01225 484938
How I became a therapist
When I was about 25 I was due to get married. I'd been with my fiance for seven years and I loved her very much, but as time went on, we argued more and more. In the end, it fell apart and she left me. She moved out and left me alone to stare at the space where she'd been.
For weeks and months afterwards I lived like an animal. The pain and the grief were almost overwhelming. I shut down really, doing nothing but holding down my job, eating and sleeping. Thankfully, my mother came to stay for a bit and once the initial shock had passed, she began to talk to me about how to move on.
'Phil,' she said, 'things have changed but you've got to get on with your life. Let's look at what you can do to survive this period and eventually come to be happier.' And she drew a tree on a piece of paper; a tree of life. The tree had branches and each one of those branches was supposed to be a part of my life - career, relationships, hobbies. I wasn't really into this sort of stuff, but at that time, I'd have painted myself blue if you'd told me it'd make me feel better.
Then she drew a branch on a piece of paper and she wrote 'Spirituality' next to it. I didn't know what that meant, but she told me it was about becoming a better person, more aware of myself and more able to cope with life. She suggested a few books I might read. I read a lot at that time and whatever I read I experimented with. I meditated, I took vitamins, I exercised, I searched for my inner beauty. I tried to go therapy but the woman told me I didn't have any problems and I was a perfectly nice person who would be alright in a month or two. That may rank as the most surprisingly honest thing anyone has ever said to me.
Somewhere in all this I read a book called 'Introducing NLP'. I found that the exercises actually seemed to help. So I went on a course for a weekend and came away bemused but curious. I didn't really understand what it all meant, but it seemed like it might be a way to feel better, so I concluded that another course was in order. I looked at all the different possibilities and finally made the fateful decision to train with Paul McKenna.
When I travelled to Hammersmith for the course, I had no idea what to expect. I presumed that McKenna's powers of subliminal influence could be almost unbounded. I remember thinking that as long as I still had the deeds to my house when I got back, everything would be okay.
For six days I say with seven hundred other people and watched Paul do his stuff. Every so often this funny looking American guy called Richard Bandler turned up. He told a lot of funny stories - I didn't really get what he was on about but I quite enjoyed it. Paul did a lot of demonstrations, but they seemed so amazing that I was convinced the people had been planted in the audience.
I was still sceptical on day 6 when he announced that we were going to do phobia cures. To facilitate this, he was bringing in three tarantulas and three pythons. I froze up - both those animals absolutely terrified me. As McKenna did his demonstration, I sat in the audience with my head between my knees and prayed for it to be over, even though the tarantula was 50ft away. The first chance I got I ran from the room.
There I bumped into one of the assistants. He calmed me down and reassured me. He said he was a professional, and how would I like to see if maybe we could do something about my response? I said sure, why not? He had me visualise a lot of circles of light and then steadily moved me closer and closer to the tarantula. After 40 minutes I found myself holding my hands out while I walked across my palms.
I had trouble processing this experience. Here I was doing something I believed was more or less impossible. But clearly it was working. And if this was real, well then probably all those other demos had been real too, and if that was the case, the possibilities were just amazing.
I was a computer programmer then, and I knew what this meant. This week was about human programming - the ability to make my brain do what I wanted to do, and the same for the brains of others. My natural curiosity and love of learning kicked in. This had all the fun of my psychology A-level and you could make these miraculous things happen. I was soon spending all my spare time and money studying everything I could get my hands on. But soon my spare time wasn't enough. How was I going to do this all day every day and still make a living?
And that's how I became a therapist