On an NLP email chat group, Seth-Deborah Roth, in Castro Valley California, reported an interesting case that I’d like to share with you:
“I was referred a 12-year-old girl with 9-10 years of Fecal Retention Syndrome. After having batteries of medical testing procedures, biofeedback, and working with a psychologist, she was told it was a ‘habit.’ The parents were beside themselves and finally gave me a call.
“After the induction of hypnosis, we regressed to the first time of the bowel incident. She was 2 years old and standing behind a big chair; her daddy was standing in front of the chair. She felt her bowels starting to move and pushed them up with her anal sphincter. It felt ‘funny.’ They started
to come down again, and she pushed them back up. It was a ‘funny’ feeling that felt different. It was a new feeling that she had never felt before, an interesting, different feeling—unusual, with a tinge of humor to it.
“The little girl and I talked about it being a kind of different feeling and that it could be fun in a way to discover new things about your body. It was a new feeling and that was OK, and it is also OK to just let the stuff come down and go out the other way. I emphasized the normalness of discovering new sensations of your body. I told the story of my brother who discovered a similar function while he was a little boy in the bathtub and that this is normal for kids to discover their body and its different sensations. I future-paced these understandings by using her timeline, going to present
time, and then tomorrow, then next week etc., noticing that she easily and effortlessly would go to the bathroom when she needed to. Upon follow up three weeks later, the habit is still gone, and this little girl (and her parents) is very happy about it.”
I thought this was a very interesting example of a significant problem that had not yielded to a variety of approaches, but was easily resolved by some very simple information gathering and normalization.
Seth-Deborah Roth’s web site: www.hypnotherapyforhealth.com
