Addiction recovery strategies (fwd from NLPTALK)
Glenn Fraser You wrote:
>I would be interested in what some of your strategies are.
>This is an area I have a deep interest in.
Glenn
All the stuff we use doing this job is not actually structured
in our minds. So I am giving you a bunch of beliefs, strategies,
values, outcomes etc...
1 - the first thing with addictions is people are coming
saying "I don't want to be addicted anymore" and it's obviously
not a valid NLP outcome. At the first glance you're facing to
a double bind. You can spend time (waste time) trying to get a
valid outcome and you'll succeed. You'll get a full bunch of
valid outcomes but as soon as you'll ask the $100 question :
"What did prevent you from reaching these outcomes ?" the answer
would sound like "being addicted !" "-awright ! awright !".
Go back to step 1.
You can also decide to go ahead and take this statement of
"not being addicted anymore" and find out a strategy. But doing
this you have to transgress the ecological NLP rule that's
you can't do valuable work without any well formed outcome.
First reason why you need guts. You have to cross the frontier
of the known way of working. Are you ready or not ?
What we do :
We have an internal picture of how would be the person not being
addicted and this internal image is becoming more and more precise
as we are interacting with the person. This is our *main* criteria
and we are calibrating all the time to notice whether the person
is going towards this picture. You can call this *intuition*.
Let's say the unconscious mind of the client is transmitting us
all the information non-verbally.And believe it !!!
2 - I don't know whether parts do actually exist or not but we are
using until now the metaphor of the Addictive Part and the Sober
Part. And using whatever will work as anchoring or visual
squash we are collapsing these parts into a New One.
Doing it, you're openning not a door but a highway, let's
say a German Highway without any speed limitation where you
can drive at the speed you want and still being aware of
Porsches running at 200 km/h (125 mph).
At this point you need guts also !
You're driving your client into deep trance phenomena, in
some ways you are in too, that's the point where you can
install all kinds of positive post hypnotic inductions.
3 - Last step we had done until now but will not necessary
last in the future is classical 6 steps reframming
with the ***NEW** part.
4 - Now since 18 months we are adding decisions strategies
work (cf postings).
5 - A that point you'll obtain valuable well-formed outcomes
and you can do whatever you want using your repertoire.
Comments : As everybody can notice there is nothing extraordinary
in this process. All the techniques are well known NLP techniques.
They are only used in an unusual way sometimes. In fact I do
actually think that it is the therapist's ATTITUDE that is making
the difference. The therapist's beliefs are dramatically important
as addicted people are usually very intuitive, they can easily
catch your beliefs, your values, want you are thinking about
them, are you judging them etc...
We have done some trainings with NLPers to teach them this way
of working with addicts and we had noticed for our next trainings
that we'll have to emphasize this ATTITUDE issue. From the previous
training, the most efficient therapists are the ones who had been
addicted in the past and had recovered with this method !!! So
they got the right beliefs !!!
-Bernard Frit