disinformation | seven 'keys' to personal change: ten years of nlp

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seven 'keys' to personal change: ten years of nlp
by Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D.Min. (Bob@neurosemantics.com) - June. 25, 2001

6. The awesome power of knowing the difference between associating and dissociating. Before I explain this difference, consider this simple exercise. Imagine yourself walking up to your refrigerator. You open the refrigerator door. Once inside the refrigerator you open the vegetable drawer. Inside the vegetable drawer you see a lemon. You take out the lemon, close the vegetable drawer and then the refrigerator door. Lemon in hand, you walk over to your kitchen cabinet; take out a cutting board and a knife. You proceed to slice the lemon in half then you take one of the halves and slice the half in half and you have two-quarter slices of lemon. You then pick up one of the quarter slices of lemon and put it in your mouth and squeeze the lemon as you feel the lemon juice pouring into your mouth. Is your mouth watering "as if" you actually had a slice of lemon in your mouth? Most people's mouth will water. This little exercise illustrates that the brain doesn't know the difference between what you imagine and what you are actually experiencing in the present.

Similarly, suppose we consciously or unconsciously imagine ourselves as a little boy or little girl back in our dysfunctional family. Suppose we recall hearing and seeing a parent screaming at us. We hear them telling us how stupid they believe we are. How do you think you would feel even though you are now a grown adult and not a child? You would feel bad, wouldn't you? That is what I mean by associating. Almost universally, I discover clients are having problems in adulthood due to their imagining themselves still children. They continue using their childhood experiences as their present frame of reference.

We call this "associating." You know if you are associating into a memory if when you recall it you do not see yourself in the picture. Let's experiment. Recall a mildly painful memory. Get a picture of it. Now, in the picture note whether or not you see yourself or you just see the other people and environment in that picture. If you do not see yourself, mentally, you have associated back into that memory and you will tend to experience the same negative feelings you had when you experienced it.

Now, because the brain does not know the difference between what you represent by imagination or by current input, when you mentally place yourself back into some painful memory, you will have negative feelings very similar to what you experienced during that event. If you see yourself in that picture as the younger you, we call that dissociating. When people say something like, "That doesn't bother me anymore, I have distanced myself from it." They have in fact dissociated from the memory by seeing themselves in the picture and by pushing the picture away from their eyes so it is at a distance. This diminishes the feelings whereas associating into a memory tends to increase the feelings.

When we consciously or unconsciously associate back into our past hurtful memories and operate from the mental frames (conceptual meanings) that we gave them, we are confusing the map with the territory. When we do this we are living our adult lives inside the painful experiences of childhood. The thinking we developed then served us then but it doesn't serve us in adulthood. If you find yourself:

� (Jumping to Conclusions) generalization
� (Being Narrow Minded) centration
� (Playing the "blame game") transductive reasoning
� (Personalizing) egocentrism
� (Making mountains out of molehills.) inductive logic or castraphizing
� (Black and white thinking) thinking in absolutes and
� (Blocking out past positive examples.) irreversability

then you are operating from childhood frames. John Burton, Ed.D. has an article on the Neuro-Semantics' web site that defines the thinking styles of children. The title of the article is "Hypnotic Language: Solutions in a Word." If I were to list one common element of the problems that I have confronted during these ten years as a therapist, I would list associating into past painful memories. The problem of unconsciously associating into childhood problem states and bringing that forward into the adult world lies at the root of many problems that I see therapeutically.

Note: You may have tried through years of reading and/or attending trainings to "fix" your thinking without it working. Experience has taught me that often times a person will need assistance in activating these associated frames in order to bring them to conscious level. From there it becomes fairly easy to meta-state and reframe them. But know this, you can change your thinking no matter how unconscious the problem state. If you do not know whether or not you are associating into some past memory, you can bet you are doing just that unconsciously if you are having problems with unwanted behaviors and thoughts.

7. People who change know how to apply higher meta-level states to lower level problems. As we have learned, our brains do not stop at just one thought. It will keep on thinking thoughts about thoughts.

When we have a "thought about a thought" the second thought will change the first thought and that is where the magic lies. In thinking and behaving the ability of the brain to have thoughts about thoughts is crucial. Here is the secret. When you have one thought (thoughts are composed of images and conceptual meanings) and then entertain another thought "about" the original thought the original thought will change.

What in the world does that mean? It is simple. If you have an experience that scares you and from that experience you become afraid of your fear, what will happen? In this case the fear will intensify. Indeed, applying fear to fear leads to paranoia. What if instead of becoming fearful of your fear, you welcomed your fear? You applied the thought that this fear has value to me and I will welcome it? What will happen to the fear? It will modulate the fear where you can step outside of it and learn from it. Then, once you learn what you need to learn from the fear, you apply the thought of faith to your fear, what would happen? What happens to fear when faith is applied to it? Fear disappears in the face of strong faith.

Play with your brain. Get a thought of anger. Now, apply to your anger the thought of forgiveness. Take the same anger and apply the thought of love. What about taking your anger and applying the thought of calmness to it, what happens? Would you have ever guessed how easy you could change your states of mind by applying one thought to another thought?

Every time we take a thought and apply another thought to it, the original thought will modulate or change in some way. We call this Meta-Stating--applying one thought to another thought. And, herein lies the magic. Herein lies your ability to re-format and re-program your thinking. Those whom I have seen who have changed their thinking, inevitably have meta-stated their problem state with higher-level resource states. Instead of meta-stating themselves sick, they learned to meta-state themselves well. They left re-building a new set of higher-level mental frames that served them.

I encourage the reader to "process" the materials found in this article. Access some personal problem and take that problem through all seven of the steps explained in this article. You may experience utter amazement at how that "problem" becomes a lesser problem.

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