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Years ago I lived on a floating home in Portland, and one of the rituals I still miss from those years is what I came to think of as my coffee-on-the-deck practice. Most mornings, before anyone else was awake and before the day’s noise began, I’d take a hot mug out to the deck and just stand there.

The Willamette River would be moving the way rivers always move, indifferent and unhurried. Mist would lift off the surface in slow rolls. A heron might pick its way along the bank. Sometimes the sky was the color of a peach, sometimes the color of slate. And every so often, if I held still long enough, something in me would let go all at once. The chatter would drop. My shoulders would drop. Time would do that strange thing it does when you stop trying to push it. And I’d come back into the day with a kind of inner steadiness that no amount of caffeine could account for.

I didn’t have a name for what was happening. I just knew the days I started that way went better than the days I didn’t, and I made a practice of getting out on the back deck whenever I could. Decades later, I recognize what I was doing. I was giving myself a daily, deliberate dose of awe.

A piece in National Geographic this fall caught me up on what science has finally figured out about the practice. The article, called “The Life-Changing Power of Awe,” summarizes about a decade of research that’s mostly come out of UC Berkeley, where the psychologist Dacher Keltner has been mapping what awe actually does to a human body. Keltner’s book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a beautiful account of what he and his colleagues have found, and the short version is this: awe is medicine.

The findings keep stacking up. A 2023 Harvard study found that just fifteen minutes in nature can measurably improve mental health, on something like the same order as moderate exercise or a basic dose of an antidepressant.

A 2022 brain-imaging study of sixty-three adults found that a single hour-long walk in a forest measurably lowered amygdala activity (the brain’s alarm system) when participants were later put under stress, compared to people who’d walked through a city.

A 2015 Berkeley study of undergraduates found that the ones who reported more frequent experiences of awe also had lower circulating levels of interleukin-6, a marker of chronic inflammation we now know underlies almost every modern disease, from heart attacks to depression to Alzheimer’s.

And a diary study tracking 269 adults over twenty-two days found that on the days people experienced more awe they reported about twenty percent less stress, fewer physical complaints, and greater well-being overall.

What the research is showing, in other words, is that awe doesn’t just feel good. It physically shifts your nervous system.

The neuroscientist Virginia Sturm at UCSF has found that awe pulls a body out of the sympathetic, fight-or-flight branch of the autonomic nervous system and into the parasympathetic, rest-and-digest branch. Your vagus nerve wakes up. Your heart rate drops. Your inflammation drops. The default mode network (the part of your brain that does most of the self-focused worrying) goes quiet.

You stop being the small, anxious self you usually are and become, for a few minutes, just an awareness that’s looking at something larger. Then you come back. And you bring the gentleness with you.

This is where my decades of teaching neurolinguistic programming come in. When Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed NLP at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, one of their core insights was that powerful internal states are anchorable. A state, in NLP language, is the whole package of how you’re feeling and thinking and breathing in a given moment, and the body keeps an unconscious record of it.

If you pair a deep enough state with a sensory cue (a touch, a word, a piece of music, a remembered image) the cue can later re-trigger the state. Athletes do this when they touch their wrist before a free throw. Singers do it when they take a particular kind of breath before a high note. Anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of something and been catapulted back to childhood has felt anchoring at work. The body does it on its own. NLP just makes it deliberate.

Awe, it turns out, is one of the deepest anchorable states available to a human being. When you stand on a mountain and the world unfolds underneath you, or you sit in a great cathedral as an organ floods the space, or you hold a newborn and your heart does that thing it does, you are in a powerfully integrated state across nearly every system in your body.

Anchor that state (notice your breath, notice where your feet are, notice the temperature of your skin, hold a particular small gesture in your hand) and you’ll be able to come back to a fragment of it later, in traffic, in a hospital waiting room, at a kitchen table where a difficult conversation is underway. You won’t get the whole peak. But you’ll get a taste, and the taste is enough to reset your physiology.

The good news is that you don’t need a mountain. Keltner and his colleagues have spent years showing that awe is built on attention more than on scale. A 2021 trial of older adults found that a fifteen-minute weekly awe walk, where people just slowed down and looked carefully at the textures and colors and small movements of the natural world, produced measurably greater drops in distress and bigger gains in positive emotion than ordinary walking did.

Sturm calls these micro-doses of awe. A leaf. A patch of moss. The way light moves on water. The face of a person you love. Music that gives you goosebumps. A stranger doing a small kindness on a city sidewalk. Even, Keltner notes, the simple practice of thinking about a person whose courage or generosity has shaped your life. He calls that last one moral beauty, and it produces awe responses just as strong as anything in nature.

What I’d add, from a working life spent inside NLP, is this: don’t just have the experience. Notice it while it’s happening. Slow down enough to feel where it lands in your body. Anchor it deliberately. Pair it with one small specific thing (a hand on your chest, a word you say to yourself, the feel of your breath at the back of your throat) so you can come back to it.

The contemplative traditions have always taught some version of this. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it recollection. Jewish tradition has the practice of saying a hundred blessings a day, each one a small returning to gratitude and astonishment. The Quakers sit in silence until something rises. None of those practices are decorative.

They are state-induction technologies, refined over thousands of years, that human beings developed precisely because we figured out, long before fMRI scanners existed, that the way we pay attention shapes everything else.

So here’s my homework, if you’ll take it. This week, find one fifteen-minute window where you can be outside without your phone. A backyard works. A park bench works. A walk to the corner and back works. Look slowly at one specific thing the way a child or a painter might. A bark texture. The geometry of a fern. The way the sky changes between two buildings.

Let yourself drop into it. When something inside you opens, even a little, notice it. Put a hand on your chest, take a breath, and say to yourself, quietly, this counts. That’s the anchor. Bring it back to your desk and use it during the next hard meeting.

Then come tell me in the comments what happened. We’re a wisdom school here, which means we do this practice together. The science is finally catching up to what the contemplatives have always known: paying attention, slowly, to the world that’s already in front of us, is the cheapest, most available, most reliable medicine we’ve got. Awe is a vitamin. And almost nobody is taking it.

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I first learned to meditate in 1968 when I took instruction in Transcendental Meditation from the Maharishi’s people (at the recommendation of the Beatles). I still practice it, although with a few variations I’ve learned over the years. When you get inside your head on a regular basis, you begin to wonder exactly what consciousness is, and where it comes from.

Recently a group of researchers at the Allen Institute in Seattle got two rival teams of neuroscientists into the same room and proposed what they called an adversarial collaboration. Each team believed in a different theory of how consciousness arises in the brain.

Rather than each side continuing to run experiments designed to confirm what they already believed, they were asked to design one large experiment together, subject it to the same measures, and see what the data actually said. It took seven years. The results were published last April in Nature, and the headline wrote itself: neither theory won.

The two theories are worth understanding, at least in outline, because they represent the two main ways serious scientists have been trying to solve the hardest problem in all of science.

The first, Integrated Information Theory, says consciousness emerges from the way information is unified and integrated across a system. The more integrated the information processing, the more conscious the system.

The second, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, says consciousness is more like a spotlight in the brain, a broadcasting mechanism that takes information and makes it globally available across different cognitive systems, and that this broadcasting, this making-available, is what produces conscious experience.

Both theories are sophisticated. Both have generated genuine predictions and genuine research programs. Both have serious scientists behind them. And in the largest, most carefully designed adversarial test ever conducted in this field, with 256 human subjects and three separate brain-imaging methods, neither came out on top. The data didn’t fit cleanly into either framework.

What it did suggest was something that neither theory had particularly emphasized. Consciousness, the study found, seems to be rooted not in the frontal cortex, where planning and reasoning and the machinery of deliberate thought are centered, but in the sensory and perceptual areas at the back of the brain.

The prefrontal cortex matters for intelligence, for doing, for executing. But awareness itself, the sheer fact of experience, appears to arise further back, in the regions that process what we see and hear and feel.

One of the researchers put it with a precision that surprised me: intelligence is about doing, while consciousness is about being.

That this would not have surprised a single serious contemplative/meditative practitioner in the last three thousand years.

The entire project of meditation, across virtually every tradition that has developed it in depth, is predicated on a distinction that modern neuroscience is only now beginning to map.

There is the thinking mind, the part that plans and reasons and narrates and judges and produces the internal monologue that most of us identify as our self. And then there is the awareness that is aware of the thinking mind, the sky in which the clouds of thought appear and move and dissolve.

The contemplatives called it the witness, or rigpa, or the ground of the soul, or pure consciousness, or a dozen other names depending on the tradition. What they all agreed on is that it is not the same thing as thought. It is what watches thought. And you can learn to rest in it.

This is not an advanced teaching. It’s the first thing a serious meditation teacher points at. Sit down. Close your eyes. Notice that you are thinking. Notice that there is something that notices the thinking. One of my teachers called it “Beginner’s mind.”

That noticing, that bare awareness prior to any particular content, is what the researchers in Seattle were inadvertently pointing toward when they located consciousness in the perceptual rather than the executive brain. Perception precedes interpretation; being precedes doing. The awareness that registers experience is more fundamental than the machinery that processes it into plans and narratives and judgments.

NLP makes a version of this same distinction, approached from a different angle. “The map is not the territory,” which is the foundational principle Richard Bandler and John Grinder built the whole framework on, is another way of saying that your running commentary about experience is not the same thing as experience itself.

Most of us spend our entire lives inside the map, inside the story about what is happening, and we rarely if ever touch the raw sensory experience underneath.

The NLP techniques that involve slowing down internal representations, changing submodalities, stepping back from the content of thought to observe how it’s structured, these are all, at bottom, exercises in finding your way from the map back to the territory. From doing back to being. From the frontal cortex down to the back of the brain, if you want to use the neuroscience.

What the Nature study leaves open, and what I find most interesting, is why this discovery was so hard to arrive at.

The experiment took seven years to design, conduct, and analyze. It involved hundreds of subjects and the full weight of modern neuroimaging technology. And its primary finding is that consciousness is more about perceiving than reasoning, which is something that anyone who’s spent serious time in meditation has known from direct experience since long before brain scanning existed.

There’s no reproach in that observation, by the way. The scientific method requires what it requires: operationalizable hypotheses, controlled conditions, replicable measures, adversarial testing.

You can’t build a proper study around someone’s meditation practice, however deep. What you can do, and what I think the field is slowly moving toward, is treat the contemplatives as having conducted their own empirical investigations, just through a different method, and take their results seriously as data.

The inner laboratory, it turns out, is real. The experiments conducted there over thousands of years have produced consistent findings across cultures and traditions that had no contact with each other. That’s not nothing.

The finding that consciousness is about being rather than doing is, at one level, a neuroscientific result about where in the brain experience is generated.

At another level, it’s an invitation. Because if consciousness is not a product of the thinking, planning, executive mind but something that underlies it and precedes it, then the practice of resting in awareness, of letting thought arise and pass without grabbing it, of sitting with the sheer fact of being alive in this moment before the narrative kicks in, is not a retreat from engagement with life: it’s contact with its actual ground.

The monks knew. The scientists are catching up. And the rest of us get to benefit from both.

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Last week, in The Loneliest Civilization in History, I wrote about culture and loneliness. This week, let’s look at individual loneliness. The AARP released a study last December showing that four in ten Americans over the age of 45 now describe themselves as lonely.

That’s up from 35 percent in 2010 and again in 2018, a number that has been climbing steadily for fifteen years through boom times and recessions, before the pandemic and after it, through every policy proposal and every surgeon general’s advisory and every think-piece about third places and community gardens.

The trend line doesn’t bend. And buried in the data is a detail that really popped out for me: for the first time since they began tracking this, men are lonelier than women. I don’t think we know what to do with that yet.

The public health conversation around loneliness tends to reach for infrastructure: more parks, more community centers, more apps designed to facilitate real-world meetups, more walkable neighborhoods.

These are good things and I’m for all of them. But they’re answers to a question about proximity, and loneliness, as anyone who’s ever felt it in a crowded room knows, is not primarily a question about proximity.

Richard Bandler, one of the founders of NLP and my mentor on the subject, once said something to me that I’ve never been able to set aside: “Most people aren’t really in a relationship with their partner. They’re in a relationship with their internal representation of their partner.”

He meant it about romantic love, and it’s profoundly true there. But the same principle reaches further. Most lonely people aren’t simply lacking other people. They’re carrying an internal representation of themselves in relation to other people that makes genuine contact feel impossible, unnecessary, dangerous, or not worth the risk.

That’s a different problem from not having enough parks.

What NLP calls a “representational system” is essentially the map your nervous system uses to navigate reality. You don’t experience the world directly. You experience your brain’s model of it, filtered through everything that has ever happened to you, every conclusion you drew, every story you told yourself about what other people are like and what you can expect from them and what you deserve.

For most people this map is largely unconscious. It runs in the background, shaping every interaction, and it was mostly written in childhood by people and circumstances that no longer exist.

A child who learned early that needing people leads to pain will grow into an adult whose nervous system treats closeness as a threat even when nothing threatening is happening. A man who was taught that asking for help is weakness will find himself at sixty with a wide social network and no one he can call at two in the morning. A woman who never saw her parents repair a rupture after a conflict will unconsciously avoid the kind of intimacy that requires repair, because she has no map for what comes after.

None of these people would necessarily describe themselves as choosing loneliness. They’d say they just don’t really connect with people, or that nobody gets them, or that they’re better off on their own. The story feels like a description of reality. It’s actually a description of the map of reality.

This is where the loneliness conversation gets uncomfortable, because it asks something of lonely people that the infrastructure solutions don’t. It asks them to look at what they’re bringing to the table, not in a blaming way, but in the way a good therapist or a good friend eventually has to ask: what is the story you’re telling about connection, and is it actually true?

I spent years working therapeutically with people, including children, who had been given very good reasons to distrust other human beings. The most striking thing I learned was not how damage works, which you can read about in any textbook, but how resilient the impulse toward connection is even under the weight of serious injury.

It doesn’t die. It goes underground. It disguises itself as self-sufficiency or cynicism or the carefully maintained preference for being alone. But it’s still there, still looking for a way through, still hoping that “this time” the door might open onto something different.

The NLP tool that I’ve found most useful for this isn’t a technique so much as a question. When you notice yourself pulling back from connection, or concluding that an interaction confirmed what you already believed about people, stop and ask: what story am I running right now?

Not whether the story is fair or unfair, justified or unjustified. Just: what is it? Name it. “People always let me down.” “Nobody really wants to hear what I think.” “I’m too much for most people to handle.” “It’s safer not to need anyone.”

The act of naming the story creates a small but real distance between you and it. You’re no longer inside the story looking out. You’re looking at the story. And from that position, a different question becomes possible: is this actually true right now, in this moment, with this person? Not in general. Not historically. Right now.

This doesn’t dissolve forty years of protective wiring overnight. But it interrupts the automatic quality of it, and interruption is where change begins.

The AARP data is worth sitting with. Men over 45 are lonely in rising numbers at precisely the life stage when the structures that organized connection for them, work, physical activity, the companionship of raising children under one roof, tend to fall away, and they often have no practiced alternative.

Women, on average, have spent decades building and maintaining the relational infrastructure that sustains them when circumstances change. Most men haven’t, because they were taught not to need it. That’s a story, too, a story about what it means to be a man, and it’s killing people at a rate that doesn’t make the front page because we don’t usually call it what it is.

The park won’t fix that. The app won’t fix that. What might fix it, slowly, imperfectly, one person at a time, is the willingness to look honestly at the map you’ve been using and ask whether it’s still serving you, or whether it’s just old, drawn by hands that are long gone, leading you reliably away from the thing you actually want.

