I once dealt with a client who had frustrating issues in his personal life. He was having difficulty finding a girlfriend, his family had troubles back in his home country and relied on his ability to speak English to survive and his parents were in general very negative about him and his life choices. At 27 he still lived at his parent's house, but he was afraid of moving out both for how he would cope and how they would cope without him. He was regularly getting panic attacks and was constantly overwhelmed with anxiety.
I decided not to use Hypnosis to help him but instead trained him to re-pattern his thought processes with simple NLP. Simply by changing his vocabulary and using NLP to remind him to use his new vocabulary his life began to see marked improvements. He started dating several women before finding a girl he really liked and settled down, he continued helping his family with their problems but was completely unaffected by the stress they caused themselves and with time distanced himself enough that he moved out.
When people are trapped in negative spirals think negatively about the world which causes their perceptions to go out of control:
Negative Thought -> Negative Emotion -> Fear/Worry/Guilt About that Emotion -> Inability to Make a Decision or Take Action
Using the process I took that client through, I will show you how you can do the same. All it takes is a little bit of perseverance every day and a bit of understanding of how the brain works.
Your first job is to find a place where you can be relaxed and carefree. For my client it was whenever he was with me. For you it might be in your car, your office, your bedroom, at a park, at the beach, wherever. This is important because all the work you do here, from now on, will be associated with positive emotion. All the work you do to re-pattern your thoughts will be anchored to this place.
Now it is time to craft your new reality through description. First we want to develop an Internal Locus of Control. This means deciding how you feel and not letting other people decide how you feel. This might sound simple enough, but suppose you did something that caused someone to yell at you and you felt upset/embarrassed/frustrated/whatever by their reaction. Saying "They made me upset" or "I'm upset because of her" or "He made me angry" is not useful.
So the first thing you need to do is write down a set of descriptions about other people's emotions. Let's take my client's problem:
"When my mum is yelling at me because of a problem, it is because she is stressed. It has nothing to do with me."
"I am a happy, confident person. When other people judge me it speaks about them and says nothing about me."
The next thing you need to do is write down a series of statements where you take responsibility for your own emotions. For example you might write:
"I choose to get angry whenever my partner leaves a mess"
"When someone makes fun of me I choose to feel uneasy"
Now you need to write down a series of descriptors about yourself that reflect who you are as a person. These descriptors need to be positive and you need to find evidence in your life that they are true. Ignore any evidence to the contrary. For example you might write "I am a confident person", if the only evidence that you have to justify that claim is that you were brave enough to write it down and express it even though you didn't feel like it, than that is still evidence in favour of that belief.
Statements like "I am thin" when you are overweight, or "I am a non-smoker" when you smoke are no good. Instead try "I respect myself enough to exercise and eat healthy" or "I am strong willed enough to become a non-smoker". Notice how the statements are phrased positively. They don't talk about "losing weight" or "quitting smoking". Both those statements imply there is something wrong. Instead take the positive, talk about becoming the better, healthier alternative rather than about the negative you would like to improve upon.
Now what you want to do is say to yourself "from now on, whenever I am in THIS place, I am going to be this positive person. I have an internal locus of control and I take responsibility for my feelings and emotions".
The next step is to write yourself a little note. It needs to be somewhere you will see it quite regularly. It can be a reminder on your phone that goes off twice a day, or a post-it note in your car or on your wall. And it will read "Reality Check". Write the note in the same place you do your NLP work, be it your office, car, the park, whatever.
Now whenever you see that note remember being in that place. Remember the positive outlook on life that you are developing. Think about whether or not you've slipped. Have you blamed yourself for how someone else feels? Have you beat yourself up or talked down to yourself? Remember that you are now a positive and confident person. Remember how you feel when you are in that place and remember to change your vocabulary.
This in NLP is called "anchoring". First we have anchored the positive vocabulary and positive self-image to a place. Next we have anchored the post-it note to that place, so that it triggers the vocabulary and the positive self-image. The last thing you do is you anchor the negative thoughts and emotions to the post-it note. Whenever you see that note you think about all the negative thoughts and impressions you've been having of yourself and the world and remember instead to use the positive ones.
What this starts to do is change how you talk about yourself and the world. You will start catching yourself talking negatively or thinking negatively and replace the negativity with positivity. And simply by changing how you talk about the world, you can change your entire outlook on life.
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