All throughout life people have experiences that they go through that changes the course of their lives or at the very least influences them greatly. I can think about experiences that I had during my youth that shaped my interest to enter the field of personal development. Some people the type of careers they grow to take on or the type hobbies that they become avid fans of can all be traced back to one magical moment. From there when the seeds of that experience have been planted a person will tend to move through the world gathering more experiences and organizing them in ways that fit within the framework of the original experience. Perhaps they go to the doctor and they do something wonderful to help them. From that point on a person can decide that they want to do they same type of thing for other people that doctor did for them.
A person can also go through an experience that seems to have a ripple effect that affects their lives in a negative way. The experience of a trauma would be an example of this. Say a person was bitten by a dog or beaten by a loved one and that experience left a very distinct impression on the person involved. In many cases this situation will serve as a self organizing attractor for the person’s perception to seek out other experiences to match their understanding of the world. In the example of a person that was bitten by a dog. The next time in their life that they might come across another dog they could be terrified and because of that earlier trauma they are unconsciously searching for behaviors that other dogs might be manifesting in order to validate their current implicit understanding of that animal. A woman that is beaten by men can consciously know that not all men are like that however at an unconscious level because of that previous experience they can’t help but to be scared.
The Decision Destroyer is a pattern created by Co-Founder of NLP, Richard Bandler and is based on the case study by
Milton H. Erickson, MD. You can find more information about the case in the book, ‘
The February Man’. Essentially what Erickson does in this case study is to great a series of what he would sometimes referred to as ‘positive traumas’ and place them before a ‘negative trauma’ so that by virtue of having that previous experience when the person in their mind’s re-experienced the negative trauma that it no longer affected in the same way. Recently when I taught this pattern at a study group that I was hosting I was able to assist the demonstration subject with being able to overcome a fear of something that she had been avoiding for over a month quickly and easily.
This pattern is a beautifully elegant and simple means of creating resource experiences for people so as to allow them to overcome previously limiting experiences. Below is a clip of a demonstration by
Steve Andreas a long time developer in the field of NLP. In this clip he is working with a woman that no experience working with the pattern. He demonstrates how easily it is assist someone in making a change using this pattern. For a copy of the DVD please check his
website.