The Fast Phobia Cure, or the Audio-kinesthetic Dissociation Technique, to give it it’s Sunday Best, is probably the most amazing piece of technology* I’ve ever encountered.
(*By technology, I don’t mean gadgets or widgets, I mean “the application of scientific advances to benefit humanity“).
The Fast Phobia Cure, from what I can gather, came about by an informal survey of people who had managed to overcome their phobias. The survey was carried out by Richard Bandler & John Grinder, the co-inventors of what eventually became NLP. Basically, people who no longer had phobias were asked “Well, how did you get rid of it?” The most common reply was “I just saw myself acting the way I did and thought enough is enough!”
I saw myself… To see yourself do anything is the essence of dissociation.
When we’re young, we don’t have the cognitive abilities available to us as adults. Children tend to think in terms of nominal processing, or “Black & White”. However, this inability to understand their experience sophisticated terms doesn’t stop young people searching for meaning. So, if a child watches their mother being scared of a spider – a mother who until now has been their source of courage and strength – then the child will naturally conclude “Spiders must be scary, they even scare my mum!”
As we go through life, people are guided by a built-in safety mechanism that tries to steer us away from unpleasant experiences. That mechanism is unconscious, and draws on our memories and beliefs. So in this case, an unpleasant experience would most likely include meeting spiders, because the mind has a memory that spiders are so scary, they even scare mum… A memory that formed before the mind could understand that Mum was being irrational…
And so a phobia is born; it’s a learned response. These kind of experiences are known as Significant Sensitising Events (an event that sensitises our innate, unconscious safety mechanism to ‘kick in’ in the future). Often, these events are compounded, to the point where we not only feel fear, but our belief is that we expect to feel fear…
The Fast Phobia Cure works by transforming the meaning of Significant Sensitising Events so they mean something else. By disassociating yourself from those original sensitising events, the meaning given to the events (e.g. Spiders are scary) changes, so releasing the fears or negative emotions the events have caused.
As Joseph O’Connor writes in his excellent NLP Workbook:
When you are associated, you feel the feelings that go with the experience.
When you are dissociated, you have feelings about the experience.
This means, rather than feeling the fear experienced whilst watching Mum cry because of a spider, instead you feel what you’d feel if you travelled back in time to watch the experience from a distance…
And so, negative emotion is released…
In ‘Freedom From The Past (Part 2)‘ I’ll be discussing just how to use the Dissociation Technique in full detail.
Warm regards,
Adrian
www.lastingchange.co.uk
