Anchoring Lucky

By Kevin Creedon

Have you ever considered lucky as an anchorable resource, just like excellence or confidence? What if you could anchor luck and then go play the lottery? I'm not endorsing gambling, but playing the lottery is a good metaphor for H.I.V.+ people.

The medication options for people with H.I.V. continue to grow with more than 25 brand names available. The standard treatment, a drug "cocktail," usually involves a combination of three to five different medications. These new treatments are modern-day miracles, undeniably extending the lives of many people with AIDS. What most people aren't aware of, however, is the complex process doctors and patients go through to find the most effective and tolerable cocktail.

Each cocktail works for some people some of the time, for a few months, or not at all. These drugs can also cause serious side effects ranging from liver inflammation and dizziness to kidney stones and anemia. (The most prevalent side effects are nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.) Many of them also require a rigid schedule, dictating when and what a person may eat for the rest of his life.

You may have have see this street poster in New York:

You Have H.I.V.
People Say Take Your Medication.
They Have No Idea.

This message resonates for people on H.I.V. medication. Think about having diarrhea every day—and throwing up twice daily—and you can begin to understand why the poster might get attention. (Now think about anything else!)

Finding the best combination is a tricky process that can take months: first testing the efficacy, then careful monitoring to see that it continues to be effective and that the side effects are tolerable. If a patient hits on a combination of meds that keep him healthy with minimal side effects, he's pretty fortunate.

People taking H.I.V. medications have to live with this uncertainty—here's where NLP can help.

Working with a client recently, I asked, "What special quality do you have that will allow you to be healthy and happy twenty-five years from now"? He was stumped, so I rephrased it to a hypothetical person: What quality would a person like that have? He thought about it and said, "He'd be one of the lucky ones I guess." From our prior conversation I knew he didn't feel lucky right then, but after pacing that idea I asked where and when he had been lucky in the past (and I anchored it)… then we talked about his new trial combination of drugs. We talked about the resource lucky in a variety of direct and indirect ways over the next couple of weeks, until it was firmly rooted in his unconscious that, in the context of H.I.V., he was one of the lucky ones.

Since then I have used the resource lucky with several clients with wonderful effects. For example, some have handled poor results with medications as just a step on the way to finding the perfect combination for them, because, "I'm lucky—something will work!"

Lucky is a great resource—its passive, relaxed quality is a nice balance to aggressive resources like confidence and determination. In a three-month follow-up session with the client who first chose lucky as a resource, I asked how he was dealing with being H.I.V.+ and he said, "Great. I don't even think about it anymore". I asked if he was taking his medication consistently, and he said "Regular as clockwork, just occasional diarrhea. These meds are working"! Lucky guy.

N.B. Kevin has also developed very effective techniques for preventing or eliminating side-effects from HIV medications, which he promises to get around to writing down sometime soon.