you make others feel. It’s important to start with yourself. If you feel good, they’ll probably want to be around you more. It’s that simple.’
Joe took this on board. He could give this a try the next time he spoke to someone he liked. It seemed so obvious that maybe it could really work.
‘What do you think would happen if you approached her?’ Alan studied Joe’s face for a response.
‘Well, I imagine she would just stare at me and wonder what was wrong with me. Then it would be awkward, and she’d make excuses and avoid me for the rest of the course.’
‘Wow, that’s amazing. You can see into the future and read her mind? Quite the skill,’ Alan teased, a broad grin spreading across his boyish face.
Joe smiled back. ‘Yeah, she would do that if I had nothing to say.’
‘When you think about her staring at you and wondering what’s wrong with you, how do you do that?’ Alan asked.
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Joe furrowed his brow.
‘Basically you’re making a movie in your mind of what would happen if she rejected you.’
Joe nodded.
‘Let me guess. This movie is pretty big and colourful and bright, right?’ Alan said.
Again Joe nodded.
‘OK, so what would happen if you practised what Richard just taught you and took that movie and made it small and black and white and moved it farther away? Then what would happen if you replaced it with a new movie of you going over there, starting a conversation, getting her laughing and smiling and making her feel good, and made that movie vivid, clear and life-size?’
Joe found the new image in his head, and for a second he felt excited and confident about the possibility of talking to her. As he looked over at the brown-haired woman, he could have sworn that she caught his eye for a few seconds and smiled at him. Then, a reality check. ‘It’s a nice thought, but reality doesn’t work that way,’ he said to Alan. His critical voice spoke loudly: Too good to be true. It can’t be that easy.
Alan stared at him quietly for a second, and then said, ‘Maybe reality isn’t what you think it is. Maybe whatever you think becomes your reality.’ With that, he walked once again to the back of the room as people began taking their seats.
Dr Richard Bandler returned to the stage and continued speaking.
A young woman approached me at a seminar last month. She told me she was on the bus that blew up in London during the infamous July 7 tragedy. That was when explosions rocked London because the underground trains and city buses were targeted.
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
