ONE OF THE BEST WAYS of getting over an unhappy past and guaranteeing a happy and successful future is to practice making yourself feel better for no particular reason. If you wake up in the mornings and feel good, you’ll make better decisions about what to do with your life.
People are making problems for themselves all the time. Some break up with a partner and then they go out and get drunk to meet other people, and a couple of hours and a lot of beer or whiskey later they’re telling someone they only met a little while ago how much they love them. Then they wake up in the morning and find they’re in bed with a piece of wood.
Sometimes people do stupid things and say later they acted like that because they were “confused,” but one of the things I have discovered over the years is that confusion is not a state that should lead to stupidity. It’s a doorway to new understanding.
If you begin to think of things as difficult, they will be. If you begin to study what makes things impossible, you’ll find out. But if you adopt the attitude that that’s only true in the state of consciousness you’re in, you won’t get stuck. So if you begin to learn how to make yourself feel differently, it will change your future once and for all.
After a while, you may start feeling better and you won’t know why. But, you see, you don’t need to know that; you just need to know how to get good feelings to replace the old ones—or, even better, to drop them in to what happens just before you feel bad, so you start to go down a new pathway.
Exercise: How Much Pleasure Can You Stand?
- I would like to invite you to think of a time and place where you felt extraordinary pleasure. When a smile begins to spread across your face you will know when you have found a significant event.
- Notice how you are remembering the event: see exactly what you saw at the time, hear what you heard, and notice how feelings come back to you.
- Now, using the list in Resource File 3 (see page 310), begin to change the submodalities one by one. If there is no significant change, put it back the way it was. If the experience intensifies and becomes more appealing, make the maximum shift possible. When you have made all the changes that seem possible, make a circle in the center of that experience and open it up rapidly, like the iris of a camera, so you can see yourself experiencing twice as much pleasure. Make the colors twice as bright, twice as intense, and make the sound of supreme satisfaction resonate through your mind, then every cell in your body…Aa-a-h!
- Do this two or three more times, pushing the feelings of pleasure as far as they will go, and then anchor them to make the feelings available to you any time you choose (see Resource File 1 on page 302).
- Notice which way the feeling of intense pleasure moves, and connect up the start and finish points. Begin to spin it as you think of some areas in your present and future life where you could benefit with these changes in place.
- Step into that future memory, fire your anchor, and see, hear, and feel as fully as possible how you will benefit from this much pleasure flooding into that experience…now.
- Do this twice more with two other scenarios, and then pause to allow your mind to begin to generalize the process out into areas that you might not yet have thought of consciously, but which would be useful and appropriate.
People struggling with problems often say things like, “If only I had my life over, I’d do things differently.” Or, my favorite: “I’ve got all these problems now because of all the terrible things that happened to me when I was a kid.”
My response is: “Well, change it. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
People are either shocked because I’m not “empathetic” enough, or they laugh, because intuitively they understand that it’s true.
Of course, we can’t change what happened to us. But we can change the way we respond to it—either consciously or unconsciously. The idea that we are all victims of past experiences is an attractive one to many psychoanalysts and counselors. But as far as I know, there is not a single shred of evidence that this always has to be the case. If it were, we wouldn’t have the situation where two people go through an identical trauma, and one is devastated while the other is apparently unscathed.
The reality is, since the past is over and done with, the victims must be responding to the memory of it in a way that causes problems for them now. It’s not that trauma has made them dysfunctional as much as they’re responding in a dysfunctional way.
Over the years, I’ve approached the problem in a number of different ways, creating patterns to release people from the tyranny of outdated beliefs. “Changing history” describes a group of techniques I developed to help the subject respond differently to the generalizations they’ve formed as a result of some traumatic past experience. This is not the same thing as going into someone’s past, time after time. We need minimum information—or, often, no information at all—to be able to help people change their responses to the past.
The first and best known approach is almost certainly the Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation Pattern, or Fast Phobia Cure. As mentioned in the first part of this book, the Phobia Cure works by dissociation. Instead of constantly reaccessing the cause of the phobia as if it is actually happening now, the subject learns to dissociate—step out of the first-person viewpoint, so she can replay it without becoming overwhelmed.
Psychologists know that people’s problems are often caused by their history, but their belief is that understanding that history is going to miraculously make the problems disappear. It would be a nice idea, if only it worked. But it doesn’t.