The number isn’t four in ten. The number is closer to ten in ten, because everyone carries some version of this. The difference is only how much of your life you’ve organized around it.

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We live in an age where the sound of words floods every corner of our lives, but genuine listening remains one of the rarest commodities. We hear, but we don’t really hear.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in intimate relationships. Two people who once leaned into every word with wonder find themselves years later trapped in cycles of complaint and defensiveness.

One says, “You never listen to me.” The other snaps back, “That’s ridiculous, I’m listening right now.” And then the quarrel spirals, not because of malice, but because of imprecision. We talk past each other, we drown in generalizations, and we bury our needs under language too vague to be acted upon.

This is where a tool from the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), the Meta Model, can open a door back to true intimacy. Developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler (my mentor, who trained and certified me as an NLP Trainer’s Trainer) and John Grinder, the Meta Model is essentially a set of questions designed to challenge the distortions, deletions, and generalizations that pepper human speech. It’s a way of rescuing the richness of lived experience from the shorthand of language.

And in relationships, it can be a lifeline.

Take that classic line, “You never listen to me.” To a partner’s ears it feels like an indictment, and the natural instinct is to defend. But the Meta Model suggests curiosity instead of counterattack. “Never?” you might ask. “Can you tell me a time when I didn’t?”

Suddenly the global accusation becomes a specific memory, which can be understood, learned from, even apologized for. Another question could be, “What would listening look like to you right now?” This moves the conversation from blame to a practical, solvable request.

Consider how often partners use vague nouns to stand in for entire universes of meaning. One says, “I just want more support.” The other nods, bewildered. Support could mean financial help, emotional reassurance, doing dishes, or staying home more often. Without clarity, resentment festers.

The Meta Model offers a question: “What kind of support do you mean?” Now the fog clears. Maybe the answer is, “I want you to put your phone down when I’m talking about my day.” A partner can act on that. Suddenly support is no longer abstract; it’s concrete, achievable, real.

Or take the statement, “You make me feel unimportant.” Left unexamined, that’s a minefield. But if you respond with, “How exactly do I make you feel unimportant?” you shift from a sweeping character judgment to behaviors that can be seen and changed. Perhaps the answer is, “When you scroll through your emails at dinner.” Now the issue is not identity but an action, and actions can be altered.

The power of the Meta Model in relationships is not that it wins arguments but that it deepens connection. It slows the rush to judgment, the instinct to defend, and instead invites exploration.

Most arguments are fueled by vagueness. We fling global accusations and distorted assumptions at each other. “You always put work first.” “You don’t care about my feelings.” “We never do anything fun anymore.” Each of those statements hides something specific and human that could actually be addressed if it were spoken clearly. The Meta Model is like a lantern that helps couples uncover what’s really there.

There is also a spiritual dimension here. To truly listen in this way is to honor the other person’s humanity. It’s to say: I will not dismiss your words, nor will I take them at face value if they conceal your real need. I will ask, gently and persistently, until the truth emerges.

That is an act of love, even when it surfaces painful revelations. And it requires courage, because sometimes the deeper truths are harder to hear than the shallow accusations.

Imagine two partners practicing this regularly. Instead of escalating arguments, they turn them into inquiries. Instead of walling off with “That’s just how I am,” they explore, “What do you mean by that? When specifically? Compared to what?” Over time, they build a culture of precision and compassion. Arguments become less about winning and more about understanding. The house grows quieter, not because conflicts vanish but because they get resolved before they metastasize into bitterness.

Of course, the Meta Model is not magic. It can be misused as a weapon, a prosecutorial cross-examination that leaves the other person feeling cornered. Tone and intention matter. The goal is not to trap your partner in contradictions but to illuminate their meaning with kindness. Sometimes that means letting go of a question if the timing is wrong, or if the partner is too raw in the moment. Deep listening requires both tools and timing.

But when practiced with sincerity, this way of listening can save relationships. It cuts through the haze of generalization and touches the concrete experiences where love is either nurtured or neglected. It allows partners to make requests that can actually be fulfilled. And it creates a sense of being seen, not just vaguely acknowledged.

At the deepest level, isn’t that what we all long for in love and relationships? Not perfection, not constant agreement, but the sense that when we speak, someone is willing to journey past the surface and hear us as we really are.

We live in a world where algorithms pretend to know us better than our closest companions. Couples drift apart not because they stop loving each other but because they stop listening with curiosity.

The Meta Model is one way of reclaiming that curiosity. It insists that language is not the end of meaning but the beginning. It teaches us that behind every vague complaint there is a specific need waiting to be revealed. And it offers us the radical possibility that instead of fighting about words, we could use them to return to each other.

In a time when relationships are tested by distraction, stress, and cultural noise, deep listening can be a revolutionary act. NLP’s Meta Model gives us the questions, but love gives us the reason to ask them. If we can combine the two, we may find that what looked like the end of a relationship was really just the beginning of a deeper conversation.

And if you want to try it tonight, here’s a simple practice. Sit down with your partner and ask each other this question: “What’s one thing you wish I understood better about you?” Listen to the answer without interrupting.

Then, instead of defending yourself or rushing to fix it, ask one clarifying question using Meta Model precision. If they say, “You don’t support me enough,” you might gently ask, “What kind of support would matter most to you right now?” If they say, “You always interrupt me,” you could respond with, “Can you tell me about a specific moment when I did that?” Just one layer deeper, just one step closer to clarity.

Try it both ways. You may discover that what felt like a wall between you was really only fog. And fog lifts when you shine a light through it.

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If there's one area of life where communication truly makes or breaks the experience, it’s in our closest relationships. Love and marriage—those intimate bonds we build over time—are not just shaped by chemistry, shared values, or life goals. They're shaped, more than anything else, by how we speak to each other, how we interpret each other’s behavior, and how we filter experience. That’s where NLP—Neuro-Linguistic Programming—comes in, not as a gimmick or manipulation trick, but as a toolbox for transformation.

I’ve been studying and practicing NLP for decades, and had the privilege of learning directly from Richard Bandler, one of its co-creators. Something Richard once told me has always stuck with me:

“Most people aren’t really in a relationship with their partner—they’re in a relationship with their internal representation of their partner.”

That’s a staggering insight when you sit with it. We don’t respond to who our partner really is: we respond to the version of them that we’ve constructed in our minds over time, shaped by memories, meanings, mood, experience, and metaphor.

That internal representation is malleable, and once we learn to shift it—once we gain the flexibility to update that mental image based on new input—we begin to see our partner not through the filter of old arguments or disappointments, but as the complex, evolving, sometimes messy but always human being that they are.

That shift alone can save a marriage. It’s not about pretending things are perfect. It’s about updating the map so it reflects the territory.

One of the simplest, most powerful ways to use NLP in a relationship is through what we call representational systems: how we internally experience the world through visuals, hearing, and feelings. Some people process primarily through visual imagery; others through auditory language or tonal nuances; others through kinesthetic sensation.

Conflicts often arise when couples are speaking past each other, not just in content but in representational language.

If one partner says, “This just doesn’t feel right,” and the other replies, “But it looks fine to me,” they’re missing each other at a deep neurological level. When we learn to identify our partner’s preferred system and speak their language—literally—we begin to connect at a level that feels intuitive, even magical.

When done right, you’ll start hearing your partner say, “I feel like you really get me.” That’s no accident. That’s rapport through calibration, a core NLP skill.

Try this simple exercise: over this coming week, listen carefully to the kinds of sensory words your partner uses. Do they say “I see what you mean,” “That rings a bell,” or “It just feels off”?

Once you’ve identified their dominant system, mirror it in your language. If your partner says, “This seems cloudy to me,” you don’t reply with, “Well, it sounds fine.” You reply with, “Let’s try to bring it into focus.” You’re now pacing their internal experience, and that builds rapport at the deepest subconscious levels.

Another indispensable NLP skill in love and marriage is reframing. We tend to get caught in ruts: thinking patterns where a partner’s behavior is interpreted through a narrow, often negative lens. “He’s always late, so he must not respect me.” “She interrupts me all the time; she doesn’t care what I think.”

These are surface-level conclusions that miss the deeper reality. NLP reframing teaches us to challenge and change the meaning we assign to behavior, and to loosen the grip of old, rigid interpretations.

Next time your partner does something that irritates you, pause. Take a breath. Ask yourself: what else could this behavior mean, outside of my current story about it? If he’s late, could it be that he’s overwhelmed and trying to please too many people? If she interrupts, could it be enthusiasm, or even anxiety, rather than disrespect?

This isn’t about letting bad behavior slide—it’s about expanding the interpretive frame. Meaning is not fixed; it's fluid. Change the frame, and you often change your feelings about your experiences, too.

Anchoring is another technique I’ve used personally and Louise and I taught for years to couples looking to reignite connection (Louise used to have a coaching business working with couples in crisis and ADHD entrepreneurs, and back in the late 1990s we taught regular seminars/workshops on NLP together at Omega Institute).

It’s simple, elegant, and based on the way our brains wire experience. An “anchor” in NLP is any stimulus—touch, tone, word, gesture—that becomes neurologically associated with a specific state. Think of Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of the bell. We all have unconscious anchors. The key is to make them conscious and intentional.

Want to bring back the spark in your relationship? Sit with your partner and think of a moment when you both laughed hysterically together, or felt completely in sync, or first fell deeply in love. Close your eyes and relive that moment fully: see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

As you reach the emotional peak of that memory, nod your head in a way that signals your partner to touch you in a specific way—a squeeze of the hand, a hand on the shoulder—and repeat it a few times. Your partner is setting an anchor in you.

Later, when things are tense or disconnected, your partner can fire that anchor—the same touch in the same way—and bring flooding back to you some of the emotion linked to that memory. Then reverse roles and repeat the exercise only this time you’re setting your partner’s anchor.

While this simple exercise doesn’t replace deep work or honest communication, it can shift a state instantly and open the door to connection.

This even applies to places. Never fight in the bedroom, for example; the space itself will become an anchor for anger, when it should be one for sleep and love. Find a place in the house where you don’t spend much time — a hallway, for example, or the garage — and go there for your arguments.

Another Richard Bandler gem he shared with me was about changing the internal “movie” we play when we think about our partner.

“People get stuck watching the same lousy loop of past pain,” he told me. “Change the movie, and you change your marriage.”

NLP’s submodalities—the subsets of the modalities (sight, sound, feeling) qualities of our internal representations—are the keys to that change. If every time you think of your spouse’s mistake, for example, you may see a giant, vivid, color movie in IMAX with Dolby sound: no wonder the emotion still hurts.

Try this: pick a negative memory that keeps surfacing. Now imagine that memory as a movie screen in your mind. Shrink it. Drain the color. Make it black and white. Turn down the volume. Add a silly soundtrack like circus music. Watch it play backward at high speed. Now, when you think of that memory, it’s no longer loaded with the same intensity. You’ve permanently shifted its emotional charge. You haven’t repressed it: you’ve re-coded it.

These tools don’t replace honesty, vulnerability, or emotional maturity. But they help create the internal space where those qualities can emerge. They unstick the patterns that keep couples spinning in circles. They empower us to take responsibility not just for what we say, but for how we perceive and interpret what’s said to us. They offer a way out of the maze.

A lot of people come to relationships expecting the other person to meet their needs, fulfill their fantasies, or heal their wounds. That’s a setup for disappointment. NLP doesn’t promise perfection, but it gives you the tools to become more conscious of how your own mind is shaping your experience of love. It puts you back in the driver’s seat.

If you and your partner are willing to play—willing to experiment with these tools and see what works—you may discover new dimensions of intimacy you didn’t even know were possible. You’ll speak to each other in ways that land. You’ll fight less often, and when you do, you’ll recover faster. You’ll stop reenacting the past and start co-authoring a new future.

And it’s fun. That’s the part people often miss. These aren’t grim psychological techniques or re-experiencing horrible times like in some dysfunctional “therapies” that involve screaming or hitting pillows. They’re playful, dynamic, and often hilarious.

You can collapse an argument by anchoring a moment of joy. You can shift a stubborn belief with a silly metaphor. You can interrupt a pattern of criticism by pacing and leading into curiosity. As Richard likes to say, “Change doesn’t have to be hard—it just has to be ecological and effective.”

If you’re interested into digging deeper into Richard Bandler’s work, his own books like Get the Life You Want or Using Your Brain for a Change are packed with exercises you can do alone or with a partner.

My book Living with ADHD: Simple Exercises to Change Your Daily Life is about using NLP to rebuild and strengthen relationships and repair from life’s woundings. While it was written with ADHD people in mind, 95% of its content is universal. Similarly, my book Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision is about how to use NLP for political communcation and is a good primer in NLP itself.

I also wrote Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being about using an NLP technique called “bilateral therapy” to overcome past traumas that haunt us, including PTSD.

There are also studies showing how NLP-based interventions improve communication and reduce conflict in couples therapy settings. John and Kathleen LaValle run introductory and advanced seminars through their company, PureNLP, that are excellent.

NLP won’t solve every problem, but it will give you a map and a set of tools for navigating the terrain of love and relationships more skillfully.

In a world that often teaches us to communicate through blame, sarcasm, or withdrawal, NLP offers something radically different: conscious connection. And that, in the end, may be the most loving act of all.

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Trauma is often seen as something to be hidden, medicated, or overcome. In our culture, we treat it like a malfunction—a deviation from the ideal of happiness and success. But what if trauma is not a curse? What if it’s a doorway?

Across spiritual traditions, mythologies, and even modern psychology, there is a recurring truth: it is through our wounds that we awaken. The pain we carry—when held consciously—becomes the very seed of our transformation. And when we do this healing not only for ourselves, but in service to others, it becomes a sacred act.

Trauma is not the end of the story. It is, quite often, the beginning of our real one.

The Wound That Speaks

Carl Jung called it the “wounded healer” archetype. In myth and in life, it is often the person who has been broken open who becomes the vessel for healing others. Chiron, the ancient Greek centaur, was struck by an incurable wound but used the pain to become a master healer and teacher. Jesus, too, rose with wounds still visible—transfigured, but not untouched.

This is not accidental. There is wisdom in the wound.

In the moment of shattering—whether it’s grief, betrayal, abuse, or loss—something deeper wakes up. Our usual defenses fall away. The ego can no longer maintain control. And into that rupture, something holy can enter.

Trauma strips us down to the raw core of being. And if we have the courage to stay with it—not bypass it with distraction or spiritual clichés—it can become the very ground of awakening.

Science Catches Up

Modern neuroscience and NeuroLinguistic Programming are beginning to affirm what the mystics have always known: trauma changes the brain. But it can also expand it.

In the early aftermath, trauma can produce hypervigilance, flashbacks, and a shattered sense of safety. But under the right conditions—therapy, ritual, deep community—this same experience can lead to what researchers now call post-traumatic growth.

Studies show that people who integrate their trauma often report:

· Greater empathy and compassion for others

· A stronger sense of purpose

· Increased spiritual awareness

· A deeper appreciation of life

The wound becomes a well. But only if we draw from it intentionally.

The Journey Downward

Many spiritual traditions teach a version of the same thing: that real initiation doesn’t take us up, but down. Into the underworld. Into the shadow. Into the grief we’ve avoided for years.

This is not pathology. It is initiation.

Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness. The Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree facing Mara. In tribal societies, initiates are taken into darkness, into symbolic death, so they may emerge reborn.

Trauma is our modern initiation. It is involuntary, often chaotic, and rarely supported by culture. But its structure is ancient. First comes the rupture. Then the descent. Then the struggle to find meaning. And if we do the work—then, maybe, the rebirth.

