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Article #2021  Combining EFT and NLP to enhance results in therapy    

Being able to mix and match different tools when working with clients just increases the success rate for brief therapy. I have found when EFT fits is used alongside with NLP the results are outstanding. Clients find new directions and focus as well as resolving their problems.

For example when a client comes to see me for a problem I figure out what the trigger for the problem is. If they learned to respond in a certain way to a certain trigger, be it visual, auditory or kinesthetic, then they can be helped to unlearn the response because it no longer serves a useful purpose.

Let’s take Kate who came to see me about self-esteem issues. She also had a habit of biting her nails when she felt stressed. Kate felt stressed a lot of the time and biting her nails took her attention off the stress and gave her immediately relief. Of course her nails were bitten down to her cuticles and looked really sore and ugly.

I had prescreened Kate and asked for a list of stressful events in her life. She had done her homework and we found a number of core incidents in her early life which we
Tapped on using EFT. With each core incident we applied the movie technique, and then used all the variations of the movie technique to send her system into overload so that she could no longer generate the negative feelings from those events.

Then came the NLP technique of anchoring. I asked Kate to think of a recent time when she felt stressed and then nibbled on her nails. She said it was at a job interview a few days ago. This time I asked her to think about the feeling she got from biting on her nails and while she was in the peak of that nibbling nails experience, I touched her on one of her knuckles to anchor that feeling. Then I asked Kate to expand the good feeling of relief she got from nibbling and to really go into it and feel it in her whole body and expand it and double and quadruple that feeling till every cell in her body felt so relieved. I continued to anchor this great feeling and finally asked her if that feeling had a color what would it be. Blue she responded. Then I asked her to take that blue color and cover her whole body with it and the room and the town and the country and the continents and the globe.

Next I asked her about the build up of the negative stress just before she starts to nibble on her nails. So back to the job interview we went. Her negative self talk and internal images would generate this stress and it would build up and while she was in the peak of the experience, again I anchored that feeling on another knuckle. We didn’t have to expand on this feeling at all and instead I just asked her to again think of going for the interview and as I saw the physiological changes, I touched the other ‘blue relief’ knuckle. I encouraged her to keep thinking about the stressful interview and within seconds the change in her was very noticeable. I asked her what was going on, as she said she couldn’t generate the stress now. Try, I said. But no, she could not do it. We had collapsed the anchors successfully.

A week later I checked with Kate and she noticed that she had not been biting her nails. In addition I had also asked Kate to do continuous tapping on her fingers if she felt any need to discharge negative feelings.