Old-school psychoanalysts then go on to blame the patient for being resistant or not ready to change. I think that’s nonsense. Their choice should be either to send them away until they’re ready, or make them ready to change. People are sometimes hesitant about accepting a new choice, either because they’re not engaging the right strategy of going for it, or they haven’t yet gone over the threshold of the problem. When they think about being afraid of elevators, or being abused in a violent relationship, they don’t string together enough experiences to make the feeling intolerable. It has nothing with being a resistant client, but it may have everything to do with the therapist’s inflexibility or limitation.
Insight alone isn’t going to do it. I know somebody who had a phobia of water because he fell in when he was five and drowned. He didn’t almost drown; he drowned and had to be dragged out, clinically dead, and resuscitated. From that day on, he was terrified of water and remembered the entire experience vividly. When he went into therapy, the therapist had him go back and relive it…and he was still afraid of water.
This wasn’t a mild fear. This was a person who couldn’t take a shower or step into a bathtub, or wash his hair, and who had to wipe his body down with a damp cloth to get clean. He had taken the idea of water and overgeneralized it to the point where his life was becoming unmanageable.
Now, knowing all the details in the world isn’t going to change these responses. What is going to change them is deciding he’s had enough—and knowing what he needs to do differently in his mind from what he’s been doing so far. He needs to dissociate from that experience. He needs to start with somebody resuscitating him, and then move backward through the whole experience. When he does that, he’s going to feel differently, because his brain is processing the experience differently. And when he feels differently, he can start to do the things that scared him and that he avoided before.
My interest in the content of an experience extends only to how it affects the way the subject maintains his fear. I don’t want to go too deeply into the past because I don’t want to increase the fear. I’m not a psychologist, and therefore I’m not interested in giving my clients insight. I want to give them personal freedom instead.
Some people accuse me of putting people into denial—and they’re right. I want people to have the means of denying the need to have bad feelings for the rest of their lives.
By now, it is clear that changing the submodalities of our representation of an experience is one of the quickest and easiest ways to change our feelings. Association and dissociation are important distinctions to apply. Most people find a dramatic difference in the way they feel about something they experience associated and the same thing dissociated. For example, if you see yourself in the front seat of a roller coaster as it goes up and down, it’s a totally different set of feelings from seeing what you’d see if you were there right now. That’s a great caffeine-free way to wake up in the morning. Imagine being cranked all the way to the top of a roller coaster, seeing things exactly the way you’d see them if they were happening now, then…just…let go…!
Some people would love that experience; others would hate it. What causes fear in one person can be exciting to another. But I believe that people with phobias—in fact, everyone with fear or depression or some similar state—are, in essence, carrying out some kind of posthypnotic suggestion, whether it came from somebody in their childhood or from something they created themselves.
I’m very fond of telling people that I’m one of the best hypnotists on the face of the earth (I have a letter to prove it), and therefore any suggestions they’ve received from other people can be countermanded by my voice. It just sounds so logical, but I think everybody should say it.
One of the ways I challenge other people’s posthypnotic suggestions is to put the subjects into deep trance and then give them a posthypnotic suggestion that their head will come out of the trance, but the rest will stay inside. When they open their eyes, they can’t move anything but their head. Then I say to them, “Now, let me ask you head to head—this belief you have, where exactly does it comes from?”
Many conditions, including psychosomatic pain, rashes, high blood pressure, and stress-related disorders, function hypnotically. Some very weird things can happen as a result.
I met this kid—about twenty-two, very bright, could take any engine apart, and put it together in no time flat…but he just couldn’t read. He went to every available remedial class, but he just kept going: “I can’t. I can’t.”
So I put him into trance and said, “I want to ask your unconscious if something is stopping you from reading?” I got an acknowledgment, so I said, “I want you to bring it into his conscious mind and have him jump up and tell me about it.”
A few seconds later, he jumped up and told how, when he was in elementary school, a teacher snapped a pencil in front of his face in frustration and said, “You’ll never learn to read!”
His unconscious mind took it as a command and blocked any attempt from then on to get him to read. It stuck somewhere in the back of his mind, and he struggled his whole life with reading. He was a bright kid, but fear can induce a very altered and suggestible state.
I simply told him, “Everything the teacher said to you is now no longer true, and the reason it’s no longer true is that she did it accidentally and I’m doing it on purpose. Now you will start reading, and it will be fun, and you’ll learn quickly.”
