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.
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