Video: http://www.vaporizeyourcombatstress.com/Resolution.html

Tom Stone’s process for eliminating PTSD

From my analysis of Tom’s video, the steps are:

1. Elicit the trauma/PTSD state enough to get a reaction. (The client must be able to feel the reaction to do the process.)
2. Have the client verify that they can feel the problem response in their body.
3. Have the client close their eyes.
4. Have the client feel the energy field of the feeling in their body, and then notice where it’s located. (You can also have the client locate the feeling first, then notice the energy field.)
5. Have the client notice where in the energy field the energy is strongest and most concentrated.
6. Have the client put their attention on the place where the energy is most intense, and observe it.
7. Suggest that the energy might stay the same for awhile, but then it will decrease in intensity.
8. As the feeling gets less, have the client focus more closely on the most intense part of the energy until there’s nothing left.

I have only done this process a few times, with myself and a friend. The feelings associated with the problem completely disappeared within a couple of minutes. I can’t think of my problem states the same way any more.

Typically, a process that can permanently eliminate a negative feeling can also eliminate a positive one. I haven’t tested a positive emotion with this process yet. However, I did try eliciting a mildly positive feeling and increasing the size of the intense part of the energy field. That greatly increased the intensity of my emotion.

What makes this process work?

I actually don’t know why Tom’s Trauma Resolution Techniques process works, but I have some ideas:

1. The process shifts the client’s attention from kinesthetic emotion (visceral K) to a different kinesthetic modality (background K). The client disassociates from the emotional part of the feeling, while simultaneously staying at least partly associated into the background K kinesthetic.
2. The process shifts the client’s attention from experiencing an emotion to observing a component of it. This automatically and implicitly creates meta-position.
3. The brain uses background K to code metadata about emotions, such as their intensity. This process first has the client pay attention to the metadata (background K) rather than content (the scary emotion). Then it has the client change the submodalities of the background K in ways that will automatically decrease emotional intensity to zero.

These steps are identical to Richard Bandler’s “spinning feelings” intervention, which is also very effective at defusing emotional traumas. The Bandler and Stone processes differ in eliciting and changing different submodalities of background K. This has me wondering whether other background K submodalities also code for emotional intensity or content. If so, will changing them also resolve traumas?

Expand NLP knowledge!

Try the process, then report your results in the Comments.

• Make friends and keep them
• Become more popular and attractive to others
• Get dates and keep partners
• Reduce conflict and negativity in your life
• Get more support from others
• Keep people around you happier

You already know this skill. You learned it during NLP training, and use it during interventions.

But you probably haven’t generalized it to everyday life. (Most NLPers don’t.) This subtle shift in language can make a big difference.

Association and disassociation cues

What skill do I mean? Associating and disassociating people using language and other cues.

When doing change work, you can disassociate a client by telling them to “observe that younger you, over there.” To keep the client disassociated, you then describe the people in the representation as “that you,” “she,” “him,” or “they,” while gesturing toward the representation and away from the client.

When building a resource state, you use “you” language, present time, and associated sensory cues to associate the client into the experience: “And as you feel that good feeling, now, notice where the center of it is in your body.”

That’s great for change work, but what about the rest of life?

Avoid these association mistakes!

A couple years after my NLP training, I began to notice the ways my NLPer friends and I used association and disassociation cues in everyday life. Our casual language often associated people around us into negative states and experiences! We didn’t mean to do it; it happened automatically while we had our “talking to a client” filters turned off.

I also heard even skilled NLPers accidently associate and disassociate people during interventions. Several times I watched an NLP professional skillfully work a demo subject or client out of a deeply unresourceful state… only to accidentally plunge them back into it by using “you” language to talk about the person’s problem!

Do a language experiment

I decided to experiment with changing how I used association and disassociation cues in everyday interactions. No more “You know when you…” language for my negative stories!

Until then I had used a lot of association cues with negative content. I decided to do the opposite most of the time:

1. Help listeners associate into desirable, positive, and empowering experiences and resources. If you have something good to share, help your listeners experience it too.
2. Help listeners disassociate from negative, unpleasant, and disempowering experiences and attitudes. If you talk about hardships and problems, keep people disassociated. If they talk about problems in an associated way, help them disassociate.

I began by changing one thing: the way I used pronouns — words such as I, you, we, they, he, she, someone, and a person. Later I added other linguistic cues. Eventually I also added gestures and body language.

What happened?

1. My results with clients improved.
2. People feel good around me, so they like me more, find me more attractive, and give me more support.

Before I tell you how to quickly change your automatic association cues, let’s do a quick review.