But rebirth doesn’t mean erasing the past. It means being transformed by it.

The Social Body

Healing is not only personal. It is also collective.

We live in a traumatized society. We see it in addiction, violence, loneliness, racism, inequality, and ecological destruction. These are not just policy failures—they are the symptoms of a wounded culture.

As my friend Dr. Gabor Maté writes, trauma is not what happens to us; it’s what happens inside us when we are overwhelmed and unsupported. And this is true on a societal scale. Colonization, slavery, genocide, poverty—these collective traumas still live in our nervous systems and institutions. They don’t just go away. They repeat until we remember them consciously, grieve them together, and begin to transmute them.

Healing trauma is spiritual work. But it is also justice work.

When we do our own inner healing, we create the capacity to hold others’ pain without fear or judgment. We become less reactive. Less punitive. More capable of building the kind of communities where others can heal too.

Our personal healing contributes to a field of collective compassion.

Sacred Activism

If you carry trauma, you are not broken. You are initiated. You are being invited into sacred activism—not just to protest injustice, but to embody its opposite. To become a presence of healing in a world built on pain.

This doesn’t mean you need to be fully healed before you serve others. Often, it’s our unhealed parts that help us connect most deeply. They remind us to stay humble, to stay human, to speak from the scar and not just the script.

Jesus didn’t heal from a throne. He healed with his hands, in the dust, alongside the wounded. He met people in their suffering—not to preach doctrine, but to touch them with love. He saw trauma not as failure, but as the very place where grace enters.

We are called to do the same.

The Invitation

Your trauma is not your shame. It’s your testimony.

It holds within it a wisdom that no textbook, no guru, no perfect life could ever teach you. It is your initiation into the depths of being human—and the invitation to become a bridge for others.

In a world that teaches us to numb, to hide, to distract—healing becomes rebellion.

And in a world built on separation, your wound is the key to connection.

So bless the scar. It means you survived. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve been chosen to help someone else find their way home.

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HOW TO CONQUER YOUR PHOBIAS WITH NLP

In these monthly lessons on NLP, we’ve discussed how we store memories in different locations of the brain, usually associating them with particular emotional states.

This type of state-dependent learning was first demonstrated back in the 1950’s, when college psychology students were broken out into two classes. One class was given enough booze to get them thoroughly drunk, the other class was sober. Both were taught some new and somewhat difficult material.

When the students were sober the next day, they were tested on the material. To nobody’s surprise, the drunk students didn’t learn as well or remember as much of the material. But then came the surprise: they got the drunk-learning students drunk again, and gave them the test again.

This time, they scored significantly better than they had when sober. If you learn something when you’re drunk, it turns out, you’ll remember it more easily when you’re drunk again. The same is true of things you learn when you’re angry, bored, happy, in love, upset, or under the influence of drugs.

Our minds are organized for state-dependent learning.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, then, if there was some sort of an external indicator that you could hang around a person’s neck which would tell you when they were accessing what states? When they were remembering a picture, when they were hearing a sound, when they were experiencing feelings?

It turns out that just such an indicator exists. And it can be used to dramatic effect in vanquishing debilitating phobias.

To some extent, it’s a person’s entire body. To a highly specific degree, though, it’s their eyes.

The eyes are part of the brain. I remember when I learned that in biology, and thought, “No, this can’t be true. The eyes are an independent sensory organ.” But our professor made it quite clear that the eyes are an extension of the brain, just like the thalamus or hypothalamus or inner ear.

They’re a seamless part of the nervous system, which is run from the brain. They develop from the brain during fetal development, protruding through the skull to pop out the front of the face. They’re the only external part of the brain: a window, as it were, into the human nervous system.

And the eyes tell us what a person’s brain is doing.

When a person facing you looks up and to your right, they’re probably accessing a visual memory. If they look up and to your left, they’re probably creating a visual image, an imagination. When their eyes look sideways and to your right, they’re probably remembering a sound or voice; when they look sideways and to your left, they’re imagining a sound. When they look down and to your right they’re probably talking to themselves, and when they look down and to your left they’re accessing or filled by feelings, emotions, or tactile sensations.

(About half of left-handed people are wired exactly opposite of this, as are about 5 percent of right-handed persons, and everybody is just a bit different: rather than memorizing the list, it’s always best to “calibrate” with the person first, by asking them questions that would cause them to access a visual memory or imagination.)

Try this exercise. Sit down in front of your child or some other person and ask them a few questions which to answer they’d have to access these different states. Some examples could be: “What color is the carpet in your car?” “Can you feel your toes when you wiggle them?” “How would you describe your best friend’s voice?” “Can you imagine what it would sound like if your best friend talked backwards?” “What would your bedroom look like if it was painted purple and the ceiling was covered with feathers?” “When you ask yourself questions, what are they usually about?”

Notice how their eyes move.

This knowledge gives you a new way to make conversations interesting! Just ask questions and watch people’s eyes. No matter how boring they may be, you’ll probably find the motion of their eyes fascinating, because it tells you so much about what’s going on inside them. It can even be an informal lie detector.

For example, when a person is describing a “real situation,” but is looking up and to your left, they may be actually imagining the situation and describing to you their hallucinated visual image. We call this “lying.” To determine if this is what’s happening, calibrate. Ask the person a question you both know the answer to, such as, “Where did you park your car tonight?” Notice where their eyes go. If they’re up and to your right just before they answer, then you know that when they go up and to the left they’re most likely making something up.

Making your own movies

While most of the time eye motion tells us what’s going on inside the brain, it’s also possible to reverse the process.

Psychologist William James pioneered this long ago when he pointed out that most people think that body posture reflects emotional states. A person walking along all hunched over is most likely feeling poorly; perhaps inadequate or depressed or unhappy. A person walking with their spine straight and chin up is probably feeling pretty good about life.

But James said you can reverse the process. If you’re feeling depressed, he suggested that you try standing up straight, taking a deep breath, and looking up and ahead instead of down. The very act of adjusting your posture will alter your brain’s neurochemistry, changing your emotional state.

Similarly, if you want to make or find a mental picture but are having difficulty doing so, try looking up. If you want to remember or experience a feeling, try looking down and to your right. Want to locate a sound? Look from side to side.

Begin to catalog your postures and the corresponding emotional states. Notice how you can shift states by changing your posture, and which postures produce the most rapid and noticeable changes.

This is the beginning of taking charge of your own neurochemistry, and can be applied to many of the behaviors that are most often treated with drugs, such as a lack of motivation, constant anxiety (often exploding into full-blown phobias), or emotional reactiveness. It’s also a process that’s relatively easy to teach to children, so they can control their own emotional states with greater ease.

Richard Bandler, who with John Grinder first developed NLP, taught me a “fast phobia cure” technique that is also in several of his books. The system has been shown in thousands of demonstrations all over the world to cure — really and permanently make go away — phobias of all sorts, from fears of spiders to elevators to public speaking. You can find videos of him doing it on YouTube.

At a training I attended in London taught by Bandler, a woman who was a writer for one of England’s largest newspapers presented herself. She had such a fear of public speaking, she said, that she was incapable of standing up in front of four of five of her peers to make a presentation at the newspaper where she worked. She didn’t stand up and tell us this because she was too frightened. She sat in her seat, hunched over, and told it to the person next to her who related it to the class.

Bandler took this poor, terrified woman up on stage, holding her hand as she stared at the floor, and walked her through the process I’m about to lay out here. It took five minutes. The transformation was so dramatic that one of London’s largest TV stations came to cover her five-minute speech to over 150 people on the seventh day of the training.

Here’s how you do it: Sit down in a quiet place and close your eyes. Imagine you’re in a movie theater, sitting in a comfortable seat in one of the front rows. The screen in front of you is blank.

Now, float up out of your body, leaving it sitting in that front row, and comfortably drift up to the upper balcony. There, you’ll find a remote control device that runs the movie, which you can operate with your mind or your hand.

Now, sitting in your safe place way back in the upper balcony, look down at yourself sitting in the front row. That “you” is looking up at the screen. Now turn on a still frame, a single picture, of yourself in the situation where you’re normally phobic, just before you begin to feel the phobic feeling.

Make it a color slide. Then push a button on the control panel and have the movie roll forward through the entire phobic experience, all the way through to the other end where it’s all over and you’re feeling ok again. At the end of the movie, freeze that frame on the screen. (If at any time watching the movie becomes too uncomfortable, you can move the screen away, make it smaller, or stop or slow down the movie.)

Now turn the freeze-framed picture on the screen to black-and-white.

Now, float down into your body in the front row, then, body and all, float up into the picture on the screen. Fully associate with the picture: that is, be inside the picture. Look around and see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel, although it’s all in black-and-white.

Now, run the movie backwards, with all the sounds going backwards, making Donald Duck noises, all the way to the beginning. Let it go jerkily and crazily, the way old-time movies did when they ran backwards.

When you get “back to the beginning” of the movie, freeze-frame it again and step out of the screen, then float back to your seat in the front row. Look at the black-and-white picture for a moment, then let the screen go white.

Usually, the first run of this wipes out most of the phobia. Imagine yourself in a phobic situation and see how you feel about it — odds are your feelings will have changed significantly. If there is any lingering phobic feeling, repeat the process.

Many children are “phobic” about school, a particular class, or a particular teacher. Our system seems set-up to cause this, and it often lasts a lifetime, as it did with that reporter.

Even though these are very mild phobias, often really verging on the “I dislike that” to the “I hate that” spectrum, there’s usually a significant element of fear in there, too — particularly after a few failures in a class or other situation.

The fast phobia cure can be very useful with people in such situations.

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Learning New Communication and Relationship Skills

Good communicators know a few things that incompetent communicators don’t. The primary three are pacing, matching, and building rapport. Very often people have been spending so much time just trying to keep up with the world, or struggling with schools and jobs that don’t suit their temperament, that they’ve failed to learn these lessons of good communication. But they’re easy to learn, and don’t take a lot of practice to become second nature.

Natural communicators — people who are intuitively good at conveying their ideas and thoughts to others — usually do these things by instinct, whether in person, on the phone, or even in writing. Nobody told them to, but somewhere along they way they picked the skills up. Odds are they had an early role model — a teacher or parent or older sibling — who was a master communicator and they simply modeled that person, picking up the techniques by practicing them without knowing that there were words or names for any of them. Perhaps they modeled a remote person they didn’t even know personally, such as a writer or TV personality.

However they did it, they became good at communicating, and the more they did it the better they got.

The concept of breaking these skills out and naming them is just from the last century, although again the ancient Greeks had more than a few words to say on the overall concepts. Numerous people over the years, and in particular Richard Bandler and John Grinder, observed highly effective communicators in a number of different settings and then asked: “What is it that they’re all doing in common that makes them so effective?” From this questioning process came the core concepts of pacing, matching, and building rapport.

When you master these skills you can be comfortable and effective in virtually any social or business situation, from talking one-on-one to giving a speech to a room full of people. You’ll find that others have a better understanding of what it is you’re trying to communicate, and — perhaps most interestingly — you’ll discover that you have a clearer and more solid grasp of what they’re trying to say.

Pacing and matching

Here’s a tip for people who have trouble communicating or getting their way when it’s important. I remember a few years ago I was stuck in the Salt Lake City airport because of a huge snowstorm that had started in the Midwest and then swept all the way down to Atlanta. I’d been waiting at the airport for a flight out for most of the day, and I wasn’t alone in my situation: the airport was crowded with people whose flights, like mine, had been delayed, rerouted, or outright cancelled. The snowstorm was echoing through the entire air traffic system, having already shut down several cities.

Sitting in my airline’s frequent flyer lounge, I took a glass of wine and a book to a seat near the reservations desk, where I could keep my eye out for possible changes in flights. From the desk, I could hear a man progressively raising his voice.

“When can you get me out of here? I have business to do! This is a disaster for me!” A man with a red face wearing a dark pin-stripe suit was leaning over the counter, speaking rapidly with short, clipped words and a faint New York accent.

“Well, sir, you see we don’t here have any control…” said the man behind the desk, sitting at a computer, his voice slow and soft with a thick southern drawl.

The New Yorker interrupted him. “I don’t care what you can’t do! Tell me what you can do! I know you can find a plane to put me on, you just don’t want to pay another airline to fly me!”

“No, sir,” the agent said, his voice soft and deliberate. “The situation is that none of the airlines have capacity right now…”

“Get somebody to bump somebody!” the man barked.

And on it went for a few minutes, until the New Yorker stomped away angrily, leaving the reservations agent shaking his head at the man’s bad manners.

I made a mental note. Ten minutes or so later, I walked over to the reservations agent, and speaking at the same speed I’d heard him talk with earlier, asked him how it looked for my flights. He brightened right up, and energetically began searching for new flight options for me.

I wish I could say that my having paced the man’s speaking speed got me the flight I wanted, but it didn’t. The point, though, was that he felt that I understood him, that I was on his wavelength. I found myself relaxing into his cadence of speech, and it made me feel like I was closer to him, too. We understood each other. Sympatico. Brothers in slow speech.

If I’d had to talk with the New Yorker, I would have sped up my speech to match his. Sometimes I even find myself picking up people’s accents without realizing I’m doing it. Years ago when I first discovered myself doing it, it seemed odd. Now it’s just there.

I remember being in a meeting with one of the larger clients for an advertising agency I used to own in Atlanta. There were eight or ten people in the room, and I was answering questions about a job we were working on, as well as offering suggestions on their marketing plans. I’d discovered that this committee in this company had their own pace, which largely followed the natural pace of the VP who ran the meeting. Everybody pretty much followed his pace, except one woman who, because of her slow and deliberate style, irritated everybody as she raised her voice to finish her long-winded (to them) sentences. The room had a pace. Those who didn’t keep up with it fell to the side.

Pacing isn’t just about speed. Notice how your voice changes when you speak with different people. I find that my voice changes as much as an octave between different people, depending in some part on how they’re speaking.[1] Pacing and matching their speed, tone of voice, use of language (slang, regionalisms, use of obscenity, etc.)

Pacing is also about the type of speech used, the predicates and other words. Is the person using simple sentences and short words, or complex sentences and polysyllabic words? Are they talking primarily in visual metaphors or auditory ones or kinesthetic ones?

This last point of predicates is a crucial one. If the other person is describing their experience using visual predicates, for example, and you use auditory or kinesthetic ones, you not only run the risk of not communicating, but you may even cause them to feel irritated with you (although they would probably never be able to say why). I’ve seen this happen in many situations over the years, and it’s particularly critical in intimate or highly personal communications.

A therapist, for example, who responds to a client saying, “I just feel like the world is crushing me: life is so rough,” with a statement like, “Well, let’s see if we can get a better focus on that — what do you see as the main problem?” is doomed. If, on the other hand, the therapist were to match the person’s predicates (e.g. “Let’s try to get a handle on that situation. What do you find is your biggest source of pain?”), there’s a very good chance that positive and productive change could take place. When you match people’s predicates, they believe that you understand their representation of reality, as if you can read their minds or have had similar experiences as them.

When you’re not synchronous with their predicates, they get the feeling that you don’t understand them or their world.

Pacing and matching also have to do with body posture, rate of breathing, and gestures. Sit in a room full of people and pick one person you don’t know in the room and imitate their body posture. You’ll notice shortly your target person will react, either changing their body posture away from you and your posture, or else moving toward you in some way, either moving physically closer or else pointing their body in some way toward you. If you copy them too closely, they may become irritated; if it’s too far off, they won’t notice it. In any case, all of their “noticing” will probably be on an unconscious level.