I got a call from that remedial department a week later to say that he was reading perfectly. The fact is, he’d been reading his whole life. He just hadn’t allowed himself to know it.
Where problems come from doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is the altered state they’re in and what needs to be done to get them out. The minute a phobic starts a phobia, he’s in an altered state, carrying out a posthypnotic suggestion. The same is true when depressives feel depressed. To me, their behavior functions in the same way as a posthypnotic suggestion works, and therefore it can be canceled the same way a posthypnotic suggestion can be canceled.
The Fast Phobia Cure is one of the first and probably the best known of the patterns I created. It proved that because someone had experienced a fear for twenty years, it didn’t mean they had to experience it for their rest of their lives.
Exercise: Fast Phobia Cure (Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation)
- Seat the subject comfortably in a small, imaginary movie theater, and have him visualize a small white screen, a little above eye level. Explain that he will soon be able to watch his traumatizing experience safely and comfortably, starting a moment before the event occurred (Safe Place 1) and ending when the movie of his experience fades out to white (Safe Place 2).
- Reassure the subject that he can return to his normal state of awareness, free of any anxiety, at any stage he chooses.
- Relax the subject and anchor his state of relaxation (see Resource File 1 on page 305), then have him dissociate by stepping out of his body and into a projection booth, from which he can both control the running of the movie and watch himself sitting comfortably watching the screen. If the subject is particularly anxious, it is desirable to dissociate him again (instructing him to “watch yourself watching yourself watching the movie”). This allows him to be at sufficient emotional remove to be able to complete the exercise.
- Hold the comfort anchor, and have the subject run the movie of his traumatic experience from Safe Place 1 to Safe Place 2, very rapidly, in black-and-white, ensuring that he stays dissociated from the experience of the trauma.
- When he has completed this stage, have him float down and reassociate into his body, sitting watching the screen, then instruct him to float out into the end of the movie (the white screen), associating into the experience, restoring the color and preparing to run the entire experience backward, from Safe Place 2 to Safe Place 1. Add in some lively circus music as a soundtrack to the experience.
- At Safe Place 1, the subject is returned to his seat, to watch the screen, to which the small black and white image of Safe Place 1 has been restored.
- Instruct him to float up out of his body back into the projection booth, and repeat the process from Step 3 to Step 6.
- Repeat the Visual-Kinesthetic Dissociation Pattern three to five times, and then test the subject by having him think about the trigger of his phobia and notice his response. If necessary, repeat the pattern as often as required.
Most people can get the Phobia Cure to work, but when they don’t, it’s usually because they haven’t done it fast enough. They’ll do a bit this week and another the week after, and then complain that it doesn’t work.
When we want to produce really powerful change, we reformat the brain in much the way information is reformatted in a computer. Years ago we had all this information on big Kennedy tape drives you could literally load into a computer and reformat it into something else. You might take a lot of data and put it in three dimensional matrices and then load it on to floppy disks the size of a table. If you needed to use the information in a particular program, you had to reformat it through that program.
People’s memories are all mixed up together, full of fear and humiliation, to the point where they can’t even make it all the way through the memory without becoming overwhelmed. They get to the source of their fear—say, an elevator—and the fear triggers automatically.
To help them reformat, I first have them step outside of the memory. Separating themselves from the memory helps them look at what happened without becoming engulfed. Now they’re looking at themselves, so they’re much smaller than before; they’re watching themselves inside of another small frame (the screen), so they’ve changed both location and size.
Then I have them turn the movie on, dissociated, and then have them run through it faster than normal, maybe with a little circus music, so it’s reformatted. When they get to the end, I have them step inside, make it life-size again, and run it backward so the analog runs in reverse. Running it backward isn’t actually necessary since the subjective experience will change anyway. It just changes better that way.
But if they dissociate from and leave the image life-size, it isn’t going to work. I’ve tried it every other way, and that’s the way that works best.
Over the years I’ve had many clients who have been traumatized and diagnosed as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. These are people constantly reliving every conceivable nightmarish event, from kidnapping and shooting to torture and rape. I’ve worked with Holocaust victims from World War II who were living and reliving horrible experiences, over and over again. The thing they all had in common was that they all represented their experience life-size.
If you are able to get people like this to step outside of the memories and look at their suffering from a different point of view and shrink it down, you can make it so they never feel the same fear again.