How sensory cues affect association and disassociation

As you know, when you mention or describe an experience, people understand what you say by building mental representations of it. Association and disassociation cues tell your listeners how to represent point of view.

Association cues include:

• Referring to “you,” “we,” “us,” and “this.”
• Using the person’s name: “John, read this now.” (Sometimes naming a group the person belongs to will also associate them, especially if you also use other linguistic cues: “Like you, most NLPers enjoy learning.”)
• Specifying present time: “As you experience that now…” or “As you’re experiencing that now…”
• Spatially enclosing the listener in the context: “As you’re in that experience now…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is real; using words like “because” and “of course.”
• Using your listener’s experiences as examples. This works especially well if the experiences are sensory-based. Tip: specify some submodalities.
• Gestures that suggest something is in or on the person’s body, or surrounds them.
• Associated sensory cues: “Hear with your own ears, see with your own eyes, feel your body.”
• Specifying submodalities that require your listener to associate: “As you notice the temperature of the air around you now…”

Disassociation cues include:

• Referring to “they,” “he,” “she,” “someone,” “a person,” “one,” “it,” and “that” in representations, and to yourself and your own experiences as “I.”
• Using names to specify people other than the listener, and groups they don’t belong to.
• Specifying past or future time, especially if qualified as not happening now: “You used to do that.”
• Spatially distancing the listener from representations: “As you see and hear those people way over there…”
• Speaking and acting as if something is unreal; using words like “if.”
• Unreal and hypothetical examples: “If you listened to an elephant playing a piano…”
• Gestures that suggest that what you refer to is distant.
• Sensory cues for disassociation: “As you observe that from over here, notice how distant it seems.”
• Specifying only submodalities appropriate to disassociation: vision and hearing, but no tactile cues.

Fortunately, you don’t have to consciously keep track of any of this if you use my strategy and…

Create a “mental movie screen” over each listener’s head

You can’t know exactly what representations other people will build in order to understand what you say. However, you can approximate their representations, and get a pretty good idea of whether your words and gestures will trigger association or disassociation.

I didn’t want to spend weeks or months retraining myself, and you probably don’t either. Instead, use the fast process below to drastically improve your awareness and cue choices within days.

Creating awareness of association cues

1. Imagine talking with a friend.
2. Create a small movie screen over your friend’s head. You will use it to display your friend’s internal representations. (Note: People who visualize less clearly can pretend they see the movie screen, knowing their subconscious mind sees it clearly. Or they can substitute a “sportscaster” voice that will describe their friend’s representations, and adjust the rest of these instructions accordingly.)
3. Say something that includes association or disassociation cues. I suggest pronouns — “I,” “you,” “them” — because they so strongly evoke point of view.
4. Have the screen show the mental movie your friend will probably make in order to understand what you say, and include the soundtrack.

   You want a movie that will give you the information you need, without associating you into the content. To do this, see and hear the movie from Observer position (so you see your friend, their movie, and how the two relate), put a frame around the movie screen, distort the sound so it seems to come through speakers facing your friend, or use whatever tricks work for you.

5. When you use associating language, have the movie screen show your friend associating into their representation of what you say. When you use disassociated language, have the movie screen show your friend disassociating from their representation. At this point, don’t try to change anything. Simply notice the new information. Practice with both positive and negative content, and adjust as needed.
6. Imagine utilizing the information you get from the screen to improve your word choices. How do you want your friend to receive your communication? If your intent matches their movie — if you want your friend disassociated, and they make a disassociated mental movie — you already chose appropriate cues. If your intent mismatches your friend’s movie, change your language cues.
7. Do imaginary practice with more people and varied content. To have a client to access a traumatic memory, or to get rid of an obnoxious person, you might want to associate someone into negative content, or disassociate them from positives. Build in flexibility and choice!
8. Once you like the results, use New Behavior Generator to install the pattern:
   • Create a disassociated movie of you using your new skill successfully. Your movie should show the screens over people’s heads, their movies, and your responses.
   • Adjust your disassociated movie until you like it.
   • Step into your movie and experience it associated from beginning to end. Do you like it? Do you feel confident and congruent? Do you want to change or improve anything?
   • Step out to make adjustments, step in to check how they work.
   • Continue until the whole movie works the way you want it to.
   • Repeat the New Behavior Generator pattern with 2 more examples.

Initially, you will probably simply notice when you use pronouns in ways that mismatch your intent. Soon your mind will start to anticipate people’s likely responses before you even open your mouth. You’ll notice mismatches between your language and intent, and make corrections before you speak.