The unconscious mind is acutely aware of these subtle cues, a remnant from our evolution as mammals and social animals, even when the conscious mind is otherwise occupied.

The greater the extent to which you can pace and match these subtleties of speech, the more in-synch your listener(s) will believe you are with him, her, or them. Out of this sense of synchronicity, of understanding, comes a sense of rapport, the first key element to effective communication.

Leading

After you’ve paced a person for a while, you may want to try leading them. Make small changes in your language, body posture, rate of speech, or even speed of breathing. If they’re really feeling in synch with you, they’ll unconsciously follow your changes. When you see that happen, you know that they’re in a highly receptive state and will attend carefully to your communications.

This is a strategy that good public speakers use, whether they realize it or not. They start out with a pace, tempo, cadence, tone, and vocabulary that’s as baseline, common-denominator as possible. From there, they escalate to progressively stronger and more intense states of emotion and insight, using their body language, tone of voice, speed of speech, and complexity of language to bring their audience along with them.

As with any tools, communications tools like this are most useful if you practice with them until you’re comfortable using them. The more effectively you can attend to the people around you, catching the nuances of their speech, posture, language, and so on, the more quickly you can “enter their world” by pacing, and matching them, and help them to enter your world by leading them.

Working with children

Pacing and leading children may seem like an adult would have to act like a child in order to step into their world. In fact, your matching, pacing, and leadings can be much more subtle. Speaking at the same speed is useful, and trying to — in your own and natural way — mirror their emotional state is a good way of beginning.

But instead of behaving childlike, you’re expressing the adult version of the child’s state. This way it feels natural to both you and the child, and your modeling the child’s world in an adult way can also provide a good role model for, “This is what it looks like when you grow up.”

When I was the executive director of the children’s village in New Hampshire, one of the kids in our care fell off a horse and split open her lip on the ground. She was crying loudly.

My first instinct was to try to calm her down, but I also knew that this was an instinct that arose from my own personal and internal sense of alarm at another person being in pain, and came out of my needs, not hers. She needed somebody to step into her world, and then lead her out of it.

So instead of saying, “Everything will be ok,” or, “Don’t cry,” I ran over to her and said, “Wow, I’ll bet that really hurts!” She looked up, stopped crying almost immediately, and through hiccupping sobs said, “Yeah, it does!”

“It always hurts a lot when you first injure yourself,” I said. “And you’re bleeding, too. That probably hurt the most when you first hit the ground.” (Notice the presupposition here: by talking about the past — when she hit the ground — I’m helping her unconscious mind begin the process of putting the hurt into the past. The statement really said, “At one time it hurt more than it does now.”)

“It did!” she said, sitting up, wiping the blood on the back of her arm.

“You’ve cut yourself before, or skinned your knee and it’s bled, right?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And then the bleeding stopped?”

“Yeah, then I get a scab.”

“I wonder how many minutes it’ll take for your lip to stop bleeding and for it to stop hurting?” I said, noticing that the bleeding had already mostly stopped.

She touched herself gently and said, “It seems like it’s stopping now.”

Notice here what had happened up to this point — I’d stepped into her world of pain, and then moved her attention from the pain to the healing. I helped her remember times when she’d been injured and had healed, and even helped her to point out to herself that it always happened that way. Now for the final step.

“I wonder if you’re strong enough to get back on the horse again now?” I said. (She was a girl who valued her own strength: if her main value had been pride or bravery or something else, I would have used that word instead of “strong enough.”)

She stood up and dusted herself off, looking at the horse with a smile. “I can do it now.”

“Are you sure?” I said, using a tonality that implied I knew she could do it. “I know you’re strong and it looks to me like your lip is much better now. But are you strong enough to get back up on that horse?”

“Just watch,” she said, flipping herself back up into the saddle.

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[1] There are also issues of command that have to do with voice. Just like someone who extends a hand to shake with their palm down is signifying their intent to dominate, and a person who extends a hand with the palm up shows their willingness to be dominated, voice tone can convey relative power positions. Generally the lower the tone of voice in comparison to others, the more power a person is claiming for themselves.

Many people are shocked when they first discover that not everybody “sees” (or “hears” or “feels”) the world the same way they do. It’s a fact, however, that we each have our own particular ways of experiencing life, and most people have a single sensory system upon which they most heavily rely.

People who have a different perception of the world from ours have interesting and often valuable lessons to teach us. Particularly when we understand our differences, they can help us expand our experience of life in ways that may not other­wise have been available to us.

Check out this simple test, and give it to a few friends and your children. The results will open a window to — or tell you more about — or give you a better feel for — yourself and those close to you.

It will also introduce you to a core concept of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) that people experience the world differently from each other. This is some­times stated as, “The map is not the territory.” After you’ve taken the test and compared your results with some friends, consider which of these possibilities may be at work in your relationships.

Rank each of the three answer-options below between one and three, with three being “most often true” and one “least often true.” When you’re finished, add up all the V’s (visual), A’s (auditory), and K’s (kinesthetic). The numerical scores will tell you (show you? give you a feeling for?) which of the three representational systems you’re most and least comfortable with. Keep in mind that, at least at this point, this is just for your entertainment:

1. I naturally and easily say things like:
V “I see what you mean”
A “That sounds sensible to me”
K “I have a good feeling for that”

2. When I encounter an old friend, I often say:
V “It’s great to see you again!”
A “It’s great to hear your voice again!”
K “I’ve missed you!” (and give them a big hug)

3. I have:
V a good eye for decor and color coordination
A the ability to arrange the stereo and__ speakers so the music is crystal clear
K a special feeling in my favorite rooms

4. I let other people know how I’m feeling by:
V the clothes I dress in and the way I do my hair or makeup
A the tone of my voice, sighs, and other sounds
K my body posture

5. My favorite romantic encounters include:
V watching the other person, or vivid visualization or visual fantasy
A listening to the sounds the other person makes
K touching and being touched by the other person

6. When I want to really totally understand something:
V I make pictures of it in my mind
A I talk to myself about it
K I roll it around until I have a good feeling for it

7. When deciding on an important action, I:
V must see all aspects of the situation
A must be able to justify the decision to myself and/or somebody else
K know when it’s the right decision because my gut feelings tell me so

8. When it’s important to me to influence another person, I pay careful attention to:
V the pictures I paint with my descriptions
A the intonation and pace of my voice
K what kind of emotional impact I can bring to the situation

9. When I’m bored, I’m more likely to:
V change the way I look or how things around me are arranged
A whistle, hum, or play by making sounds in my throat or chest
K stretch, exercise, take a hot bath

10.  My favorite authors:
 V paint vivid pictures of interesting places
A write dialogue that sounds true-to-life
K give me a feeling for the story which is moving and meaningful

11. I can tell what another person is thinking by:
V the look on their face
A the tone of their voice
K the vibes I get from them

12. When I read a menu trying to decide what to order, I:
V visualize the food
A discuss with myself the various options
K read the list and choose what feels best

13. I would rather:
V look at the pictures in an art gallery
A listen to a symphony or rock concert
K participate in a sporting or athletic event

14. When I’m in a room with a band playing, I find most interesting:
V watching the other people or the band
A closing my eyes and listening to the music
K dancing with or feeling close to the other people around me

15. A true statement is:
V “It’s important how you look if you want to influence others”
A “People don’t know a thing about you until they’ve heard what you have to say”
K  “It takes time to really get in touch with another person’s core self”

Most people, when they take this test, will find that there is a definite preference for one system, but that preference is not more than five or ten points away from their least- preferred system.

A well-balanced person will have very simi­lar scores for all three areas, whereas a person with radically high or low scores in any one system may want to consider exploring ways to break up rigid patterns of perception and broaden and enrich his or her view, hearing, and experience in life.

You may also find it interesting that your closest friends — the people you best understand — often score similarly to you on the test. Those you just can’t figure out no matter how hard you try may score quite differently from you on the test.

This doesn’t mean that you should avoid people who have different modality-preference systems: instead it gives you an insight into (voice to? feeling for?) how you can have a wider range of friends and connections with others.

For ex­ample, experiment with using language that matches the lan­guage of those around you, and while doing so try to also experience the sensory realities that such language implies.

When we have this information about our children, it gives us a whole new range of tools for improving communication, and also for understanding their style of learning.

This helps us improve the way we communicate with them, and can also help you help your child’s teachers to better understand how she or he learns — and through that understanding change the way the child is taught. This, in turn, can have a profound impact on your child’s self-esteem.

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One of the easiest ways to learn something is to learn it backwards.

Over the years, a number of NLP practitioners reported that their “learning disabled” clients, both children and adults, had difficulty making stable, clear imaginary pictures. Somehow, for some reason that nobody knows but more than a few suspect has to do with watching television, these people have either lost or never developed in the first place the ability to consciously create pictures in their heads.

The visual cortex, that part of the occipital portion of the brain that processes images, is absolutely huge when compared to just about any other single-function part of the brain. It’s ten to fifty times larger (depending on how narrowly you define it), for example, than the temporal-region auditory processing areas such as Wernicke’s or Broca’s regions on either side of the head. It occupies most of the back of the head and is huge.

The reason for this is pretty obvious when you think of it. In the one microsecond-long picture — what you see right now when you look up quickly from this article and then back — there are literally billions of individual elements which go to make up that image. For the brain to process this, for us to be able to discriminate between over a million different colors, and to remember these images for years at a time, takes enormous brain processing horsepower.

For this reason, the visual part of the brain is one of the most powerful tools you have available in your mental toolkit. And it’s why if you can see something, or make a picture of it, you’ll remember it long, long, long after the “rote memory” (trying to remember the words by repeating them) part has gone.

Unfortunately, this simple fact about how we learn hasn’t yet made a complete transit from the laboratory to the classroom. Teachers still ask kids to recite things over and over, trying to cram them into those tiny auditory-processing parts of the brain, in order to memorize them. Very little emphasis is put on making pictures, except perhaps by the occasional highly-visual teacher.

So, to learn something, make a picture of it.

Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom, and over your head is one of those thought-balloons like in the comic strips. And in that thought balloon is a picture of you drawing a picture on an easel. If you can make that picture, one of the strongest memories you’ll carry away from this book is that you can learn things when you make a picture of them.

But, as mentioned earlier, many “learning disabled” people — those with “deficits” and “disorders” — have a difficult time making pictures. Their imagination apparatus has become sluggish.

Fortunately, the solution is easy and painless. As with learning to ride a bike or drive a car or read or type or anything else, there is one main thing which will quickly produce proficiency at making mental pictures: practice.

But how does a person know when they’re making good mental pictures? This is where the “backwards” part comes in.

Try this experiment. Find somebody — child or adult — who thinks of themselves as a poor speller. Get a few vocabulary words that they don’t know how to spell and would like to learn. Let’s say that one of those words is, for example, Connecticut. Or for the younger set, perhaps llama.

Now, have them make a mental picture of the map of the state of Connecticut or of a llama. When they say they have the picture, ask them to use a mental paintbrush to paint the word on the picture, one letter at a time, saying the letters out loud as they do it.

Now comes the reality test. If they’re really a “disabled” poor speller, odds are that they made a fuzzy, jiggling, poorly defined picture, and therefore can’t easily pull it back up and read the word off it.

So, ask them to look at the picture and to read the word off of it backwards. In order to do this, they must stabilize their picture. And that exercise of stabilizing the picture, done just a few times (sometimes it takes as many as twenty or thirty repetitions, each time with a different word), teaches them how to make clear, stable, useful pictures.

Memory teacher Harry Lorayne takes this a step further. If you can make a picture, he says, and make it an absurd picture, then you’ll have instantly committed something to memory.

This method, which Aristotle first taught as a way of memorizing speeches (he called it the Loci method, since he used absurd objects mentally placed in his house as speech-item reminders), has been around for a long time.

This is the basis of techniques to remember people’s names: think of Pat running around and patting everybody on the butt, or Loraine having rain pouring out of her hair and over her face, or Bill covered with dollar bills, or Dick…well…with an ice-pick for a nose. (See how hard it is not to imagine things?)

If you need to remember a to-do list, just make each item absurd and then link them together. The store is exploding with loaves of bread popping out of the windows. They’re raining down on the bank down the street. This is causing money to flow out the front door of the bank like a river, right into the front door of the dry-cleaner’s shop.

Pick up the bread, cash the check, pick up the clothes. The list could as easily be twenty items as three.

When NLP practitioners began teaching kids how to dissolve their spelling disability by reading off pictures backwards and practicing making absurd images, many noticed an interesting side effect: the kids became more proficient learners in virtually every area of academics.

They became better and faster learners of life skills. They could follow directions. They didn’t lose things as often. They had learned how to learn.

It’s all about those pictures and harnessing the horsepower evolution or the gods gave us to see and instantly process our world.

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When we communicate, there is a story, a storyteller, and a listener. The story travels from teller to listener, from writer to reader. Without people telling and listening, writing and reading, there would be no communication.

We began this discussion by talking about the importance of story. I wrote about the different ways people interact with the world, the way some people are primarily visual, some primarily auditory, some primarily kinesthetic, and so forth. In later articles, I talked about the importance of recognizing that someone else might not have the same response you have to a story and what techniques we can use to try to match their response to ours.

In all of these discussions, we assumed that the person who is reading, or listening to, or experiencing our story has just one identity. We talked about ways people are different from each other, but we haven’t yet talked about the different identities we each carry around inside ourselves.

Every day, we live out many different stories about ourselves. Another way of saying this is that we take on multiple identities to accomplish what we set out to do in the world. I am a husband to my wife, a father to my kids, a child to my mother, a friend to my friends, a boss to my employees, a performer to my radio listeners, an author to you, and so forth. Each requires different behaviors and, to some extent, different perspectives.

Many of us have experienced a personal “aha” moment when we saw or heard or felt who we really are, a deep and profound sense of personal identity and connection with all creation. Psychologists call that the core self, and Connirae and Tamara Andreas wrote a brilliant book about it in a therapeutic context, Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. I learned much of what I know about this concept from a training session I took with them a decade ago (although the way I’m expressing this all is entirely mine—their expressions are much more elegant, detailed, and specific to therapy and personal growth and transformation).

Those moments when we discover our core selves are memorable because they don’t come that often. Most of the time, though, we are inhabiting one of our many sub-identities.

Each of these identities requires a different skill set. This doesn’t mean that we’re acting or playing a role or putting on a mask when we inhabit one of these identities. For example, the part of me you meet when I sign books is really me—but it’s just one “part” of me. You probably won’t meet the part of me who is a dad because it’s not useful for me to be my dad part when I’m signing books.

There’s that word useful again. By now you may have recognized that “usefulness” is a like a secret handshake for competent communicators. When you are an unconsciously competent communicator*, you instinctively recognize which part of yourself is most useful when communicating with someone else. And you understand how to identify the part of your listener that will be most likely to connect with or listen to you.

Effective communication happens when your message matches the part of you that most cares about and most uses that message—and reaches the part of your listener that most cares about and uses that message. This is a form of map and territory congruence (as mentioned in earlier articles in this series).

If you’ve been reading this series of articles in a linear way, you may think you’ve read this before. Matching your message to the person listening may sound an awful lot like “The Meaning of a Communication Is the Response You Get.” It is. The message of that article was that each of us is different from one another, so what persuades me may not be very persuasive to you. We talked about tools we can use—such as anchoring, future pacing, and the learning trance—to make it easier to persuade someone to at least pay attention when we communicate with him or her.

Mapping identity is about your relationship with the person listening to you, but it goes even deeper. At this level of the communication code, we learn that even if you are talking to just one person, there is not just one “me” talking and not just one “them” listening.

