Do you suffer from anxiety, fear or panic attacks?

Why is it that so many people suffer from anxiety? The majority of my clients come to me to resolve issues directly or indirectly related to fear, anxiety and some times panic attacks. Whether it is worrying about an upcoming presentation or exam, getting on a plane, performing on stage or at an interview, giving birth, dying and leaving a family behind, getting the next promotion, failing to meet Mr Right or like me thinking that harm would befall my children if we were separated for a lengthy period of time, feeling anxious is normal and every one of us has felt anxious or afraid every now and then. It is when the anxiety is so intense and chronic that it cripples you and prevents you from leading a normal life that it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed.

For as far as I can remember, my dad, was an overly anxious man. He worried constantly and was mostly in an agitated state of mind. So  when in turn I suffered from anxiety I didn’t really give it much attention and just thought that it was genetic. I worried about everything and anything and spent sleepless nights tossing and turning in my bed churning all kinds of negative thoughts about future events. I used to envy people around me that looked calm and relaxed and wished that I was born with such a gene.

Then at the age of seventeen something terrible happened. I said goodbye to my cousin, who was also my best friend, as she was going on a holiday to London with her parents the next day. The next morning my cousin was dead. I was in shock. No one had prepared me for such a catastrophe. One-day life was normal; the next day life for me came to a standstill. I found it difficult to make sense of this new reality. So I buried my feelings deep within the crevices of my unconscious mind and somehow found a way to move on.

When I became a parent for the first time, a new kind of anxiety was added to my previous lists of anxieties: separation anxiety. I found the prospect of being separated from my child extremely unbearable. I felt anxious and afraid that something terrible would happen to her and I won’t be present to save her. This anxiety not only affected me personally but also had a great negative impact on our family life and stood in the way of my husband having the chance to naturally bond with his daughter, as I felt terrified leaving her even with him. It was insane! I first assumed that the way I felt was part and parcel of motherhood. However as I listened to other mums I realised that something was seriously wrong with the way I felt and behaved. I needed to do something about this and fast.

I dealt with this fear the way I have dealt with all my other fears and anxieties, I took a plunge. At first I started slowly to do the very thing I feared the most. I allowed my husband to take my child for a stroll in the pram and I stayed home. I allowed my neighbour, who had been offering countless times, to babysit my child while my husband and I went out for a meal one evening. And when my daughter was two I dared to send her to nursery for three mornings a week.  There was one problem with this solution. I suffered immensely in those few hours when I was away from my daughter and didn’t really have any quality time. I wanted to find a way to be comfortable in those situations. I wanted to be anxiety free. The real solution to my problem came much later when I came across NLP.

According to Dr David Burns, there are many forms of anxieties: fears/phobias, performance related anxieties, obsessive-compulsive behaviours, social anxieties and post-traumatic disorders. And there are also many theories and therefore treatments relating to anxieties. Many people prefer taking a pill to get rid of their anxieties. But since anxiety relates to our thoughts about a future event, it makes more sense and perhaps a more lasting and empowering solution if we were to change those thoughts about those upcoming events in order to get rid of our anxieties once and for all. That is exactly what NLP offered me.

Discover your strategy

If you take my case for example, my anxiety came as a result of my having thoughts of all kinds about horrible events that might happen to my daughter while she was away from me. I was extremely creative in this respect and my over active imagination served me well by giving me the most horrific scenarios. I felt that as long as she was with me she would be safe as I would be able to save her. Through NLP I became first and foremost aware of these thoughts and images that I made inside my head. Awareness is the first real step to change. It might seem obvious, but in reality these processes that took place in my brain were very fast and outside my conscious awareness. The process we do in our brain to produce a behaviour is referred to in NLP as a strategy.

This strategy is very common in cases of extreme fear and panic attacks. In most cases the strategy is played so fast in our brain that the only thing we are aware of is the fear or panic, which is the final step in the strategy- the end result. Using NLP the client can discover the strategy that they make in their head to produce the fear.  By discovering the individual steps and sequence in this process, the client is then aided to change it. By changing it, we change the end result. In other words, anxiety, fear or panic disappears. The easiest way to understand this is if you think of it like the recipe for a cake. There are certain ingredients, and they need to be added in a certain sequence to get the perfect cake. If one ingredient is missed or the sequence of steps jumbled, the end result will be different.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined thoughts and therefore, my body reacted physiologically to my imagined thoughts as though they were real.  So changing my thought pattern ultimately had an effect on my physiology.

