One of the most profound realizations that I have taken from NLP is that change (and I am talking big, life altering change) can happen in a moment.

In fact, nearly all of my clients have confirmed to me over the last six years that change ONLY happens in the moment.

Every time I help an individual transform a phobia, an eating disorder, a confidence issue, a traumatic memory (that comes with full recall of the feelings), or many of the emotional issues that people come to me for help with; I notice that in our time together, there is a moment when the person’s unconscious lets go of the old pattern and state and happily accepts the new alternatives. Such shifts are clear to anyone practiced in observing state changes in their subtlest forms and are in fact the most important signs that tell us where next to go in our work as NLP practitioners.

Last week I had a near suicidal forty year old in my office who was suffering from something he called “depression”.

Unfortunately for him, an expert (I think she was called a Psychiatrist) confirmed that he did indeed have depression and that he was “required” to take a nice little cocktail of pills to keep his issue in check.

Someone suggested that he see me before diving into the chemical soup, and a only a day later, he was glad that they did.

My new client’s state was certainly one that people like to label ‘depression’. It was slumped posture, slow speech patterns, reports of feeling lost and in a “black hole”. This and getting out of bed at midday to stare at a computer screen with no intention or motivation for the day ahead. This is becoming an all too familiar pattern for many people in the western world.

I asked him, “How do you know you have depression?” His response was, “I’ve been told by my psychiatrist”.

Me: “Do you always take another persons opinion when your life is at stake?”

Him: No, but what else can I do?

The answer to that question was swift and dramatic. I used the following patterns so that he could stop ‘doing’ depression, which is a very different perspective to ‘being‘ depressed.

I made his depressed state stronger and stronger through provocation and once I could calibrate that this state was fully activated, I then used a simple hypnotic pattern to regress him to the very first time he had experienced it – the very source of his emotional state.

The memory (whether it’s actual or metaphoric is not so relevant in the process of such change work) was one of being abandoned in his play pen at a very early age. This was also the source of his “black hole” metaphor and “a sense of empty, abandoned hopelessness”.

I asked my client to find a place in my office which best represented the play-pen he had been abandoned in all those years ago. It turned out that my fireplace (with it’s accompanying dust!) was just the spot that his unconscious most associated with.

It was there, on-and-off for the next forty-five minutes that he crawled from the old “depressed and abandoned” state, then stood and walked to the corner of my office that is reserved for playing New Code games.

The New Code games that we often employ as a tool in our interventions are the most elegant way of generating highly resourceful states in the individual. Once these high performance states have been achieved we can then associate it with the context of the old unwanted states. The effect is often nothing short of magic.

The result for my client was that in approximately one hour, he had gone from contemplating suicide, to now contemplating what he is going to do with all of the new found energy and love for life that is suddenly his.

And he’s taking no medication whatsoever.

If you or someone that you know is suffering from an emotional issue, no matter how severe it has been diagnosed as. The following will always hold true: Under the correct conditions, change happens fast. Change happens in a moment. Because change is all we are at every level of existence.

What could allow you to start changing?