For most of us who know NLP, most interactions happen in everyday life outside NLP interventions. How we use everyday language affects our important relationships, our interactions at work, even who likes and dislikes us. We can use association and disassociation cues to uplift and empower people, separate them mentally from their problems, and help them feel good. That benefits the people around us, and it benefits us as well.

Want to experiment?

1. Calibrate how you us associative and disassociative cues in everyday interactions now. How do people typically respond to you?
2. Switch to using cues that associate people into good experiences, disassociate them from bad ones.
3. Calibrate how people’s responses change, immediately and over time.
4. Post your results in the Comments below.

1. the degree to which the person is “in time” or “observing time”, and
2. the physical size of “now.”

If now is physically small, the person is likely to feel pressured or harassed, as though there is literally not enough time to get things done.

If now is spacious, they are likely to experience of having plenty of time, even when they have a lot to do and not much actual time available.

If now is enormous, the future may seem irrelevant because it is so small and far away. This works well for meditating, but can cause significant problems in day-to-day life.

Adjusting “now”

I do timeline tune-ups with most clients. One of the last steps is adjusting the size of now.

With the client standing in their usual relationship with their timeline, I ask them, “How big is now, physically?” To help them get a clear sense of now’s size, I might have them show me where it is with gestures. Or I may put my hands about where they describe, ask “Here?”, then adjust my hand position according to their instructions.

I then elicit how they feel about “now” right now. What’s their experience of their relationship with time?

Next I have them make “now” smaller. For almost everyone, that’s an unpleasant experience. They feel they have less time. The tasks they want or need to do may look and feel overwhelming.

After they return now to its original size again, I have them make “now” bigger. Virtually everyone visibly relaxes. The tension goes out of their face and shoulders, and they usually sigh. I have them notice how their experience changes as they keep making “now” bigger and bigger.

Having an enormous “now” is great for relaxing, meditating, and zoning out in ecstasy. But when “now” becomes so large that even the immediate future seems distant and unimportant, getting things done can become a problem! (Could that be why so many mystics accomplish little else once they achieve bliss?)

Generally a person has  optimum sizes of “now” for doing various activities. I have the client imagine a variety of activities and experiences they’re likely to have in the future, and find the optimum size of “now” for each. This future-paces dynamically adjusting “now,” something I reinforce with conversational suggestions.

One man I worked with had been at least somewhat anxious about 70% of the time for years. We made a lot of changes to his timeline, including an in time/observe time adjustment. But he didn’t really relax until we expanded “now” at the end of his session. I’m pretty sure expanding his now was a lot of why that single session decreased the amount of time he felt anxious from 70% to 10%.

There may be ecology issues with making “now” bigger, especially if the client uses mostly Away From strategies to motivate themselves. Resolve these, and you can send a significantly de-stressed client home with a blissful smile on their face.

Want to experiment?

Investigate how the size of “now” in your own experience relates to bliss, and to getting things done. Report your results in the Comments section below. Thanks for participating!

Instructions:

1.  Having “now” spontaneously change size may be an important component in ecstatic states. Recall a time when you were totally “blissed out” — perhaps getting a back rub, lying on a beach, meditating, or totally in the moment while making love. As you re-experience that blissful state, now… notice how big “now” is in that experience… and compare that to your usual size of “now” when you post your results below.

2.  Recall times when you got a lot done in a short amount of time. Contrast times when you got a lot done but felt stressed… to times when you worked with ease and flow. What size is “now” in each of these experiences?

Changing with NLP: A Casebook of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Medical Practice,

I think that when someone has had a longstanding chronic problem over many years, in virtually all areas of life there are huge numbers of contextual anchors (people, places, color schemes, sounds, voice tones, postures, gestures, etc.) that keep it alive… Chronic re-exposure to these myriad anchors after a session is one way in which the problem can recur over time to a varying degree…

I have experienced this anchor issue myself in making major life changes. It’s a big problem for a lot of people.

Contextual anchors as resources

The existing anchors for a longstanding problem state are powerful, widespread, and reliable. They recur in exactly those contexts where the problem was a problem.

The person making a change most needs their new resources in these contexts. Old “problem” anchors thus make ideal resources for anchoring the person’s new solution state.

This type of intervention seems potentially useful for virtually any longstanding or widely contextualized problem. I therefore added it to my change work toolbox in the form of hypnotic suggestions.

Repurposing existing anchors

I chose to use hypnosis because I want to repurpose all the old triggers, not just the ones the client knows about consciously and could include in an NLP process. The basic format I use is direct suggestions that “the more the problem, the more the solution.”