Each of us has multiple identities, and what is persuasive to one part of a person may not be persuasive to another part of them. To increase the effectiveness of these techniques, you’ll need to map out your listener’s identity and figure out which part will be most effective to speak with.

Creating Mini-Me’s

In the 1999 Mike Myers’ movie The Spy Who Shagged Me, the hero Austin Powers has a little problem with his nemesis, Dr. Evil. Dr Evil has cloned a part of himself and named the one-eighth-sized clone Mini-Me. Dr. Evil created Mini-Me because he felt he wasn’t quite evil enough; he created Mini-Me out of his frighteningly curled pinky finger—his purely evil part. Mini-Me can’t talk—or at least can’t talk much—because an evil part doesn’t really need to talk. He writes notes and fights (unfairly) very well. Whenever Dr. Evil seems to be in danger of showing the least bit of compassion or humanity, Mini-Me scribbles him a note to buck up his evil side. He’s a very useful sidekick to have around for a fictional character like Dr. Evil.

Mini-Me gets most of the laughs in the film. It’s funny to see a pint-size version of an already cartoonish character, and actor Verne Troyer does a great job of imitating actor Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil character. As with most jokes, though, there’s also a germ of truth. All of us create Mini-Me’s, parts of ourselves that take on a life and an identity of their own. We create them because, like Dr. Evil, we find them useful.

It’s easiest to identify the different Mini-Me’s that play defined social roles in the world, such as my dad part, my friend part, and so on. These are identities that are created by our relationships with other people. Closer to our core, we have identities that we create from our own needs and desires. For example, I have a curious part, a hungry part, a compassionate part, a spiritual part, and so on. Being human, I also have a selfish part, a vengeful part, and a part capable of expressing anger.

We create, throughout the course of our lives, parts for every aspect of our being.

These parts have developed because they are useful to us. When we are born, parts emerge to accomplish certain tasks and to meet specific needs. Crying was a behavior controlled by one of our first parts, a part we developed because we needed a way to tell the world that we were hungry. Every time a new need arose, a new part of our brain was activated as a resource to meet that need. One part took responsibility for getting the diapers changed, another for getting fed, another for getting affection, and so forth.

As we go through life, we develop a whole repertory of parts. An entire cast of these parts develops to handle particular desires, needs, problems, and crises. Very often these parts were momentary loci of focused energy and attention; and when they were finished with their job, they dissolved back into your core self, the totality that is you.

Others were created to meet ongoing and lifelong needs, such as the need to be fed, or the need for attention, or the need to protect the body. These parts tend to come into being when we face large life changes, such as going to kindergarten, engaging in our first romantic relationship, leaving home, suffering a deep personal loss, and so on.

The parts that emerge to provide us with important new skill sets can take on relatively independent lives of their own. They each have a unique identity and personality. That’s why it’s more useful to say that there are multiple “me’s” than to talk about just one “me.”

“Wait,” you might say. “You make it sound like each of us has multiple-personality disorder.” We do each have multiple personalities, but for most of us they are not disordered.

The difference between someone who is mentally healthy and someone who has multiple-personality disorder (MPD) is that with MPD one part takes over, gives itself a name, and causes amnesia about all the other parts. In a mentally healthy person, a part takes center stage when needed but is aware of the other parts and, in fact, interacts with them.

For example, I can use my teaching part while I write this article, and at the same time I’m drawing on my friend part (thinking of you in a positive way, trying to give you something useful) and my parent part (hoping to equip you for the world, to one day see you fly on your own). Mentally healthy people unconsciously and intuitively understand that each of these parts is “me” and that collectively they make up the larger “me.”

We juggle our different parts all the time. The part that comes to the fore when you’re having a fight is very different from the part in charge when you’re falling in love; and both are quite different from the part that takes charge when you are applying for a job, dealing with a store clerk, or advocating for something you believe in.

Therapists can use this information about our different parts to heal dysfunctional parts and help us find our core self. I talk about how to do that in my book Living with ADHD: Simple Exercises to Change Your Daily Life. When we communicate specific, individual-issue messages, however, we almost always want to speak to a particular part.

Consider how George W. Bush spoke to our hurt and vengeful parts when he used the bullhorn at Ground Zero in New York. Or how some politicians speak to their constituents’ fearful child parts when they repeatedly invoke 9/11 “be afraid” frames. That’s because each part has its own function, and we can use the differences between parts to control how our message is heard. This is the primary key to cracking the identity code.

*As mentioned in an earlier article in this series, the transition we make (think of riding a bicycle) is from unconsciously incompetent (we don’t know that we don’t know how to ride the bike), to consciously incompetent (we try to ride and fall and realize we don’t know how), to consciously competent (we learn how to ride a bike, but still have to pay attention to what we’re doing or we’ll fall over), to unconsciously competent (we can ride the bike without even thinking about it). That same process applies to pretty much everything in life, including becoming an unconsciously competent communicator.

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Chapter 11

Walking to Improve Physical Health

Walking may well be the best single exercise there is for human beings. We're designed to walk. Through most of our history, we walked several miles a day in search of food, water, and firewood—as indigenous people do to this very day.

         …

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Chapter 10

Walking to Create a Motivational State

In his 1937 classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill shared the secret that steel baron Andrew Carnegie used to transform himself from a penniless Scottish immigrant into one of the richest men in America. That secret, Hill reveals, is to bind a clear vision of a future you want (in the case of his book, a future filled with riches) with a strong and positive emotional state.

         Hill wasn’t the first to observe how motivational states work. Three centuries before Christ was born, Plato wrote Protagoras, a story of a discussion between the sophist Protagoras and Plato’s teacher, Socrates. In this classic example of Socratic dialogue, the two men struggle with questions such as, “Why do the sons of good fathers often turn out ill [or good]?” and “Surely knowledge is the food of the soul?”

         Socrates speaks directly to motivation and results, asking Protagoras, “And what is done strongly is done by strength, and what is weakly done, by weakness?” Plato tell us that, “He [Protagoras] assented.“

         Following lengthy discussion of how people are raised and what they learn, one of the conclusions the men come to is that people are more strongly motivated by what they consider close than what they consider far away, be it in distance or in time.

         Or, as King Solomon is purported to have said a thousand years earlier, “When desire cometh, it is a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12.

         We are all, always, choosing between moving toward pleasure or moving away from pain. Every single minute is filled with one or the other: we’re never neutral.

         Moving away from pain is the “hottest” of these two, but strategies that move us toward pleasure provide long-term, compelling, inexorable motivation. A good analogy is that moving-away-from-pain strategies are like lightning, producing rapid but short-lasting (and sometimes painful) jerks away from what we fear, whereas moving-toward-pleasure strategies are like gravity—inexorable, continuous, and ultimately a means for bringing us to our goals.

         The key to making powerful moving-toward-pleasure choices and connecting them to our goals is anchoring a positive vision of the future we want with a powerful positive emotional state. Motivational teachers over the years have proposed many fine techniques to accomplish this—putting up note cards with motivational slogans on mirrors or refrigerators, reading a motivational statement every morning and evening, listening to tapes of motivational speakers regularly—but all eventually bring us to the same place: creating a powerful vision of the future that is bright, shining, and desirable.

         Using the Walking Your Blues Away technique, you can build and anchor strong positive motivational states. The process is straightforward:

1. While walking, visualize possible future states.

2. Select the one that seems optimal and that you want to focus on.

3. Hold it while you’re walking.

4. While walking and holding this future ideal, remember times in the past when you were able to accomplish similar things or had great successes or desires fulfilled.

5. Allow the emotional state of the positive memories to fill and suffuse the hoped-for future state.

6. See yourself in the picture clearly—how you’re dressed, what you’re doing, how you’re standing.

7. When the positive future state is clear and makes you smile, stand up a bit straighter and feel powerfully good. Create a word, sound, gesture, or posture to anchor the state.

8. Repeat the anchoring reminder a few times until it once again brings up the feeling of success in your body, then finish your walk.

         Having done this, you can then put reminders up around the house—the cards on the refrigerator or mirror with a word or two that remind you of your future goals. Whenever you see these you then assume the posture and make the sound or gesture that re-accesses that state, remembering your goal and letting the full positive intensity of the enthusiastic emotion fill you.

        Over time—often over a surprisingly short time—you’ll discover that you are achieving your goals. Programming your unconscious mind like this, you’ll begin to see opportunities and chances where before you would have missed or ignored them. You’ll find yourself moving toward your positive future as if it were drawing you in the same inexorable straight line that drew Newton’s apple from the tree.

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Chapter 9

Walking for Creativity and Problem Solving

Creativity and problem solving are psychologically similar processes. Both combine a linear approach—“How do I get from here to there?”—with the need to randomly access memories and ideas that may, in a linear world, seem completely unrelated.

         One of the unique hallmarks of bilateral activity is that it gives access to the whole brain, making walking and other forms of bilateral work/play useful for enhancing creativity and problem solving. Resources and strengths, useful learnings and experiences, that date all the way back from childhood are available when walking, and can be brought to bear on current problems or creative endeavors.

         Walking is a grounding experience, a step-by-step, moment-by-moment contact with the earth. Whether by some mystical force or some as-yet-unexplained psychological phenomenon, perhaps deeply rooted in our genes and stretching back over millions of years of evolutionary ancestry, feeling connected with the earth produces a liberating experience for most people.

         Walking also provides us with a break from the state of normal everyday existence. Looking at the same walls, the same furniture, the same place and people often anchors us to a particular state of mind. When we go out for a walk that state is broken, and new states of mind and emotion provoked by new sounds, sights, smells, and sensations offer access to new ways of knowing and understanding ourselves and our problems or opportunities.

         The process for walking to solve problems or encourage creativity is straightforward. Decide on the issue you’re going to bring to the walk, whether it’s solving a business problem or deciding how to finish a painting. Then, while walking, keep returning your mind to that specific issue, while at the same time allowing it to freely roam in the intervals between your internal mental reminders.

         Another quick technique that can aid in both problem solving and enhancing creativity is to ask the creative part of you to participate in the walk. Although this may sound a bit odd, try this simple exercise right now and you’ll discover how real and useful it be.

After you finish reading this paragraph, put the book down, close your eyes, and ask yourself, “Is there a creative part of me in here?” Do it now.

         Nearly everybody will hear or sense some sort of a “Yes!” answer to that question, because we are complex beings with different internal mental and emotional aspects of ourselves that have taken responsibility for different tasks in our lives.

         When you’re going to walk for problem solving or for encouraging creativity, before you go on the walk ask the creative part of you if it will participate in the process by tossing out possibilities and helping you see or hear or get new ideas as you’re walking.

You may also want to ask if there’s a part inside you that has taken responsibility for the creative project or problem you’re trying to solve. When that part of you says agrees, ask it if it is willing to receive some help from your creative self. Again, the answer is almost always, “Yes!”

        Once you’ve accessed both of those parts of yourself and put them in touch with one another, go for the walk.

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Chapter 8

Walking Your Blues Away with a Coach or Therapist

Some people find themselves easily distracted when they walk, and they have a hard time—at least at first—doing Walking Your Blues Away therapy by themselves. Collaborating with some of the coaches and therapists I’ve trained over the years, I’ve developed a very simple protocol for the work. Therapists can take this as a rough outline. I present it in such a way that even non-professionals can do it with each other.

Step 1: Define the Issue

The first step is to define where the person is stuck. What’s the issue, the event, the problem, or the emotion that’s hanging that person up?

         Interestingly, it’s not necessary for the therapist to know any details about the event or the trauma. People can keep their secrets. Because this work is done at the level of the structure of the state, it’s not necessary to get caught up in the content of the memory or issue.

         In fact, unless you’re well trained in how to avoid getting stuck in the other person’s dramas—their content—it’s often most effective to do this exercise without ever asking or knowing what the details of the event/trauma/emotion are.

         Working in the abstract like this accomplishes two things: it allows people to keep their secrets and privacy, and it prevents an increase in the intensity of the emotions (a re-traumatization) by engaging in discussion that repeatedly brings the issue or event back to consciousness. (These are the two main ways that “talk therapy” often wounds and re-wounds people.)

         Thus, if you’re dealing with content that you don’t know the details of, it’s useful to ask the walker to give the issue a name. It can be anything from a nonsense word (“Bzzlip!”) to something meaningful to the walker but otherwise abstract (“Jessie” or “that time”).

         Once the event/trauma/emotion is defined, ask the walker to bring up a picture of the issue and to name where it exists in their kinesphere, the space around the body. If it’s a true trauma, it will almost always be located directly in front of the chest. If it’s something problematic but not traumatic, it may be located somewhere else relative to the body—behind, off to the side, or in the distance.

         Ask the walker to point to the picture; if it’s not directly in front of the chest, have the walker move it there for a moment. Ask the walker to determine, on a scale of 0 to 100, what the intensity of feeling was before placing the picture in front, and then what the intensity was when the picture was placed in front of the chest. Note the shift in intensity when the memory-picture is placed in front of the chest. Then have the person return the memory-picture to where it was in the body’s kinesphere initially. Rarely, moving the picture or feeling to a position in front of the person will produce an intense emotional reaction, such as bursting into tears. If this happens, tell the person to quickly return the picture to where it was initially, and then turn the process over to a trained professional.

         Once you and the walker have identified the issue/event/feeling that will be the subject of your work together, it’s time to head outside.

Step 2: Go for a Walk

Choose a safe place to walk—“safe” in the sense that you’re unlikely to run into people you know or to be otherwise distracted by people or things you can’t avoid. This doesn’t rule out walking the streets of a city (even New York!)—you simply don’t want to walk through a familiar neighborhood where you’re likely to meet people you know, or through an area that is in some way associated with the trauma itself.

         Define a route that will take at least twenty minutes, and then begin your walk. Take the first few minutes to simply relax, to notice your environment, to bring your attention and your client’s thoughts to the present. To do this, suggest that the person walking with you notice what is to be seen in the immediate environment, then what can be heard, then what can be physically felt (the physical sensations of walking, the temperature, and so on). Ground yourselves in the present.

Make sure you’re both walking in the natural cross-crawl fashion, with opposite arm and leg swinging forward with each stride, and that you are walking relaxed, with arms swinging naturally, not in an exaggerated way.

Step 3: Maintain Dual Awareness of Picture and Motion

When the walker is ready, suggest that he or she brings the image or feeling in front of the chest and holds the picture or emotion there as you walk. As you continue walking together, notice any changes in affect, body language, facial expression, breathing, or stride. If the walker breaks stride or changes the way he or she is walking, provide a gentle reminder to go back to a normal way of walking while holding the picture at the same time.

         Suggest that the walker notice how the body is being propelled forward first by the left foot, then by the right foot, then the left again, while the picture is being held in place in front of the body. The therapeutic effect is greatest when the walker is both conscious of the picture he or she is holding in front of the body and is conscious of the bilateral motion of the body, the shifting of weight and balance from right to left to right.

Step 4: Make Therapeutic Suggestions

One of the interesting aspects about suggestions made during this type of activity is how the unconscious mind of the other person handles them. In hypnosis it’s nearly impossible to suggest that a person engage in an action that violates their basic code of behavior or isn’t good or useful for them (or isn’t at least neutral in that way). Similarly, the suggestions you make to the walker that may be less useful or even counterproductive will generally be discarded, whereas the useful ones will be used and processed.

         Thus, as you’re walking together you may want to occasionally make comments, in your own words, about how it’s the natural course of living organisms to heal themselves, the way that when you scrape your knee it eventually scabs over and then finally the scab falls off and is left behind as new tissue and skin grows. Eventually there is no evidence—or only the smallest reminder—of the scrape in the first place.

