I haven’t worked with compulsions but I have worked with over 550 phobias over the phone – and some of those long-standing too. One of these people had a sever phobia of eating, which was completely gone after the session. she is now very happy living in the UK and she is an NLP Master Practitioner, too
I have noticed that people need something ELSE to replace the behaviour as well. a new strategy, a new behaviour that replaces that and that feels just as familiar as the unuseful issue itself.
Since the UM doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination (I.e. they both appear real – and that’s how most problems are being created btw), it follows that if they have a scenario of a positive, ersatz-type (replacement) of behaviour in place and they rehearse it by visualisation and they do that a few times a day, then the UM will create an alternate “feels familiar” attached to this behaviour that will create a new, healthy habit.
When I’ve started tasking my clients with this – and of course the key is that the scenario is positive and runs for at least 5 minutes and has sufficient level of detail that it appears real rather than an aberrant vision – their success sky-rocketed. I have then incorporated these frames into the preframes at the start of the session.
if you need more details, please email me on bogdan@nlpcoaching.com – I have acquired a wealth of experience working with that amount of people in two and a half years.