"Time heals all wounds." This aphoristic bit of common sense contains very
little usable information about the relationship between time, healing, and
woundedness – about how time heals. However, we all probably can recall
situations where this apparent dynamic seemed to hold true. An old enemy now is
a great friend; an old injustice we swear we'll never forget becomes a source of
humor and wisdom. But was it just the passage of time that caused these changes
to occur? And if, without contemplation, it seemed so, what about all the old
wounds that haven’t healed, and are managing our lives through habitual
avoidance patterns?
The secrets of abuse, the dynamics of shame, and the
hollowness of the elaborate strategies of co-dependency are all being revealed
as we work on ourselves and share our learnings. Why hasn’t time healed them
without all the work? As we become aware of our past, peeling back the layers of
romanticism ("I had a happy childhood, my parents never abused me"), those of us
who find that such cheerful attitudes are part of the spell of denial are faced
with some sense of the irrevocable nature of the past. We may deeply sense that
these things happened and we are stuck with them — forever deprived and
deficient.
This attitude to a varying degree is incorporated into some older
forms and philosophies of therapy. From their perspective the best we can hope
for is to become reasonably neurotic and accept some sense of bleakness about
the human condition. And, of course, it is necessary to spend years of time and
great sums of money to arrive at this version of sanity. Fortunately, Eastern
religions infiltrated our culture, fostering the formulation of more holistic
philosophies and therapies, and validating the rediscovery of the Western
mysteries and magic. (For anyone averse to the suggestion of such a causal
relationship between the arrival of Eastern wisdom and our own awakening, it's
perfectly acceptable to consider the process as auspicious coincidence —
synchronistic). With the help of Eastern concepts that elevate the regard for
our humanity, we have come a long way in redefining our potential, who we are,
and what we can be.
The conviction that we can reveal the truth of our past and
heal our past grows daily. But — change our past? — even those at the forefront
of the consciousness movement are shaken by such a concept. I have seen a room
full of therapists bridle at the thought of tampering with our sacred past.
(Check in for a moment here — doesn't it make you a little queasy to think of
changing your past? Doesn't the ground suddenly feel a little less solid
underfoot? And do you get a new sense of your past, your bundle of memories, as
just that — a bundle, a commodity — the referent package by which you navigate
into the future?) But for a moment, let us disassociate from personal histories,
and reflect on general history. It is very apparent upon reflection that history
is not "real" — it is a story told by some of us to the rest of us. The "some of
us" most certainly discriminates, or has an axe to grind, regarding what facts
to include and how to include them, and the "rest of us" have our attitudes,
discriminations, and axes that determine how and what we hear.
Now, we say,
personal history is different, I was there, I know what happened, it happened to
me! But, were you, do you, and, did it? Reflect on the selectivity of our own
function of memory and how it is affected by attitudes and beliefs. Haven't our
memories contained our shame and guilt because of the way we remembered them.
Can we not read attitudes and beliefs as "self-or-other induced" hypnotic
suggestions about what was real and what it meant? We all have witnessed the
insidious side of efforts to change history – the holocaust never happened,
Stalin was a saint, and Iraq was to blame for 9/11. Those not fooled by such
misinformation are disgusted by it. And it is the element of intelligent
discrimination that rebels against the possibility of a similar inner violation.
But changing personal history, using hypnotherapy and NLP, is not such a denial
strategy. Hypnotherapy and NLP, recognizing the pervasive hypnotic quality of
all communication and that it is happening unconsciously with largely unsuitable
results, have elucidated the structure and dynamics of how we communicate so we
can communicate more clearly for more beneficial results. To change personal
history is not to deny your existing memories or to suppress them. The goal of
changing your personal history is to free your life force from the frozen
emotional crystallizations attached to your memories so that this life force —
your very being — can be available to you, to live as you, in present time.
Dissolving these crystals, breaking up the patterning of how you identify
yourself, your limitations and your potential, is the goal of changing your
personal history.
Consider for a moment the possibility of changing your
personal history without seeking self deception, or denial, or new avoidance
strategies. In such a process, you are not assuming the internal posture of a
victim acquiescing to doublespeak for survival imperatives. Rather, you are
empowering yourself to be at cause over your life — even over your heretofore
irrevocable, past. To be "at cause" over every aspect of your life is
tremendously empowering. To understand it and do it properly (we are not talking
about taking the blame for what happened to you here) amplifies and accelerates
the healing process. Your unconscious mind gauges the reality of what it
contacts by its vividness, and the unconscious assessment of reality determines
your emotional relationship to experience. If you re-image a past situation with
enough conviction and power, you send instructions to the unconscious to break
up the patterning that has held your emotional energy captive, freeing yourself
from the fixed limiting ideas that were sustained and perpetuated by that
captivated, "frozen" energy. You gain new insights into the situation, new
perspectives on yourself and your past. You do not lose any learnings you had
gained or any of the information. All you do is break up the patterns that kept
you restricted, and you learn to challenge a very powerful unconscious
assumption we all share to a greater or lesser degree — that to keep our
learnings we have to keep the emotions captive; we have to hold on, to be in a
sense unforgiving of ourselves and others to keep the intelligence to protect
ourselves. This simply is not true. We learn by learning, not by holding on to
our emotions. When you re-image a past event vividly, changing your behavior in
that event to include choices you didn't think to have at the time, you
reprogram yourself to access such new resources in all similar situations,
seeing and feeling yourself acting with your new choices.
The more you work with
this process, the more you become aware of and free yourself from the subtle
sense of irredeemability that has plagued you because of the absolute regard in
which you held your memories and your relationship to them. This process can be
one of self-hypnosis. But in the same way that you might talk with a friend
about an idea to help give it clarity and power, it can be invaluable,
especially initially, to do this work with a skilled hypnotherapist who can keep
you focused on what you want to create. They will also help you to find ways to
"move" in the realm of the unconscious, suggesting perspectives that might not
otherwise occur to you. For example, many clients have the experience of
learning something that makes them feel resourceful in the therapist’s office,
but lose this resourcefulness when they go out into the world. The simple remedy
is to spend a bit of time in the office imagining taking new learnings into
future situations — called ‘future pacing.’
It is a crucial and powerful bit of work that is generally
overlooked in a lot of therapy work. I suspect that a lot of addictive problems
would not recur if the clients, having once learned how to change their
behavior, were taught how to keep the change by allowing their unconscious minds
to prepare them to handle future temptations through the use of future pacing. I
have briefly sketched the dynamics of a powerful concept for change. That there
exist procedures today that can give you a happy childhood — that can allow you
to heal and enrich your past in ways you never thought you could give yourself
permission to do, is a possibility worth investigating.
To link directly to this article use this
link:
http://www.hypnotherapyarticles.com/Transpersonal/articlet00006.htm
Copyright, Jack Elias, October, 2003. All rights reserved.
Contact: Jack Elias, Author, Finding True Magic: Transpersonal Hypnosis
and Hypnotherapy/NLP
American Institute for Transpersonal Hypnotherapy/NLP, P.O. Box 17229,
Seattle, WA, 98127, jack@FindingTrueMagic.com ,
www.FindingTrueMagic.com
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