David Gordon was my primary trainer in what is an exciting new model of change called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NIP). A technique called changing your personal history was one that I learned then and have used
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and adapted over the last six years. Of all the techniques in this book, I consider this to be one of the most powerful for healing the shame that binds you.
What follows is my adaptation of the NLP technique. I call this process
"Giving Back the Hot Potato". It works best with a memory involving a caretaker (parent, minister, teacher, priest) who shamed you by using one of the interpersonal strategies for transfening felt shame.
The Nature Of Anchors
The technique itself is based on a phenomena of human programming which the NLP people call anchoring. An anchor is like the "on" button of a stereo that plays an old recorded memory. An anchor triggers the sounds, sights (images), feelings and even tastes and smells of an old recorded memory. Words themselves are anchors. Words are triggers which stimulate the images and feelings of old memories.
In fact, if you look at Figure 9.1 you can see that the reality we experience can only be re-presented as we talk about it. What I mean is that we can never convey our lived experience exactly as it happens. When we talk about it, we talk about the way we interpreted the experience by means of our two representational systems — our sensory perceptual and intellectual ways of knowing.
The sensory perception is our first and most immediate way of knowing.
Our intellectual knowing is always two degrees removed from reality. The philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz taught us that concepts (intellectual knowledge) are always based on precepts (sensory knowledge). Every thought we think canies sensory data with it. Every thought we think was first perceived, seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled. Concepts trigger sensory images — either visual images, auditory self-talk or feelings (kinesthetic) responses.
When we talk about toxic shame, many memories are elicited uncons-ciously. These shame memories are often enmeshed in collages of imagery.
When shame has become internalized, these images are often triggered and send the shame-based person into shame spirals. These spirals seem to operate independently of us. They seem to have a life of their own.
Shame spirals are also triggered by internal self-talk. Such inner talk is based on old beliefs we have about ourselves and the world. These beliefs were fostered by our shame-based caretakers. Auditory shame spirals result from introjected parental voices which were originally the actual voices of our shaming caretakers. They play like stereo recordings in our head. The Transactional Analysis therapists estimate there are 25,000 hours of these recordings.
How we know
Reality
Experience
Figure 9.1. Represented Reality
1° Re-presentation
Body knowledge (perception) Right brain - imagination Holistic - nonverbal - emotional
Subconscious
2° Re-presentation Mind knowledge
(conception) Left brain - intellect Sequential - verbal Logical
Conscious (7t2 chunks)
Visual images
Auditory images
Kinesthetic —
Touch E-motion
Gustatory
Olfactory
Words (language) elicit sensory images. This is
they make sense.
Words are
second degree re-presentation of
experience.
Words need to be con-nected to sensory experi-ence.
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"Giving Back the Hot Potato" is a way to change old imagery through the use of kinesthetic anchors (touch anchors). It is a form of re-experiencing the past with corrective resources. It is also a way of giving back what Pia Mellody calls the induced or carried shame.
When a caretaker acts "shameless" by raging, condemning, criticizing or being judgmental, we take on the shame they are avoiding. While they avoid their shame, we have to carry it. In actual fact it is our shame, i.e., we actually experience being shamed by their acting in a shameless manner. We accepted their judgment as being about us, when it was really about them.
It is in this sense that we carry their shame.
In order to understand this technique, let me quote from Leslie Bandler, one of the early pioneers and creators of NIP.
"A basic premise of my work is that people have all the resources they need to make the changes they want and need to make . . . The resources I am speaking of. . . lie in each of our personal histories.
Each and every experience we have ever had can serve as an asset. Most every one has had the experience of being confident or daring or assertive or relaxed at some time. The therapist's task is to make those resources available in the contexts in which they are needed. Bandler, Grindler, Delozier and I have developed a method called anchoring which does just that."
Leslie goes on to explain that just as certain stimuli, like an old song, can bring back past experiences, we can learn to deliberately associate a memory to a specific experience. We can do this by accessing the memory and touching our thumb and finger together while we are re-experiencing that memory. Once the association has taken place, the touch of thumb to finger will then trigger the experience. We can then retrigger the experience at will.
Language works the same way. I remember sitting in a meeting with a friend some ten years ago. I looked over and saw that he was crying. I asked him what was the matter and he said, "Bluffy died." Bluffy was his dog.
When I heard this, I thought it was weird for a grown man to be crying over the death of a dumb animal. The word dog had no first degree representation associated with it for me. I had no experience of owning a dog. As a child I was afraid of dogs. I had been a paper boy! Dogs were our natural enemy. It didn't make sense to me for someone to cry over a dog, because I had no sensory memories of warmth with a dog.
Some eight years ago I bought my son a little Shetland sheepdog. We called him Cully. When I come into the house and Cully sees me, he jumps two feet off the ground and tinkles on himself. (I never had a friend do that.) No matter when or how many times I come in, Cully goes crazy because he's
They Lived Happily Ever After
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so glad to see me. I have become very attached to Cully. I now have the sensory experience to know why someone would cry if he lost his dog. It makes sense to me now. If someone told me his dog died, the word "dog"
would immediately trigger my experience with Cully. So words are anchors which trigger past sensory experience. Again, as Leslie Bandler writes:
"If I ask you to remember a time when you felt truly satisfied with yourself, my words send you on a search through your past experi-ences . . . you know how you can become angry again by remember-ing a past argument or frightened again by rememberremember-ing a terrifyremember-ing movie or incident. Thus by bringing up a memory (an internally generated experience) we re-experience many of the same feelings which occurred when that memory was formed."
