A WHILE AGO, SOMEONE pointed out some research that said people who believed they had been able to lose weight in the past had an easy time of losing weight again—even if they hadn’t really done so before.
I’m not sure how these researchers had these people believe they’d been successful in the past, but it sounds to me like some kind of false memory syndrome.
False memories were something we heard a lot about a few years ago because some therapists were actually installing in their clients memories of things that had never happened by the ignorant way they asked questions and made suggestions.
This practice caused terrible problems for the individuals and their families, especially when the therapist suggested indirectly that Uncle Fred had not just been giving them a bath when they examined some childhood photographs together. These therapists would go through the client’s pictures and select perfectly innocent snaps of, say, a baby sitting on someone’s knee. Then they’d ask the client questions like, “How can you be sure that was all that was happening? How do you know your uncle or aunt wasn’t interfering with you?” and, of course, since they couldn’t possibly be sure, it had to be true.
It’s very easy to lead people in ways that get them to “remember” things that never happened, especially if they’re very young or in an altered state. I remember watching those old films of a hypnotherapist regressing people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and they always followed a certain pattern.
The hypnotist would say things like, “So, it’s a warm night on July 5, and you’re asleep in your room, right? And, suddenly you hear a noise—you remember that, don’t you?”
The subject would say, “Uh-huh. Yeah. I guess so…”
“And you become aware that whatever is making that noise is in there with you near your bed, don’t you?”
The person would say with greater conviction, “Yes. That’s right. Near my bed.”
“That’s right. Near your bed. Noises…and how many aliens are there in the room?”
This kind of language is extremely persuasive because it operates below the level of conscious awareness. We recognize these patterns from the Milton Model (see Resource File 5 on page 316): “You hear a noise,” “Something is with you in the room,” “You become aware that it’s near, don’t you?”—all these statements function as commands to do something embedded within a seemingly innocent sentence. The listener’s unconscious mind hears them as injunctions rather than questions or statements, and then it experiences them as “true.” If you get a subject to agree enough about other things—dates, times, locations, and so on—he is altogether more likely to perceive a statement presupposing there are aliens as true. This is hypnosis in its simplest but still very powerful form.
Problems are made worse because memory is extremely plastic. We create memories from moment to moment. We remember things that never happened, and sometimes we forget things that did happen. Sometimes, in the case of things we forget, it’s a blessing.
Psychologists are always bringing clients to me, wanting me to get them to remember being molested as a child or some such nonsense. Even if it happened, I don’t think that remembering trauma can be profoundly useful. If people have true amnesia, it’s often a good thing.
These days, I find it very useful to give people amnesia for bad experiences that are still destroying their lives. If they didn’t remember it happening, they can’t keep going over what it was like and making themselves feel terrible.
I much prefer teaching people to remember good things and to build on their strengths rather than reinforce their weaknesses.
Our ability to remember things that happened many years ago is apparently limitless. Two clients who proved this very dramatically spring to mind.
One woman came to me because she and her husband had been fighting for years. Six months after they got married she lost her wedding ring, and he’d never let her forget it. To him it was a deliberate act. He believed she washed it down the drain or threw it away after a fight.
But she was still very upset about it after twenty-five years. She said, “The ring’s lost, and there’s no way I could ever find it.”
I asked her a couple of Meta Model questions. I said, “Well, what would happen if you did find it? What would have to happen for you to do that?”
She said, “I guess in the back of my mind I know it’s somewhere.”
As soon as she said that, I said, “Good. Then let’s go into the back of your mind and find out.”
I put her in deep trance and told her not to come out until she had remembered where the ring had gone. I told her to sort through her memories to the moment just before the ring disappeared and said, “When you find it, let your hand go up.”
She sat there for three hours while I went off and did something else. Then my dog came in and acted like I should go back in (my dog was pretty clever that way), so I did, and sure enough, her hand was floating up—completely cataleptic.
I told her to wake from trance and tell me only what I needed to know—that is, exactly where the ring was. She sat up, the way people do when they’re in a trance, looking blank. Then she said, “Basement…water heater…rolled under…,” and then dropped back into deep trance.
I woke her up and said, “Do you still live in the same house you did when the ring was lost?”
She said, “Yes. It’s my parents’ house, and when we got married we moved in with them, and when they died, we stayed there. My family’s been in that house for five generations. It’s a very big house.”
I said, “It has a basement, doesn’t it?”
She answered, “Yes,” so I asked her if her husband was home. She said, “No. He’s outside in the car.” But when we went outside, he’d already gone home. He’d thought the session was going to be shorter, especially as I’d told him I wanted him to come inside later to work on their difficulties with each other. I guessed he got in a tizzy because I left him out in the driveway for three hours.
However, when I called him at home, he was annoyed because he was convinced she’d been talking about him for three hours. I said, “Well, actually she didn’t talk about anybody. She’s been sitting there in trance the whole time.”
He was even more annoyed. He said, “What’s the point of that?”
I told him, “Get a flashlight and go downstairs. You’ve got some kind of a boiler down there in the basement, right?”
He said, “Yes. It’s a water heater.”
I said, “I want you to get all the dust bunnies from underneath and tell me what surprise you find there.”
He called back about fifteen minutes later to tell me he’d found the ring. His comment was, “She must have hidden it there all these years and then told you and not me.”
