TLT_Chapter1.pdf

Excerpt from Time Line Therapy™ & The Basis of Personality -

Chapter 1

& Advanced Neuro Dynamics

Chapter 1

Since the introduction of the Line Therapy® Techniques in 1988 in the book Time

Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality , there has been, not only excitement

about the techniques themselves, but also major interest by the

psychotherapeutic community and a rather rapid adoption of the process by

people actively involved in seeing clients daily for various reasons. In the last few

years, it has become obvious that an individual's Time Line with all the person's

history -- his joys and fears, his happiness and sorrow, his loves and hates, his

limiting and empowering decisions -- is a major part of that person's personality.

Over the last few years, we found that, if we were able to intervene in a client's

Time Line therapeutically, we were able to assist the client to create seemingly

miraculous changes in his life -- changes that extended even to the deepest level

of personality.

Models, such as Time Line Therapy®, are interesting devices. A model is a

description or simulation of how something works. In essence a model is a

blueprint or a map. Like a map, a model is not necessarily "true." It is just a

representation of reality. So, we are not necessarily looking for truth in our model,

we are only attempting to offer a description of how a portion of the human

personality works. Like a map, it is only a description of the territory; and the

value of any map or a blueprint lies in the results that you can produce by using

it. In retrospect, even after 5 years, this model still seems to be a major

discovery.

From the time of Aristotle to William James to Freud and Jung to Milton Erickson,

M.D., people interested in Psychology have been searching for a way to

adequately describe the human experience of time. Time Line Therapy®, as a

model, has the potential to not only make sense out of our temporal experience,

but also to change our understanding of how negative emotions and limiting

decisions affect us, as well as describing how to create a meaningful future for all

time to come, because with Time Line Therapy® we now understand the human

temporal experience and can change the basic elements that make up

someone's history.

Since 1988, thousands of people have been affected by the techniques of Time

Line Therapy®. Hundreds of people have been trained in the techniques and use

them daily. Thousands of others have attended the Secret of Creating Your

Future® seminars given all over the world, and have seen dramatic changes in

their lives. Today, there are institutes in Europe, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong,

Brazil and the United States authorized to teach the techniques of Time Line

Therapy®.

The Time Line Therapy® techniques are a relatively recent development. The

idea of an individual having a means of knowing the difference between

memories of the past, and the future, or having a "Time Line" is not. Aristotle was

one of the first in our culture to mention the idea of a "Time Line" in Physics IV,

for the Greeks had a clear idea of temporality. Our having a Time Line may be, at

least in part, a result of the structure our language.

ARISTOTLE: "Western minds represent time as a straight line upon which we

stand with our gaze directed forward; before us we have the future and behind us

the past. On this line we can unequivocally define all tenses by means of points.

The present is the point on which we are standing , the future is found on some

point in front of us, and in between lies the exact future; behind us lies the

perfect, still farther back the imperfect, and farther yet the pluperfect. ... The

Greek language also has corresponding verb-forms which can be delineated in

quite similar manner on a straight time-line. ... According to Aristotle, therefore,

we must represent time by the image of a line (more accurately: by the image of

movement along a line), either a circular line ... or a straight line." [Hebrew, pp

124-6]

WILLIAM JAMES : Time Line Therapy® has its roots in traditional psychological

thinking, and is based on earlier models, which preceded it. William James, in

Principles of Psychology, in 1890 says, "If the constitution of consciousness were

that of a string of bead-like sensations all separate ... we should be wholly

incapable of acquiring experience. ... Whether a highly developed practical life be

possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful ..." He described

the experience of time, "In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-

edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched

and from which we look in two directions in time. ... Date in time corresponds to

direction in space. ... If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by an

horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past,

present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the

horizontal at a certain point." He says, "Some things we date simply by tossing

them into a past or future direction." And so, "memory gets strewn with dated

things -- dated in the sense of being before or after each other. The date of a

thing is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some past or future

thing." [Principles, pp 396-413]

MILTON ERICKSON: Time Line Therapy® also has its roots in the work of

Milton Erickson, who until his death in 1980, was the world's foremost

Hypnotherapist. Erickson, almost single -handedly, brought hypnosis out of the

closet, and made it possible for the American medical and psychiatric community

to accept it as a "legitimate form of treatment." In the early 1960's Erickson was

using an hypnotic technique which, remarkably, was quite like Time Line

Therapy®.

"One hypnotic phenomenon can be used to induce another. The movie screen

can be employed as an uncovering technique. The patient looks at it, sees his

past ... He can look at the screen, lose his own identity, and observe various

traumatic experiences that occurred in his own life experience. ..." The client can

look at his past and his future in a non-threatening way: "... the patient saw

himself at a later age; on another, at a still later age -- all the way from five years

of age on up to thirty-two. ... Then he was allowed to set up another screen

where he could see himself as he hoped to appear next year. Thus he was led to

recognize what he wanted in his future, what was meaningful for him in that

future. ... That technique has been called pseudo- orientation into the future. Just

as one can orient a patient back to the past, so one can project himself into the

future in accordance with his own motivations and ... desires." [Practical, pp 342-

344]

YOUR TIME LINE : Who are you if not your collection of memories? For almost

100 years, psychologists have agreed that our past experiences do determine

who we are, and how we act. (Although the examination of memories has, in the

last decade or two, fallen into disfavor among psychologists because they did

have a reliable technique to affect the memories.) Memories are recorded and

stored as we age and with time they have more and more influence on us. Our

Time Line is the index to the memory encoding of the unconscious mind, and it is

usually wholly unconscious.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND : In the context of Time Line Therapy®, the words

"unconscious mind" are not intended to signify anything mysterious or unusual,

simply the part of your mind of which you are not conscious, right now. Your

unconscious mind is a very important part of you. Think about it for just a

moment. Here is a part of you that runs your body; it makes your heart beat,

causes the lymph system to circulate, your breathing to continue, your eyes to

blink, your stomach to digest your food, and many other tasks that perhaps you

had never even considered.

