How to Take Charge of Your Life: The User’s Guide to NLP

Although this ugly act of terrorism struck the hearts of all of us who were there, most of all it affected those who were in the midst of the explosions and their loved ones. This young woman stood in front of me, nervously hopping from one foot to the other, wringing her hands, as she told me she had been on the bus that had blown up.

She told me how she had survived but was now plagued by fear. She had not been able to get beyond it. Every person with a backpack, every package, every purse was a bomb. And, of course, sights like those only brought back the nightmare.

She was sure she would die soon. She said she could make no real plans. Her sense of continuity had been stolen. She, like most victims who can’t get beyond an event, was trapped in that event, so she needed, then more than ever, a lesson in freedom.

There was a line of other people behind this woman waiting to ask questions. I had 400 other people doing exercises, as this was in the middle of a seminar, so I had little time. I wanted to give her something that would help her feel even a little better about her experience.

I asked her a question that I already knew the answer to, and I gave her instructions that might sound silly on the surface, yet they’re powerful enough to break the chains that tie us to overwhelming past events.

I asked her if, when she thought about the event, it was life-size – were the images she remembered as big as real life? She said they were. In fact, she replied, ‘They’re bigger than real life.’

All at once she began to tear up and shake. All too often, someone like her is told that we must relive our nightmares to get over them. She was a perfect example of how untrue this is. She had been reliving and reliving this for some years, and it had only gotten worse. I knew it was time for some humour.

I asked, ‘Are you afraid of trains, buses or planes?’

She nodded, still trembling. I told her that the chance of being struck by terrorism is low itself, but the chance of being stuck twice is ridiculously low. I then told her that I’d like to hire her to fly in the seat next to me, ride in my cabs and be my bodyguard in all my travels, just so I could be safe.

She laughed. I needed to get her laughing so that she could focus on what I wanted her to do rather than being obsessed with the fear she was feeling. People are often afraid of making jokes with someone who has been through a trauma, but getting someone to laugh at their problem is exactly what they need, to start seeing things from a different perspective.

We were ready to begin.

There were two main problems that she had: the fact that she continuously imagined the event happening over and over again and also that she imagined it occurring as a bigger-than-life movie that was happening to her in the present. I needed to get her to change these two things.

I asked her to do something a little different than what she had been doing.

‘I know that this terrible memory has been terrifying you, but I want to help you begin to put it where it belongs, in the past. To do that, can you think of the memory you have of where you were after the bomb exploded? Maybe a couple of hours afterwards, when you realized you had survived and that you were alive and OK?’

She closed her eyes and started to recall the time after the event and nodded.

I continued, ‘Now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to imagine floating inside that “you” in this memory, and as you do I’m going to ask you to imagine the whole experience happening in reverse.

‘I want you to run it backwards so that you see people walking backwards, suck the bus back together so that you see it reassembling and riding backwards, the whole movie of everything that happened moving backwards so that you’re watching it in reverse. Run the movie all the way back until before you got on the bus.’

When she got to the start I asked her to stop. I got her to do this a few more times. While she carried out my instructions, I hummed circus music, ‘Dunt dunt dulluduh en duhduhdeh.’ She giggled. That, as I told you, is a very important thing. I asked, ‘Are you done?’

She nodded. I got her to run the movie backwards because she was used to imagining the event happening in the future. I wanted her to begin to put it back in the past. By having her reverse the experience in her mind, it got her brain to think about it in a completely different way.

‘Now I want you to shrink the memory of the tragedy to the size it would be if it was a tiny movie,’ I said as I held out my hands about three feet in front of her. ‘About this big. Look at what happened as if it’s in a tiny screen in front of you, and run the movie of that event from beginning to end, but see it small and in the distance.’

She did what I asked of her, with great precision.

‘Last, I want you to imagine yourself on a bus, looking at all the other people on the bus with their knapsacks and purses and see them taking pens and books out while they study.’

She imagined this and smiled. That smile meant a lot.

I then asked her to go back to the scary picture. A few minutes had passed, and here I was asking her to do the very thing she’s been avoiding and fearing for years.

She just shook her head and said, ‘It feels different.’ I told her to look at strangers with backpacks, at parcels on the floor of the train. She shook her head again and looked at me, shrugging, and saying, ‘It just doesn’t bother me the same way.’

Now, it’s not that she deleted the event from her mind. It would always be a horrible memory in her past. What I did was get her to stop her past memory from affecting her present. Because I got her to change how she represented the memory, she was able to diminish the feelings she had when she imagined it, and it was easier for her to cope. It was something for her to practise, and each time she did so she could cope a bit more. She had learned something that would help her become free from this memory.

Tragedy exists only in the mind as a terrible memory. A memory is just a representation of an experience. When you change the way you represent an experience, you change how you feel about the experience. Now it’s time for you to get some practice doing something similar.

Joe found it difficult to believe that it was that easy for the woman to overcome the trauma that must have come from such a terrible experience. Richard’s idea itself made sense, though. It was true that what had made her feel so horrible was the memory of the awful event. It made perfect sense to Joe that, if you changed the memory, the resulting feeling would be affected as well. But such a dramatic change? And so quickly?

Richard then explained that it was time for the audience to do an exercise. Each person had to find a partner and get each other to think of a negative experience from their past. The exercise involved helping each other watch the experience on a mental TV screen, and then running the imaginary movie of what happened backwards in their mind while humming circus music. Then everyone had to get each other to see themselves in the experience, but with the experience working out in the end differently. Joe wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to do this. He considered wandering out of the seminar room until the exercise was over, but he thought twice about it. He had come this far, so for the first day at least he would do all the exercises. A slightly balding middle-aged man tapped Joe on the shoulder from behind.