I find myself most profoundly impacted – again and again – by the effect of RTT on young people, which I define as under 30 years old. 

In fact, if I could ONLY work with one segment of the population, this would (now) be my choice…

There are 2 reasons:

  1. Young people are so RESPONSIVE!! Their thoughts, habits and beliefs are not as deeply ingrained as they are with adults, so they can adapt; change, embrace new ideas….

  2. The opportunity to help someone change the trajectory of their entire life – at an age where the results will last for decades and change everything about their future – is beyond exciting! The  ramifications and implications are endless and that thrills me!

I have decided to write up my 3 favourite cases. I want to do this as they are so profound, life-changing, moving and exciting that I want to share them. I also want to remind myself that this is the reason I do what I do.

Taylor – from London:

Taylor’s mum called me. She was worried about her daughter, and asked me to speak to her as soon as possible.

We scheduled a Discovery Call so Taylor and I could get to know each other and make sure there was a good connection and trust (very important in therapy!).

At 29, Taylor is smart, funny, engaging. She has a degree in engineering – no small feat, and is an extremely interesting girl with more than a small dose of personality!

We chatted; she was articulate and insightful… Honest about where she was at and clearly very open to change. She was feeling extreme ‘anxiety and lack of confidence‘ (probably the 2 most common reasons people come to me for help).

I asked how her this showed itself in her life, and she told me that it was in every aspect – work, social, personal, even her health and motivation.

At work, if she had a presentation to give, she wouldn’t sleep the night before worrying about it, and would literally cry and feel nauseous from the anxiety.

She wasn’t going into the office, choosing to work exclusively from home, even though she felt isolated and alone. She wasn’t interacting with her colleagues beyond the minimum that was required; she was anxious all the time and consumed by thoughts of not being good enough. Paralysed by them, in fact.

She couldn’t sleep, hated meeting people and talking to them for the first time. She was missing out on opportunities to go out and have fun; anxious at the thought of travel or going to the gym.

“I think about messing up”, she told me, “…of saying things wrong and looking stupid. I feel nauseous; there’s a tightness in my chest and I can’t breathe. I can feel it building up in my head and then the tears come and my throat closes up.”

When the Feelings Don’t Match the Evidence:

Like so many people, the feelings of anxiety and lack of confidence are in direct contradiction to the evidence in front of us. The evidence that everyone else sees, but we don’t.

It’s very hard as a therapist when you see a client like Taylor, with such potential and so much to offer, that you can’t imagine there would be any cause for anxiety or lack of confidence. 

How can someone who has an engineering degree feel stupid, one might ask.

But it’s not conscious, is it?  If it was, we’d all be able to fix ourselves!

It’s not about thinking it through, or trying to do things differently. It’s not even about forcing yourself to be different through sheer willpower, or pretending, as in the dreaded ‘fake it till you make it’ advice.

This kind of anxiety is all about what lies hidden beneath the surface of our conscious awareness; deep within our unconscious mind. It’s all about the beliefs, habitual thinking patterns, and perceptions that hold us back; the one’s we usually don’t even know we have.

And that’s where RTT really shines – like nothing else I’ve ever found.

Straight to the Root Cause

RTT gets STRAIGHT to the root cause of these kinds of problems. It goes beyond all the self-justification, the rationale, and the reasons we give; the stories we tell ourselves and others to explain our strange behaviour.

It’s so easy to think, ‘I’m anxious because I am not great at presenting; people might think I’m boring, etc…’

When really – as it turns out in Taylor’s case – it’s something that goes way back into childhood; an incident that’s either hidden from awareness, forgotten, or is apparently not connected.

At 8 years old, Taylor was rejected by her 2 ‘best friends’ in a brutal way.

“We don’t want to be your friend anymore”, they told her. “We don’t like you. We were just pretending.”

She was obviously bereft.

At 8, we simply don’t have the wherewithal to process life, people and events. We have not been on the planet long enough to have context, insight and awareness. We do not have deductive reasoning that comes with the physiological development of our brains; nor the resources and resilience that come with age and experience.

For Taylor – as it would be for the majority of 8 year olds – it was as if her whole world imploded.

Imagine – your 2 best friends; the people you trusted most – letting you down. It’s easy to understand the feelings of total rejection, confusion and disbelief.  

How does a child process this kind of pain?

The answer: In most cases, by making up very disempowering beliefs about themselves, other people and/or the world in general.

Like Taylor did.

Her thoughts were: 
“I don’t understand… Why do they hate me?”

The conclusion was: 
“I must be a bad person.”

And then the CORE belief: 
“No one will EVER like or love me.”

If you take 10 kids, you’ll get 10 different beliefs and conclusions about themselves and the world. Probably most would be as destructive and disempowering as Taylor’s – and understandably so.

And it’s these beliefs – from such a young age – that then become the filter through which they see and interpret every subsequent event and interaction. It quite literally becomes the blueprint for the rest of that child’s life.

Where the Problems Begin:

For most people, the events we experience before the age of 7, become the foundation upon which we build the rest of our lives and, most importantly, our own identities. Then we spend the rest of our lives looking for – and finding (because we are looking) – the evidence to support those beliefs. And this generalises across every situation and relationship from then on.

As an example, when Taylor was 20, there was an incident where her father put her down, making her feel unloved. He was probably just having a bad day and acted out of frustration, but to Taylor’s already damaged sense of self, it was just more proof that she was unlovable; not worthy of love.

Then at age 22, her first love rejected her in the most confusing and painful way. Again, just more evidence to reinforce her core belief that “no one will ever love me”.

These may seem like unrelated events, but they trigger the same emotional reaction that was created at age 8. They ‘press the same button’, if you like… and we all know about them!

With RTT, those events are ‘reprocessed’ from an adult perspective, and the emotional charge, which has been retained in the neurology of the body ever since, is reduced or eliminated. At this point, the beliefs can then be questioned and rightfully rejected and then replaced with empowering and helpful new beliefs. 

And then the healing begins. And this is what I see over and over again.

So here you have a young woman, who was paralysed socially and professionally and 2 weeks later (after only one RTT session), writes this: