I am writing this excited and eager to share. But I am also thinking that many of you will chuckle at the newbie and say, “Ya, I did that ten years ago.” Still I want to share a success.
I am a special education teacher and therefore have a unique population to work with. I have had some interesting experiences and needs that come with this very vulnerable population. It was looking for tools to help these people that led me to NLP classes. The more I thought about it the more I thought, most of you probably don’t work with the special needs population and might enjoy looking at NLP from my perspective.
As an example of vulnerable, one year I had eleven girls in my class and before the end of the school year seven of them had been molested. I have never had a year go by without at least one child molested or abused. School counselors find this population difficult to deal with as they do not respond in “normal” ways and so our counselor sends them back to teacher for counseling. I’m the teacher.  I have a Special Olympics team and one of my Special Olympians, Angel, was having a difficult time with a traumatic event. She was willing to work it through with me. We were on an overnighter this weekend. I planned to use the evening after swimming to work with her and I had planned to use the time line.
Our hotel room was so crowded and cold that going to the time line for the first time did not feel right. I decided to do instead the V-K Dissociation. Only one problem, Angel is blind. There is no visual. She has been blind since she was one month old and has no memory of ever seeing.
“How could I do this,” I thought. I remembered my NLP teacher, Judy DeLozier, counseling us to be creative and to listen. I could create instead a sound booth.
Angel and I talked about how CD’s are made. We talked about the recording studio where the singer or speaker produces the audio and then about a sound booth that was a separate room that was sound proof so that those in the recording studio could not hear what was being said, but those in the sound booth could hear everything going on. We talked about it being of Plexiglas and separate and safe.
Then instead of producing an image on a screen she produced the sounds of the situation from the safety of the sound booth. Her eyes are prostheses so I watched for other clues to anchor. She was able to access safely from the sound booth the memory that she wanted to change, and add auditory and kinesthetic resources. I then I collapsed anchors.
It was very fun to do and to see it make a difference in the way she felt about the event.
(permission to share has been granted from Angel, and Angel is not her real name)
(I have written permission for all of my students to work with them using NLP, and to share with the NLP population what I am doing) |