences. This can be good way of getting the experience out of the system and to come to grips with what has happened. However, how you talk about an experience affects your memory of that experience. I have come across cases where people have survived traumatic events without suffering any trauma, but have later become traumatized because of the way they talked about that event and thought about it. REMEMBER no experience is traumatic in itself. It is how you think about it that makes it traumatic or not. The way you talk can affect the way you think.  When you think about the experience:

THINK POSITIVE.

KEEP TO THE FACTS.

STATE WHAT HAPPENED and WHAT YOU DID.

Stay focused with your thoughts. Talk about what needs to be done and do them. When you are not doing them: relax, do things you enjoy doing, spend time with people you like. Try not to think about the bad things that have happened: you will simply feel bad. KEEP YOUR MIND ON WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Take care of those around you

Make sure that those around you are eating well and sleeping well. It will make things easier for www.cogniscientNLP.com-comforteachothereveryone.

Talk about the experience following the guidelines above. It is typical for people suffering shock to talk only about the experience, and repeat descriptions over and over again. If this is happening, talk them through the experience, keeping to the facts, and talking about what they did and what you did. If people mention the victims or the destruction caused by the earthquake, acknowledge it, but try to move on. Keep their thoughts on making the present as comfortable as possible and ensuring the future is going to be one you are proud of.

Do fun things together – play games or sport. Go for a bike ride or do gardening. Be active. This will keep you from thinking about events and get you tired for sleep at night.

Do things that help each other and others. If you and the people around you feel like you are making a positive contribution, you know that you are mastering the situation. That feels good and removes the threat of a victim mentality. We are not victims, we are survivors and we are moving on with our lives.

Show sympathy, empathy, and lead people on to doing something positive. It might be helping clean up the neighbour’s yard or making pancakes or delivering water to friends.

Use comfort food and music.

Recognise the need for help

If you or those around you (loved ones, friends, flat-mates, neighbours) continue to suffer from anxiety, worry, insomnia, depression, panic attacks, flashbacks or an inability to concentrate, then seek professional help.  These reactions are natural and can be resolved. If you would like a personal consultation to help you through these, contact me. I provide one-on-one consultations both in person and on Skype.

What is NLP and why I prefer it

There are many types of support available. I use NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) for the simple reason that I found it extremely effective and useful for dealing specifically with trauma and depression. NLP is a results orientated therapy. The focus is on identifying what issues you have and resolving them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

In the case of psychological trauma, an experience takes on whatever meaning you subconsciously give it. Recent research into neuroplasticity has shown that when we recall an experience, by the process of remembering it we recreate it in our mind. We then store that new recollection in our memory. This gives us a crucial key in dealing with traumatic memories. By getting people to recall experiences in a way that is non-threatening, future recollections of the experience no longer cause anxiety or any of the other symptoms associated with psychological trauma.  NLP has numerous, elegant techniques which enable people to effectively alter the way they think in order to overcome a wide range of problems and enable people to perform to much higher and greater levels. NLP is used successfully to help: build confidence, motivation; deal with stress, anxiety, insomnia; develop resourcefulness and overcome fears and addictions.

© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, www.CogniscientNLP.com.

 

How to be brave: An NLP based approach

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www.CogniscientNLP.com-sharkAt some stage most of us go through a time when we have to be strong and brave. Whenever we find ourselves in a dangerous and continually threatening situation it is natural to ask “how long will this continue?” For some of us this question really is “how long do we need to be brave?”

Sleepless nights, fear and anxiety have their impact on all areas of your life, affecting your personal health and relationships. Here’s how to build resilience and courage.

Although people will often tell you to “be strong” or “be brave” few people actually know how to be brave. People will often tell you that bravery is something you are born with, someone is brave and someone else is a coward.

It’s not that simple.

www.CogniscientNLP.com-WWIIairplaneBravery is relative, it is also context specific. Above all it is all about what is going on in YOUR mind.  There is a story of a World War II bomber pilot who had flown into through enemy anti-aircraft fire on numerous occasions. He said he never felt fear. There was too much to do.

The bravest thing he ever did was walk through a rice paddy in Burma. He never got a medal for it. There wasn’t an enemy soldier present for 50 miles but he had perceived that the danger was high and walking, he had nothing to occupy his mind – and it fixated on the danger.

I was once snorkelling with a friend of mine at a seal colony (in a wetsuit) and I asked my friend if he was ever afraid of sharks. He looked at me as if he hadn’t even considered the possibility and said, “If I think about it, of course I’m afraid of them.  I just don’t think about it.”

He mightn’t be one of my smartest friends, but he’s certainly the bravest, and amazingly enough, he’s still alive.

www.CogniscientNLP.com-RomanLegionThe Romans believed that bravery could be taught. With an army of 500,000 men they protected an empire that encompassed Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. They regularly fought armies much larger than their own. The Roman legionaries were definitely brave.

The Romans taught their soldiers to be brave by accustoming them to the sense of danger and teaching them how to respond to it. Danger triggers adrenalin which can significantly enhance your strength, awareness and abilities.

In a dangerous situation you can become another person, if you know what to do.

