Erasure Exercise
The object of this optional exercise is to partly erase a traumatic memory. If recall of a flight causes distress, the Erasure Exercise can reduce the emotional impact when you recall it. Before getting started, bring the traumatic flight to mind and make an assessment, zero to ten, of your anxiety while you are remembering the worst part. Like a novel or a movie, your memory of the flight runs forward in time from the beginning to the end. This exercise artificially creates a memory of the flight that runs backward in time, from the end, then backward through the entire flight to the beginning.
First, we create a backward version of the flight. Make a step-by-step outline of what happened. For example, you checked in at the airport, went through security, and sat down in the boarding area. After waiting, you boarded the plane. The plane taxied out, took off, climbed to cruise altitude. Everything was fine. Suddenly there was some turbulence. An announcement was made to fasten your seat belt. The turbulence became so intense you began to worry. You imagined the plane might plunge. You had thoughts about not seeing loved ones again. Then the turbulence stabilized. The plane landed. You got off. You got in a car or taxi and went to the place you would spend the night. You woke up the next morning.
Using your notes, begin assembling a backward version of the flight—visually—in your mind. Start with waking up the next morning. Since everything will run backward, imagine the clock is running backward, it is getting darker, and you fall asleep. You sleep backward through the night. You get out of bed and walk backward to the bathroom, where you brush your teeth. When you finish, there is toothpaste on the brush. You touch the toothpaste tube to the brush and the paste goes back into the tube. You put on your clothes and go to the dinner table, where a finished plate is presented. As you eat backward, and the food comes out of your mouth, back onto the plate, and you finish the meal by giving up a perfectly untouched plate of food.
You walk backward out to a car or taxi. It goes down the road backward. When you look out the windshield, everything is going away from you, except the cars are coming backward toward you.
You ride backward to the airport. You get out of the vehicle backward. You go backward into the terminal. You put your bag on the baggage carousel. As it spins, your bag disappears. You go backward up the escalator, backward to the gate, backward through the passenger boarding bridge, backward through the aisle of the plane, and backward to your seat.
The door closes, and the plane taxis backward to the runway. Making lots of noise, it rushes faster and faster backward down the runway, and bumps into the air. It climbs backward to cruise altitude. In most cases, a traumatic flight involves turbulence. As you visualize your flight backward, it is important that you visualize turbulence backward. This is probably the most important piece of the Erasure Exercise. On an actual flight, when the plane moves down, you feel light-headed, and get the impression that the plane is falling. When the plane moves upward, you feel heavier in your seat and are not alarmed. But when visualizing your flight backward, you must reverse this. In other words, what you feel in turbulence when the plane moves up and down is reversed. When you visualize the plane moving upward, imagine feeling light-headedness and alarm that the plane will fall. When you visualize the plane moving downward, imagine feeling heavy in your seat, and no alarm at all. Spend extra time on this part of the Erasure Exercise so as to solidly connect falling with upward motion, and heaviness with downward motion, as you visualize the plane flying backward.
Next, picture the plane descending backward, landing, and taxiing backward to the terminal. You get off backward, go backward through security, and back to check in, and, backward, back to where you started the day.
Now that you have it assembled, you are ready to record the backward version on top of the forward version. Pretend you have a video of the traumatic flight on a cell phone. View a few seconds of it on the small cell phone screen. Then, without delay, run the backward version. See it in your imagination—not on the small cell phone screen—but life-size. That completes one cycle. Continue with a second cycle. Again, make sure you build the backward memory on top of the original memory. Watching a few seconds of the original memory establishes the location. Then, run the backward version again full size.
Take a break. Distract yourself from this exercise by recalling something you did earlier today. After you have taken your mind elsewhere, return to the memory of your bad flight. Note your stress level, zero to ten. Compare it with what it was before the exercise. It is probably a bit lower.
Repeat the exercise again a day or two later, and again after a few days. Test your reaction again, zero to ten. Repeat until the memory of the original flight does not bother you when you recall it.