Why Traditional Therapy Keeps You Coming Back

How learning this powerful thinking system helped me break free once and for all.

The Journey to Change

“OK, I’ll see you next week,” my therapist said from his armchair as he turned that alarm off. My 50-minutes were up. I thanked him as I, once again, left feeling worse than when I arrived, one breath away from the cold sweat of another panic attack.

The Breaking Point

I’m 23 years old and this is one of the lowest points in my life. I can still see the brown arm chair I sat in and the leafless tree outside the window. The tree looked as hopeless as I felt.

Even with seeing a therapist, a psychiatrist who prescribed Zoloft and Xanax, my days were a roller coaster ride of panic attacks and sleeplessness. The medication was making me feel worse, not better.

During this time period I was estranged from my family (hence, therapy) and I spent most of my time working or driving to work. For four hours a day seven days a week I was in my tiny tan four speed Hyundai Excel (the little Lamborghini of economy cars) enjoying Long Island’s finest traffic on 495, where my dreams of getting to work in under two-hours went to die.

As I look back I see that traditional therapy was making me better at my problems through a continuous recitation of them. I was wiring my woes deeper and deeper into my mind.

The little blue and white pills were not helping me either. As Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection, “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”

The Catalyst

That was 33 years ago. My 23-year-old self knew something wasn't working, but she had no idea what to do. This low point became more than just a crisis, it became the catalyst in my journey as a seeker, someone determined to understand how change really happens.

The Search Begins

First I changed jobs, thinking that would change everything. Spoiler alert: changing your zip code doesn’t change your mind code. I took myself and all those doom and gloom thoughts with me.

My next small step was reading, I surrounded myself with every positive quote I could find aiming to change my mindset. I joined the ranks of readers of self-help books to sleuth the secret to changing my stinking thinking.

Quotes and books led to courses, like Larry Crane’s Release Technique.

Finding FasterEFT

And one day, many years later Dr. Mercola shared Emotional Freedom Technique in a newsletter. Finding EFT ultimately brought me to Robert Smith’s Healing Magic on YouTube and his FasterEFT™ eutaptics® technique.

FasterEFT is a paradigm shift in healing therapies because it integrates traditional practices with fundamental mind mechanics. FasterEFT resolves both physical and emotional challenges with a unique combination of meridian tapping, de-fractionation, and, what was key for me: memory reimprinting.

Where traditional therapy felt like I was becoming better at my problems and grooving them a bit deeper into my mind, the mind mechanics of FasterEFT allowed me to interrupt long held limiting beliefs, release my most painful memory references and build a new story of Nicola.

The understanding of how our mind creates and maintains patterns allowed me to work with my natural learning processes rather than against them.

FasterEFT is a healing modality that teaches you how to change what you think and feel, your default ‘wiring.’ Robert Smith has distilled elements of Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLP) and hypnosis, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Be Set Free Fast (BSFF) into a very user friendly approach he coined FasterEFT.

As I watched more and more of Robert’s Healing Magic videos on YouTube I became convinced I had found the solution I was looking for.

Feeling excited and a bit nervous, I invested my entire tax refund on his 97 DVD home study program. Yes, you read that right - 97 DVDs. While my roommate was happily streaming The Walking Dead on Netflix, I was going back to the stone ages with those 97 DVDs to change my life.

Even so, I felt a surprising determination.

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Work With Me Personally

If you're ready to:

• Break free from limiting patterns that keep you stuck in anxiety, fear, or pain

• Release traumatic memories that are controlling your present experience

• Create a new internal blueprint that supports the life you truly want to live

I invite you to schedule a personal breakthrough session where we'll create a customized plan to transform your unconscious programming. (Note: This will be a conversation about investing in your transformation. If you're not open to investing in yourself if the value is there, please don't book this call).

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The Breakthrough

These DVDs revealed their transformative truths to me: that no one is truly broken - we're simply operating from faulty belief systems. I learned that what we think directly creates what we feel, that problems originate from birth, and that our perceptions are the natural result of our unique life experiences.

A revelation that surprised me: all problems are a success: you’re doing something correctly inside, based on what made perfect sense given your collection of life experiences, to create the outcomes you currently have.

Perhaps most importantly, I discovered we are all 'trance monkeys' (think less ‘Zen meditation’ and more an autopilot that makes you crash into emotional walls).

We are constantly operating from programmed patterns we can change. Turns out my brain wasn’t missing a chemical, I was just running some programs that were no longer useful.

Robert Smith’s FasterEFT has been a major player rewriting the stories and patterns that were keeping me stuck in a revolving door of money problems, failed relationships, wondering when I would grow up and feel like an adult at last.

Rewriting my life did not happen overnight, but with patience and persistence it did.

With newfound purpose and perspective, I took a leap and went all in to become a practitioner of change. In 2014, I started my own business, “Faster Changes with Nicola,” and hung up my Vibrams as a successful personal trainer.

From someone who couldn't sleep through the night to someone who helps others rewrite their life stories, the irony isn't lost on me.

But that's the thing about transformation: once you understand how to change your own programming, you can't help but want to share that knowledge with others.

Full Circle

Looking back at my 23-year-old self sitting in that brown armchair, I wish I could tell her that the leafless tree outside the window wasn't hopeless, it was just between seasons. Just like she was.

Just like maybe you are right now.

My next articles will dive deeper into mind mechanics and FasterEFT.

Your Turn to Reflect

Take a moment to consider your own early programming. What's one pattern in your life that might make more sense now, knowing how our minds create associations? Share your insight in the comments below, your experience might help others recognize their own patterns.

Coming up next in this series: "The Mind's Operating System: How We Get Programmed," where I'll explore how these early patterns develop into our adult behaviors and beliefs. Subscribe to make sure you don't miss it.