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Revision as of 18:43, 26 March 2006

This technique neutralizes the powerful, negative feelings of phobias and traumatic events.

Remember, most people learned to be phobic in a single situation that was actually dangerous, or seemed dangerous. The fact that individuals can do what psychologists call "one-trial learning" is proof that a person's brain can learn quite rapidly. That ability to learn rapidly makes it easy for you to learn a new way to respond to any phobia or trauma.

The part of you that has been protecting you all these years by making you phobic is an important and valuable part. We want to preserve its ability to protect you in dangerous situations. The purpose of this technique is to refine and improve your brain's ability to protect you by updating its information.

1. With your eyes open or closed, imagine you're sitting gin the middle of a movie theater and you see a black and white snapshot of yourself on the screen.

2. Now, float out of your body and up into the projection booth. See yourself sitting in the movie theater seat, and also see the black and white photo on the screen. You may even wish to imagine plexiglass over the booth's opening, protecting you.

3. Now, watch and listen, protected in the projection booth, as you see a black and white movie of a younger you going through one of those situations in which he/she experienced that phobia/trauma. Watch the whole event, starting before the beginning of that incident. Observe until beyond the end of it, when everything was OK again.

If you are not fully detached, make the theater screen smaller and farther away, make the picture grainier, and stop and start the film so that when you're done viewing it, you're completely detached. End the movie after the phobia-causing event, with a freeze frame of yourself.

4. Nest, leave the projection booth and slip back in the present you in the theater seat. Next, step into the freeze frame photo of the younger you, who is feeling OK again, at the movie's end. Now, run the entire movie of that experience backwards in color, taking two seconds or less to do so. Be sure to go all the way back to before the beginning. See, hear, and feel everything going backwards in those two seconds or less.

5. To test the process, attempt to return to the phobic state in any way you can. What if you were in that situation now? When will you next encounter one of these situations? If you still get a phobic response, repeat the steps 1 to 4 exactly, but faster each time, until none of the phobic response remains.

6. Since you were phobic/traumatized, you have stayed far away from those particular situations in which you used to feel phobic, so you haven't had the opportunity to learn about them. As you begin to encounter and explore these situations in the future, we urge you to exercise a certain degree of caution until you learn more thoroughly about them.

NLP Patterns