Tag Archives: NLP Therapist

Bringing Down the Barriers – Dealing With Someone Who is Defensive

“Have you thought about getting a part time job?” I asked
“What are you trying to say?” Was barked back at me. |
“Errrm, literally just that. Have you thought about getting a part time job?” “Oh for God-sake!”

This was a recent encounter with a relative who, unbeknownst to me at that time, had, having recently retired, been asked the same question by many of our other relatives.

I hadn’t anticipated that such a simple and innocent question could prompt such a defensive response. If I had, I would have avoided asking it.

But sometimes we need to ask questions or make suggestions that we know are going to be provocative, either because of who we are dealing with or what the subject matter is going to be.

It seems unreasonable that you should have to formulate strategies to avoid upsetting the apple cart and so assisting the other person in changing their behaviour may be a more desirable alternative.

At The Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we subscribe to a set of NLP presuppositions. One of these is “You cannot change others. When you change yourself others change also.” So when I make the suggestion of changing the other persons defensive behaviour, this is a change that will occur as a result of your new way of managing them.

Firstly, you’ve got to start thinking about life from their perspective. What are these unjust that they are protecting themselves from? What are the ways that their perceive their value to be challenges or violated? When you have identified these consider their other motivators too. What do they like, what gets their interest?

If you can begin to communicate with them in a way that has them feel as if their needs are being met, as if you too have their best interests at heart they will not have the need to defend themselves as they felt they did before.

You need to create the sense that you are on their side or, that at the very least you understand there side, if you want to remove from them the feeling that they need to defend themselves from you.

In the example above, my relative was complaining about not getting enough pension. This told me that they were concerned about the finances. The rest of us were concerned about how much money she was spending due to boredom. But having recently gained the freedom of retirement, she was in no hurry to put herself in a position of employment as the above outburst had demonstrated.

I waited a while and had to pick the right moment to casually say “Wow, that’s a decent amount of money.” As I flicked through the newspaper.
“What? What’s that?” She asked.
“Huh? Oh nothing. It’s an advert for part time Christmas work at the post office. I didn’t realise they paid such a good hourly rate.”

The ‘planting of the seed’ proved to be a useful way to covertly work around what would have otherwise been a suggestion that was disregarded due to stubbornness and defensiveness.

When you begin to see the world as they do, you can change how you communicate to fit with them. As the trust between you develops the barriers of defensiveness will soften meaning that when you need to cut-to-the-chase with them, they will already regard what you say as being reasonable.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Learning to Make Connections After Overcoming Social Anxiety

The anxiety is gone (or at the very least is entirely manageable now) and you’re ready to start getting out there in the big wide world, making new friends and forging new relationships. But wait? How do you do that exactly?

I remember being about 7 years old and able to walk up to a child and say “Hi, I’m Gemma. Would you like to play with me?” It was a pretty cool strategy that worked almost all of the time. Except this one time when I was on holiday with my grandparents. We were in Spain and I was playing alone in a swimming pool. I saw a little girl just like me and thought it would be nice to play.

The challenge was that I hadn’t realised she was Spanish. So when I approached her to say hello, she looked at me and freaked out because I was speaking to her in the wrong language. I watched her swim away hurriedly to her father, talk to him in her own language and point at me as if I had threatened to kill her. It was a big wake up call. Making friends wasn’t always going to be as easy in the future as it had been in the past, and clearly there was a little more that I need to know when it came to making relationships. “Hello, do you want to be my friend?” wasn’t the fail safe that I thought it was.

There’s a rule when it comes to communications that ‘People like people who are like themselves’. Meaning that we prefer to connect with others who in some way appear to be like us. That could be something about their posture or how they use their body, the tone of their voice or even the sorts of words and language they use.

Therefore, a good first step in building up relationships with others after overcoming social anxiety, is to observe others first. Notice the communication styles they use. At the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we teach people all of the different clues you can look out for to identify someone’s communication style; how to replicate it and communicate back to them in that style causing them to feel comfortable and at ease with you.

We’ll also teach you how to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. It goes without saying that we have all experienced an uncomfortable social encounter at some time, but when someone has had social anxiety, they have felt that feeling (or at the very least feared having that feeling) for a significant period of time. Taking that first bold steps to ‘get back out there’ and face up to whatever may come your way takes an honest acknowledgement that just because you feel better, it doesn’t mean that everyone you meet will be lovely, or that they’ll love you. Becoming comfortable with the idea that sometimes your conversations may be stilted or that people might not be as friendly as you would have liked; whilst still maintaining the knowledge that many people will be friendly and many other conversations will be wonderful, takes a kind of acceptance of the idea that that things may not be perfect every time and that this is perfectly natural and okay.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Moving On After a Relationship Break-Up

There are no set rules when it comes to the best way in dealing with a relationship break up because most of the actions you need to take will need to be customised to your own unique situation.

