If you are making or have made positive changes in your daily life and still struggling to shift your mindset, you may benefit from counselling, coaching or therapy. These practices will help you with longer term and deeper rooted-issues and traumas that you may be experiencing or may have experienced in the past. Your GP can help refer you to appropriate services in your area, waiting lists will often vary through the NHS. Alternative routes are through private counsellors, coaches and therapists who can also offer a safe and confidential space for you to work with any deeper issues.
NLP and Psychotherapy techniques may be used in therapy to help move people forward to where they want to be in their lives and helping to reduce, change or remove any negative thoughts and patterns.
Each person’s map of the world is unique to them, it represents their individual experiences and perceptions. Therapists work with the client in the client’s map of the world.
NLP and Psychotherapy, works on how we take in the external world, how we process it and what we then put back out into the world, using extensive tools, techniques and advanced language patterns enables clients to move forward in their lives more positively in areas where they may have been struggling, often for many years.
Metaphors are one of the techniques used with both children and adults, metaphors used as stories enable a person to find their own solutions, rather than the therapist giving them the solution. Telling a story that is equivalent to a person’s current experience and allowing them to access and find the possible solutions to their problem keeps them in their map of the world.
Milton Erikson often used complex, deep metaphors as stories to distract his clients mind and to allow their unconscious mind to access the resources to solve their problem or issue at a deeper level.
Metaphors can also be used as phrases such as “cool as a cucumber.” “Laughter is the music of the soul.” “The teacher planted the seeds of wisdom.”
This is one of my all-time favourite metaphors, which I use often, when working with adults and children.
Dances with Wolves, taken from More Magic of Metaphor, by Nick Owen.
A white-haired Cherokee is teaching his grandchildren about life. He tells them “A fight is going on inside me. A terrible fight, and it is a fight between two wolves”.
“One wolf represents fear, greed, hatred, anger, envy, false pride, self-pity, resentment, guilt, inferiority, arrogance, deceitfulness, superiority and selfishness.”
“The other wolf stands for peace, love, kindness, joy, truth, compassion, humility, transparency, authenticity, friendship, respect, integrity, benevolence, generosity, faith, sharing, serenity and empathy.”
“The same fight is going on inside you, and in every other person too.”
The children thought about this for a while. Then one little girl asked her grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The old Cherokee held a long silence. Then simply said “Whichever one you feed.”
(Primary source: Eleonora Gilbert
General Source: Native American tradition).
I will leave that with you to make sense of it in “your map of the world.”
If we begin to be more conscious and knowing of how we interact with ourselves, babies, children and young people, encouraging and nurturing them to grow up loving themselves, others, and to have total belief in themselves, what would that look like?
Kim
P.S
This book is one of my personal favourites, I feel it’s an invaluable, must read book for anyone, especially those involved in the wellbeing and caring of children.
Why Love Matters – by Sue Gerhart, explains how love and affection shapes a baby’s brain, from life being in the womb to early childhood. Discussing how our external world influences our thoughts and beliefs, which creates our patterns and habits, both positive and negative, which in turn creates our reality.
