Magic Valley NLP

Presupposition: If what you are doing isn’t working, do anything else

Events are real, however names have been changed. 

Picture from Microsoft Clip Art, color has been changed.

I have a darling little girl in my room named Ana May.  I have worked a bit with Ana May.  She comes in to school in the morning with no meds down her system and the worst case of ADHD one can imagine. Her brain is totally not in gear. 

One day a boy came in sporting proudly his newly dyed blue hair. I mean bright blue.  Ana May told him that it was ugly.  He was hurt and is the type that blows up big time.  I have the chipped plaster in the walls to prove it.  

Could I do it?  Could I effect a change? 

I escorted them back into our private room and let them talk.  Talk they did.  I could see and feel the anger.   He had a right to his anger, she had attacked him personally. 

I remembered what my mentor had told me, if you remove something you will leave a void.  I did not want to leave a void.  These kids feel and react to voids or emptiness.  They have no social restraints and no idea how to fill their voids so they hit out or cause problems trying to find a way to fill the void.

I got an idea.  I had them imagine the anger they felt and give it a color.  Hers was brown, his blue.    I stood behind and had them place the color out in front of them with their imagination and asked if they wanted to get rid of it.

I then had them both imagine themselves as happy and in a positive state.  We then together swished and superimposed the happy, positive image over the angry color pushing the angry color away and replacing it, or filling the void it had left, with a positive image of self.  We did this several times to make certain it would stick.

I then sent the blue-headed boy off to class. As he walked through the class room the aides overheard him say, “That was cool!”    The anger was totally gone and he was calm.  What was more important to me is that it seemed to hold.  For the entire rest of the year this young man did not have another blow-up and he was the kind that had them frequently in the past.  I had taken a justifiable blowup situation and provided an alternative way to behave and he then applied it himself to other situations.

I kept Ana May a bit longer and had her work on impulse control. She also is making progress and I am happy to say is doing better. 

This program is a loosely applied NLP pattern called the SWISH.  It accepts that there are things we no longer want, but leaving them will leave a vacuum in us somewhere.  We therefore replace the thing we no longer want with a well-formed outcome in its place.  In this situation we replaced anger with a well-formed outcome of a happy, positive self image. 

© by Debrah Roundy 2008