The Miracle of Change, using a secret therapy called Life Architecture

There is a small, British run alternative health clinic in Southern Spain that is attracting clients to its doors from across Europe and the USA. They offer a refreshingly new approach to therapy, which they have named ‘Life Architecture’. In its purest form it allows someone to achieve quite dramatic change in his or her life. It has been used to help someone change from being a smoker to a non-smoker, from being overweight to being slim, from being sad to being happy, and from being old in their outlook on life to being youthful.

People are visiting the clinic for many different reasons; some because they are scared, or lonely, others believe they have reached a crossroads in their life and feel it is inevitable, some just wake up one morning and decide that they want more from life. Often it is down to them seeing a growing discrepancy between where their life is and where they want it to be. One version of the treatment ends at the point where the client sits before an imaginary sheet of brilliant white paper with a pencil in their hand and the therapist suggests: “Ok, let’s sit down together and design your life exactly the way you want it to be.”

There seems to be few limits as to the diversity of problems that LA can help people with, recent successes have included cocaine and alcohol addiction and helping couples rebuild their relationships,

The treatment has been used to show people how to implement rapid change in their life, simply and without too much effort. In its purest form,
They accept that no one is born an alcoholic, or a smoker, and no one comes into this world suffering from panic attacks or with an emotional hang up with food. The fact is all of these negative actions have had to be painstakingly learned; or have been adopted for some reason or another, but there always is a reason, just like the positive ones we learnt as children, such as being able to recite the alphabet, or tying our shoelaces.

Any bad habit, or learned pattern of behaviour, can be changed or “unlearned”, and in time, people can learn different, more beneficial ones instead.

Of course it is relatively simple to change many habits and thoughts in life, admittedly some more easily than others. A critical element is always the individual’s motivation and desire for it to happen; commitment is required and a certain amount of energy needs to be invested. At the clinic they have observed that sometimes just showing someone that change is possible is all that’s necessary to turn a persons life around, and the effect can sometimes be dramatic. When people see and understand, maybe for the first time, that just about any change in life is possible, and that it can be achieved relatively easily, it’s like opening Pandora’s Box; all of a sudden life holds unlimited new and exciting prospects for the future.

An example of Life Architecture and its benefits is in weight control, which is usually incorrectly treated by putting a person on a diet. Everyone knows that dieting only treats the symptoms of being overweight, never the cause; it is impossible for dieting to ever eliminate a person’s subconscious need for excess food. An overweight person usually overeats because they have somehow learned the negative habit of eating to try and fill an emotional void, or to stave off boredom, rather than eating for basic, nutritional reasons, out of simple, physical hunger.

With the therapy the reasons for the misuse of food can be uncovered and explained, then a simple strategy of introducing change, incorporating new eating habits is often all that is required. The rapid and positive effect on the dieter, who has spent years, incorrectly striving to control his or her weight by deprivation, can be highly emotional.

The ‘Life Architecture’ treatment contains little that is new, but its approach and methodology is certainly different. At the clinic they have adopted their very own cocktail of therapies, which they call ‘ Triple Therapy’; it incorporates the complete merging of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Hypnotherapy and NLP, and is underpinned with their own ‘Diagnostic Questioning’ process, which has been designed quite cleverly to ensure they find and treat the primary cause of the problem, never the symptoms.

Helping clients to let go of a habit can sometimes be a challenge: at the clinic they always accept that clients are individuals and have varied emotional and behaviour needs, each always requiring a unique and flexible approach.