Walking Your Blues Away with a Coach or Therapist

An excerpt from my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

Walking Your Blues Away

Chapter 8

Walking Your Blues Away with a Coach or Therapist

If I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.