I said, “Actually, she doesn’t know yet. I want you to bring it here—and be careful, because she might accuse you of having hidden it all these years.”
Interestingly, when he gave her the ring, she had absolutely no memory of ever having told me. It constantly amazes me what people can do in trance—in this case, going back twenty-five years, even though she hadn’t been consciously aware of the ring falling off and rolling under the heater. But somewhere in her unconscious, she was able to sort through and find that sound and know what it meant.
The brain is capable of amazing feats. Recently, a woman came to me suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d been attacked but was vague about whether she’d been raped or just beaten or robbed. I didn’t push for that kind of detail, because I don’t think it’s always useful. But she was absolutely terrified almost all the time, because she kept reliving the attack.
When I asked, “Is it life-size?” she said, “What do you mean, ‘it’?”
I told her I could tell by the way she was looking that she was making pictures, but she said, “Yes…but it’s dark.” She knew she’d feel better if she could bring the memory out of the shadows, so the first thing I did was to put in a few lights. I had a Corel Draw program that let you put lights anywhere you liked in a photograph, and that gave me the idea. The brain is very digital that way. It was possible to take a memory that was dark and out-of-focus because of fear, and illuminate it to the point where she could see the faces of the other people in the memory.
I had one case that was even more bizarre. Somebody had grabbed the victim from behind and covered the victim’s eyes. The police weren’t clear about what had actually happened, so I slowed the movie down, froze it just before the hands touched the victim’s face, and magnified the image. Then I had the victim draw the fingerprint—and the police found the attacker. That’s how precise the mind is.
Now I’m not saying that was quick by any means. That took me hours to do. The person concerned was a good hypnotic subject and could also draw pretty well. The drawing of the fingerprint was really big.
Once we had something, the police shrank it down and ran it against their database of known felons. The image wasn’t perfect by any means; it was only what they call “a partial,” but it was enough to get a match.
When they pulled the guy in for questioning, he confessed immediately. Not only did he confess to that, but he confessed to about ten other incidents. This was pretty helpful of him, because if it ever became known how we’d gotten the print, it would have been thrown out of court.
So, sometimes it’s good to remember things, other times not. What the researchers mentioned earlier in the weight-loss study discovered is that it can be useful to remember something that may not even have happened.
What they missed was that telling people they had been good at losing weight when they were young was simply another way of giving a suggestion. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not. If part of them remembers as true that they’ve already succeeded at something, doing it a second time isn’t going to be that hard.
For this reason I often install false memory. I have people go in and experience being totally in command in front of an audience, and then I make it a real memory. I go through and look at their reality strategy, comparing a real memory with the one we just made up, then adjusting the new memory so it’s a perfect match: same size, same location, same distance, same voices, same feelings.
What happens then is that when the person thinks about the new behavior, it’s as if they’re doing it for the second time.
I’ve done this with very some odd experiences, too. I’ve consulted with organizations such as NASA (and some others that shall remain nameless) whose people were expected to go into some very challenging and scary situations, and I was able to have them, for all intents and purposes, live it out so they could cope in the real situation.
Of course, people in sports make good use of this. One of my clients was a downhill skier who had been really badly hurt in an accident. He was so traumatized he couldn’t get back on the slope.
I put him in trance and had him go back on the slope and ski all the way down in his mind. His memory was life-size, a fully associated revivification. I remember being fascinated watching him, because I could actually see his cheeks being forced back by the wind.
When he came out of trance, he couldn’t wait to get back on the slopes because another part of the memory had been restored: the sheer enjoyment he’d had when skiing. Previously, he couldn’t even think about skiing, because he couldn’t get past the bad memory to the good ones. By building him one good, new memory, the old memory simply collapsed, and he was able to recall just how much he enjoyed his sport. Sometimes it’s just a function of sequence. It’s not just which of your memories you access, but where they are in your mind.
Exercise: Installing Positive Memories
- Think of a situation in your life that would be easily accomplished or improved if you had had previous experience of success. This could involve learning a new skill or enhancing one you already have. As in the example above, it could involve successfully losing weight, stopping smoking, or changing some other habit.
- Imagine yourself as if you had been completely successful in this venture at some previous time in your life. Make a comprehensive list of the submodalities of this representation.
- Find a strong and positive memory of something you know incontrovertibly that you accomplished in the past—perhaps learning to drive, becoming fluent in a second language, passing an important exam. List this memory’s submodalities in detail.
- Compare the submodalities, and adjust those of the new memory to match those of the real memory.
- Now imagine floating up and back in time to where you would have most benefited from gaining these new resources and drop down into the “you” you were then.
- Fast-forward through all the relevant points in your past, allowing your unconscious to make all the necessary adjustments, embedding the knowledge and skills where they will have been most useful to you from the point in the present all the way into the future…now.
- Imagine three to five situations in the future where you are fully using your new skills. Do this associated, experiencing them as richly as you can. See what you will see, hear what you will hear, and feel what you will be feeling.
- Imagine these three to five examples generalizing out into the rest of your life, expanding all possibilities appropriately in ways that will surprise and delight you.
- Repeat this exercise several times. Then make the decision to practice the skill or behavior you want to acquire, noticing how much easier it is when you “remember” your success.