In March 2005, I had a gentleman referred to me for smoking cessation; however, this was not the primary importance at the time we spoke. He had another problem that needed to be addressed immediately- teeth grinding.About eight years prior, his dentist noticed that many of his teeth had been totally worn down; some of them were cracked. At that time he realized that he was always grinding his teeth, but had no idea why. He thought he was content in his life. His dentist told him that he would need $40,000 worth of dental work to keep his own teeth. He followed through and had the work done. By the time we spoke, the teeth had grounded down again and one would never know that he had all that work done.His dentist told him that he would have to stop the grinding before he was to have any more work done on his teeth. While we were on the phone the client asked me if we could do anything to stop this destructive habit of his because he really wanted to keep his own teeth.I found out from a dentist that the reason that people grind their teeth (otherwise known as “bruxism” in the dental community) is because they have a lot of pent up anger, which increases adrenaline in their bodies. The body uses this adrenaline by the grinding of the teeth. It became obvious to me that the course of action was to find out what was creating all the anger then de-sensitize the emotional charge on each of the events that was creating that anger. Once that was accomplished the grinding of the teeth would stop.The first step was to do a Detailed Personal History on my client ; I found out that there were a few incidents that occurred in his twenties that triggered him. The first incident happened during WWII, when his father was fighting the socialist in France: he was captured and tortured, which lead to his death. His mother was devastated with this turn of events and become very depressed for the rest of her life. His oldest brother was having a difficult time with manic-depressive episodes and came after my client a couple of times with a knife trying to kill him. With all of these events, my client was forced to take on the role of the “father figure” for his large family. He did the best that he could under fairly difficult circumstances. Though he thought he was calm and in control of his life currently, he did realize that he was grinding his teeth not just at night, but all day long. We now knew why this was happening.Using a technique where he imagined the past traumatic incidents in a light trance state, we were able to desensitize him from the emotional charge of these negative events in his life. We then reframed the experiences so that he could understand how much he was able to learn about taking control of his life and doing what it takes to get through any adversity, while reclaiming his life, for all these things had happened 50 years ago and had no practical effect on his current life.A few years after the treatment, which lasted all of 5 hours, he is still not grinding his teeth any longer.If you have a known problem of grinding your teeth, I suggest you find yourself a competent hypnotist and NLP practitioner to assist you, for this is a very easy situation to get under control with the correct professional intervention. Incidentally, with any habit, once you discover and understand the triggers, it becomes much easier to let it go.

This past April I was asked to travel to Seattle to work with a gentleman who had a huge problem with grinding his teeth. He had spent approximately $40,000 to fix his teeth eight years ago. The only problem was that he had ground them so much that one could not tell any work had been done. In fact his dentist told him that he had to have all the work redone. He told me that he grinded his teeth all through the day. He was aware of it but yet could never stop it. Continue »