We can’t change what happened, of course, but we can change the way we feel about things. Our job is to take charge of our own thinking processes and help others to do the same. We want it so they don’t put themselves in situations of danger, but also so that they don’t live in fear for the rest of their lives simply because something bad happened to them randomly.
It’s very important to me that people understand that fear doesn’t come from outside. It comes from inside. I think I’ve probably discovered more than any other living person how to get rid of fear. I doubt whether there’s anybody who has rid people of as much fear on this planet as I have.
Not only have I developed techniques I use with people myself, but I’ve also taught them to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, so they are using them to help even more people. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of effort finding things that work, and then refining them so that other people can easily do them for themselves.
I don’t much care how people get the way they do. I don’t want to know how they got broken or stuck. All I want is to help them operate optimally. I want them to understand that if they replay terrible things life-size, these events will continue to disrupt their lives, as if they’re actually happening all over again. That’s why they have massive screens in movie houses: the bigger the screen, the more intense your feelings.
The Fast Phobia Cure was extremely effective. It worked with everybody who came along, but I started thinking: “It can take thirty minutes to do. We should be able to do it in three.” Of course, everybody thought that concept was crazy, but that didn’t bother me too much. Most of what I’ve accomplished I’ve done by acting crazy.
I was crazy enough to believe that it was possible to get clients out of their difficulties in a single session. I believe it’s easier to do it in one session than in ten or one hundred, because, as I’ve said several times before, human beings learn better when they learn fast. When those pages flip by, you see the pattern of the movement; when you take a series of still images and show them at thirty-five frames a second you have a movie. The brain understands this. Also, the faster we can get a pattern to run, the quicker it moves into the unconscious.
We know now how this works in the cortex. First it takes large areas of the brain to sort out a pattern of, say, learning to roller-skate or ride a bike; then suddenly it recodes and occupies a comparatively tiny part of the brain. It’s the difference between short-term memory and long-term memory. It’s the difference between a conscious behavior that you struggle with and an unconscious, automated response.
Problems occur because we have unconscious, automated responses that are not the ones we want. But we are infinitely programmable, and we can recode our responses in ways that support and enhance our lives—but only if we become completely intolerant of staying the way we are.
When working with people suffering from fear-based disorders, we need to distinguish between phobias and anxiety. Phobias are straight stimulus-response. Anxiety is the result of a longer process—a build-up to the anxiety attack. The approaches to dealing with these conditions are therefore different.
By helping subjects change the way they respond to their past, we are effectively teaching them how to change their personal history.
Not long ago, a woman who had been kidnapped by terrorists in Peru was brought to me almost incapacitated by fear that was triggered by almost any situation she couldn’t easily leave. She became terrified in cars, elevators, trains, and so on. She even had to keep the windows of her own house open because of what had been labeled as claustrophobia.
But, strangely, even though she was supposed to be claustrophobic, she could fly in planes, as long as she could sit near a door.
Everybody knew exactly why she had her problem. During her very first vacation, she was mugged on the way from the airport to the hotel, there was a bomb incident at the hotel, and then, soon after she boarded a light aircraft to fly to another destination, it was taken over by terrorists with ski masks and Uzis, and she had such a bad panic attack that they got such a fright they stopped the plane on the runway and opened the door to calm her down.
Now I thought that was funny, and when I laughed she looked at me terribly upset. She said, “I don’t think that’s funny.”
I replied, “You don’t? You don’t find it funny that you had such a panic attack that you scared a plane full of terrorists, and they didn’t just shoot you, and throw you out of the plane? I’m sorry. To me, that’s funny.” Then I said to her, “But unless you can laugh about it, you have to suffer for the rest of your life.”
Humor is a valuable aid to making significant changes. If we can genuinely laugh at the same time that we try to hold the problem in place, we alter and weaken the neurological structure of what was worrying or scaring us. People often come up to me and say, “I know that one day I’m going to laugh about this, but…,” and before they can get any further, I say, “So why wait?”
This woman didn’t really have a phobia but was suffering from a habituated pattern. What I had to do was, first, make sure she was fed up with responding that way. She’d had this problem for twenty-five years, and even after years of therapy, she was still anxious. She was also embarrassed by the problem—but not embarrassed enough.
As part of her treatment, I dragged her to movie theaters and seminars in front of the cameras and audiences of hundreds and hundreds of people. I pushed her into an elevator, and all the time she kept saying, “Oh, I’m getting worse. I’m the worst patient ever.”