         You may want to remind the walker to keep the picture in front of the chest while simultaneously feeling the sensations of the bilateral motion of walking. Encourage the walker to notice that there is a left and right side to the field of vision, and even a left and right side to our auditory awareness.

         You may want to remind the walker that it’s the nature of life for every person to make mistakes, to have accidents happen, to cause and to be the recipient of problems, crises, and pain, and that the way we best move on from such experiences is to acknowledge them, apologize or forgive, let go, and move on with life, leaving the past to trail out behind us where, forever over, it can never again harm us or others.

         You may want to remind the walker of the old saying that “Nothing is true, but thinking makes it so.” The only way we can make sense of the world, the things that happen to us, and the constant stream of information that comes in through our senses is to tell ourselves stories about the things we see and experience. Those stories help us make sense of life events, but sometimes those stories are either wrong or not useful and different stories are needed, and isn’t it amazing how our unconscious mind can help us come up with new and more useful—and often even more accurate—stories about how things really are or once were?

         You may want to note for the walker that it’s perfectly normal—in fact, it’s a good sign—if the picture of his or her past event is starting to change, becoming washed out or turning from color to black and white, or breaking up, or if it keeps trying to move behind the body (and into the past). When the walker is sure the picture, the memory-story, is fully processed, he or she can feel free to let it change and move, as the unconscious mind best knows how to have it change and move to effect healing from that experience or trauma or pain or loss.

         These kinds of suggestions, spoken somewhat rhythmically and as run-on sentences, tend to help the process along, while also sliding in beneath the radar of the walker’s conscious mind. The use of classic “hypnotic language”—long statements that include lots of ands instead of periods or sentence ends—is a useful tool in helping people speed up their healing. On the other hand, if this is a manner of speaking that you haven’t yet learned how to do in a way that sounds natural, just put the concepts into your own words.

        None of this, of course, is necessary. Walking Your Blues Away therapy works when people do it alone. In fact, if you get over-involved in talking to the person with you, you may end up distracting the walker from holding the image and processing it as he or she walks. Try to achieve a balance of the occasional comment and a fair amount of silence. Being there and being supportive is enough. The main reason for going along with a person as he or she works through this process is to simply be a physical, present-moment reminder to hold the image before the body while walking, and to stay grounded in the present moment as the experience of shifting the memory-structure unfolds.

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Chapter 7

The Amnesia of Healing

One of the most fascinating aspects of true psychological healing is how people who’ve been through a healing experience dismember, reassemble, and re-member their past. Psychological and emotional healing requires that the old stories of what happened to us in the past, and that can fester away inside, be examined, taken apart, and reassembled into a new whole that is supportive and healthy.

         Because this is true healing, the result is a sort of amnesia about the original pain, not unlike the difficulty each of us has in remembering how much it hurt when we physically injured ourselves in the past.

         In fact, one of the ways to know whether healing has occurred is to ask a people if they can remember clearly how much an original trauma hurt. They may say that they can, but the memory no longer brings tears to their eyes, no longer colors their view of the world, no longer nags at them daily. The amnesia isn’t about details or facts—those remain intact. Rather, it is amnesia of emotion. A healed person has cut loose the old pain and let it drift away behind them into their past, where it’s difficult to reach even should they want to reach it.

         Ironically, this means that people, when healed, often don’t realize the magnitude of the transformation that they themselves have experienced. Because in the present they can no longer re-experience the pain of that past, they have no clear basis for comparison between how they feel now and how they felt then. The result is that they’ll often respond to questions about the healing—particularly more than a few weeks or months after the healing shift has occurred—with a shrug, as if to say, “Well, yeah, I feel fine now. But I wasn’t so bad back then, was I?”

         Of course, their friends and relatives remember well what a wounded wreck the person was. But the person him- or herself has, as part of the healing process, disconnected so completely from the pain that it is no longer possible to remember it.

         This is not an uncommon phenomenon: it happens in many other dimensions of emotional life. Ask a person about someone he or she was once in a relationship with, but now have completely left the relationship and it’s resolved and in their past. Odds are that person will have a very difficult time remembering what it was about the other person that attracted and held the two of them together. They may easily remember what they did together, but the feelings are no longer accessible.

         This just makes psychological sense. If we didn’t cut loose from old emotions as we move forward with life, they would constantly harass us. While joy states that stand alone are powerful tools we carry throughout our lives to help us confront daily dramas and traumas, past emotional states that continue to visit us must be released for us to function in the now.

         This can be deflating news for therapists who employ bilateral systems such as Walking Your Blues Away therapy to bring about true, lasting healing. Your clients and friends don’t remember how incapacitated they were, so they’re not as amazed by the changes you’ve made happen as you are!

         The good news here, though, is that when people have developed this sort of emotional amnesia about a past pain, they’ve really and truly been healed. Look for this as a landmark.

         The other significant landmark that lets you know that healing has happened—one that you’ll often see on the very day, at the very moment, the big healing shift happens—is that the story the person tells him- or herself about the past event changes. It shifts from some variation of “I was a victim of that” or “That really hurt me,” to something like “I really learned from that” or “That wasn’t such a big deal, and it’s long over now.”

Personally Experiencing the Shift

When you’ve been through this process yourself, you’ll notice this shift, although it will be an intellectual realization rather than an emotional one.

         Everyone, for example, has experienced a broken heart at one time or another in their lives. It’s part of growing up, passing middle age, and growing old: it happens in every stage of life. Whether it’s a teenage crush that devastates us when it doesn’t work out or the loss of a friend or relative to disease or accidental death, we all get hurt. Ultimately, as Jim Morrison pointed out, “No one here gets out alive.” Similarly, no one gets through life without being wounded.

         Yet when you think back to some of the wounds you’ve experienced, odds are that most of them are now more intellectual than emotional memories. I still remember when my dearly beloved maternal grandmother died when I was a child: I was inconsolable. I remember myself sobbing, but I see it as a disconnected picture, in black-and-white tones, from a distant past. While I still miss her (and my paternal grandparents as well), the wound no longer rips me apart inside.

         I still remember the first big love of my teenage years, and how she dumped me for a guy on the football team. I remember what I said and did, but I can’t quite get a grasp on the frantic pain that I know I experienced.

         I still remember when my best friend from my high school years, Clark Stinson, committed suicide. We had spent a summer living in tipis deep in the forest of northern Michigan on a spiritual quest when we were only seventeen. After high school he’d been drafted into the war in Vietnam. Clark friend came home from Vietnam for Christmas, put his revolver into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I remember that event in my life, but I don’t remember too. The excruciating pain is now gone, more than fifty years later—what is left is a wistful and sad emptiness.

         None of these experiences were processed using any particular technique or therapy; they all resolved themselves, like the skin heals over with a scab. No doubt there were processes I went through on the road to healing from these wounds—changing the stories I told myself, walking, discussing the event with others, and so on—but none were “intentional” attempts to resolve trauma. I simply healed, as we all do from most of the vagaries and vicissitudes of life.

         It’s when we get stuck—unable to get past or around or through the “present-feeling” memory of a wound—that we need a technique such as Walking Your Blues Away or Thought Field Therapy or EMDR or NeuroLinguistic Programming to process, break loose from, and move out ahead of past traumas. Or when we simply want to speed up the normal healing and grieving processes we experience in life as the result of loss, disappointment, pain, or fear. We know we’ve been successful when the pain and trauma are only intellectual memories than can be handled once again without searing our flesh or blinding our vision.

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We’ve discussed how the brain processes senses into feelings and feelings into thoughts. We’ve learned that we can guide those feelings through techniques like anchoring, future pacing, and the learning trance. With each code you crack, you have moved from being an unconscious communicator to a conscious one and hopefully from being an incompetent communicator to a competent one.

The next and last step to cracking the code is to become an unconsciously competent communicator; then effective communication simply becomes second nature. As such you will master the art of effectively sharing opinions and ideas as well as the science. Once you master this last section of the communication code, you will move from being able to persuade the person sitting next to you to being able to persuade large groups of people.

When we move from persuading a single individual to the much larger and more complex task of political persuasion, we need a whole new set of tools. Unconscious competence requires understanding not only how the communication code works but also why it works. Without understanding the why, even competent communicators can fail to persuade.

Understanding the Why

A core NLP principle is that “The meaning of a communication is the response you get”: what matters is not what I say but what my listener thinks I said. We talked in previous articles here at Wisdom School about ways to make sure that your listener would get your meaning. That’s one key to the communication code.

What we didn’t talk much about, however, is why communication works this way. Why don’t other people see or hear or feel the world the same way I do? Don’t we all see, hear, and feel the same things? If we walk into a room with a desk and a chair, don’t we all see a desk? If we sit down, don’t we all feel the same seat?

The answer, in short, is, “No. We don’t.” We don’t all see exactly the same thing, and we don’t all feel that seat in exactly the same way. There really is a desk and a chair in the room, but each of us experiences that desk and chair differently.

Let me give you an example from my own life. I once lived on a houseboat on a river. That was the territory I lived in. “Territory” can be used to describe any part of the physical world. A room with a desk and a chair is a territory, for example. And “territory” can also be used to describe our psychological and political worlds (more on that shortly).

I can describe to you where I lived—my territory—even if you were not there with me. Sitting in my houseboat, looking at the river, I could have told you that the water is brown/blue/greenish, there are ripples, there are ducks along the bank, and so forth. My description of the river becomes a map of the territory for you. You are not experiencing the territory yourself, but you can experience my map of it.

Now, what happens if you came to visit me when I lived there? What if you and I were standing on my dock, looking at the river together?

We’d be looking at the same territory, the river. We’d both see the blue heron fishing on the riverbank, feel the cool-water breeze, and smell and hear the water as it flows around the pilings on which our dock and home float up and down with the tides. We could discuss the river and share what we each see and hear and feel. But here’s a secret that most of us know but never really accept. It’s the secret that will make you an unconsciously competent communicator:

Even though we are both experiencing the same territory, our individual experience of that territory will always remain different.

When we both stand and look at the river together, we both notice and experience different things. I might be knowledgeable about trees and thus see beech trees and willows, whereas you might see just trees. You might like to fish and know where they’re most likely to be found, seeing those places that I don’t even know exist.

We also come with different emotions that change how we understand our sensory experiences. I might have memories of the Willamette River that color my feelings about it and how I see it—and those are memories and feelings that are different from yours. Your experience of rivers in is certainly different from mine. Because our senses are tied to our emotions and memories, and mediated by our individual nervous systems, neither of us will never see or hear or smell or taste or feel things in exactly the same way as another person.

We already know this. One of our kids loves peppermint ice cream; the other kid hates it. Same ice cream, different experience.

One person listens to a Beethoven symphony and hears patterns of sound; another hears a story; another is bored and tunes out.

We have these experiences of our differences among each other all the time. It’s what makes life so rich and interesting.

Those differences have significant consequences, however, for communication. Anytime we communicate, we are never going to be successful at giving people a pure experience of objective reality—the territory.

No matter how well I describe my river to you, my map of the territory will never match your map of the territory. And neither map is the territory!

Distortion, Deletion, Generalization

There is a reason why our maps usually don’t match up. We put our sensory experience of the world through three different kinds of filters: distortion, deletion, and generalization. Our brain instantaneously and continuously uses these filters to be more efficient in our communication and our experience of the world.

As you read this series of lessons on NLP here at Wisdom School, you are engaged in these three kinds of filters. Until you read this sentence, you were probably not aware of what is on the wall to your left or the temperature in the room. You deleted that experience—and you will delete it again by the time this chapter is over—because our minds simply can’t process more than five to nine things at once.

You’re also distorting your experiences right now. In distortion we misrepresent parts of reality, often as a way of simplifying experience. We almost always distort our memories of events because we file those events in ways that make the most emotional sense to us (remember the Pentaflex folders metaphor from an earlier lesson?) rather than according to what our senses actually told us at the time.

We also distort and generalize when we make assumptions about others. You may have made a whole set of assumptions about what was in this series of lessons when you read that “Thom Hartmann, radio host” was the author, or that I was on a Vermont roster of psychotherapists and once was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused and emotionally disturbed children, or that I was an advertising industry executive and consultant, or that I’m the author of more than thirty books and an entrepreneur, or that I did international relief work on and off for more than twenty years on five continents in several war and conflict zones, or that Louise and I have been married for fifty-three years and have three grown children, two dogs, and four cats, or that doing all of these things pretty easily qualifies me as a poster child for attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

Each evokes a frame, and each frame is filled with shorthand: distortions, deletions, and generalizations.

You’ve also been generalizing your experience of the place you are in as you read this book. We don’t have enough time or energy to analyze every object we see that has four legs. We generalize, and say to ourselves, that is a chair, this is a table. Right now you may be aware that you are in a room, or on a plane, or wherever you happen to be, but you are probably not paying attention to all of the details that make up the place you are in. You probably did not spend time thinking about the floor, the walls, or the objects in the room before you decided that you were in a room.

To get through life, most of the time we have to label the world around us without thinking about its specificity.

Deletion, distortion, and generalization are necessary filters that enable us to process and make sense of the tremendous amount of information available to our senses. Yet when using these filters, we also sometimes delete, distort, or generalize in ways that may not be appropriate or useful. We may lose information we need, or we may misapprehend information.

When I tell you about the Columbia River I now live on, my map of the territory has been filtered through my deletion, distortion, and generalization process into language. That is, the map I describe to you is already not the territory. It’s just a generalized and distorted version of my map, filled with deletions and handed to you in the form of words. (Forgot to mention that bald eagle in the tree on the riverbank, didn’t I?)

When I communicate that map to you, I communicate through language. That language is then filtered by you through your own internal deletion, distortion, and generalization process into your map. Your map is, in turn, a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of my map, which is in turn a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of the actual reality, the territory.

You may think when I describe the river to you that you’re getting the territory, but you’re not. All we can ever get from another person is a deleted, distorted, and generalized version of their map.

Map versus Territory

Let’s make the metaphor solid and talk about a Rand McNally highway map. As children learn in grammar school, a map’s code is necessary to read and make sense of a map. That code is called the legend. It’s a nice metaphor, legend, because the map’s code really is the story of the map, and it tells us how the map was created.

For example, if I am going to drive from Chicago to Ames, Iowa, I will look at my road map, which will show me which roads to take. But if I want to know what kind of roads they will be, I have to look at the legend, which will let me know that expressways are red, highways are bold black, and 2-lane country roads are thin black lines.

If I want to know how long the journey will take, I have to consult the legend again, which may tell me that 1 inch on the map equals 50 miles. I can measure the inches, multiply by 50, multiply by my driving speed (which I won’t reveal here!), and figure out how long it will take me to get from Chicago to Ames.

Geographers study the stories that maps tell. They can discern how people think about their world by the kinds of maps they make. Christopher Columbus, for example, had a map of the world in which Europe was at the center, and all the places he visited were “discoveries” because they had never been known to Europeans before.

The people living in those places had their own maps, of course, telling themselves stories about the relationships between their people and the many other people who they knew lived on the land. For them the appearance of Europeans represented a discovery that necessitated altogether new maps. And for every culture in the world, the center of its map was the center of its living space (so much so that during the Middle Ages in Europe, people who suggested that the Earth wasn’t at the center of the universe were put to death).

