Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you want something but there’s a part of you that gets in the way? Such as having lots of work to do but procrastinating on social media instead?! Or being on a diet and not being able to resist that chocolate cake?! I certainly do! (especially the chocolate cake one…)
Isn’t it intriguing that we do things that we know aren’t good for us and yet we do them anyway? It’s as if there was this part of us that we don’t control but seems sometimes to be in charge of our reactions and emotions…
There’s a brilliant NLP process called Parts Integration that addresses those inner conflicts. One of the things I really love about this process is how imaginative and elegant it can be. I have mainly seen this technique performed quickly, as it is indeed possible to resolve that type of conflict swiftly. But I found that by giving it a more meaningful approach, the changes my clients were getting were more profound, more significant.
I was working once with a person who suffered from travel sickness and found it very debilitating as he had always dreamt of being an airline pilot. We started to look into the part of him that was producing the symptoms and he realized he had created this part when he was a little boy. He had been stuck in a traffic jam in a car with his dad who was verbally very abusive. As a child he found this situation so unbearable that his unconscious mind started to develop this physical reaction as a coping mechanism. I must say It was actually fascinating to see such an example of mind-body connexion…
So when my client started to understand where his issues came from, it produced a very deep shift and he burst into tears, remembering the despair and pain he had experienced as a child. But as we progressively unravelled the thread of his subconscious, he recognized this part of him was only trying to protect him, and then he was able to develop some compassion and love towards himself. I was very moved by how this person managed to connect deeply with the child within, and I discovered how NLP can sometimes be connected with some other models of therapies, such as Transactional Analysis in this case. And I realized that through helping people to connect and communicate with the deep parts of themselves they’ve been rejecting for years, some amazing changes can take place that go beyond a simple conflict resolution.
My client called me a few weeks later, thrilled to announce he had started his training as a pilot as he was no longer experiencing any of the symptoms he had been suffering from during the last 30 years…he’s today working with one of the biggest airline company and I will always remember the face of the boy in tears in front of me as he was reconnecting with such an important part of his history…
So I’m wondering, what inner conflict are you currently experiencing that is getting in the way of what you want to achieve?