Hi there, I am a counsellor in a Hospice and am half way through my NLP practitioners course. I am so fired up by NLP and can use it in some cases with patients and family members. Does anyone know any ways I can use it better, and with people who have very limited time left? Thanks, Julia.

Wow, that would be a very powerful context in which to use NLP. Such potential to offer comfort to patients, family, staff...

Hi Julia,

Steve Andreas has a good process for resolving grief - here is a link to one of his sources
Steve Andreas Home

Also in The Healing Pool Magazine - NLP Edition - Brian Colbert uses lots of techniques to deal with pain and increase comfort which he found useful with Cancer patients. The Link to the magazine is in my signature below.

Best wishes
Nina

Thank you Nina - looked at both, ordered the book. Best wishes, Julia.

Hi Julia,

- If your patients are fragile but in their senses, you can use NLP and relaxation exercise with them. This will definitely help them.

- Patients with terminal illness are generally given maximum dosage of pain killers towards end of their life. Knowing this, it is still possible to help them to be as comfortable as possible with pain management sessions. Or you could use relaxation technique (whispering in their ear).

I hope this is what you were looking for.

Regards,

Mohammed (Clinical Hypnotherapist, NLP Practitioner and Life coach)

Thank you Mohammed.

You might find this Tip from Michael Neill helpful it's not really nlp but might be helpful

I pasted this from another forum I posted this on

I was lucky enough to be at Shifting You Life Michael Neill and Robert Holden which turned out to be a pretty magical day.

Toward the end of the day Robert got a goldfish bowl that was full of bits of paper that turned out to be the names of very one who attended the day. The lucky person who's name was pulled from the goldfish bowl would get a 15 mins on coaching from Michael and Robert.

I have to be honsest I was very worried it would be me!

So this guy get drawn and talks about his father dying some 7 months ago and trying to make sense of it all. Robert and Michael talked about a few things to the guy which mainly consisted of allowing the griving process to play out and Michael mentioned the tip pasted below which he wrote specifically for a couple he knew who's baby died.

So I though I would share!

It is not the threat of death, illness, hardship, or poverty that crushes the human spirit; it is the fear of being alone and unloved in the universe.

Anthony Welsh

-Anthony Welsh

The first time I remember someone close to me dying was as a child when my grandfather Papa Jack died. I knew I was supposed to feel something profound, and as everyone stared at me with sad eyes waiting for my reaction to the news, I felt the weight of their expectation on me. I escaped to our driveway, shooting baskets and wondering how I was supposed to feel - what the 'right' way to respond was.

I have had mercifully few occasions to explore that same question in the ensuing years, though life instead has brought me face to face with many others who are dealing with dramatic loss in their lives, be it the loss of a job, the demise of a dream, or the death of a loved one. In the past week, as the Southern California fires raged ever closer to our home, we were forced to face up to the possibility of losing our home. No sooner had the unexpected rains washed away the danger than the temporary nature of life showed itself even closer to home, when a neighbor phoned to let us know that her daughter's baby had died in her tummy while in labor the night before.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross first published On Death and Dying, the book which introduced the five stages of grief into the common parlance, but my first introduction to them was in Bob Fosse's autobiographical film, All That Jazz. Throughout the film, Fosse's alter-ego Joey Gideon is editing a stand-up comedy routine on the five stages of grief, comparing them to the names of the partners at an upscale lawfirm.

"Hello," the comedian says in a female receptionist's nasal twang. "Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance - can I help you?"

In this week's tip, I wanted to briefly explore the five stages and offer up a sixth as part of our potential - going beyond mere acceptance to a full embrace of the reality of our lives.

1. Denial

"Denial is not a river in Egypt."

-Paul Pearsall

The first stage that we often go through when dealing with loss or impending loss is denial. In his bestselling book Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson illustrates this kind of denial in sharing the difference between humans and rats. When the cheese is moved in a maze, the rats quickly move on in search of more. Stuck in the same maze, the humans sit around where the cheese used to be and rail against the unseen hand which moved it.

This points to the second stage of grief, when many people begin to experience a fierce and burning anger.