But she didn’t realize I was making her worse on purpose, because I wanted her to become so intolerant that she would start trying to change, asking herself questions such as, “How far can I get into the movie theater by myself?” “How comfortable can I be?” and she started becoming really excited about each little bit of progress she made.
Some time later now, she flies everywhere, rides in elevators and cars, and would have never believed it was possible. But first she had to be fed up, and then she had to get good feelings to reinforce every little step forward. She needed to learn to notice to what degree she was better than the day before.
She sent me an e-mail recently that I found quite funny because she listed all the problems she no longer had and then said, “I think it’s related to what you did.”
But it wasn’t. It’s related to what she did. She had become intolerant of the biggest problem in her life, and when she solved it, all the other problems didn’t seem so insurmountable, so she started chipping away at those, too.
That’s what good learning is. Learning is about looking at things differently, making your life a little bit better every day, noticing the progress you make, however small in the beginning. The truth is, people don’t stay the same. People either get better or they get worse. Those are the only two choices.
We know that people who have ongoing problems have, at some time in their lives, built generalizations that no longer serve them well. Most therapies try to find ways of getting people to replace their thoughts, feelings, and memories with new and more appropriate patterns. The problem with this approach is that it’s not exactly how the human brain works.
What I try to do is to get people back to a point before they built the generalizations that didn’t work, and then put in new generalizations to override the old ones. This works because the human brain operates by a kind of push-down storage, rather like the sort you see in cafeterias, where plates are stored by pushing them down into a spring-loaded compartment. As each one is taken off the stack, another comes up to take its place.
We’ve all had the experience of getting a new telephone number, and for the first couple of weeks, we keep calling the old number when we try to phone home. Eventually you put the new number on top of the old one, which gets pushed back into the recesses of your mind. The human brain archives information; it never forgets anything.
This is a powerful and dramatic phenomenon. I can age-regress people with hypnosis, so they’ll remember every phone number they ever had—and they do it in reverse order.
My approach now is to recognize this archival system and put in a new resource, a new “memory,” so that it’s accessed before the memory responsible for the unwanted generalization kicks in.
What I usually try to do is to go back before people built a specific bad learning, put in a new resource, and prompt it to generalize out, so that when they go back, it doesn’t feel quite as it did before. That sense of, “Yes, I know I did this but it’s not really me anymore,” is a very important part of the process. Since discovering this, I don’t use formal age regression as much as I used to. I focus much more on the future at this point in time. We could use the old NLP term “future pacing” to describe this, or, in hypnosis-talk, “posthypnotic suggestion.” Whatever we call it, I want to make sure that the new state of consciousness comes out at just the right moment.
People don’t need to have confidence every moment of the day. But if they have been having trouble crossing bridges or driving on the freeway, they need to have confidence that everything will be fine when they get to that situation. This needs practice.
Exercise: Putting a New Spin on the Past
- Think of a specific, habituated response you would like to change—for example, nervousness in front of large groups, or short-temper while driving.
- Replay a vivid example of the response, paying particular attention to the feeling it triggers. Notice how it moves in a particular direction.
- Now, follow that feeling back to the first significant time it occurred. You may or may not be able to remember this consciously. If you cannot recall a specific incident, simply move slowly back until you come to a halt.
- Once again, notice the feeling, and this time, connect the endpoint with the start, and spin it in the opposite direction. This will significantly change the feeling. Continue spinning it in reverse as you move on to the next phase.
- Now, take a step back in time to a moment just before the original sensitizing incident, continuing to run the feeling in reverse, spinning it faster and faster, spreading the feeling through your entire body. Then, begin to move forward, through each subsequent experience in turn, allowing it to recode in relation to the reverse-spin of the feeling it was first associated with. Do this rapidly until you come up into the present moment.
- Check to see how you feel about your unwanted response. If it still feels a significant part of you, repeat the exercise from Step 5 to Step 6. Keep testing, and stop when you approach a sense that it doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore.
- Now, recall the exercise at the beginning of this chapter, where you learned to have intense, good feelings for no particular reason. Reaccess a strong, joyful, optimistic state; start it spinning strongly; and see yourself moving along the future in front of you. Notice how you respond differently and better, especially in those situations where you might previously have had problems, with these new resources in place.
- Repeat three to five times—and resolve to notice every day or so for twenty-one days what improvements, large or small, have occurred.