That’s why at The hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire, we always perform a consultation (fact finding) session first to find out more about how you are thinking and feeling presently and where you’d like to get to in your thinking and feelings to be able to cope better with what has happened.

Some people will feel hurt, anger or simply lost when when a relationship fails. Part of moving on can be to look at why things didn’t work out so that you can be better prepared in the future to avoid the mistakes or clues that might have shown you that things were not as you would have hoped.

If you feel you have been wronged in some way, these are particularly important emotions to resolve so that you are able to be more robust in the future and avoid having what could otherwise remain as a vulnerability from being exploited.

Of course, we all know that time is a healer and that pain can fade with time. However, I also fully appreciate that when you are in emotional pain, waiting for it to pass with time can be an unrealistic expectation. When the heart break is interfering with your interactions in the rest of your life or preventing you from functioning as you need to, then it’s time to take some action to speed up the process of recovery.

When a relationship has gone bad and there were clear signs, perhaps for some time, that the partnership was toxic in some way, you’d think that this would accelerate the healing process. In my experience I have found the reverse to be true. Often when a relationship is already showing signs of unpleasantness, we have a tendency to want to fix it before jumping ship. All of that effort and energy that goes into tolerating abuses, helping the other person, making excuses for the way things are is suddenly redundant. It’s proven to be a waste of time and this can make us feel that not only have we lost someone who is part of our lives, but we have lost a battle to save them/the relationship/ourselves too. It’s an extra blow. Logically your mind may say “Look at all the trouble you had. Remember how unhappy you were, all of those bad things they said!” and then it seems almost crazy that logically knowing that to be true, you’d still feel so sad.

A baby step that you can take to start moving in the right direction is to begin to slowly build yourself back up. What do you deserve in a relationship? What kind of standards do you want to set for yourself that your next partner should (within reason) adhere to? What will you not tolerate?

You can begin to remove the emotional charge from this situation by reminding yourself in a way that an empowering coach would say “You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be treated well. Remember that and move forward with your focus there.”

Make moving forward about becoming the best you can be and really knowing what you want from a relationship. That doesn’t mean you are seeking another relationship necessarily, it simply means that you are making a point of knowing yourself, knowing what you want and refusing to take anything less than that.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk

Relief From Defensiveness

Defensiveness occurs when we assume we are in some way being attacked or threatened. The importance of what we feel the need to protect will have have a direct correlation with the degree to which we defend.

Whilst being able to defend what is important to you and having the ability to stand up for yourself are admirable skills that can prevent other people taking you for granted, sometimes our levels of defensiveness are overly elevated such that they begin to cause a problem.

For example, if someone rudely criticises your appearance because they dislike your choice of fashion, it is entirely reasonable that you should respond and defend yourself. After all, those little unjust that you let creep by will eventually eat away at your self-esteem, if you do not either develop some resilience or stand up for yourself.

However, if you are criticised for your appearance because you work in a job with a strict dress code or uniform and you showed up that day dressed as if you were having a lazy Sunday at home, then reacting defensively instead of taking on board the criticism (or in this instance we might refer to it as being feedback instead) could cause a problem.

As linguistics is my favourite element of NLP, one of the things I like to do with clients that I meet at the Hypnotherapy and NLP Clinic in Hertfordshire is to help them devise good quality questions that they can ask themselves when they feel that their defensive barriers are coming up.

Some useful things to ask yourself when you notice that sensation of needing to defend yourself are:

Will my reaction really make a difference to this person or me? Is it therefore really worth my time and energy?

Is this really an attack or threat or could it be a misunderstanding?
Could I relax and explain my position instead of defending it?

Is it OK for someone to have a different idea or opinion to me on this? If so do I still need to defend myself?

Will I still be bothered by this tomorrow/next week/next month/next year/in 10 years time?

Could there be an entirely different message intended to the one I am receiving? Would that change how I am about to respond?

Would I still feel defensive if I found something humorous in all this?

Not too long ago, I had a dispute with a relative about something which was so minimal, I now cannot remember what it was. What I do remember is that it was by text (which is never a good way to understand the other persons point or have them understand yours). At the time, it seemed to be significant enough that I had pinged over a few messages defending my position.

Simultaneously, I was looking for a way to wrap up the dispute because it was time consuming at a point when I had better things to do and I could feel the tension increasing as I began to feel more defensive. This was something that I wanted to avoid.

The other person then responded with a message saying “You always have to have the last word.”

Rather than defending myself again and sending something else back that would no doubt fan the flames further, I instead decided to make the situation humorous (for myself) by deliberately not replying to the message that stated I always had to have the last word. I had a little chuckle to myself about it and by re-framing the importance of defending myself in that situation was able to let go of the stress that being defensive had created.

By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk