HOW TO BE PHOBIA FREE!
The Pattern That Could Change The World!
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
What follows here is a basic NLP pattern that was originally created
by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. You can find the pattern in its
original form in Steve Andreas’ book, Frog to Princes (1979). I first found this pattern in 1986 and it revolutionized my life. Literally.
First it completely changed the way I was doing psychotherapy as it
changed my Cognitive-Behavioral approach sending me into an entirely new
level of structure —the structure of experience and making
that primary to content. Next, as I used the pattern on my own memories
and the things that could “push my buttons” to create a lot of negative
emotional charge about things, it transformed me as a person.
Then I realized something—every person on this planet should know this pattern! With this pattern, there should not be a single human being walking around or living with a phobia. There’s
no need. Not any longer. When you learn this pattern and how to use
it, using a simple metaphor like watching a movie, you can take the emotional charge out of any old memory that still pushes your buttons or that throws you into a phobic response state.
In the field of NLP, this pattern is called the Phobia Cure pattern
or the V-K (Visual-Kinesthetic) dissociation pattern. When I wrote the
book MovieMind (2002) and User’s Manual of the Brain, Volume II (2001 with Bob Bodenhamer), I called it The Movie Rewind Pattern because
that is the central process used in the pattern— you run your mental
movie backwards. And that’s why you can use it for all kinds of things—
phobias, traumatic memories, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder),
strong over-emotional reactions to things, “buttons,” depression,
anxiety, etc.
The Secret Behind being Phobia Free
It’s all about your “thinking.” There are two ways that you can process information as you think. You can do so analytically and you can do so experientially. When you think or read something experientially, you feel as
if you have entered into the story that you are reading or imagining.
To do that you represent the information an encode the information in a
way that you cue yourself to neuro-linguistically experience it.
Conversely, when you think or read something analytically, you hold
the material at “arms length” so to speak. You analyze it, think about it,
and you take a spectator’s point of view regarding the information.
In the first instance, you step into the content of the story or
information and in the second, you step out of it and take a view from
outside it as a spectator.
Each of these ways of looking at things (perceptual styles) has its strengths and its weaknesses. To step into your representations empowers
you to take the first perceptual position. You see thins from out of
your own eyes and ears and feel things as if from out of your own body.
Do this and you enter into a story and will come to “know” it from
within.
To step outside of the representations allows you to take
the second and third perceptual positions—to see it as someone else
might or to see it from a third and neutral position. And when you do
that, you can analyze it in order to learn from it. Then it will not
activate your emotional responses. If you do too much of the stepping
in and associating, you can become an emotional cripple, hysterical,
unable to “think,” and reactive with all kinds of emotional reactions.
If you do gdtoo much of the stepping out and just observing, you may
become an intellectual egghead and an emotional incompetent—unable to
relate emotionally and personally to yourself or others. So obviously,
the balance of choosing when and where to do each is the secret.
With regard to hurts, traumas, and unpleasant realities, many people can’t even think about such
things. To think is to be re-traumatized. It activates all sorts of
negative emotions—especially fears and phobias. Typically, such
individuals eventually lose their willingness to even entertain painful
thoughts; those in helping professions frequently burn-out. Others
develop PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Because they cannot
even “think” about a subject without going into negative painful
emotional state, they experience thinking as distressful and
unpleasant. This robs them of an important resource: the skill of thinking comfortably about unpleasant events. So “reality” pains them. So they repress, suppress, deny, avoid, etc.
The Phobia Cure Pattern or The Movie-Rewind Pattern offers
a marvelous technology for recovering from trauma states and from
PTSD. The pattern enables and empowers a person to learn how to
“think” about unpleasant things without re-associating and
re-experiencing the situation. You can stop signaling your body to
respond to “thoughts” as if actually in the trauma again. By stopping
the ongoing re-traumatization, you resolve the pain, and can then
release the old memories so that you can get on with living your life
more abundantly and positively.
The human technology within this pattern works by moving in your mind
and understanding (mentally and conceptually) to a different
frame-of-reference. It invites you to move to the “second” perceptual
position of another person, then to the “third” perceptual position of
seeing things from an observer point of view so that you can see
whatever the scene or information is from a position of distance. This
allows you to feel safe as you “think” about it. It also enables you to
stop yourself from stepping back into the memory and associating into
the experience because if you did that you would be re-accessing the old
negative emotional states. And that does not help. Instead, with the
new perspectives, you will be able to apply new and more powerful
resources to the old memory and thereby change it.
To recapitulate, The Movie-Rewind Pattern (called the Phobia Cure Pattern in
NLP) works by enabling you to move to a different frame-of-reference—
to a spectator viewpoint. There you can view the “painful” information
from your past comfortably. Doing this interrupts your “trauma
thinking” and prevents you from processing the information in a way
whereby you could collapse into a negative emotional state.
This understanding of human subjective experiences identifies that the source of your emotional experience goes back to how you code things in your mind-and-body. As
you code information—so you experience. It’s that simple. It is also
that profound. Your subjective experiences is created by the coding you
use. So, when you change that coding, you change your experience at
the neurological level. And that leads to a change in your emotions and
behaviors.
So with your two categorical ways of “thinking” (by stepping in and
stepping out of your representations of an event) you can now develop the flexibility of consciousness to choose which to do when. You can decide how to code and
experience the “”information” about various events that you have been
through. You can do so analytically (that is objectively) and so
un-emotionally or you can do so experientially (that is, subjectively)
and hence “emotionally.” You can remember old events as a spectator to
those experiences—as if you were a movie goer, just watching it, rather
than as an actor in the movie.
When you use this technology, you can effectively managing strong
negative “emotions” and then you can learn from your past rather than
using your past to feel bad about. You can use it to “switch off” any
scene that you don’t need to play anymore in your inner theater. If it
was a B-rated movie the first time you experienced it, you do not have
to keep replaying it.
A final caveat: If you use this pattern on pleasant experiences, you
will thereby neutralize them. This can also work to your detriment.
Doing so will rob you of the feel of being alive and vital. It will eliminate good feelings, motivation, emotional understanding, etc.
The Movie-Rewind Pattern
Here is a step by step description of what to do to “run your
brain” in this way and to take out the negative emotional charge of some
old memory. Try it with yourself, if you have difficulty, then
find a well-trained and qualified NLP practitioner or Neuro-Semanticist
who can then facilitate the process with you.
1) Identify a mental representation that bothers you.
What thought activates strong negative emotions in you?
What memory of some unpleasant experience or even traumatic experience
puts you, as it were, back in that event? What idea pushes your
buttons? What triggers you to go into a fight-flight stress response by
just thinking about it or considering it?
When you know, identify it in terms of what you see, hear, and
sense. This means, identify the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic
features of the movie that you are playing in your mind. If you are new
to this, this will— at first— be strange or challenging.
2) Use the Movie Metaphor to create an Internal Representation of this old troublesome Movie.
Now imagine that you have gone to the movies are are setting in a
theater, in your mind, and ready to watch this old movie for the last
time. As you imagine yourself sitting in a movie theater, which row
would you like to be in so that you can observe comfortably? I like the
tenth row. You might like row 5 or row 20 or row 200. Find the row
that works best for you.
When you are in the seat that you best like, then on the screen of
your mind, put a black-and white picture of the younger you in the
situation fifteen minutes or so before the traumatic events occurred. Oh yes, get out your bag of popcorn or whatever you best like to eat when you go to the movies.
The movie up on the screen is a snap-shot right now. You have
freezed-framed it and it represents something that occurred 15 minutes
prior to when something unpleasant happened. Now sit back to watch it,
aware that you have taken a spectator’s position to that younger you.
Notice that you have stepped out of the picture, and have a position
from outside. And in a little bit you will watch this old B-rated movie
for the last time.
As you gain this psychological distance from that event, you have
begun the process of running your own brain. So you can feel delighted
that you have this ability to step aside from your thoughts. You are
more than your thoughts, you are more than the experiences you have been
through. Those are just the things you have had to deal with and now
you can put them behind you. And shortly you can use those memories for
learning— perhaps learning what not to do, but never again for feeling
bad. That’s not useful.
