To help Sarah create a new view of the experience I asked her what’s known as the miracle question. “Imagine you went to sleep at night and, while you were sleeping, a miracle occurred. Now, imagine waking up unaware that this miracle happened. What would you be doing differently?” I guided Sarah through her morning activities, her thoughts, the things she’d be noticing, and so on, all the way up to and beyond her dental appointment. The overall response was one of calm; it was just a normal day like any other. The purpose of this exercise was to reframe the experience ‘as if’ going to the dentist was not an issue and “loosened” her phobic response a little.

Next, through a gentle trance, I asked Sarah to remember the first time she experienced the fear of the dentist. Her answer surprised her when she said she was 2 years old. Regressing to that time all those years ago, but fully dissociated (outside looking in), she imagined herself way above the event looking down on top of it. I asked Sarah to imagine a time after that experience when she was safe and comfortable. We placed that image on a cinema screen in black and white and she imagined herself sitting in the audience looking up at the screen. Here I asked her to imagine floating up out of her body in the seat into the projection booth. This causes a double dissociation which will allow her to re-experience the event without experiencing the emotional intensity. From here Sarah went to a time before the incident and, from the safety of projection room looking down on herself in the audience watching the screen, ran through the whole experience in black and white. Next I asked her to white out the image and bring it back in full colour, to imagine floating back down into her body in the audience and then into the colour image. Now I asked Sarah to rewind the whole experience (while she was in it and in full colour) from the end to the beginning in about 2 seconds. We repeated that exercise a couple of times which ended up recoding how her brain accessed this experience.

Traumatic experiences shouldn’t prevent us from moving forward in life but should be used as an opportunity to learn from them and tap into our incredible resources that may be lying dormant within us. Therefore, when I asked Sarah what she needed to learn from this early event to enable her to let go of it completely she responded that she was physically bigger now and had a feeling of being more in control and so could communicate any discomfort she was experiencing.

Using these new learnings we moved back along her ‘timeline’ of events clearing up any related emotions caused by similar events wherein she discovered a new lesson; “I will never make another person feel that way”. Lastly we focused on clearing out the kinaesthetic (bodily) feeling (she felt sharp painful feeling in her chest) until she was completely at piece.