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Introduction
First Aid: Individuals
BluesBusters
Anxiety relief
First Aid:Relationships
The Right Stuff
Tool Room I
Sub-modalities
Parting thoughts
- Sit quietly, and relax as much as you can. If you know how to put yourself into a light trance, do that.
- Visualize your gopher (or use whatever sensory modality is appropriate for contact). Ask them to please go and find out for you the positive intention behind the symptom you are experiencing; what is your unconscious attempting to do for you by engaging in your symptom? What problem is it solving? Ask your gopher to let you know as soon as they find out.
- Important: make your request three times, in a row. Why three? Because three is a magic number... Jeeze, don't you know anything? (asking three times seems to improve results for most people.)
- Once your gopher has agreed to the task, take your mind off the issue and think about something else. If you continue trying to figure out your symptom consciously, you will interfere with the gopher's work.
- When your gopher gets the information, they will let you know. Usually, the answer just seems to pop into your head, out of nowhere. It can also emerge in a dream.
- When you get your answer, it is important to thank your gopher. In any positive, working relationship, respect and kindness are vital. If you do not nurture a relationship, it will wither away.
There's a reason you haven't been able to consciously access the information you just asked your gopher to go find for you. It may be that you have simply forgotten, or that you have never really been aware of the information. More often, however, the reason involves purposeful and motivated suppression of information; you may be using defense mechanisms to protect the conscious you from knowing. The answer your gopher brings back most likely is at least part of a valid answer, although you may be tempted to dismiss or reject it (those are your defenses working). Do so, and you get to keep your symptom.
Building new behaviors
Once you know what's behind your symptom, you are free to wonder what to do about it. If you're interested in changing your life for the better, you might search for some new behaviors that fulfill the intentions of your symptom without the undesirable side-effects. A number of possibilities may occur to you. If so, great! Try them out. Here's how:
- First, try them in your imagination. See yourself in a formerly symptom-producing situation, engaging in a behavior other than your symptom, one that meets the intentions of your symptom even better than your symptom did. Adjust your internal movie until you are satisfied that your new behavior is much more desirable.
- When you really like the way your movie looks, step into it. See what you would see if you were really there; hear what you would hear; feel what you would feel. Go through the entire movie this way, with you being an actor in a play. If things meet with your approval, proceed. If not, adjust, as necessary.
- Ask your gopher, using the procedure outlined above, to do an internal check to see if there is any part of you that has objections to your proposed solution. If there is such a part, ask the part to let you know the objection in consciousness and modify your solution to remove the offending elements.
- Repeat the above steps twice more, using different possible behaviors. This way, you'll have a choice of what to do when confronted with the triggering stimulus in the future.
- Imagine using each of your three choices, in different situations, in the future. For each choice, step into the imagined situation, pretend as though you are really there, seeing what you would see, hearing what you would hear.
- Once you are satisfied that you have three viable choices, ask your gopher (three times) to see to it that whenever you are confronted with the symptom-triggering stimulus, your gopher will automatically select and encourage one of the three new behaviors instead.
Clueless
It's always possible to know the purpose of a symptom and not be able to come up with an alternative behavior that accomplishes the same goal, without the negative side-effects. While I will not deal directly with that situation, here, I will point you towards some general approaches to the problem. You might consider any of the following:
- Consider the possibility that the intention behind the symptom arises from an irrational belief. If so, changing the belief may almost automatically change the unwanted behavior.
- Ask your gopher for a suggestion, or ask them to run the entire procedure unconsciously.
- Read a few books on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, (NLP), particularly Reframing by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, or Core Transformations by Connirae Andreas.
- Call a Professional versed in NLP and let her, or him, step you through the process.
- Take advantage of the e-therapy option found elsewhere at this site, tell me how you're stuck, and ask for suggestions.
- Give-up, and go have a beer with your gopher.
There are other, perhaps even more powerful, ways of changing experience and, hence, behavior. That's what we'll look at next.
Sub-modalities >>
| © 2008 Richard V. Sansbury (letters@headworks.com) |