3) Begin to Become the Editor of your own Movies
As you set back and take a spectator’s point of view to that old
movie, notice how you have coded the movie. Doing that will then give
you the ability to play around with these codes and to alter them so
that they enhance your life and emotions.
4) Float back and up to the Control Booth.
Now as you sit there, still getting ready for the movie to begin, one
more thing to do—imagine floating out of your body from the row that
you are sitting in and floating back to the Projection Booth. Float all
the way out of your body and into the Control Room until you can feel
your hands on the plexi-glass window so that you can look out and see
the back of your head facing the screen.
Take a moment to experience and enjoy this very different
point-of-view. It may take just a little bit to fully imagine seeing
yourself —today’s you (in whatever row you are sitting in) watching your
younger you on the screen before the movie begins to play. As you note
The Adult You sitting in the theater (seeing the back of his or her
head) let yourself also see beyond that to the still picture on the
screen.
Watching this will be strange and weird the first time but you will
get used to it very quickly, and if you feel a bit dizzy at any time,
you can put your hands on the plexi-glass again and feel safe and secure
in this control booth. This is the place to remember that you are in
control of the movie and can stop it or fast-forward it at any time that
you wish.
5) Playing the old memory for the Last time.
Now when you are ready, from the Project Booth, you can turn on the
movie and let it move from the initial snapshot. Let it now play out as
a black-and-white movie. And watch it from a double-perspective— from
the audience and from the projection booth. Watch it from the beginning
to the end.
And if at any time, the movie tempts you to step in— feel your hands on the plexi-glass and stay safe and in control in the Control Room.
And if at any time, you need to fast-forward the movie, after all, you
know what happened, just fast forward it a bit. Then play it to the
end.
When you have let it play out beyond the unpleasant experience, play
if a bit further. Play it to a later time, after the bad scene
disappears, and see that Younger You in a time and place of safety and
even pleasure. . . . Go to a scene of comfort when you were feeling
good about yourself and having fun doing something — at a park, on a
beach, with a loved one. …. This later time does not have to be even
close to the time of the trauma, but just some time later when you were
enjoying yourself.
Good. Now when you get to that place of comfort and pleasure, stop the movie and freeze frame the picture again.
6) Step in and Rewind your Movie from the Pleasure backwards.
Now the next step will occur in just a moment— when you are ready—
and when it does it will occur very, very quickly. We are doing to move
into super-fast movement as we rewind the movie in fast rewind
So wait until you get all of the instructions about how to do this. In a moment, rewind this memory movie in
fast rewind mode. As you have seen movies or videos run backwards so
you will rewind the movie backwards at a very high speed rewind, so fast
that it will only take two seconds—2 seconds! But — and this is a big but— this time you will be inside the movie when you rewind it.
So imagine that! Float inside the scene of comfort and pleasure… be
there. See and hear what you would see and hear when there and feel
it— feel the comfort and the pleasure. And now from this vantage point,
you will be rewind the movie backwards. You know the sound of running a
movie backward? Hear that. And you know the rush and confusion of
sights as everything goes backwards, a jumbling of sounds as everything
zooms back to the moment 15 minutes prior to the unpleasant movie. When
you experience this fast rewinding, all the people and their actions go
backwards. They walk and talk backwards. You walk and talk in
reverse. Everything happens in reverse, like rewinding a movie. So
ready?
How much do you feel the comfort and pleasure right now? When it is
at a level of 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, then push the rewind button . .
. and experience it rewinding . . . zooooooommmmm. All the way back
to the beginning. It only takes a second or two to do that fast rewind
. . .
And how did that feel . . . rewinding from inside the movie?
7) Repeat this Rewinding Process five times.
When you arrive back to the snapshot at the beginning, clear the
screen in your mind. That is, take a break, open your eyes and look
around. Good.
Now, immediately go to the scene of comfort and pleasure at the end again, and as soon as you step it, feel, see, and hear it fully . . . rewind the movie even faster.