Think about how you would map your neighborhood. One map is the satellite map, showing how your home looks from outer space. Another is a road map of your city or county that shows all the streets near you but doesn’t show your house at all. A third map is the computer map your friend uses to get to your house, which may show streets or may be just a list of directions. A fourth map is the map of real estate values, which becomes very important when you want to sell your house. A fifth map is the map you carry around in your head of your neighbors—who lives next to you, who lives across the way from you, and so forth. You may even have a map of everyone’s dog, if you’re a dog owner, or a map of all the playgrounds in the neighborhood if you have young kids.

Which of these maps is the map of the territory? All of them, and none of them.

Each map engages in deletion, distortion, and generalization. What makes these maps valuable to us isn’t whether they accurately represent the territory but how useful they are to us.

If I don’t have kids, I probably don’t care where the playgrounds are. If I rent, I probably don’t care about real estate values. I may not care what my house looks like from outer space.

What matters to us is what story a particular map can tell us—the story of who lives nearby, or what our financial value is, or how someone can find us.

It helps to remember that the code for maps is called a legend. The key to unlocking any map is the story the map tells. That’s true for communicative maps as well. What matters isn’t how accurate the map is—because no map will ever accurately reflect the territory—but rather how useful it is.

Which sets up our lesson for next month, The Identity Code.

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Chapter 6

How to Do a Walking Your Blues Away Session

There are five steps to correctly performing a Walking Your Blues Away session. They are:

1. Define the issue.

2. Bring up the story.

3. Walk with the issue.

4. Notice how the issue changes.

5. Anchor the new state.

I will go into detail on each of the steps for you now.

Define the Issue

Before going for your walk, begin by considering the issues that are still hanging around in your life that you feel are unresolved. This could range from past traumas, hurts, angers, or embarrassments to relationship issues with people you no longer have access to (including people who have died).

         Don’t worry that an issue might be too complex or something that happened over a long time. Many issues are multi-dimensional. What happens is that, when the core issue is resolved, it rapidly begins the process of unwinding or “cleaning up” the peripheral associated issues.

         Similarly, if you pick an issue that you may think is, itself, part of something larger, you’ll notice after you’ve worked with it that the larger issue will also begin to resolve.

         There’s no specific right or wrong issue to work with. If you can think of it, visualize it, and get a feeling from it, then you can walk and work with it.

Bring Up the Story

Notice your story about the issue; story in this context refers to such thought patterns as “She was cruel toward me,” or “He had no right to hurt me like that,” or “Why did she have to die?” or “I’d like to get this job, but I don’t know what to do to make it happen.” There is always an internal story, with you and the object of the story at the center, and it’s important to pull that story out so you can say and hear it explicitly. How would you describe the story—to yourself, in your most private and safe space—if you had to boil it down to a few words or a sentence or two? Once you have that, you have one of two tools to use in determining when your process has finished.

         Another important tool is to notice the strength of the emotional charge associated with this event. Using a scale of 0 (truly don’t care) to 100 (the most intense you have ever felt), come up with a number to rank the emotional charge connected with this event.

         Not only will this number be useful in your work with the process; it will also be an excellent tool for gaining historical perspective, as often after a memory is resolved it’s impossible to regain access to the original emotional charge (because it’s been resolved). We can forget very quickly how important a past event had seemed.

Walk with the Issue

Walking is pretty simple, but there are a few commonsense rules. Wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Don’t bring along anything other than your ID, so you’re not distracted by a hanging purse or a carried book: you want to be able to walk easily and to swing your arms comfortably.

         Pick a route that is at least a mile long, and ideally two miles. At the average walking speed of 3 miles per hour, a mile is a 20-minute walk. For those who walk fast comfortably, a mile takes approximately 15 minutes.

         Make sure the route matches your level of health: don’t include hills or mountains if you have a heart condition and your doctor would warn you against overexertion. On the other hand, there’s no need to exclude climbs that may get you out of breath if you’re in good health and want to use your walk as aerobic exercise.

         It’s not necessary to pick a rural, suburban, or urban route. Anywhere you walk there will be things to distract you, from squirrels to the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue. The key is not in finding a distraction free walking area – which is pretty much impossible. Rather, the key is to continue to remind yourself to hold your picture and/or feeling in front of you while walking.

         Of course, nobody has perfect concentration. Most of us, in fact, are pretty attention compromised—after twenty or thirty seconds of walking we find our attention zooming off in some other direction. That’s no problem—just keep reminding yourself to keep bringing your attention back to the issue or goal, and again bring up the picture. The mind has a tremendous ability to pick up where it left off and continue processing things, even though they’re not yet done.

         In reality, the total amount of “concentrated time” it takes your bilateral motion to resolve your issue or goal is probably just a matter of a few minutes—between five and ten minutes, in my experience. But to aggregate those few minutes, most people have to walk for a half hour or so, continuously reminding themselves to be present with the picture and feeling until all of the “remembering-to-do-it” moments add up to those five to ten total minutes.

         One of the important keys to this process is to relax into it. It may take a few walks to get used to this manner of walking and not thinking—just like it took you a few tries to learn to ride a bicycle. To motivate yourself, though, think of the positive resolution that you’re trying to achieve rather than engaging in any sort of internal dialogue that chastises you for past actions.

We’re all wired to learn through trial and error. Learning how to quickly and easily do a Walk Your Blue Away session usually takes a few tries.

Remember: There is no failure. There is only feedback. Learn from the feedback and continue on.

Notice How the Issue Changes

Because the submodalities—the primarily visual and auditory characteristics of a memory-picture, such as how bright a memory-picture is, where it’s located, how clear it seems, whether it’s in color or black and white, whether or not there’s sound, whether it looks like a movie clip or a still picture, whether we see ourselves in the picture or see it as if we were watching from the outside, and so forth—are the filing-system tags for the emotional brain. As the emotional value or the emotion attached to a picture/memory changes, the submodalities will change. When people walk with an unpleasant memory, it’s not uncommon for them to say that they see it beginning to disintegrate, or get dimmer, or lose its color, or move farther away (or even behind them). The dimming usually begins in a corner or in one part of the picture. As if it were an old photograph with a lit match held underneath it, part of the picture begins to distort and darken; then the change spreads across the entire picture, usually rather quickly.

         Once this change has happened, people notice that the emotion they feel about the picture is now different. It’s still possible to remember the event, but the feeling about the event is changed. Often the story of “I was hurt and it still hurts,” for example, changes to something like, “I learned a good lesson from that, even if it was unpleasant.” Present-tense pain becomes past-tense experience.

         When you notice the picture changing (or the feeling changing, if that’s all you could bring up), let the process proceed until you notice a perceptible shift in feeling, and you no longer notice any changes taking place. Then ask yourself, “What’s my story about this memory now?” If the process is complete, you’ll discover that the story you’re now telling yourself will be considerably healthier, more resilient, and more useful than the previous story. When the story changes to one that provides a positive frame, you’re most likely finished with that memory for good.

Anchor the New State

When the picture is well formed and you notice that your self-told story about the event has changed, anchor this new reality by reviewing it carefully. Notice all the ways it’s changed. Think of other ways it may now be useful to you, even helpful. And, as you’re walking back home or to your starting point, think about how you’d describe it if you were to choose to tell somebody else about it. (It’s not at all necessary to tell anybody about it, but framing it in this way helps you clarify the new story.)

        When you get home, consider writing something about it—an autobiographical narrative, like a diary entry, or something abstract, like a poem. If it’s so personal and private that you don’t want to write it down, just sit in a quiet and safe place and speak it out loud in private to yourself. These steps help anchor the new state, fixing it in its new place in your mind and heart, so it will be available to you as a resource—rather than a problem—in the future.

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Chapter 5

Developing the Walking Your Troubles Away Technique

Seeing the correlations between bilateral therapies from the time of Mesmer to today, and knowing that bilateral eye motion in REM sleep is associated with healing traumas, I began to wonder: how would a person heal from trauma if there wasn’t a Mesmerist or energy therapist around and the trauma was too intense to be processed during REM sleep? How would humankind have handled trauma in an era without psychotherapists, hypnotists, and EMDR practitioners?

It was a sunny Vermont afternoon in the late spring of 2001 when I was first asking myself this question. From my office window I could see some of the streets of Montpelier, and the people walking along those streets. I noticed that most people walked in a way referred to in Brain Gym as the “cross crawl”—the right arm swings forward with the forward swing of the left leg, then the left arms swings forward at the same time as the right leg. Back and forth, back and forth—right arm and left leg, left arm and right leg.

         I realized with a start that this was bilateral, rhythmic motion! As people walk they alternately engage the left and right hemispheres of the brain in a process controlled by the unconscious and aspects of the limbic brain—the same aspects of the brain that the alternate-side eye movement and alternate-ear sound stimulation and alternate-side tapping therapies work to engage. Could it be? I wondered. Is it possible that the way our hunting/gathering ancestors relieved themselves of the burden of psychological trauma was by walking back to the village from the hunt, and that the walking itself stimulated the whole-brain psychological healing process?

         Remembering how Francine Shapiro said she first discovered EMDR by having a difficult memory resolve itself while walking, I decided to try the same, but without moving my eyes from side to side. I wanted to find out if the simple rhythmic bilateral activity of walking was enough to stimulate the brain to psychological healing.

The next morning I went for a walk from my home into downtown Montpelier and through some of the town’s neighborhoods, a total of perhaps a half-hour’s walk, a bit more than a mile. While walking rhythmically, using the cross-crawl of a normal walker, I brought up a memory of a recent minor trauma—an embarrassing incident that occurred in the town drugstore. When I gave my name to the pharmacist, the woman standing next to me apparently recognized my name and said, “Hi!”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or to one of the people behind me, and so was temporarily frozen in one of those social moments in which you’re completely unsure of what to do. I meet many people, but rarely remember their names after just a first meeting. I'd recently given several speeches at local churches and done book signings, had been on local TV, and my radio show was broadcast on a local station, so it was possible that we had never actually met.

The pharmacist handed me my prescription and I left, never having responded to her. As I was leaving, however, I saw that she was staring at the floor, as if she were embarrassed. I left thinking that it must have been me she was speaking to, and that my shyness had caused her embarrassment. She was probably thinking I was some sort of insufferably arrogant snob, when in fact I was just caught in one of those socially awkward moments that you wish you could have left behind in high school.

         For days afterward I thought about trying to figure out who the woman was so that I might apologize, although my wife told me it was no big deal and that I should forget it. But to me it was a big deal—I thought about the experience daily. Every time I thought about it I relived the feeling of social anguish of not being able to acknowledge her, and the compounded and continuing embarrassment of thinking there was a person walking around town toward whom I’d behaved disrespectfully.

         As I walked now I mentally held the memory of that time in front of me, as though I were carrying a basketball in front of my chest. I walked normally through town, maintaining the rhythm of my walk but making no effort to move my eyes from side to side

         After about three blocks I noticed that the colors in the memory-picture of the experience were beginning to wash out. And no matter how I tried to hold it in front of my chest, the location of the memory kept moving a few feet out and away from me, off to my left.

         On the fourth block I suddenly heard my voice say silently to myself, “Hey, everybody’s a little shy at heart, and most people would realize that you’re not a snob but were just uncertain about how to react. And instead of thinking poorly of you, that woman is probably walking around feeling like an idiot because she spoke up and didn’t get a reply. It would be nice if you could make it straight with her and both of you could feel better, but you don’t have a clue who she is. So you may as well just let the whole thing go and resolve that, the next time something similar happens, you’ll answer the person even if it does feel awkward.”

         As my mind said this to me the memory-picture flattened out and lost most of its color. Suddenly I could see myself inside of the picture instead of viewing the event from the outside. A feeling of relief washed over me, followed by a feeling of peace. I’d come to terms with the event and with myself.

         This was not a form of self- therapy in which I engaged my cognition or familiar talk-therapy techniques. I hadn’t set out to come up with a better story to tell myself about the event, or to alter my thinking about it. I was just carrying it with me as I walked, waiting to see if or how it may change. And change it did!

         Later in the week I was talking with a client who is a psychologist. He felt “stuck” in a personal relationship that was very painful. He told me of all the past wounds around the relationship, and of how difficult he was finding it to separate himself from the other person, even though he knew that had to be done.

         He’d come to an intellectual understanding of how toxic his relationship was, but he hadn’t been able to translate that into an emotional resolution. As a result, he spent hours every day obsessively thinking about this disintegrating relationship, to the point where it was interfering with virtually every other aspect of his life.

         I told my client about my discovery of this simple Walking Your Blues Away system and suggested that he try it, asking him to report back to me how many minutes or miles it took him to resolve things, if that happened. He called me two days later to say it had taken him exactly 17 minutes of steady walking, and that he could now pronounce himself “cured.”

         Emboldened by this success, I began recommending this system to all of my consulting clients. Because my practice is based almost entirely on doing short-term telephone consultations, mostly teaching NeuroLinguistic Programming techniques, with psychology-industry professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, teachers, and coaches, I fortunately had a group of people who could easily understand the concept I was suggesting. And while my consulting is positioned as teaching and problem solving, at least half of the professionals who contact me for consultation are looking for techniques and ideas to resolve problems in their own lives as much as for their clients’ lives and situations.

         Every person I’ve shared this technique with, and who did it correctly (as opposed to listening to music while you walk or stopping to browse store windows, both of which interrupt the process), got resolution of his or her problem in less than a half hour. A few had to repeat the process for a few days in a row to wipe clear the final traces of emotional charge around an incident. It has not yet failed to work.

         One of the mental health professionals who'd been in a class I taught on this technique about six months after 9/11 wrote to me about her personal use of the technique. Her husband travels a lot on business, and she'd been so severely traumatized by watching the video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center buildings over and over again that she was having regular nightmares and daily panic attacks whenever her husband was traveling by plane.

         “I took the walk you suggested,” she emailed me, “with the small addition of a belt-clipped tape player with some music that has always cheered me. The walk did produce the hoped-for ‘flattening’ of the trauma of 9/11 and the resultant terror. Total time was about 20 minutes. I walked comfortably and observed nature around me, and drew in joy from the sights—and sounds—I encountered: a chipmunk staring back at me, the incredible call of an eagle overhead (I even spotted him!), the gentle ‘moo’ of the cows I passed.”

         She added that she'd still get anxiety “twinges” sometimes when Bush administration officials went on TV to talk about how “in danger” we all are. (This was during the months prior to the November 2004 elections, when Cheney’s comment that if Kerry were elected we’d be “hit again, and hit hard” was being replayed endlessly in the media.)

But she had anchored the “healing” experience of the walk with the music she played in her headset when she took the initial walk to deal with her daily anxiety attacks. The result was that, as she reported, “There have been tiny zaps of recurrence of the fear. When they pop up I hum the music, and the fear leaves. I believe that the recurrences have more to do with the fact that my husband is again traveling extensively than being spurred by the original trauma, and he and I are developing strategies to cope [with that separation anxiety].”

         Upon further questioning I learned that the fear this woman was describing around her husband’s travels now have more to do with the normal and generalized concern for a loved one who is away—and the normal feelings of missing one's lover and friend. They no longer were rooted in 9/11 anxiety at all. The walking experience had “healed” the 9/11 anxiety.

         She added, “Thank you so very much for planting this [knowledge]! I’m now also using it in other such situations!”

         Another professional in the mental health field for whom I’d done consulting work sent me a note that he was planning to try the Walking Your Blues Away technique after reading a rough first draft of this book.

         “As you know,” wrote Bob, “I have a big PTSD issue over the treatment I received from my uncle after my father died, and his cheating and stealing from the estate over a million dollars, which left me financially insecure.”

         He mentioned that he had done EMDR when his father died, and it helped him tremendously with the grieving process, “but the real trauma came when I couldn't stop, but only delay, my uncle from ripping me off!” His uncle had not only failed to notify Bob of the impending death of his father, but had actively been taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the family business.

