Jason's Story

Sometimes I have to go for a limiting belief change before anything else will work. An example of this happened just recently. This young man, Jason, was brought to me from out of state by his family. The family had scheduled several days in Oklahoma City and I had cleared my calendar for them. The young man was 12 years old. According to his mother "He was hyperactive and impulsive as a child. At age 6, we had him tested at Children's Hospital for 3 days. They found him to be ADHD with all the symptoms. They medicated him with Ritalin and a wide range of other drugs through age 12. All were unsuccessful or caused severe side effects such as insomnia, anxiety, emotional problems, confusion, tics, etc.

In the sixth grade he fell apart. He began showing signs of depression. He talked of death, was angry, frustrated, confused, and had low self-esteem. I had talked to the mother before we started about the possibility of working on Jason's limiting beliefs. This was primarily because of the shortness of time of their visit and the fact that I would not be available for follow-up. She had agreed upon this approach.

I started by asking Jason some questions about school and how he did in school just to build some rapport and to get to know how his mind worked. Shortly thereafter I had him spell several easy words which he already knew how to spell. After he could do that successfully, I had him attempt to spell a couple of them backwards to see if he could do it. The results were inconsistent and slow. Sometimes he could slowly spell them backwards and other times he could not. When I asked him to explain what happened to his pictures when he had trouble he said they disappeared -- just vanished. I would get him to try different sub-modalities such as size, distance, and brightness and the changes seemed to help him stabilize the pictures.

I switched to having him visualize an apple and to learn to move it around in his mind. He was more successful with the apple even when I started trying to get him to picture the word "apple" on the face of the apple. He could do this quite easily. When I started having him print longer words on the apple, he started getting frustrated. He started tearfully saying things, with frustration in his voice, like "I can't do this!" "This is not working." "Why do I have to do this?" and "I want to leave." We took a break. The statement "I can’t do this!" is a limiting belief about his capability.

When we came back from the break, he was really into frustration and anger and he was tired. He wanted to quit. I decided immediately to shift to work on changing his belief. I asked him if he ever believed in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. He had. I then asked him if he still believed in them. He did not. I asked him to describe what had happened and asked him to consider how it was possible that he once believed in something and now did not. He described how some friends had made some comments that made him wonder about Santa Claus, then he had thought about how impossible it was for Santa Claus to travel that far that fast, and then he had caught his parents putting presents under the tree.

I told him that those were the natural steps to changing a belief: first, you would start to doubt it because you would experience some counter examples; second, the evidence would build up in support of the disbelief; and then, third, it would become an old belief that you no longer believed. Then you are open to replace it with a new belief which