As you do this over and over your brain will become more and more
proficient and the rewind will go faster and faster until the rewind
takes only a second each time. Zoommmm!
Test the results.
Break state from this exercise. Then after a minute or two, call up
the original memory and see if you can get the feelings back. Try as
hard as you can to step into the scene and feel the full weight of the
emotions.
Other Editing Tools
From the act of stepping back from experientially thinking about a
fearful or hurtful event to watching it as a spectator, to imagine
watching it from a projection booth in the control room, you can do all
kinds of things. You can rewind the movie and take the emotional charge
out of the experience. You can also do many other things to change
your codings. Here are some other choices.
1) Associate a resourceful memory.
Recall the memory of a time when you felt creative, confident,
powerful, etc. from the past. See what you saw at that time and turn up
the brightness and color on that memory so that invites you into it to
fully associate into it and experience it. Now when you do feel this fully as
a resourceful state—bring into it the scene that has been fearful to
you. What is the negative stimulus (e.g., dog, spider) that you fear?
As you now merge these two memories, do so until they integrate so that
you can then experience yourself handling the situation using the
resources from the more positive memory.
2) Alter your sound track.
Re-process the way you hear yourself and others talk. How would you
want to make your voice different? Or the voice of someone else? What
qualities would make the memory less intense? What voice would you
like to have heard? Install an internal voice to help you through this
situation.
3) Add tonal qualities to the sound track to make it better.
Take the unpleasant memory and put some nice loud circus music behind
it. Now watch the movie again. How do you feel when you see the old
movie and hear the circus music?
4) Apply your spiritual faith.
Use your spiritual belief system to bring in a Guardian Angel, a
loving heavenly Father, or some strong resource. Now split your screen
and see through the eye of your faith, the Guardian Angel hovering over
the earthly scene of your memory. See and hear your Angel caring and
loving you. Perhaps you hear, “I am with you.” “I will help you.” See
Jesus touch you with his healing hand.
5) Symbolically code the memory.
You could make all the people transparent in your memory so you see
through them. Or you could color code them according to how you think
and feel about them. You could draw a line around the
three-dimensional persons in your memory, make them two dimensional and
color them according your evaluation of them.
6) Humorize your memory.
Because laughter provides a great distancing skill, use your humor so
that you can laugh the emotional pain off. How far in the future do
you need to transport yourself before you can look back on a memory and
laugh at it? What difference lies between a memory you can laugh at and
one that you can’t? Do you see yourself in one, but not in the other?
Do you have one coded as a snap-shot and the other as a movie? What
difference lies in color, size, brightness? Imagine the hurtful person
talking like Donald Duck? Turn your opponent into a caricature cartoon
character with exaggerated lips, eyes, head, hands, etc.
End Notes:
1. A caveat about the terminology. I only use the term dissociation here
because it is used in the literature of NLP. Personally, I do not use
the term and do not like it. In psychology, it is used to speak about
various personality disorderings. Further, we humans do not, and
cannot, literally step out of our body to avoid experiencing emotions.
So even in “dissociation” a person is using his or her body and all
that’s occurring is occurring in the body and that’s generating
various somatic sensations and feelings. More accurately, what’s
actually happening is that a person is conceptually stepping aside from his or her emotions and thinking about them from a meta position. As embodied neuro-linguistic beings, we cannot literally dissociate from our bodies.
The Pattern That Could Change The World!
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
What follows here is a basic NLP pattern that was originally created
by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. You can find the pattern in its
original form in Steve Andreas’ book, Frog to Princes (1979). I first found this pattern in 1986 and it revolutionized my life. Literally.
First it completely changed the way I was doing psychotherapy as it
changed my Cognitive-Behavioral approach sending me into an entirely new
level of structure —the structure of experience and making
that primary to content. Next, as I used the pattern on my own memories
and the things that could “push my buttons” to create a lot of negative
emotional charge about things, it transformed me as a person.
Then I realized something—every person on this planet should know this pattern! With this pattern, there should not be a single human being walking around or living with a phobia. There’s
no need. Not any longer. When you learn this pattern and how to use
it, using a simple metaphor like watching a movie, you can take the emotional charge out of any old memory that still pushes your buttons or that throws you into a phobic response state.
