Conflicts and discussions are part of people’s lives as the social beings that we are. We live and socialize with people who have their own perception of the world and what happens in it, and this means that, when trying to reach agreements, we clash and arguments arise.
An argument or conflict is not bad in itself. What happens is that there are people who, being inside it, cannot control their emotional state of anger, rage and even rage, and they let themselves be carried away by it, losing their power of decision. This is when the emotion gets out of control and shows itself in the form of shouting, offensive words and, in some cases, even physical harm.
In most cases, these people, after finishing the emotional hijacking, are aware of their reaction and feel bad. They perceive that There is something that activates that reaction and that they cannot control, but the truth is that there are different techniques and ways to channel an uncontrolled emotional state. In this article we want to talk to you about one in particular of Neurolinguistic Programming: the 6 steps to freedom.
One of the clearest examples of uncontrolled emotional kidnapping that then leaves the person experiencing it with a burden of guilt are arguments with children. For example, that case in which the parent insists on his or her son or daughter to clean up the room and ends up yelling for him or her to do so after several failed requests. After the conflict, the vast majority of parents feel bad about the way they reacted.
You may think that there is no other reaction to that situation, especially when fatigue and other day-to-day worries accumulate, but there is. One of the many things that NLP teaches is that Each one of us is responsible for what happens in us and about others and we can choose how to react to certain situations
That a child ignores cleaning up the room is neither good nor bad. Value is given by each of us and, in many cases, the patterns learned over years cause us to react as we believe we have to.
With NLP we can change these patterns and achieve the ability to choose to determine how we want to react and what emotional state we want to adopt in certain situations. It is important to understand that our mood directly influences our thoughts, and these influence our actions.
The 6 steps to freedom
This NLP tool is extremely effective for working with emotional kidnapping in conflict situations. There are 6 simple steps that allow the individual stop being a robot and slave to your emotions by learning, first, to identify them, and second, to manage them according to your decision
Step 1: Recognize the trigger
It consists of observing in the body the signal that indicates that the emotional kidnapping is going to arrive. This step may be the most complicated, but it is key to stopping the lack of control.
Taking into account the example of the situation of the father or mother who reacts by shouting to the son or daughter’s inaction to clean up the room, before ‘exploding’ the parent may feel pressure in the chest or pit of the stomach, which His breathing is agitated, and a wave of rage invades him and rises through his body to his head… That’s the key. Detect what it feels like and stop there to go to step two.
When the trigger is detected, you must physically stop and take a deep breath What is sought with this step is to stop unconscious action.
Step 3: Ask yourself
Once you have breathed, you have to ask yourself what emotional state you really want to have. Do you want to scream and get agitated or do you want to have a calmer feeling to deal with the situation in a different way?
Step 4: Establish and recognize that state
Once the emotion they want to feel has been identified, the person should think about a moment in which they did feel that emotion, calm in this example, which could be, perhaps, walking through the countryside. In this case You have to try to mentally put yourself in that situation: what you do on the walk, what you see, what you hear and even what you feel.
This step seeks to really bring that calm physically to the body.
Step 5: Name it
Yes, it consists of naming that emotion so that it becomes stronger and anchors.
6. Return to the present
Return to the here and now and act from the new emotion and see how the situation changes. Could the chosen calm make the father or mother capable of approaching and reasoning with their child in another way to achieve the goal of picking up?
The key to internalizing these 6 steps is to continually work on them in situations where emotional kidnapping occurs so that, in the long term, it becomes an almost automatic process in which the mind itself is capable of attracting the emotion that is needed and desired to the tense situation.
In our school, this powerful tool of the 6 steps to freedom is studied along with many others and the great fundamentals of Neurolinguistic Programming in our NLP Practitioner. With this, individuals improve their quality of life by improving self-knowledge and the way they work on their own emotions, thoughts and actions.
That is why learning Neurolinguistic Programming is not only recommended for people who already work within human help and accompaniment such as coaches, psychologists or therapists of various kinds, but it can be helpful for any individual who wants to know themselves better and have more options and freedom in your life.