The key is to focus on what to do, what you can do and responding to the situation. People who are afraid focus on the danger, the possibility of being maimed or killed and the possibility of having loved ones maimed and killed. They’re not pretty thoughts. In crisis situations don’t think them.

Easier said than done, you say.

Exactly.

And it might take some effort to teach yourself not to do it, but it can be learnt, and all it takes is a little bit of time.

What we want you to be able to do in an emergency is to replace those terrifying and unpleasant thoughts which trigger fear and flight and replace them with immediate actions that need to be done. But the first thing to do is general preparation.

General Preparation

  1. Have an emergency kit ready, check the Civil Defence website for suggestions
  2. Make sure your family knows how to respond to emergencies
  3. Have meeting points arranged so you can meet up
  4. Minimise dangers at home and work

By taking these steps you know that you have done everything you can to minimise the danger. This isn’t a guarantee but it means the chances are in your favour that you and your family will survive. This means that when the ground starts to shake or any other emergency begins, that you are set up for survival.

Research the Experience

Know what you are going to do when an emergency occurs. Do some research so you know what the cause is and what the best response is.

Knowing what is causing the emergency by itself makes it feel safer.

Rehearse the Experience

Now you know:

  • what will happen in an emergency
  • know that you have safeguarded yourself as best you can
  • know what the best response is

You can mentally rehearse various emergency scenarios.  There are several effective NLP techniques for doing this, if you know something of NLP you can do these yourself.

They include:

  • The Swish
  • The Trauma Cure
  • Chained Anchors
  • Timeline processes
  • Mental Rehearsal

For those less familiar with these techniques, the best approach is simply mentally rehearsing what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. If there are family members that you need to look after, include helping them in your plans. Play these plans like a movie over and over several times. The repetition moves the thoughts into your subconscious mind so that when you need to, you can act immediately.

This preparation will enable you to act immediately, without thinking, to do what you need to do. Like the WWII bomber pilot, when you know what to do in an emergency, you just don’t have time to get yourself scared.

For more information and to book a consultation, contact Peter.

© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, www.CogniscientNLP.com.

More than Just Talk – Understanding Trauma Counselling with NLP

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talking-therapy-www.cogniscientNLP.comA common misunderstanding is that the best way to deal with a traumatic experience is to talk about it. The idea is that this gets it ‘out of the system.’ Although this is correct to some extent, it is important to understand that some ways of discussing issues can cause trauma and not heal it. There are two types of conversation which are typical when recalling traumatic experiences; one is regressive, the other progressive.

Regressive conversations focus on the scary elements of the experience, they repeat the worst memories and focus on how bad the experience could have been. Such conversations often become panicky and followed by such repetitions ‘it’s terrible’, ‘it could have been so bad’, ‘I can’t believe how lucky we are, it could have been so much worse…’ Such conversations tend to regress people back into the negative aspects of the experience. The consequences of this can be disturbing with people surviving a traumatic event only to traumatize themselves in the aftermath. An event is not traumatic itself; it is how we think about the event that determines how traumatic we find it.

trauma02-www.cogniscientNLP.comThe way we think about events can be altered and changed by how we talk about them. Talking is a way of trying to work through events and understand what that event means to us. However, if we focus on the event as a very real experience which continues to control and threaten our lives, we will often start to feel the symptoms commonly associated with trauma.

Progressive conversations have a different focus. They emphasize what people did during the experience, how they responded. ‘Good luck’ is often the result of good planning, good training, or presence of mind to make an effective response. Progressive conversations are more positive about the consequences of an event and view the event as a one-off, unusual disturbance to daily life which can then return to normal.

I had a vivid experience which demonstrates these points some years ago when in Finland.  I was caught up in a series of unpleasant events that were quite beyond my control. Following the experience I wrote an account of what had happened and having completed this task felt settled and in control of myself. I had successfully got the experience out of my system. That evening my parents phoned and I described what had happened to me over the previous twenty-four hours. In describing the experience I relived it and this traumatized me. It would have been better if I had not talked with anyone.  I had inadvertently had a regressive conversation which had thrown me back into the horror of what had happened. Talking with friends and family can be helpful but can also do harm.

The whole counseling approach often risks as much as it gains by getting people to relive these experiences which can psychologically lock them into a situation that feels threatening, unsafe and out of control.

therapy-session-www.cogniscientNLP.comFortunately, there are other techniques which are more useful and safer for people to use. These techniques which are based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) approaches avoid focusing on the event itself and deal with how the recollection of the event is remembered.  This technique has been used successfully around the world in trauma cases involving Vietnam veterans, victims of the September 11 attacks in the USA, and genocide and terrorist victims in Bosnia and Russia. The advantage of the NLP approach is that it is a simple method which gets people to mentally rehearse the event in a way that is without the emotional content. By using this technique we can remove the trauma associated with an event, thus making it emotionally neutral and safe.

While talking about events is natural and many ways positive, try to focus on the good stuff and let bygones be bygones.

Peter Campbell is an NLP Master Practitioner. He offers a full range of NLP based services to expatriates. He has personal experience working with trauma, and has worked with victims of violence, sexual abuse and earthquake survivors.

To book a consultation to start recovering from trauma contact Peter.