In the field of NLP, this pattern is called the Phobia Cure pattern
or the V-K (Visual-Kinesthetic) dissociation pattern. When I wrote the
book MovieMind (2002) and User’s Manual of the Brain, Volume II (2001 with Bob Bodenhamer), I called it The Movie Rewind Pattern because
that is the central process used in the pattern— you run your mental
movie backwards. And that’s why you can use it for all kinds of things—
phobias, traumatic memories, PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder),
strong over-emotional reactions to things, “buttons,” depression,
anxiety, etc.
The Secret Behind being Phobia Free
It’s all about your “thinking.” There are two ways that you can process information as you think. You can do so analytically and you can do so experientially. When you think or read something experientially, you feel as
if you have entered into the story that you are reading or imagining.
To do that you represent the information an encode the information in a
way that you cue yourself to neuro-linguistically experience it.
Conversely, when you think or read something analytically, you hold
the material at “arms length” so to speak. You analyze it, think about it,
and you take a spectator’s point of view regarding the information.
In the first instance, you step into the content of the story or
information and in the second, you step out of it and take a view from
outside it as a spectator.
Each of these ways of looking at things (perceptual styles) has its strengths and its weaknesses. To step into your representations empowers
you to take the first perceptual position. You see thins from out of
your own eyes and ears and feel things as if from out of your own body.
Do this and you enter into a story and will come to “know” it from
within.
To step outside of the representations allows you to take
the second and third perceptual positions—to see it as someone else
might or to see it from a third and neutral position. And when you do
that, you can analyze it in order to learn from it. Then it will not
activate your emotional responses. If you do too much of the stepping
in and associating, you can become an emotional cripple, hysterical,
unable to “think,” and reactive with all kinds of emotional reactions.
If you do gdtoo much of the stepping out and just observing, you may
become an intellectual egghead and an emotional incompetent—unable to
relate emotionally and personally to yourself or others. So obviously,
the balance of choosing when and where to do each is the secret.
With regard to hurts, traumas, and unpleasant realities, many people can’t even think about such
things. To think is to be re-traumatized. It activates all sorts of
negative emotions—especially fears and phobias. Typically, such
individuals eventually lose their willingness to even entertain painful
thoughts; those in helping professions frequently burn-out. Others
develop PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Because they cannot
even “think” about a subject without going into negative painful
emotional state, they experience thinking as distressful and
unpleasant. This robs them of an important resource: the skill of thinking comfortably about unpleasant events. So “reality” pains them. So they repress, suppress, deny, avoid, etc.
The Phobia Cure Pattern or The Movie-Rewind Pattern offers
a marvelous technology for recovering from trauma states and from
PTSD. The pattern enables and empowers a person to learn how to
“think” about unpleasant things without re-associating and
re-experiencing the situation. You can stop signaling your body to
respond to “thoughts” as if actually in the trauma again. By stopping
the ongoing re-traumatization, you resolve the pain, and can then
release the old memories so that you can get on with living your life
more abundantly and positively.
The human technology within this pattern works by moving in your mind
and understanding (mentally and conceptually) to a different
frame-of-reference. It invites you to move to the “second” perceptual
position of another person, then to the “third” perceptual position of
seeing things from an observer point of view so that you can see
whatever the scene or information is from a position of distance. This
allows you to feel safe as you “think” about it. It also enables you to
stop yourself from stepping back into the memory and associating into
the experience because if you did that you would be re-accessing the old
negative emotional states. And that does not help. Instead, with the
new perspectives, you will be able to apply new and more powerful
resources to the old memory and thereby change it.
To recapitulate, The Movie-Rewind Pattern (called the Phobia Cure Pattern in
NLP) works by enabling you to move to a different frame-of-reference—
to a spectator viewpoint. There you can view the “painful” information
from your past comfortably. Doing this interrupts your “trauma
thinking” and prevents you from processing the information in a way
whereby you could collapse into a negative emotional state.
