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Therapy helped Linda to get a lift ...

Linda Rowell was on holiday in Spain when she had her first attack of claustrophobia. She had always been wary of small enclosed spaces and avoided using lifts, but she had never been in a situation where she had panicked. The holiday changed all that.

"We were staying in a villa among trees and it was very, very dark," she says.

"At night I found it very frightening and could not get to sleep. There were shutters on the windows and unlike at home there was not even a sliver of light. It was very alarming and I kept waking up in a sweat. Eventually, I had to sleep with a candle burning."

During the day Linda, who was on holiday with her husband Stephen and daughters Emily and Janine, was fine. "It was a lovely place, it was the darkness on a night that made me fearful."

The experience brought Linda's fear of being trapped in an enclosed space to a head. It was something that she had always been anxious about, but had taken steps to avoid. "When I left school I went to work for a solicitor in Bradford and I had to deliver mail to solicitors around town. A few of us did the deliveries and I was always a bit longer than the others because I always took the stairs rather than the lift." She adds: "It was not the fear of the lift itself, but I worried about it breaking down and being trapped inside in the dark. It was the fear of not being able to get out. I did once go in a lift and I stood in a corner absolutely petrified."

Linda, who lives in Scholes, also suffered feelings of anxiety in crowds. "I was once at Lincoln market and it was very busy I felt really hot and sweaty because I could not get away." Similarly, she felt enclosed when out in the car in a thick fog. "It is a feeling of enclosure and it can be very frightening."

Linda did not want to go through life having to avoid situations that could provoke a reaction. She heard that John Ellis, a man she knew, was working in that area, so she made an appointment. What happened at Linda's one - and only - session with Bingley-based John was, she says "amazing."

"Before I went along I wondered how he was going to approach it. Using Time Line Therapy he took me back through my 'time line'. We did little exercises. He asked me how I felt standing in front of a lift - about the feelings in my stomach. I had to do a lot of the work. I had to stop at the event that caused the claustrophobia. I remember looking down on my time line, as silly as it sounds. I was looking down and was on a train tootling along and all of a sudden it stopped but I could not see what the event was that caused it to stop. I got a funny feeling in my stomach, a feeling of fear." John took Linda 'back' again and again, and each time the same thing happened, and each time she was less fearful. "There is no hypnosis. You are working with your subconscious. When you are asked a question you have to snap out the answer."

"It was a turning point," she says. For the first time she felt that she could face her fear and overcome it. The following day Linda purposely went to a lift. "I rang John to tell him how I'd got on." After 30 years steering clear of lifts she was no longer afraid. "It was incredible. I can handle dark bedrooms too. I don't think about it. Before I would think about a situation - now I don't."



Says John, who is a qualified master practitioner of Time Line Therapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and uses a mixture of both: "We go back to the start. People have a conscious and an unconscious mind. The object of the session is to get a rapport between them. I ask a series of questions and get the background to the problem and then try to get people to respond in a different manner." He adds: "Linda responded really well because she wanted to get rid of her problem. People must be at the stage of wanting to change and overcome their problems. You cannot force them to change but you can help them change if they want to. The procedures I use help people to get to the root cause of the problem They consciously are not aware of it but unconsciously there is a root cause."

Last year on holiday in Spain, Linda did not think twice about using the lift in her hotel. Once, while it was descending the mechanism slipped. But she kept calm. "I was frightened but more of the lift going wrong - not of being enclosed." She says her life is easier now she does not have to avoid certain situations. But she blames John for her having put on weight. "Because now I'm always using the lift not the stairs."

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