Do you understand the phobia cure or rewind technique

How does the rewind technique really work?

I remember when I attended my HG rewind training and Joe and he said “we have taken the phobia cure used in NLP and improved it” (or something to that effect). He said “what was missing was the creating the correct state first and the technique should only be performed once a person is in a state of deep relaxation”.  In hypnotic terms you could also create a ‘safe place’ and ensure the person is in or can access that safe place easily.

This made me think more about my NLP training and how this compares to my HG training of this technique. Suddenly it came to me that Richard Bandler describes it as a process and states “People misunderstand NLP and see it as a series of techniques when actually it is an attitude of tenacity and curiosity from which a methodology has been built and from that techniques have been developed. Techiques are a test or application of the attitude and methodology, they are NOT NLP!!”

Tonight I saw a client with long-term anxiety and “deep-seated phobias” as he called them. He had seen ‘many therapists’ without any success and had been given my name. He told me he’d even bought a ‘Phobia cure CD’ which used the ‘fast phobia cure’ but it didn’t work!!! I must admit I was curious as to what ‘work’ meant or if your are interested in David Grove’s work on metaphor “what kind of work is work?”

It was quite clear he had built a black and white expectation of therapeutic interventions whereby they either ‘work’ or don’t against a very tight criteria so recalibrating his criteria was my first focus.

Anyway back to the REWIND technique… The key points are association / disassociation, state creation, and using what is presented by the client. Richard Bandler first developed the process following interviewing people who had naturally overcome their fears and phobias without therapeutic intervention and then tested his findings. His key areas of interest in NLP are state creation and sub-modalities (qualities of sensory experience); he always puts people in the states best for them and works with their sensory evidence (sub-modalities). Hold this thought…

So back to the client. As we discussed his expectation and experiences he mentioned more acceptance of science than faith and that he was interested in astral projection although it hadn’t worked for him. I added YET to the statement and continued with recalibrating expectations. From there I put him into a trance (deep state of relaxation) and asked him to float free from his body that is safe in the comfortable chair and to turn to observe his deeply relaxed and safe self . The way I presented this was actually a disassociated state!! Next I took him to what had previously been considered a danger place and gave him the ability to ‘phaze in and out’ of the experience so he could experience and then observe. After we had finished he said the observer position was behind glass in a control room where he could take notes and experiment with the experience by stepping in and out of it.

Hopefully you can see this is a rework of the REWIND technique to suit the clients reference experiences and I was able to make this shift in application as I understand the design. Once you review the original work of Richard Bandler, and adjustments by Joe, you will be able to rework yo suit virtually any client with phobias, anxiety, PTSD and more.

If you have any questions please contact me