This understanding of human subjective experiences identifies that the source of your emotional experience goes back to how you code things in your mind-and-body. As
you code information—so you experience. It’s that simple. It is also
that profound. Your subjective experiences is created by the coding you
use. So, when you change that coding, you change your experience at
the neurological level. And that leads to a change in your emotions and
behaviors.
So with your two categorical ways of “thinking” (by stepping in and
stepping out of your representations of an event) you can now develop the flexibility of consciousness to choose which to do when. You can decide how to code and
experience the “”information” about various events that you have been
through. You can do so analytically (that is objectively) and so
un-emotionally or you can do so experientially (that is, subjectively)
and hence “emotionally.” You can remember old events as a spectator to
those experiences—as if you were a movie goer, just watching it, rather
than as an actor in the movie.
When you use this technology, you can effectively managing strong
negative “emotions” and then you can learn from your past rather than
using your past to feel bad about. You can use it to “switch off” any
scene that you don’t need to play anymore in your inner theater. If it
was a B-rated movie the first time you experienced it, you do not have
to keep replaying it.
A final caveat: If you use this pattern on pleasant experiences, you
will thereby neutralize them. This can also work to your detriment.
Doing so will rob you of the feel of being alive and vital. It will eliminate good feelings, motivation, emotional understanding, etc.
The Movie-Rewind Pattern
Here is a step by step description of what to do to “run your
brain” in this way and to take out the negative emotional charge of some
old memory. Try it with yourself, if you have difficulty, then
find a well-trained and qualified NLP practitioner or Neuro-Semanticist
who can then facilitate the process with you.
1) Identify a mental representation that bothers you.
What thought activates strong negative emotions in you?
What memory of some unpleasant experience or even traumatic experience
puts you, as it were, back in that event? What idea pushes your
buttons? What triggers you to go into a fight-flight stress response by
just thinking about it or considering it?
When you know, identify it in terms of what you see, hear, and
sense. This means, identify the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic
features of the movie that you are playing in your mind. If you are new
to this, this will— at first— be strange or challenging.
- What are you aware off visually— what do you see? Where? Is it in color or black-and-white?
- What are you aware of auditorially— what sounds, words from others, words around you, words that you are saying inside yourself?
- What are you aware of kinesthetically— what sensations, what
temperature (cold, warm, hot), what pressure, movement, etc.
(Kinesthetic refers to internal or external sensations, and are not
emotions, just the feelings that make up one aspect of an emotion).
2) Use the Movie Metaphor to create an Internal Representation of this old troublesome Movie.
Now imagine that you have gone to the movies are are setting in a
theater, in your mind, and ready to watch this old movie for the last
time. As you imagine yourself sitting in a movie theater, which row
would you like to be in so that you can observe comfortably? I like the
tenth row. You might like row 5 or row 20 or row 200. Find the row
that works best for you.
When you are in the seat that you best like, then on the screen of
your mind, put a black-and white picture of the younger you in the
situation fifteen minutes or so before the traumatic events occurred. Oh yes, get out your bag of popcorn or whatever you best like to eat when you go to the movies.
The movie up on the screen is a snap-shot right now. You have
freezed-framed it and it represents something that occurred 15 minutes
prior to when something unpleasant happened. Now sit back to watch it,
aware that you have taken a spectator’s position to that younger you.
Notice that you have stepped out of the picture, and have a position
from outside. And in a little bit you will watch this old B-rated movie
for the last time.
As you gain this psychological distance from that event, you have
begun the process of running your own brain. So you can feel delighted
that you have this ability to step aside from your thoughts. You are
more than your thoughts, you are more than the experiences you have been
through. Those are just the things you have had to deal with and now
you can put them behind you. And shortly you can use those memories for
learning— perhaps learning what not to do, but never again for feeling
bad. That’s not useful.
3) Begin to Become the Editor of your own Movies
As you set back and take a spectator’s point of view to that old
movie, notice how you have coded the movie. Doing that will then give
you the ability to play around with these codes and to alter them so
that they enhance your life and emotions.
