Frogs into Princes: Neuro Linguistic Programming

Now, staying in that third position, I want you to look past yourself sitting here holding my hand and feeling the feelings of strength and adult resourcefulness. This time, with feelings of strength and comfort, I want you to watch and listen carefully to everything that happened to young Tammy way back there, so that you can make new understandings and learnings about what occurred, and therefore have new choices. You are to do this, watching from the third position, having the feelings of resourcefullness and strength connected with my hand here. Knowing that you did live through that and you won’t have to again, let that younger part of you feel the old feelings over there as she goes through that old experience for the last time. When you’ve seen and heard it all, adequate for your making new understandings, simply nod your head and stay there. You can begin the movie now…. (She nods.)

All right, now very, very slowly I want you to float down from the third position and step back in and reunite with your body, sitting here with feelings of resourcefulness and strength….

And now I want you to do something very powerful and important for yourself. Younger Tammy did something very powerful for you; she went through those feelings again for you, and she let you watch and listen with comfort and strength to stimuli which in the past have triggered overwhelming responses. This time you were able to see and hear those without pinking. I want you to walk over to young Tammy in your mind's eye. I want you to reach out and use all of the adult female resources you have, to comfort her and reassure her that she will never have to go through that again. Thank her for living through the old feelings for the last time for you. Explain to her that you can guarantee that she lived through it because you are from her future.

And when you see on her face and in her posture and in her breathing that she is reassured that you will be there to take care of her from now on, I want you to really reach out, take her by the shoulders and pull her close and actually feel her enter your body. Pull her inside. She is a part of you, and she's a very energetic part. That energy is freed now from that phobic response. I would like your unconscious mind to select some particular pleasurable activity that some of that energy can now be used for, for yourself here in the present and in the future. Because energy is energy and you deserve it. Just sit there and relax and enjoy those feelings. Let them spread through your whole body. Take your time. You've got plenty going on inside. I'm going to talk to the group.

Do you understand the anchors? First, she holds hands with me. This is a "bail-out" anchor, a resource anchor that will always get her out of trouble and says "Here, you're grounded right here." It's also a really exquisite biofeedback mechanism. By temperature and pressure and moisture changes in her hand, I get an incredible amount of information about her complex internal experience. An anchor here on her arm stabilizes the phobic feelings to use as a lead to go back and find some visual experience that will serve as a metaphor for her entire set of experiences called "the phobic response."

Once she sees herself at an earlier age over there, using the feelings to lead her back to something she had never known about consciously before, then I dissociate her a second step—I ask her to float up out of her body. You could see the changes in posture and color and breathing and so forth which indicated which position she was operating from.

Once the two-step dissociation has been established, I have her watch and listen with comfort to the old experience. She saw and heard things today which have never been available to her before.

Tammy: That's true.

She was so overwhelmed in the past by the kinesthetic phobic response that she couldn't see and hear what was going on. Consciousness is limited. As she watches and listens to herself at a younger age, the competent feelings of comfort and resourcefulness are being associated with the auditory and visual stimuli from the past.

And when she's gone through the whole thing, then we reintegrate. Every model of therapy, every psychotheology, is built on dissociation and sorting to help people reorganize. Whether you call it "parent-child-adult," "topdog-underdog," using chairs or words doesn't matter as long as you label and sort a person's behavior, dissociating parts of them, one from the other. You have the responsibility as a professional communicator to put your clients back together before the session is over. One easy way to make sure the dissociations that you create are re-integrated before the end of the session is to simply reverse the process by which you create the dissociation.