Response-ability by Christopher Fish
February 20th, 2012 by Isis
As someone who takes great pleasure in addressing the difficulties that we are err to in these trying times, my appreciation for the gentle arts of hypnotherapy and NLP is continuously renewed. My memory goes back clearly to the answer I gave as a 14 year old to a friend who asked what I wanted to be when I grew up? I can vividly recall the friend, the room, the house and the district. At the time it was just another conversation that people of our age had. My answer was ‘a psychologist’. I didn’t know at the time what that word specifically meant it was just the label for a desire to work with the internal worlds of others because I was becoming fascinated by the internal world that ‘behind the scenes’ made up a person. Now, I am not a psychologist but I am still deeply interested in making a difference to the internal world of others and I do this to a great extent with the processes of trance and NLP. The label I can give myself now is Hypnosis and NLP therapist.
I could if it took my fancy call myself a Response-Ability therapist or suchlike. Why? Because at the heart of what I am aiming to achieve with a client is first establish early on that this is what is going to make the most difference to their well being. Taking responsibility for their response to events and life’s circumstance and developing more flexible and richer span of choices. This is I believe a major liberating understanding that can make the most significant improvement to a person’s life. The understanding here is that we are 100% responsible for our feelings and thoughts. Nobody or no situation can actually make us feel or think anything. On some level we all make a choice of how we respond to the good and the challenging things that life and people present us with*.
This connects up with the NLP principle that we all live from our ‘internal representation’ of life. We may all share the same world but the way we have interpreted it and the way we tend to respond is very unique.
The challenge for all of us if we accept this idea is how to respond to the blessings and adversities of life so that when we are blessed we really enjoy it and when the going gets tough we are resilient. The answer lies within our own minds and hearts. We have at every moment of the day the opportunity to bring awareness into the internal process of feelings and thoughts and with the natural skills of hypnosis and NLP effect changes.
We really do have the ability now to recognise old ways of responding in thought, feeling and action, and begin new ways that reflect a way of living closer to who we truly are.
*If your in any doubt about this, Victor Frankl who spent time in concentration camps during WW2, will throw some light. His most famous work is “Man and his search for meaning.”
Best wishes