- Visually. Begin with the visual system and just notice
whether you have the picture in color or black-and-white? Is it a movie
or snapshot? Is it bright or dim? Close or far? And as you make
these distinctions, you can begin to choose which coding would enable
you to think comfortably about that memory so that you can stay
resourceful and thoughtful in a relaxed and comfortable way. Just
notice the effect that it has for you when you dim the picture of your
unpleasant memory. Now turn down the brightness, further, further,
until it doesn’t bother you anymore. Send the picture off into the
distance. - Auditorially. Next check out the auditory system—the sound
track of your memory. Do you even have a sound track? What sounds do
you hear coming from that movie? What quality of tones do you hear? At
what volume, pitch, and melody? Now check out your language system.
What words do you hear from that younger you? From where do you hear
these words coming? Notice their tone, volume, and location. As you
notice how that younger you feels, what sensations does that person have
in his or her body up that on the screen? Where and at what intensity,
weight, pressure? What shifts in these codes enable you to think comfortably about that
old memory? How relaxed do you feel as you make alterations in your
coding? How much of a growing sense of distance and control does this
gives you?
4) Float back and up to the Control Booth.
Now as you sit there, still getting ready for the movie to begin, one
more thing to do—imagine floating out of your body from the row that
you are sitting in and floating back to the Projection Booth. Float all
the way out of your body and into the Control Room until you can feel
your hands on the plexi-glass window so that you can look out and see
the back of your head facing the screen.
Take a moment to experience and enjoy this very different
point-of-view. It may take just a little bit to fully imagine seeing
yourself —today’s you (in whatever row you are sitting in) watching your
younger you on the screen before the movie begins to play. As you note
The Adult You sitting in the theater (seeing the back of his or her
head) let yourself also see beyond that to the still picture on the
screen.
Watching this will be strange and weird the first time but you will
get used to it very quickly, and if you feel a bit dizzy at any time,
you can put your hands on the plexi-glass again and feel safe and secure
in this control booth. This is the place to remember that you are in
control of the movie and can stop it or fast-forward it at any time that
you wish.
5) Playing the old memory for the Last time.
Now when you are ready, from the Project Booth, you can turn on the
movie and let it move from the initial snapshot. Let it now play out as
a black-and-white movie. And watch it from a double-perspective— from
the audience and from the projection booth. Watch it from the beginning
to the end.
And if at any time, the movie tempts you to step in— feel your hands on the plexi-glass and stay safe and in control in the Control Room.
And if at any time, you need to fast-forward the movie, after all, you
know what happened, just fast forward it a bit. Then play it to the
end.
When you have let it play out beyond the unpleasant experience, play
if a bit further. Play it to a later time, after the bad scene
disappears, and see that Younger You in a time and place of safety and
even pleasure. . . . Go to a scene of comfort when you were feeling
good about yourself and having fun doing something — at a park, on a
beach, with a loved one. …. This later time does not have to be even
close to the time of the trauma, but just some time later when you were
enjoying yourself.
Good. Now when you get to that place of comfort and pleasure, stop the movie and freeze frame the picture again.
6) Step in and Rewind your Movie from the Pleasure backwards.
Now the next step will occur in just a moment— when you are ready—
and when it does it will occur very, very quickly. We are doing to move
into super-fast movement as we rewind the movie in fast rewind
So wait until you get all of the instructions about how to do this. In a moment, rewind this memory movie in
fast rewind mode. As you have seen movies or videos run backwards so
you will rewind the movie backwards at a very high speed rewind, so fast
that it will only take two seconds—2 seconds! But — and this is a big but— this time you will be inside the movie when you rewind it.
So imagine that! Float inside the scene of comfort and pleasure… be
there. See and hear what you would see and hear when there and feel
it— feel the comfort and the pleasure. And now from this vantage point,
you will be rewind the movie backwards. You know the sound of running a
movie backward? Hear that. And you know the rush and confusion of
sights as everything goes backwards, a jumbling of sounds as everything
zooms back to the moment 15 minutes prior to the unpleasant movie. When
you experience this fast rewinding, all the people and their actions go
backwards. They walk and talk backwards. You walk and talk in
reverse. Everything happens in reverse, like rewinding a movie. So
ready?
