Doing is believing when it comes to recovering from traumatic experiences.

My introduction to NLP was dramatic. I arrived in London direct from St. Petersburg, Russia, and as soon as I was settled, my brother visited me bearing a book.

'You'll need this,' he said handing me a copy of Heart of the Mind, by Connirae and Steve Andreas. I was lying in a hospital bed, weak and enfeebled. My face was swollen and fortunately I couldn't feel much of it - the nerve had been pinched. What I could feel was painful enough. I had been assaulted in Russia and had multiple fractures to my face. The experience changed my life forever.

I was very fortunate. The surgery was successful. Three weeks later I was back in Russia. Neither the assault nor the surgery changed my life in any meaningful way - it was what I learnt from the experience which was so life changing. There were two main things I learnt from Heart of the Mind: one was how to recover from trauma, the second was discovering a whole, new, inner world which I could access using NLP techniques. The Heart of the Mind was a very accessible introduction to NLP and simple though its techniques were they proved effective.

A couple of years after my surgery I met an Englishman in Riga who had been in Russia in the 1990s and suffered from an assault very similar to mine. He had returned immediately to the UK - unlike me he hadn't had the advantage of NLP techniques. He had suffered from anxiety for about three years after the attack. He had never returned to Russia and he still suffers from considerable discomfort as a result of nerve damage.

The NLP techniques I learnt enabled me to overcome trauma quickly and not only was my emotional and psychological recovery fast, so too was my physical recovery. By being able to move on from the event my body seemed to be free to heal and recover. Within five weeks of the surgery I was backpacking in Italy.

The trauma cure, which also works on phobias, is a very elegant and simple process. It works by visually rehearsing the experience in a way that is safe for the individual. The principle is to remove the experience from a first person (associated) experience to one, which is seen in the third person (dissociated). By carrying out this mental rehearsal much of the trauma disappears as do the emotions connected with it. The process takes some 15-20 minutes to carry out and has proven effective for a variety of situations. Dr. Richard Bolstad has used it in Bosnia with genocide victims as well as in Chechnya. So no matter how traumatic the experience - the trauma and phobia cure can work wonders.

My own experience with NLP astonished me so much that I continued reading and increasing my knowledge of the subject. Among friends and family I became something of a fix-it person when people got into trouble. When the opportunity came to fully train in NLP, I seized it immediately and haven't looked back. Most of techniques that I recommend and use with clients I have used myself. I know how effective NLP is because I haven't only studied it but have used it constantly over the past five years to develop myself, help friends, family and clients.

© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, Christchurch, Mind Design Ltd. www.mind-design.co.nz

About the author

I am a trained linquist and have spent much of my life travelling. The linguistic component on NLP has always interested me and having experienced some of the powerful changes that NLP is capable of producing in terms of professional life, personal relationships, health and personal development, I was overcome with a desire to train and teach people these life changing skills.