Change your belief

The second thing that I needed to work on was to challenge the validity of my thoughts, the beliefs I had surrounding the issue of what might happen when I am separated from my daughter. Often anxiety results from unrealistic and distorted thoughts or beliefs. And some of my thoughts were certainly just that! This is done by what is referred to as Meta programming. These are simply questions that are designed to challenge your perceptions and beliefs. In his book, When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns uses what he calls Truth-based techniques to examine the evidence for our negative thoughts. What was the probability that something terrible would happen to my daughter when she was away from me, and was it really true that I am the only person in the world able to protect and save her? Sometimes this work can hint at an underlying root cause or past trauma that might be linked to one’s anxiety. If this is indeed the case then Time Line Therapy can be used to heal such a trauma.

Time Line Therapy

The root cause of my separation anxiety was of course the death of my cousin when I was 17 years of age. I just buried my feelings instead of processing my emotions and making some sense of this tragedy. My traumatic experience made me think of doom and gloom every time a loved one was late, or for some reason didn’t answer their phone. In such a situation I would conjure up in my mind the worst possible disasters, when in reality there could be so many innocent, non-sinister reasons to explain the situation. I believed that I needed to be always prepared for disaster. Fate will not catch me unaware again!

Through Time Line Therapy I was able to mentally travel back in time and view the past with a fresh perspective, learn what I needed to learn to heal and come back to the present with new skills and more empowering coping mechanisms.

NLP simply changed my life. This doesn’t mean that I do not feel anxious. It means that my anxiety is normal, realistic, transient and  appropriate to the situation. It meant I was a more relaxed and calm parent the second time round and when the time came for my eldest daughter to leave home and go to university I was able to cope well with this separation. Although emotional, I was able to let her go and have my mind conjure up all the wonderful and positive experiences awaiting her in the years to come.

Recommended reading: When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns M.D.

Discovering The Root Cause

Twelve years ago, I was sitting on the steps leading to the conference room that was being used for our NLP, Time Line Therapy and Hypnosis practitioner course. We were having a morning break after having had a lecture on Time Line Therapy and discovering the root cause of present behavioural problems. I was drinking a much needed cup of coffee and pondering what I had just learnt.

For as long as I could remember I suffered from low self- esteem, fear of failure and a sense that I didn’t have what it takes to succeed. This was despite the fact that the evidence in my life pointed to the contrary. So what was the root cause of this problem? Just like that and without warning a memory was presented to me that had the very answer I was looking for.

It was early morning and I had just been woken up by a noise in the bedroom, a room I shared with two of my cousins. It was my aunt waking us up to get ready for nursery school. I sat up bolt upright, flung the bed covers off and looked down at my bed. I was instantly filled with dread as I realised that I had wet my bed yet again. At the same time my aunt could sniff the faint smell of stale urine and so looked at my face, filled with guilt and said:

 “You did it again, didn’t you? Shame, shame on you!” she shouted disapprovingly.

 My cousins threw pitiful glances in my direction. I felt so worthless, so ashamed. I have failed once again in the simple task of keeping my bed dry during the night. My cousins who were younger than me could do it. Why can’t I? I haven’t got what it takes to succeed.

 I came back to the room and was astounded. So that was it. That was the answer.

And so it happened that an incident in the first five years of my life has led me to make a limiting decision that influenced my thoughts and actions in adult life.

Becoming aware of the root cause of my present behaviour and using Time Line Therapy to remove my limiting decision was the start for me to regain my self-esteem, to let go of my fear of failure and be able to see that I had all the resources I needed to succeed.

Wouldn’t be great if you could also discover the root cause of what is holding you back from achieving what you want in life?

Time Line Therapy helps you do just that.

Why go back to the root cause?

 Depending on our experiences we sometimes make decisions early in life as a way of coping or surviving with the existing situation.

“Often, decisions that are made early in childhood persist into adulthood, long after they have become obsolete, and interfere with our relationships and our happiness”, says Chloe Madanes, an internationally regarded innovator in family therapy.

In other words, decisions that were made in the past offer some sort of protection and serve as a kind of coping mechanism in difficult circumstances but then later in life when that situation is no longer present they, at an unconscious level, become limiting and stop us from achieving what we desire in life. . Therefore decisions such as “I’m not good enough,” or “I can’t get things right,” or in my case “I don’t have what it takes to succeed,” create false limitations and hamper your ability to create reachable and attainable goals and outcomes.

Becoming aware of what leads us to make such a decision is the first step towards change.

So what is Time Line Therapy®?

 Time Line Therapy®, developed by Tad James, is a specific process designed to trace a particular negative feeling, belief or limiting decision back to the first time in memory that it can be found. 

The theory behind this is that problems in the present day are likely to have their roots in the past.  So, what is bothering us now is not what is happening now but what it has, at an unconscious level, reminded us of from the past.

Time Line Therapy® allows us to go back to the very root cause of a problem and resolve the problem at that point in time. This process allows you to gain emotional balance in your life and brings to your awareness choices that you were unable to access previously.

Recommended reading:
Relationship Breakthrough by Cloe Madanes
Time Line Therapy by Tad James & Wyatt Woodsmall