EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Curing a child's phobia

In a few minutes

Fun and laughter are important ingredients in any change work you do. In fact, if you don't have a sense of humour, you cannot do NLP: it is one of the requirements. I worked with a nine-year-old boy who had a phobia of snakes. He was playing in the barn, picked up a handful of hay and found himself holding a snake. His response to the incident was extreme and he had not slept through a single night in the ten months following the incident. The first thing I did was to ask him where he thought the snake was now. I answered my own question: "Probably hiding down in his hole. When his Mommy asks him why he doesn't go to the barn to play, he tells her about the boy who picked him up and yelled at him and threw him around." He thought this was really funny and we laughed about how silly the snake was. Then I told him the story about Jessica and her monster.

Going into the event from the point of view of the snake gave him a new perspective. We joked about who was more frightened, him or the snake. If the snake could make that kind of mistake, so could he. Jessica's story introduced the idea that he could control the process that was terrifying him, and certainly if a three-year-old could do it, a big nine-year-old like him could, too. The stories and the laughing made it easier to do the rest of the work, and he was able to go home and sleep all night by himself without dreaming about snakes.

Will McDonald and Richard Bandler

In An Insider's Guide to Submodalities

Suggest this page to a friend