After an amazingly chaotic day at work, I reached home in the evening at the twilight hour of 6.30 AM. Winter was setting itself up to retire and Spring was firing away the anchors reminding me the Summer vacations from school days. I was running visuals inside my brain of how I could make my evening relaxing and I could visualize the strategy quite clearly. As I was doing that, I entered my bungalow compound and that’s when I heard scream as if someone had seen a ghost. The scream came from inside my house and clearly because I had been with my wife to a horror movie before, I recognized that voice right away.

Okay! We humans have a reptilian brain but that doesn’t stop us from getting terrified of reptiles, especially if they are inside our house. So, the dramatic scene inside the house was, my wife was standing terrified at one end of the room and was looking in a direction. I followed that line of sight and found a 3 by half-inch lizard at the other end of the room. I could read the lizard’s expressions as well which were pointing to having the same emotions as my wife’s. I realized both have a Phobia of each other. Isn’t that an exception in general that there is a common ground between two living entities which doesn’t help the relationship to be any better. So, my wife looked at me and yelled, “Do something about it!” I think that’s when I decided whose side to take because I work with the “First-come-first-serve” philosophy! Eventually I got into the ‘National Security Guard’ state of mind and successfully flushed out the intruder from the window just next to it. For some reason, I didn’t think the lizard had my phobia and surely I am not a reptile fan but I know I cannot have any irrational fear about it.

But that’s what phobia is all about. Irrational Fear! It is a seeing and feeling event. Just that it is Visual-Kinaesthetic Synaesthesia. This means the visuals and the feeling are not able to separate themselves inside the head and that’s where the entire trouble starts. By the way, after I raised the ‘Mission Successful’ flag after the encounter, I said to my wife that she had an amazing memory. She obviously thought the statement was out of context and probably I was going through the side-effects of the encounter. But the fact is, every phobia is manifested due to some event in your life. The result of that event is a neural pathway which is formed and which is ‘Phobic pathway’ for me. So every time the same phobic entity appears in front of you, the neurons fire in the same way, resulting in a Phobic reaction.

Now my question is, my wife was in a state of not having a phobia at one point of time and now let us say she is in the state of having this phobia. What has changed in the head. The neural pathway? Well looks like it from the logical perspective. So for her to go back to the ‘Non-Phobia’ state something will have to be done about the pathway. If you really think about it, the neural pathway is analogous to someone walking right across a sugarcane field repeatedly. That is how that path became distinct and metaphorically we can say that the phobia pathway also became stronger with every phobic event in her life. So it is quite clear now that the pathway needs to be destroyed. Fortunately, there is an intervention in Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP. I was glad I had done NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner and today I am a Trainer of NLP conducting a lot of trainings through my firm Agile Neuro. This was like a piece of cake for me. So many times people had contacted me on agileneuro.com about so many manageable psychological problems, this was one of them.

So out came my NLP Toolkit and I ran a simple cognitive NLP procedure on my wife. Took us around 15 min to reprogram her brain and remove the Neural Pathway once and for all. The procedure is very simple and the person having phobia runs it by him/herself and she did it sitting calmly with her eyes closed. So next week when I came home from work after a similar chaotic day, I saw a different picture in my house. My wife was in the ‘National Security Guard’ state of mind, flushing out the slimy intruder. I felt so proud of myself. I felt proud of her as well for two reasons, one that she did the pattern without judging me which she usually does by saying, “Keep that NLP s*** out of my house”. Secondly, she was implementing it. I just have one regret, I didn’t get paid. Maybe, that is why they say, “Never mix business and family.”