         “This has taken the life and energy out of me,” Bob wrote. “While the anger rants walking around the house and most of the nightmares about it have decreased from several times a week to very occasional, I can get worked up about it in a few seconds if I think about it.

         “I just don’t have the energy or spirit to continue [living with] this level of PTSD. I’m literally worn out from worry and regrets about it. I'm hoping this walking process will help me to put the feelings that suck the life and energy out of me into the past, and allow me to go forward without the drain on my energy and motivation.”

         A week later Bob wrote me again, after having tried the technique.

         “I found that I was able to keep the issue floating in my head about 10 to 12 minutes of the entire walk to various degrees,” he said. “I then ‘felt’ it under the surface as I looked at the new houses with for sale signs in front of them or people out in their yard in the evening. . . . Compared to what happened when I worked on this problem when I first became aware of it with EMDR in 1993, the difference was pronounced.

         “Time is an element of this healing, and the issue in no longer current and ongoing, as it was just beginning then. But I definitely noticed a certain distance in feeling from the problem when I thought about it after the walk several hours later. I did not want to think about it any more, and it didn’t seem important. I thought I’d get back to it Saturday, but didn’t. . . . It really did reduce the energy around this issue. It now seems more a distant past memory than something currently simmering under the surface.

         “The ‘energy’ for being upset about it is gone. For the first time I feel hope that I can finally get this behind me, and not let it influence my present. It will free me to go forward without carrying the weight of the past. That’s how I feel now.”

         Noting that the walking technique had worked so well for him, a few weeks later Bob wrote that he was now looking forward to sharing it with his clients.

         “My feeling is that I now have a tool I can use for myself and my clients,” he said, “that can be used whenever that buzzing in the head starts about some hurt done to me (or them). Following the instructions to the best of my ability has brought great relief.

        “Thank you for passing this on to me. I love the techniques I’ve learned from you and they always seem more direct and easy and avoid the formality of therapy sessions. They are the ‘herb tea’ of therapy: easily administered, and of immense value. I would choose this over traditional therapy in a second.”

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Chapter 4

NLP and the Modern History of Bilateral Therapies

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For just over sixty years—from the turn of the last century, when Freud abandoned the practice of moving his fingers back and forth in front of his patient’s faces, until the 1950s, when Milton Erickson and others began to gain acceptance for their efforts to revive the practice of therapeutic hypnosis—the only way a person could use eye-motion therapy to heal from trauma was during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While REM sleep is important and useful, and—as we discussed in the first chapter—is apparently one way in which the normal vicissitudes of life are processed, REM sleep isn’t strong enough to process severe trauma.

         The human potential movement that began to flourish in the late 1960s provided fertile ground for developing new perspectives on how the human mind worked. In the early 1970s, John Grinder, an assistant professor of linguists at University of California Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler, a fourth-year undergraduate involved in Gestalt therapy, teamed up to develop a model for how the mind and body interact. Under the mentorship of Gregory Bateson, the two created the model and system known as NeuroLinguistic Programming, defining a relationship between the mind (neuro) and language, both verbal and nonverbal (linguistic), and suggesting how their interaction might be organized (programming) to affect mind, body, and behavior.

Eye Motion Therapy (EMT) came out of the early work of Richard Bandler and John Grinder. In the process of developing NLP, the founders noticed that each emotional state and each memory a person carried had its own unique sensory structure. A memory will exist in color or in black-and-white, as a still picture or a movie, and it will have a sound element or not. If you ask a person to point to the memory, the person will point in a particular direction and will be able to tell you if he or she experiences the picture of the memory as being two feet away or twenty feet away. Generally, recent and/or emotionally intense memories are closer and more likely to be color filled, and often are seen as if the person was an observer (that is, they don’t see themselves in the picture), while older and less emotion-charged images are more distant and faded or lacking color, and often the person can see him- or herself in the picture.

         Grinder and Bandler observed that people tend to internalize memories of past traumatic events in bright, full color; the memory-sounds are usually loud and the memory-feelings intense. They discovered that when people shifted these structural components of the traumatic memory—the specific visual, auditory, and kinesthetic qualities (which they called submodalities) of their internal mental pictures and memories of events, the emotional charge of those events shifted as an outcome. They deduced that the structural components of memory are part of the mind’s way of organizing and giving meaning to memories and are the key to therapeutically changing them.

         For example, you might remember a past time of embarrassment as a bright color picture on your left side, about five feet away from you. If you move that picture over to the upper right corner of your field of vision, push it twenty feet out, and then turn from color to black and white, the odds are high that the emotional charge associated with the memory will diminish. Bandler and Grinder call this process shifting the submodalities.

         One of the most important submodalities of a memory, Bandler and Grinder found, is position. So early NLP practitioners such as Bandler and Steve Andreas had people move their memory-pictures back and forth and back and forth to see what would happen. The result was that, with minor pains and troubles, this lateral movement of the pictures rapidly “flattened” the picture, reducing the emotional charge.

         This discovery about moving pictures from side to side, Richard Bandler told me, was a fascinating insight into the power of bilateral stimulation and functions. “If you’re just tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand,” he said, “it’s impossible to feel angry, and if you do it while thinking of a problem, often the problem will resolve or solutions will pop into your mind.”

         There was only one problem with the initial system of having people move their traumatic memory pictures from side to side. For big traumas, this “brute force” method would sometimes bring back to people the intensity of the event so strongly and quickly that they’d break into tears or freak out—an experience known as an abreaction. Although Sigmund Freud had considered abreactions generally a good thing and thought it a sign of healing when patients broke down and cried or went into distress during their therapy sessions with him, experience had taught Bandler and Grinder that this was actually often a re-wounding that left people in greater emotional distress than before they experienced the abreaction. (Numerous studies in the past five decades have proven this to be true. Many abreaction-based therapies that were popular in the 1960s, such as screaming loudly or hitting pillows with baseball bats, have been discredited and discontinued because they were so emotionally harmful to some people.)

         This desire to avoid abreactions led to a search for ways to create true structural change in memories without producing a re-wounding response. So, to avoid abreactions, they suggested people hold the memory-picture in one place; then, while the person held the memory-picture in place—say, a few feet in front of them at chest height, which seems to be where most people hold highly traumatic pictures—they’d have the person move his or her eyes from side to side, following the tip of a pen held in the hand of the NLP practitioner.

         NeuroLinguistic Programming researchers discovered that if the tip of the pen the person was following with his or her eyes didn’t “touch” the picture, there was no abreaction and the intensity of the picture would gradually diminish. When the EMT practitioner did this several times for a few minutes each time, until the pen-tip had moved back and forth over the top of the picture enough to reduce the emotional intensity of the picture by at least 50 percent, then the person would not experience an abreaction when the practitioner finally did move the pen (and thus the person’s vision) into the area that the memory-picture occupied. When the pen finally “punctured” the picture, the resolution of the trauma was rapid and complete, often within a single session.

         This discovery of an NLP system for dealing with trauma was, in effect, a rediscovery of Mesmer’s 1780 techniques that had been used by Freud and hundreds of other psychotherapists up until the hypnosis scandals of the 1890s.

EMDR

<TNI>In the 1987, Francine Shapiro was out for a walk one day when she noticed that side-to-side eye movements seemed to decrease the negative emotions connected with certain traumatic memories that she held. Shapiro carried this insight into her PhD thesis in psychology, and from that developed what she called Eye Movement Desensitization, a technique by which she waved two fingers from side to side in front of a patient’s eyes while having the patient call to mind a traumatic event. Her early experiences with this work convinced her that her technique could quickly heal trauma. She added to the practice a few classic psychological techniques for and renamed the system Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing has now been taught to tens of thousands of professionals and has been the subject of numerous studies demonstrating its efficacy.

         Advocates of the system suggest that EMDR may be effective because bilateral stimulation of the brain brings about some sort of neurological integration of emotional and intellectual processes involving the hippocampus, corpus callosum, and the two hemispheres of the brain. Others have suggested that a variation on Mesmer’s original theory is more correct. While not using Mesmer’s term of animal magnetism or Braid’s hypnosis, what has emerged in the past two decades are numerous systems that purport to use bilateral stimulation in various forms to manipulate the body’s so-called energy field in ways that heal trauma.

         Roger Callahan developed a system called Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and The Callahan Techniques to help clients resolve trauma; he claims that the field he works with is “an invisible structure in space that has an effect upon matter.” His system involves tapping classic acupuncture points on one side of the face, then on the opposite side of the torso, and then tapping on the wrist while watching a therapist move his or her hand in a large circle, then alternately humming and counting (right brain and left brain functions).

         In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gary Craig developed a system called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for treating trauma that draws on classic NLP systems of submodality shift, as well as on Freud’s pre-1895 techniques of bilateral tapping on the face and body and back-and-forth eye movements. The EFT Website also lists numerous “cousins” of his energy-therapy system, including WHEE, TAT, NEAM, EDxTM, GTT, BSFF, WLH, MMT, PET, and others. What all have in common is that they all claim to heal trauma, using some form of bilateral stimulation of the eyes, ears, face, or body in the process. All have success stories and claim to be able to easily prove their efficacy.

         Another system that relies on bilateral movement and coordination is called Educational Kinesiology, or Brain Gym. Studies in Europe and the USA have shown that many of the Brain Gym exercises that use bilateral movement – rhythmic coordination of the right and left sides of the body – both help heal people of emotional disturbances and improve their memory, learning abilities, and general functioning.

         As NLP co-developer Richard Bandler casually pointed out to me during a training years ago, it’s impossible to get upset while you’re tossing a tennis ball from hand to hand. There is something very psychologically significant about bilateral movement.

EMT in Action: A Profile of an EMT Session

Stephen Larsen, Ph.D. is a longtime friend of mine and the biographer and former protégé of Joseph Campbell. Now retired from university teaching, Steven and his wife, Robin, run the Center for Symbolic Studies. As well, Stephen has a private psychology practice at the Stone Mountain Counseling Center in New Paltz, New York.

         It was in this context that Stephen invited me to co-teach a weekend workshop with him at the Stone Mountain Counseling Center. His topic was broadly based in the ancient psychological, emotional, and spiritual healing systems of shamans, and mine was the modern systems designed to produce similar results through techniques such as NeuroLinguistic Programming.

         Our course, titled “Hunters and Shamans,” was designed principally for therapists, although every year that we presented it a few well-informed lay people would show up. This particular year, one of them was a fellow who I will call Ralph, a man who had been suffering for decades from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

         Ralph was both curious about what we had to say and hopeful that one of us would demonstrate the techniques we were discussing on him, and thus perhaps heal his PTSD. Nothing else he had tried, from psychotherapy to drugs to biofeedback, had helped Ralph; several times each day in the course of the preceding thirty years he would spontaneously and uncontrollably experience an eruption of panic, accompanied by an outburst of tears. These severe symptoms had rendered him unable to hold a job. He was distressed by his inability to earn a living and his need to survive on disability and Social Security payments.

Having told us all of this, Ralph said that he had a past trauma that was troubling him and that he’d like to resolve. He said, further, that it was something he couldn’t talk about without falling apart, so was very interested to try something that didn’t involve speaking the content of the event.

         I explained that I was rostered as a psychotherapist in Vermont but not in New York, so anything I did would not be an attempt at therapy but would, instead, be a teaching demonstration for the purpose of showing Ralph and the others in the room the Eye Movement Therapy technique. Ralph came up to the front of the room and sat in the chair next to me that had been occupied by Stephen.

         I told Ralph that, in the way this technique worked, the therapist would first ask the client where the client held the picture of her or his trauma. Ralph said that his memory-picture was right in front of him, about two feet away, in a square area that roughly encompassed his chest. He began to tremble and tears came to his eyes as he pointed at the spot. I told Ralph and the group that it had been my experience that most people with PTSD held their traumatic memories in roughly the same place as Ralph did, and that when memories were located elsewhere they were usually not the source of true PTSD symptoms. I then told Ralph that to do Eye Motion Therapy a therapist would not have the client look in the direction of the traumatic picture, but would instead direct her or his eyes everywhere else. As Ralph looked away from that spot, he regained his composure.

         Ralph sat opposite me, facing me directly, our knees about six inches from one another. I held a felt marker pen just above his eye level and told him that, with EMT, the therapist would ask the client to hold his head steady and just follow the tip of the pen with his eyes. I suggested that Ralph consider the intensity of the emotion he was experiencing right now as 100 on a scale of 0 to 100, and we’d check it again as we went along.

         Then I began moving the pen around in regular, rhythmic patterns, from side to side across the top of his field of vision, going just to the edge of Ralph’s field of vision, as if I were wiping a blackboard at that height. I continued this for about two minutes, then stopped.

         “What’s the intensity of the emotion now?” I asked.

         Ralph glanced down and said, “Around eighty percent.”

         “Fine,” I said, and repeated the process, this time moving through the center of his visual field as well as above it, but always being careful not to move the pen into the area where he said the painful picture was located. After another two or three minutes of having his eyes follow the pen from side to side again, I stopped and asked how he was doing.

         “It’s down around sixty percent,” he said.

         We repeated the process again, and this time he said it went to about forty percent.

         One of the keys to doing EMT and avoiding abreactions is to not enter the picture until the intensity is below 50 percent. When Ralph reported the emotional intensity to be at 40 percent, I again moved the pen from side to side but this time did it across his entire visual field, from top to bottom to top, as if I were thoroughly washing a blackboard. Whenever I noticed his eyes seize up for a moment and interrupt the smooth flow of motion as his eyes followed the pen, I’d revisit that area a few times until his eye motions were smooth at that spot.

After about two minutes of this Ralph took a deep breath as his eyes were following the pen. The he let the breath out, began to grin broadly, and chuckled under his breath.

         I stopped the pen and asked, “What’s up?”

         He looked at me with an expression of mixed amusement and astonishment. “I can’t believe what a dummy I’ve been all these years,” he said.

         “What do you mean?”

         “I should have just let that go and gotten on with my life. Instead, I’ve wasted more than thirty years.”

         “Are we talking about the event that was bringing you to tears fifteen minutes ago?” I asked.

         “We sure are,” he said. “I was with a medivac unit in Vietnam, and after a really nasty firefight I called in two choppers to carry out the wounded. I was pretty sure all the enemy were dead, so after the choppers were loaded I signaled them to take off. They got about two hundred feet up into the air when two rockets came out of the jungle and exploded both helicopter, raining parts and bodies on those of us on the ground.” He shook his head with an expression of regret, although his tone was matter-of-fact. “I blamed myself for the deaths of those soldiers. Every day since that day in 1970 I’ve seen those choppers explode and heard those men screaming as they fell out of the sky.”

         “And now?”

         He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “I still remember it. But while you were doing that last pass there with the pen, suddenly it seemed like the pictures flattened out and took on the quality of an old newscast. And I heard my own voice in my head say, ‘You did what you thought was right at the time. It was a mistake, but you did it with good intentions. You wanted to get those men to medical care, and you saved a lot of other lives while you were in that war. Now it’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it, and it’s time to forgive yourself and get on with your life. If nothing else, that’s what the guys who died would want you to do, because it’s what you would have wanted them to do if the situation had been reversed.’”

         “And what’s the intensity of the emotion right now?” I said.

         He shrugged again. “Close to zero. I mean, damn, it’s been thirty years. It’s over and done with.”

        It’s been several years since Ralph participated in that teaching demonstration, and Stephen tells me that he’s doing well in his life, has a job, and is no longer tortured by his past. Ralph is cured of his PTSD.

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