Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Guilt's a little different. There are a couple of ways to feel guilty. One of the best ways to feel guilty is to make a picture of the response on someone's face when you did something that they didn't like. In this case you are making a visual eidetic picture. You can feel guilty about anything that way. However, if you step outside the picture, in other words reverse the procedure that we use with grief, what happens is that you will no longer feel guilty, because then you literally get a new perspective.

It sounds too easy, doesn't it? It is too easy. Ninety-nine out of a hundred depressed clients that I have seen have exactly the same pattern. They will be visualizing and/or talking to themselves about some experience that is depressing to them. But all they will have in awareness are the kinesthetic feelings. And they will use words which are appropriate: "weighed down, burdened, heavy, crushing." However, if you ask them any questions about their feelings, they will give you an elegant, non-verbal description of how they create their depression. "How do you know you're depressed? Have you felt this way a long time? What started this syndrome?" The exact questions are wholly irrelevant; they are just ways of accessing that process.

Depressed people usually make a series of visual images, usually constructed and outside of awareness. Usually they have no idea that they are making any images. Some of you had that experience with your partners today. You told them that they were accessing in a system, and they went "Oh, I don't know about that" and they didn't, because that wasn't in their awareness. Depressed people are running profoundly effective hypnotic inductions by seeing images and talking about them outside of awareness and responding in consciousness with only the feelings. They are going to be bewildered about where their feelings come from, since where they come from is totally outside of their awareness.

Many, many people who have weight problems are doing the same thing. They will have a hypnotic voice that goes "Don't eat that cake in the refrigerator." "Don't think about all the candy in the living room." "Don't feel hungry." Most people have no idea that commands like that are actually commands to do the behavior. In order to understand the sentence "Don't think of blue" you have to access the meaning of the words and think of blue.

If a child is in a dangerous situation and you say "Don't fall down," in order for him to understand what you have said, he has to access some representation of "falling down." That internal representation, especially if it is kinesthetic, will usually result in the behavior that the parent is trying to prevent. However, if you give positive instructions like "Be careful; pay attention to your balance and move slowly," then the child will access representations that will help him cope with the situation.

Man: Can you say more about guilt?

Guilt is like everything else. It's just a word, and the question is "What experience does the word refer to?" For years now people have walked into psychiatric offices of all kinds and said "I have guilt." Therapists have heard the word "guilt" and said "Yeah, I know what you mean." If that same person had walked in and said "I have some X," those therapists wouldn't have made the jump to thinking that they understood what the person meant.

The point we are trying to make about guilt and depression and jealousy and all those other words is that the important thing is to find out how it works—find out what the process is. How does someone know when it's time to be guilty as opposed to when it's not time to be guilty? And we said that an example—and this is ONLY ONE example—of how to feel guilty is to make eidetic images of people looking disappointed, and then feel bad about it. There are other ways you can feel guilty. You can make constructed images or you can talk yourself into feeling guilty. There are lots and lots of ways to go about it. It's important with each individual that you find out how they do it, if you want to change that process to something else. If the way they make themselves feel guilty is with eidetic images, you can have them change the eidetic image into a constructed image. If they do it with constructed images, you can have them change it into an eidetic one. If they talk to themselves, you can have them sing to themselves.

If you have the sensory refinements to be able to discover the specific steps in the process that the person goes through to create any response which they don't find useful and which they want to change, it gives you multiple points of intervention. The intervention can be as simple as substituting one system for another, because that will break up the pattern.