My daughter has cerebral palsy (C.P.). For those who don't know what that is,
it's basically brain damage in some part of the brain. It happens mostly in
infants when they are born where oxygen is cut off to their brain somehow. It
has the same effect on a body as a stroke has on an older person where some part of their body becomes immobile. My daughter has a mild case. In fact, you
wouldn't know she has it by looking at her, but walking for her has been 19
years in the making.

I take her over to Healthtrax gym every other day to keep her muscles strong and to stretch her out, because her C.P. causes her muscles to be tight.  Typically she walks with two canes, a white cane (blindness) and a supporting cane.  When we’re at the gym I have her walk with neither of those things because I’m trying to get her comfortable walking in space without any support to lessen her fears about it.   
 
As soon as I walk away from her she gets nervous and begins searching for something to hold on to.  She walks great by herself, but she lacks confidence to keep it going for any period of time.   In the gym there is this 3” step that separates two rooms.  When she’s holding my arm and we walk over it she barely notices it, but when I have her walk up to it and step up independently, she acts like I’m asking her to climb a mountain. All this fear comes up for her and she panics. 

Coming from a NLP perspective, my intent is to allow her to have as many experiences doing this successfully without assistance so that it then becomes a “resource” for her.  In NLP, a resource is a remembered successful event that you can use to draw upon when you need it in the present.  I will talk more about that in a minute.  From a physical development  perspective, it’s developing motor memory.  Years ago I was watching a documentary on ice skaters and how they get good at flipping through the air and stuff on skates, and it was told that it takes 2,000 repetitions of any physical movement in order for the corresponding muscles to make it automatic.  That’s when I got the idea that I was going to get her to walk.

So as we are walking out of the gym to our car she immediately searches for a wall for safety, and all the while me walking behind her encouraging her not to.  I remind her of all the things she’s done successfully in the past.  As I describe that past scenario for her she has to recall those memories to know what I'm referring to, and as she’s remembering them she
automatically shifts her physiology accordingly.  This is  where “resources” comes in that I mentioned above.  By my saying, “Remember when you finally were able to do this or that, when at first you thought you couldn’t?  “This or that” gets filled in with successful events from her past where she moved past doubt and fear into success.  As she calls up these physical successes into her senses you can literally see her change her gait and balance. 

Most of us don’t realize that we can transfer successful past events into the present moment.  The reason this works is because once we know how to do something, it gets hardwired into a neurological network in our brain.  Simply by recalling
the event in our head, it automatically causes our  brain to fire those same neurons, thus changing our state of mind and allowing us to take on a task with the same confidence from the past. 

When we got into the car to leave I asked my daughter why she let her thoughts trick her so much. I explained to her that she wasn’t scared of the things in her environment, but rather the thoughts about those things.  I asked her, “When you thought about going up that little step without support, did you imagine that step had a mind of its own and thought to itself, ‘oh, here comes Lexi, I’m going to trip her up’?”  She laughingly replied no.  I continued to explain  to her that things in her environment are not as dangerous as the “thoughts” she has about them in her head.  I explained that she is responding to her thoughts, and not the thing.  She got it and laughed some more.

That’s how most of us operate—we believe our thoughts about a subject and respond to it in kind.  All fear is only our thoughts about a subject appearing real. And because our brain doesn’t know the difference between something real from something imagined, we respond to it like it is real and have real chemcial reactions to it like increased heart rate, adrenline, etc. This is the basis of almost all panic attacks. We have a thought about something that we keep thinking over and over and then
finally it becomes a belief and then we stop trying to move past it altogether because we convince ourselves that it is real.

With my daughter I cannot afford to let this happen.  I have to show her in as many ways that it will take that she is the only one creating her obstacles.  I’m not asking her to do something that she doesn’t have the capacity to do, because she does have physical limitations, but her strongest ally is her ability to tap into other successes to help her stretch past her preconceived boundaries.  All beliefs are just perceptions anyway.

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