Curing Phobia’s with NLP using Virtual World Technologies

The NLP Fast Phobia Cure was developed by Richard Bandler – co-creator of NLP. Far from exposing people to their fears, it uses fun and innovative ways to help a person re-wire their response ‘before’ they are asked to ‘test’ out thier exposure to it. In contrast, many times it results in the client actually ‘asking’ to be exposed to the old fear stimulus. So I saw the virtual world as an opportunity to create a safe environment for a fun way to change thier patterns around fear and even be able to test out situations that might not be possible in real life.

A virtual balcony can help a client, via their avatar, re -access and change a fear of heights.

One such example was a lady who had a fear of her own balcony. At the Healing Pool we met on top of a virtual mountain on which I had created a balcony, we worked together to assess the part of her fear that caused the most discomfort and then tested out the reduction in fear by allowing her to ‘walk’ out onto the virtual balcony and giving her a representation of what it might be like to do this in real life. When we got to the point that she was able to experince no fear – she was then able to go out to her own balcony and was amazed at how comfortable she felt. So the moral of this story is that, when you can use your imagination in ‘real life’ to cure phobias, then it stands to reason that virtual worlds are the perfect platform for creating neurological changes using NLP techniques and processes to create powerful and lasting change, quickly and effectively.