If a client doesn’t know what an anchor is, either explain or adjust your language. Suggest that:

1. What were anchors for the problem now anchor the client’s resource states and behaviors.
   

   “Each and every object, thought, and experience that used to trigger those old behaviors and beliefs, old attitudes and emotions… from now on instead triggers your new and empowering behaviors and beliefs, your new and empowering attitudes and emotions. Whatever used to reinforce your old self-concept as someone who had that problem, now reinforces your identity as someone who thinks and acts so you get the outcomes you want.”

   (Note: Make sure you include actions in your solution suggestions. Ensure that the client will do new behaviors that will create their desired outcomes, not simply feel different.)

2. The stronger the anchor was for the problem, the stronger an anchor it now is for the solution. (What used to be the strongest problem triggers are now going to be the most help in solving the problem. This changes the meaning of the anchors, making it less likely that the client will think about or respond to the anchors as they used to.)
3. The more strongly and more often each anchor gets triggered, the more strongly it triggers the client’s resource states and behaviors. (Immediately after the session, some clients may still have negative responses to their anchors. This suggestion will build the desired responses over time. The more the client gets triggered, and the more negatively, the faster they build more useful responses. And it turns negative responses from subjective “proof of failure” into marks of progress.)

I initially test most new patterns by running them on myself. A few days after giving myself the above suggestions, I visited a context that has a lot of old negative anchors. Instead of negative, my emotional responses were neutral. I no longer felt that I had to change aspects of the context in order to make it bearable. Instead, I looked around to see what I could maybe change in the future, while no longer feeling any need to change anything.

Want to experiment?

This is an NLP development blog, and you can participate by testing patterns. Try today’s intervention on yourself or a client, and report the results in the Comments section below. Thanks for participating!

• If they are in time, with their timeline running through their body (or they stand inside a “time tube”), they are probably good at being present in the moment. However, they may stay so in the moment that they have trouble keeping appointments or planning ahead.
• If they observe time, standing outside the “now” so they have perspective and can see the future from now, they can probably remember appointments and plan ahead. However, they might find it difficult to enjoy the moment because they always see, hear, and think about their future and/or past.

Each option has useful elements, and it would be nice to have them all, rather than having to pick one or the other. That’s why I developed the following technique.

Creating a both/and “now”

My frame for doing timeline tune-ups is that the client and I are going to provide their brain with a bunch of options for how to work their timeline. Their brain will then automatically choose those options that work best for them.

After eliciting their timeline and determining whether they are in time or observe time, I have them try the other version.

I then have them compare the two, pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Next I suggest that it would be useful to have both options. I have them double their timeline at “now.” The “in time” section goes through their body; the “observe time” section goes in front of them where they can see it. Visually, it’s rather like a river splitting to go around an island.

Once they have both options, I instruct them to vary how much of the timeline goes through each pathway. If they want to be present in the moment, they can have most of their timeline go through their body. I suggest they keep only enough observe time to remind them of upcoming events, and to make sure their current behavior supports their future plans and goals. If they want to plan ahead, they can have most of their timeline in observe time, with just enough in time that they can be present when that’s appropriate.

Now I talk them through practicing and future-pacing various examples. If they are relaxing on the beach or hanging out with their children, they might want 99% of their timeline to be in time. They can retain just enough observe time to remind them of an appointment later. If they need to do planning at work, they might want 95% of their timeline to be observe time. They can stay just enough in time to respond appropriately when a colleague or customer needs to connect with them. At a business dinner they might want to be 50% observe time, so they can plan ahead and notice the future implications of their current actions and decisions, and 50% in time so they can enjoy the food and conversation, and bond with their colleagues.

I have them pick several examples in the near future where each option might be useful. In each, I have them practice adjusting how much of their timeline is in time and observe time. Finally I suggest that from now on, their mind will automatically adjust their timeline to make it appropriate to what they’re doing.

So far, every person I have done this with chose to keep their adjustable in time/observe time “now.” Including me! It is delightful to be able to be thoroughly in the moment, knowing that at the appropriate time, I’ll remember other tasks and appointments. It’s also nice to go deep into abstract thinking mode, and still notice and appreciate delicious food, beautiful sunsets, and great people.

So much of NLP is about adding choices. Adding both/and options to what many people assume are digital either/or choices can do a lot to improve quality of life — for both you and your clients.

Want to experiment?

This is an NLP development blog, and you can participate by testing NLP patterns and suggestion improvements. Try today’s intervention on yourself or a client, and report the results in the Comments section below. Thanks for participating!