The first thing to appreciate is that your unconscious mind is the source of all

learning, all behavior and all change. Let us look at each one of these

individually:

LEARNING : Your unconscious mind is the part of you that learns, not your

conscious mind. Now, you may have thought that you learned consciously in the

past, and although your learning has to go through the conscious mind, it is your

unconscious mind that remembers everything. Everything, once learned, resides

in the unconscious mind.

Think about all the things you have ever learned. Until the subject was

mentioned, how many of them did you remember consciously? Probably none! If

you had to remember all the phone numbers you know consciously, there

wouldn't be enough room for anything else, would there? So all learning takes

place at the unconscious level.

Think of all the phone numbers you have learned, and which you now know. For

example, you know your home phone number, do you not? If you'd like to do this

with me, please say it to yourself. Now before you were thinking of your home

phone number, where was it? Obviously it was stored somewhere, of which you

were not conscious -- that is your unconscious mind -- the part of your mind of

which you are not conscious, right now. What's important about that is that all

your learning -- everything you have ever learned -- is stored in your unconscious

mind.

BEHAVIOR : I was approached by a student at one of the hypnosis seminars I

teach.&127; He asked, "Can you make me move my arm unconsciously?" I

asked the student if he had ever considered that he can't move his hand

consciously. I said, "Do you know how many muscles there are between the tip

of your fingers and your shoulder blade? There are 159 muscles. So, you

couldn't move your hand consciously. You have to move it unconsciously. It's not

just your hand, either -- all behavior is generated at the unconscious level. Think

about walking. You just put one foot in front of the other, don't you? When you

do, however, you don't think about it. You just do it. In fact if you think about

walking, that thinking can be counter-productive. Thinking about walking is

conscious thinking. The fact that it interferes with walking shows us that the

behavior is generated unconsciously.

How about this, the last time you drove to work, how conscious of it were you?

Do you remember the whole trip? Or do you remember none of it? If you want a

real scare just look over at the person next to you on the freeway, the next time

you drive somewhere. They too are probably unconscious.

One more example. You get on an elevator, punch a button (say 8) and the

doors close. Your eyes go up, and you watch the floor numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 6,

and the doors open, and the person next to you gets out, and you follow. "Is this

the 8th floor." I do that all the time, I must admit.

CHANGE : Think of a bad habit you wanted to change in the past. Was it easy?

Probably not. Most people find it hard to change a bad habit. For them it's

something that takes time. I remember in the 60's when sideburns were long, and

I used to play with mine all the time, and one day I said I'm not going to do that

any more! But, you know, five minutes, and there I was again, playing with them.

If change was that easy, you could walk up to a friend who was being a bit of a

jerk and say, "Um, excuse me, but you're being a bit of a jerk! Would you please

change?" And they would change. Right then -- if change was conscious! In the

real world, change isn't always that easy. Many people go on doing the same old

thi ngs over and over, year after year and they complain about it. If change isn't

that easy for us, it is simply because we aren't fully in rapport with our

unconscious mind. In the real world people are often not in rapport with the

unconscious mind, and that is why change isn't that easy for them.

Your unconscious mind would really like to be in rapport with your conscious

mind. In fact your unconscious mind yearns for rapport, and looks up to your

conscious mind like a 5 or 6 or 7 year old brother or sister might look up to you. It

wants your direction and support, and it would like to&127; do what you asked if

it only knew how. If you are not feeling like there is rapport between your

conscious and unconscious mind, it may be because you were giving confusing

messages to the conscious mind.

Let us look at this idea a little further: Your unconscious mind cannot process a

negative in consciousness. It's true. In fact, it's also true for the conscious mind

as well. Think about this. You cannot think about what you wish to not think about

without thinking about it. Think about that. For example, if I said, "Don't think

about a blue tree," what are you thinking about. unless you were semantically

trained, you are probably thinking about a blue tree. Even though I asked you not

to!!

Most of us go through our lives telling ourselves, "I don't want to think about a

blue tree. When you go in to see the boss, do you say, "I hope he doesn't get

angry like the last time."? Or when starting out in a new relationship, do you say,

"Gee, I hope I don't get hurt."? Or how about a salesperson going in to make a

sale and saying, "I hope I don't blow this sale."?

Do you do that? If you do, it may be the wrong signal to be giving to your

unconscious mind. If it is the wrong signal, it is because the unconscious mind

cannot process a negative in consciousness. So, to facilitate communication

between the conscious and the unconscious minds let us find out a little more

about this part of us which is so important, and of which we are so little aware --

the unconscious mind.

The Prime Directives of the Unconscious Mind:

The Prime Directives of the unconscious mind provide a framework for the

context of doing Time Line Therapy® with yourself or others. The model of the

Prime Directives gives us some powerful assumptions which structure our use of

the tool of the techniques we will learn. The term Prime Directives means that the

unconscious mind is "hard wired" (meaning that it comes from the factory this

way) and is set-up to provide or to do the following:

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