2. Anger

"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease
to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

-Dag Hammarskjold

'How could a kind and loving God take away my husband/mother/daughter/son?', people ask, and with no satisfactory answer to be find, they rage against what Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called 'the dying of the light'. Yet ultimately, the hot white fire of anger burns itself out. At this point, it is common for the griever to begin bargaining with God or life.

3. Bargaining

"I used to think crying was something that only children did, but as I grew older, I realised that it was only crying loudly
in the hopes that someone might hear you and come to your rescue which was the province of children."

-Neal Stephenson

When our anger has run its course, we then seek to make a deal. "I'll be a better person", we say, "if you'll just promise to spare my job/partner/child". Unfortunately, these bargains are doomed before they're made, not (in my opinion) because God doesn't care but because impermanence is the very essence of what it is to be alive. The realization of our true helplessness in the face of life often leads us initially into depression.

4. Depression

"I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top."

-John Keats

I remember a friend of my wife asking me if I thought she needed treatment for depression. "What's been going on in your life?' I asked. As she unfolded her tale of woe involving the loss of her fiancee to the 'loving embrace' of his secretary, it occurred to me that she really didn't need treatment for depression - rather, she needed to take the time to be depressed. If we rush through loss without taking at least a bit of time to pull back from our outer lives, we may never get to stage five - acceptance.

5. Acceptance

"What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."

-Friedrich Nietzche

At some point, it dawns on us that life moves on - indeed, it has never stopped moving on, though we may have gotten off the merry-go-round for a while. Acceptance no longer fights with reality, not, as Byron Katie would say, because of any great spiritual insight, but because fighting with reality hurts. In acceptance, we are finally free to move on - sadder, wiser, and often stronger than before.

It is this newfound wisdom and strength that points to what I believe to be a potential sixth stage in the grief process - gratitude.

6. Gratitude

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few years back, I was hiking in the mountains above the Option Institute with four men, all of whom had autistic children. I expected the conversation to be a commiseration of woe, and even mentally prepared some of my own sad stories to share so that I might 'fit in'. To my amazement, they each in turn expressed their heartfelt opinion that having an autistic child was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them..

One man spoke of how dealing with his daughter's illness had led him to re-evaluate his priorities and leave a job he hated in order to spend more time with his family. Another told me that he and his wife's shared commitment to accept and deal with his son's autism had saved his marriage. The third man shared how his previously rebellious teenage children from an earlier relationship had come back into his life as they shared in the care and responsibility for their autistic sister, and the last man said that when his son finally made eye contact with him after more than a year of working with him, he rediscovered his faith.

When I finally processed that their common joy was not the product of 'happy-clappy positive thinking' but a genuine expression of gratitude for what seemed to me to be the tragedy of their lives, I remembered a conversation with a client who had lost her baby less than a year after it was born. She had told me that what she came to realize as she passed through her own unique version of the five stages of grief was that having a child had given her access to a kind of love she had never imagined possible. Even though her baby was no longer with her, she could still feel that extraordinary love whenever she thought of him- that had been her baby's gift to her.

While I am am a firm believer in feeling your feelings and am loathe to belabor the point for any of you who are still struggling in the early stages of grief, I find this an incredibly comforting thought - that it is possible to come out the other side of any tragedy enriched with more love, gratitude, and faith than you had going in.


Today's Experiment:

"In a superficial truth, the opposite is false. In a deep truth, the opposite is also true."

-Nils Bohr

I cannot recall at what point I began remembering my father with gratitude and love instead of sadness and despair, but I have found the following exercise extremely valuable at the point when you're ready to look for some 'blessings in disguise' in your own life...

1. Choose an experience that you currently see as a tragedy but are willing to see differently.

2. List at least twenty things about that experience that you see as bad or terrible

3. Now, list at least twenty blessings that have come from that experience. These may include positive changes in you, other people, or the world.

4. Look at both lists. Recognize that they are both likely to be 'true' - accurate yet incomplete ways of seeing the experience. Choose which list to focus on now.

5. Write a thank you letter to the other person, God, or the universe for the blessings.

Thank you Lenny, that is very interesting and thought provoking. Julia.