Tina was confident and
consistent with her car driving skills. While most of her colleagues travelled
by bus, she had been driving to office daily from more than a year. One sudden
stroke of migraine induced a life-long fear of driving?
While she was driving and
waiting for the traffic signal to go green, she suddenly felt acute pain in her
head and black out as she couldn’t see anything ahead. Everybody around started
honking and she got so afraid and affected by this incident and lost all her
confidence in driving. This was the last time she drove the car. Even in case
of emergency she would not drive as she felt so fearful thinking she would
again get the attack at the traffic lights.
I and Tina sat down for a
discussion where she shared that she had left driving from some 3 months as now
she was quite scared after the incident.
I asked her to close her
eyes and imagine/ visualize a red frame and picture that moment of attack
adding every possible memory to it, and then visualize at the bottom-right of
the red frame, a small green frame where she could see herself driving
confidently and happily as she had always done, and then as I made the sound
“Whoosh” she had to expand the green frame and break the red one with it and
then feel the green and open her eyes to break the pattern. Then again close
her eyes and repeat the steps.
She did this 5 times and later
when she tried closing her eyes and visualize the red picture, she was amazed
to realize that she could only think and see green picture. The old, scary and
undesired pattern got completely vanished from her thought pattern. Next day
onwards she started driving with the same zest and confidence as she had always
been.
NOTE:
This technique of changing the unwanted behaviors or neurological patterns is a
powerful approach used by NLP. NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It
works on the principle that there is a connection between
the neurological processes(“Neuro”), language (“Linguistic”) and behavioral
patterns learned through experience (“Programming”) and these can be changed to
achieve specific goals in life. Anyone can apply this simple technique of
“whooshing” to let go of any unwanted behavior or thought pattern.
