NLP & Nervous System Regulation

NLP and Nervous System Regulation

NLP views the mind and body as a system (i.e. what we believe, think and feel greatly impacts our bodies, and what we do and how we behave impact what we feel, think and believe). NLP techniques primarily focus on transforming the psychological, emotional and cognitive aspects of experience which in turn can profoundly calm the nervous system.

Similar to many fields in psychology, NLP recognises that trauma in all its forms can greatly impact the nervous system and understands that during traumatic experiences when we feel overwhelmed beyond our resources to cope, our bodies may enter the fight, flight, freeze stress response with the amygdala firing. In this survival mode, it is difficult to consolidate useful learnings and meanings about the event in the moment, as all our physical and mental resources are focused on survival. There are a range of NLP techniques that can be used to profoundly calm and regulate the nervous system, whilst reprocessing useful learnings and transforming meanings and beliefs from past events.

Examples of these processes include:

1. Trauma recovery processes - processes that rapidly calm the nervous system using eye movement processes and guided visualisation (e.g. double dissociation visualisations, havening, eye movement desensitisation reprocessing EMDR)

2. Transforming internal representations of events - processes for state change, resolving internal conflict, transforming troubling voices, shifting sub modalities of experiences (e.g. shifting how close, far, light, dark, big, small, loud, soft a memory is in the mind shifts the experience of the memory).

3. Reprocessing learnings from past experiences - processes that help transform meanings, learnings and beliefs from past events without re-triggering or re- traumatising, such as Timeline Therapy and deep relaxation linguistic patterns.

4. Discovering what one wants and new ways of achieving this - processes that support values discovery, reframing, intentional, specified and compelling goal setting, altering language patterns and strategy formation.