When I try your version of a both/and timeline, I have to vary the height in order to achieve various levels of association and dissociation. For me to associate fully, the timeline must pass through my chest. For me to begin to dissociate, I must move the timeline down. By the time I fully dissociate from “now,” I’m standing on it, so it is less visible than my version. However, I can feel the texture I’m standing on, which I can’t in my version.

I too have found “timelines” an oversimplification. I worked with a brilliant physicist whose time “line” consisted of several intertwined helices, some carrying events and others carrying resources. Once I started investigating contextual time coding, a subject I’ll post more about, I encountered some very bizarre structures.

“Time coding,” “time representations,” “time structures,” or “time constructs” might better describe the many interesting ways in which people represent time. (Vote your preference…)

Joy

However, I have a alternative way to integrate “in time” and “observe time” (what previously was called “through time”) that works well for me and has also worked well for others when I have offered it to them.

When you elicit an observe time timeline, which typically goes from left to right, there are two very different possibilities. The line can go in front of the person — or if it is physicalized on the floor, underneath the person, in which case the person is separated from the timeline, dissociated from it. The other possibility is that the line goes through the person’s body — usually the chest and/or belly. This means that the person is fully associated into the present moment, while still able to observe the past and future. To me this is a more integrated way of being. And of course, someone might take Joy’s instruction and modify it in the way I have outlined.

There is another factor, encouraged by the word “line” in “timeline,” namely that the flow of time is a narrow line, rather than an area or tube, or infinite panorama. If you visualize the flow of time as an infinite space, all of which is shifting and changing as time flows, that creates a greater sense of being immersed in (associated in) the present moment — even when visualizing the past and future to the left and right.

For the record, when Connirae and I were first exploring the submodalities of time in 1983, we didn’t use the word “timeline,” we just explored how people represented the past, present, and future, and how those representations were related to each other in space. By doing it in this way, many fascinating elements emerged that would not have if we had used the word “line.”

For instance, one person used transparency in an interesting way. He viewed a representation of a less recent past THROUGH a representation of a more recent past, and did the same for the future. This created a much more integrated flow than viewing events as being like a sequence of beads on a string.

Another woman saw her future possibilities as bubbles floating in space, sometimes exchanging position, becoming larger or smaller, nearer or farther. These bubbles were only constrained by a cone of space, expanding into the more distant future.

My future grows out into the distance, gradually as I plan and take action in the present. I visualize this as ice slowly freezing in needles in water, moving out. The more distant future is all water, the immediate future is mostly ice (determined) and my intermediate future is a mixture of ice and water.

Many people have literal “turning points” where their timeline changes direction sharply, often obscuring portions of their history. And sometimes with significant consequences.

For instance, some people have timelines that end abruptly. Someone who had a traumatic event will say, “My life ended that day,” while others may have a definite future ending paralleling a parent’s heart attack at a certain age (or a doctor’s prediction that they have six months to live) and this will affect their lives very strongly. If someone is dead already, “nothing matters,” and if someone “knows” they will die soon, there is no point in planning.

If you try out several of these possibilities — and there are many, many more — you can realize that the word “line” in “timeline” limits your conception of time, and what you are likely to think of changing for a client.

Later others reduced this wonderful complexity into two alternatives. For many purposes the two alternatives are enough to make a useful change, but it leaves out a lot of fascinating details that are sometimes quite significant and useful.

Steve Andreas