How to kill bedtime monsters

When I was a child I had monsters everywhere. Under my bed, in the wardrobe, behind the curtains and I even remember once lying frozen in bed too scared to even shout for my mum, for fear that the 'mad axe man' would get me - (my friend Julie was responsible for that particular urban legend reaching my ears, thanks for that by the way!).

In short, my fears terrorised me. My mum must have felt helpless and could do no more than reassure me that there was nothing there and nothing to be scared of. Which of course didn't help. I slept with the light on but still spent many nights hiding under my duvet.

When my little girl first began suffering from nightmares, I had recently qualified as a Hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner, so we spent some time experimenting to see which technique worked best for monster slaying.

The first thing we tried was to change the colour of the monster. We made him pink with yellow spots and lots of frizz. Then we made him smaller and shrunk him down to half the size. Finally we gave him a silly voice and a rather unfortunate flatulence problem which tended to occur when he walked, in time with his steps.

By this point my daughter was giggling like mad, and from then till now, she saw that the monster was quite ridiculous and therefore completely useless at scaring people. She actually found some sympathy and felt quite sorry for the monster, being so useless at his job and all.

From then onwards, she was the one in control. The monsters still pop by occasionally but all we need to do is remember the monsters' little 'problem' and she just can't take them seriously.