How much do you feel the comfort and pleasure right now? When it is
at a level of 7 or 8 on a scale of 10, then push the rewind button . .
. and experience it rewinding . . . zooooooommmmm. All the way back
to the beginning. It only takes a second or two to do that fast rewind
. . .
And how did that feel . . . rewinding from inside the movie?
7) Repeat this Rewinding Process five times.
When you arrive back to the snapshot at the beginning, clear the
screen in your mind. That is, take a break, open your eyes and look
around. Good.
Now, immediately go to the scene of comfort and pleasure at the end again, and as soon as you step it, feel, see, and hear it fully . . . rewind the movie even faster.
As you do this over and over your brain will become more and more
proficient and the rewind will go faster and faster until the rewind
takes only a second each time. Zoommmm!
Test the results.Break state from this exercise. Then after a minute or two, call up
the original memory and see if you can get the feelings back. Try as
hard as you can to step into the scene and feel the full weight of the
emotions.
Other Editing Tools
From the act of stepping back from experientially thinking about a
fearful or hurtful event to watching it as a spectator, to imagine
watching it from a projection booth in the control room, you can do all
kinds of things. You can rewind the movie and take the emotional charge
out of the experience. You can also do many other things to change
your codings. Here are some other choices.
1) Associate a resourceful memory.
Recall the memory of a time when you felt creative, confident,
powerful, etc. from the past. See what you saw at that time and turn up
the brightness and color on that memory so that invites you into it to
fully associate into it and experience it. Now when you do feel this fully as
a resourceful state—bring into it the scene that has been fearful to
you. What is the negative stimulus (e.g., dog, spider) that you fear?
As you now merge these two memories, do so until they integrate so that
you can then experience yourself handling the situation using the
resources from the more positive memory.
2) Alter your sound track.
Re-process the way you hear yourself and others talk. How would you
want to make your voice different? Or the voice of someone else? What
qualities would make the memory less intense? What voice would you
like to have heard? Install an internal voice to help you through this
situation.
3) Add tonal qualities to the sound track to make it better.
Take the unpleasant memory and put some nice loud circus music behind
it. Now watch the movie again. How do you feel when you see the old
movie and hear the circus music?
4) Apply your spiritual faith.
Use your spiritual belief system to bring in a Guardian Angel, a
loving heavenly Father, or some strong resource. Now split your screen
and see through the eye of your faith, the Guardian Angel hovering over
the earthly scene of your memory. See and hear your Angel caring and
loving you. Perhaps you hear, “I am with you.” “I will help you.” See
Jesus touch you with his healing hand.
5) Symbolically code the memory.
You could make all the people transparent in your memory so you see
through them. Or you could color code them according to how you think
and feel about them. You could draw a line around the
three-dimensional persons in your memory, make them two dimensional and
color them according your evaluation of them.
6) Humorize your memory.
Because laughter provides a great distancing skill, use your humor so
that you can laugh the emotional pain off. How far in the future do
you need to transport yourself before you can look back on a memory and
laugh at it? What difference lies between a memory you can laugh at and
one that you can’t? Do you see yourself in one, but not in the other?
Do you have one coded as a snap-shot and the other as a movie? What
difference lies in color, size, brightness? Imagine the hurtful person
talking like Donald Duck? Turn your opponent into a caricature cartoon
character with exaggerated lips, eyes, head, hands, etc.
End Notes:
1. A caveat about the terminology. I only use the term dissociation here
because it is used in the literature of NLP. Personally, I do not use
the term and do not like it. In psychology, it is used to speak about
various personality disorderings. Further, we humans do not, and
cannot, literally step out of our body to avoid experiencing emotions.
So even in “dissociation” a person is using his or her body and all
that’s occurring is occurring in the body and that’s generating
various somatic sensations and feelings. More accurately, what’s
actually happening is that a person is conceptually stepping aside from his or her emotions and thinking about them from a meta position. As embodied neuro-linguistic beings, we cannot literally dissociate from our bodies.