By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

NLP can help both the physical / sexual abuse victim and the perpetrator. NLP can also help “would be” victims and “could be” perpetrators.

Now, when I say that you could help a perpetrator, I do not mean helping him/her to stay out of jail! What I do mean, obviously, is to help them face the reasons for these behaviors, seek the subconscious secondary gains and teach them how to handle stress and violent thoughts before they become uncontrollable actions. This will help the person to regain self esteem and self control, but it will also serve the community he/she will end up living in. It will serve society by making him/her less likely to repeat criminal actions, and in addition become contributing citizens.

But we’ll discuss the more important person in cases of physical and sexual abuse – the victim.

What can NLP do for a victim?

First and above all, you can teach them stress management techniques. This is important to do in the first session for one crucial reason – you want them to have a different reaction to the event (or events). Your work together is not going to end in the first session, so it is going to be very useful for them to have immediate tools they can use between the sessions. Stress management can be taught by using a few relaxation techniques (hypnosis preferred), deepening in case they are still rigid, and then stacking anchors. Do not use only one anchor but work hard on establishing at least 4 or 5. If you can avoid using kinesthetic anchors (do not touch your physical abuse clients!), do so. If not, ask them to apply the anchor. Also, for relieving stress, teach them about physiology and body posture.

Even if you’re dealing with a rape victim, you are not going to say things like “when did the rape happen?” or “what do you feel today when you think about your rape?”. You are going to refer to that memory as “the event” and nothing else.

Tagging the memory from the beginning in a vague non specific term will help when you progress in your sessions.

Now, before you’re starting to deal with disarming the emotional burden of the traumatic memory, you should pay attention to possible subconscious objections. The biggest one, which will almost certainly be prominent in physical / sexual abuse clients, is guilt. Victims feel guilt either consciously or subconsciously because as humans, we tend to blame ourselves for anything that happens to us. Some of us may use the word “Karma”, others will refer to god or to some other super-natural vengeance. And yet most victims will think that they deserve what happened because of who or what they are.

You can handle guilt quite rapidly with processes such as Change Personal History Pattern, Breaking Limiting Associations Pattern, The Criticism Analyzer Pattern, The Grief Pattern and Reframing. Choose one that you are comfortable to work with and try it out. You certainly do not need 10 different procedures for one outcome, but it’s good to have all options and choices available.

Your next move is to help the client to feel safe in the future. You do so by dealing with limiting beliefs or learned behavioral strategies or thought patterns that may bring harm to the client. For example, your client might believe that using drugs is a good strategy for alleviating the pain she feels. It is true – it does alleviate the pain for awhile, you confirm it – but it does put her in danger of being abused again! How easy it is for anyone to take advantage of you when you’re stoned or unconscious? How hard is it for you to control yourself and the environment you find yourself in when you’re addicted to a substance?

Another example would be a belief such as, “I deserve to be treated like this, I am a horrible person”. For whatever reason they may believe so, it is unreal and unreasonable. Nobody should be physically / sexually abused! If you sense that the client has some core ill-formed beliefs as the one above, use the big guns of NLP – go for re-imprinting techniques, belief change cycles or strategies redesigning. Forget about confronting the client with only meta-model questions and logic. You should avoid letting your client to go into details on “why this belief is right and true” in the session room. Once you have identified such a limiting and ill-formed belief, deal with it without asking your client further questions or telling them what you’re going to do next.

In my opinion, your next move should be to engage the client in future pacing – preparing a plan and a set of outcomes to work on, something they’ll start doing after your work on disarming the traumatic memory. The idea here is to prepare their mind to accept the removal of the emotional reaction to the memory. I would suggest that you’d leave the “removing emotional reaction” to the next session, and by that giving their subconsciousness enough time to actually do the work for you even before the next session!

Teach your client how to set well-defined outcomes and work through the procedure on 4 major life areas – health, relationship, money and family. It may take an hour or two to help them understand the process and get them to work on it. Leave them in your reception area to complete the well-defined outcome pattern if they would like to do it on their own – sending them home might encourage procrastination and it may not be the best therapeutic strategy.

Next session is the last one. Removing an emotional reaction from a memory is one of NLP’s greatest strengths. You can use almost any NLP technique to do just that. You can use the Phobia Cure Pattern, the Slicing Pattern, the Meta Transformation Pattern, the Content Reframing Pattern and even the Allergy Pattern! When you are well experienced with enough NLP patterns, you would have an easy time choosing the right one for your specific client.

To make further progress, you could work with your client on developing a stronger character, on enhancing assertiveness level, on turning “mistakes” or “failures” into “experiences” and “learning chances”. You can help them become more congruent and self-relied, we have specialized techniques for these results as well.

Now let’s move on to help the perpetrator of the physical / sexual abuse. In this case, we have to accept one NLP presupposition that is crucial for doing our job effectively – “Behind every behavior there is a positive intention”. I know how hard it is to accept such a statement, but this is the kind of a “lie” that will help generate new insights and help you change the person you’re working with into a better and “safer” individual.

You begin with their past. We hear a lot that perpetrators have their own collection of traumatic memories. How many times have you read in the news about a rapist who claims he was raped himself by someone for many years, as a child? So your first action would be to deal with possible traumatic memories, when the perpetrator was a victim himself/herself. Deal with every memory the person offers, and to make yourself less likable to burn out, try to encourage as less content telling as possible. That’s the beauty of NLP – you really don’t need to hear the whole story to help a person to change.

Next is de-anchoring and re-anchoring. Abusers tend to be “triggered”. Search for these triggers, take them back in time into recent memories of attacking someone and go step by step backwards until you find the triggers that drive them into losing control. Neutralize these anchors (Collapsing Anchors Pattern, for example, or Context Reframing) and establish really strong and positive anchors to replace them. This is where you will also use the Boundaries Installation Pattern and any technique to increase Self-Esteem. You have to remember that what you want to do is to empower the person and give them more choices for action. You cannot take away the violence, but you can make them motivated to choose more resources and healthier choices.

What can NLP do for the perpetrator?

Working with a perpetrator is somewhat harder than with a victim, simply because the triggers for the behavior are not the only reasons it happens. You really have to re-educate them in a few areas -

Teach them how to separate a person for a behavior. First, give examples of random people they might know (use celebrities gossip stories if you must).

Then, ask them meta-model questions that will lead them to realize that they are not their behavior. Yes, they tend to be abusive, but they are not abusers.

There is a huge difference between a behavior and the identity of a person – when you get them to see the behavior as something they choose, not something they are, then their level of self control and self esteem will go much higher and much faster. This is one of those “aha!” realizations, you’ll see the spark in their eyes when it happens.

And last, work on making the future even more desirable and attractive, connect with the well-form outcomes and future pacing yo already started working on. This newly found energy will help your client to respect others and have a sense of composure, which will hopefully prevent him/her from abusing others in the future.

In my opinion, you should avoid using the words “guilt” or “respect others” or “crime” in your sessions with a perpetrator. They already feel guilty, as they should! You do not need to work with them on guilt! That guilty feeling is creating a motivation to seek help and be changed. Leave it there and let them go through the guilt process naturally.

Once they are changed, they will seek ways to “make it right” for everyone. Taking away the guilt, especially in early stages of the work, might be the wrong approach.