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Accessing States

Can anyone give me any helpful advice on how I might help people more easily achieve a reasonable level of remembered emotional state? Frank Rainer

These thoughts are in response to Frank's question

You're right - there are people who find it difficult to access states and then put lots of meaning onto it - the complex equivalences rattle around. And if we don't meet this sensitively a negative anchor can be set up. As I I think about it, there could be a range of reasons for this:

1 POSITIONS: not becoming fully associated, because they are more used to being in a meta position, and dissociated with themselves. For whatever reasons, becoming fully associated is something that they avoid. People who tend to be rational, digital in their thinking, have an absence of sensory specific language are prime candidates. It might be because they are more comfortable in second position (although they would always been themselves in this position and could be associated, feeling the responses of someone experiencing them in that reference experience.

2 SENSORY ACUITY: not being able to make the distinctions in feeling, or not considering them worthy of attention. For non kinaesthetic people, a fairly high threshold has to be reached before they begin to notice that 'this' is different from 'that'. Once the wiring becomes activated, it can take less and less stimulation to get the information. It might also be that another rep system is down so the dominant one may have to be either amplified to take over threshold, or dampened down to allow the others to come through. It is also worth saying in a way that they can really hear you, that the internal responses don't have to be in high Technicolor, deafeningly off the Richter Scale.

3 SELF BELIEF: Internal dialogue does no favours here. It could be that the explorer has little belief or faith in their abilities to achieve the task and their focus of attention is on unuseful self talk, and their body is tensing up. As you say this gets particularly difficult if others are doing well, and 'I ought' and 'I should' creeps in. To enable the explorer to relax, bring out your permissive Milton model and talk to the explorer's unconscious mind, which is gagging to offer the information!

4 TIME LINE: It could the that the explorer has 'done something' with his or her past to render it inaccessible. You would need to check what reference experiences if any they can remember, to then access. It might be that should the explorer agree, you could find out how they represent their past and enable them to adjust the submodalities to make experiences accessible. It may also be that they are so through time, and off their timeline, that there is something preventing them from getting onto their timeline. It could be that their present isn't directly under their feet/in front of them.

5 RAPPORT: This should be at the top of the list! It maybe nothing to do with the explorer and everything to do with the guide. It maybe that a lot more pacing is required before you lead with 'think back to a time...'

Hopefully this offers some options to consider, since enabling others to realise just how resourceful they are is a tremendous gift to offer.

Fran Burgess February 2004