In my version of the NLP technique, I would have you select a past shame memory and anchor it. This is done by simply closing your eyes and letting your memory take you back to a time when Mom or Dad or a teacher or preacher was laying their shame on you.
One of my clients remembered being shamed in the second grade. He was at a Catholic parochial school, and the priest who was in charge of the church handed out the children's report cards. It was this priest's custom to throw the cards on the ground if a child got a D or an F. My client was an undiagnosed dyslexic and was having a terrible time learning to read. He got an F in reading and the good priest threw his card on the ground. My client was ashamed and humiliated and somehow couldn't pick the card up.
(He was a fingernail biter.) Everyone laughed, as this child suffered an excruciating moment of being shamed. This memory, as with most nondissociated painful memories, was easy to anchor. He anchored it with the thumb and finger of his left hand.
I then asked him what resource(s) he now had, which if he had had them then would have helped him handle that experience better. He thought for a moment. Then he said firmly, "I'm articulate now and I've learned to be assertive."
I said, "Close your eyes and think of a time when you were being articulate. The memory can come from any time in your life. You are speaking firmly and clearly, saying exactly what you want to say."
As my client searched for that past experience, I saw his face begin to change. His jaw loosened and he looked more confident. I asked him to touch his right thumb to a finger on his right hand. I had him hold the touch for 30 seconds as he re-experienced being articulate. Then I had him take a deep breath and relax. I suggested that he think of a pleasant memory from the past in order to separate the experience of being verbally expressive from the next anchor we were going to make — the assertiveness anchor.
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After a moment I said, "Now think of a time when you were actually being assertive." I took some time to let him get fully into the details of the memory. I asked him, "Who was there? What did they have on? How were you dressed?" When he was re-experiencing being assertive, I had him touch his right thumb to the same right finger and make the assertive anchor exactly in the same way he did for the anchor associating verbal expression.
I had him hold it for 30 seconds and then I asked him to take a deep breath, and go back to the pleasant memory he had accessed earlier. Up to this point we had:
1. Made a shame anchor ( X ) of the second grade report card scene with the touch of his left thumb to one of his left fingers.
2. Made a resource anchor (Y) with the touch of his right thumb to one of his right fingers. This anchor embodied two strengths which my client now had that he did not have in the second grade, viz., verbal expressiveness and assertiveness.
Now we were ready for the redoing of the old memory. It may help you understand this process if you think about a premise used in cybernetics.
That premise states that the brain and central nervous system cannot tell the difference between real and imagined experience if the imagined experience is vivid enough and in detail.
Most people can achieve sexual arousal by using their imagination. This means that there is full kinesthetic response without another real person being there. Paranoid personalities live in a threatened and hypervigilant universe by virtue of fantasies and hallucinations that they themselves create. Normal people often create tenible stress and anxiety by worrying about the future — something that hasn't even happened yet. These are all ways that behavior is programmed by simply using one's imagination.
In step three of the process I asked my client to go back into the shame scene with the new resources of verbal expressiveness and assertiveness.
This is accomplished by touching the two anchors X and Y simultaneously.
I tell my client not to change anyone else's behavior in the scene. He is to focus only on his own responses to the report card throwing. He is free to respond any way he wants to with his assertiveness and verbal expression.
I encourage him to really tell the priest what he feels. I may even suggest things like — "How awful for you to bully and humiliate a child like me. I'm doing the best I can. You're a poor model of the love of God, etc."
It's best when the words come spontaneously. They can be actually said out loud or subvocally. What I look for is good energy in expressing the anger about the shame.
Finally I ask the person to give his shameless caretaker back the shame that he has been carrying for him for years. I like to symbolize it as a black soggy
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bag. The symbolic giving back is important. Once the experience feels better internally, I ask the person To take a deep breath, relax and open his eyes.
WELL FORMED ANCHORS
This work can be done without anyone else. And each scene can be done several times. I've personally worked on over 100 shame memories. Some scenes I've done ten times. The key to this work is making good resource anchors. The shame anchors are usually easy because of the high voltage of the pain. Achieving well-formed resource anchors will require time, practice and patience. The conditions for well-formed anchors are:
1. Pure access state — This means that the best anchor is the one with the highest energy voltage . . . when you're feeling the feeling most intensely.
2. Well-timed application — We need to set the anchor (thumb and finger) when the energy is at or near its apex.
3. Can be duplicated — We can check as to whether we've made a good anchor by testing it. When we touch our thumb and finger, the past experience is triggered. If we've made a good anchor, it will have high voltage.
The last point is a crucial one. Always check your resource anchor at least once before doing the corrective experience to be sure you have a good anchor.
A couple of things excite me about this method. The first is that the person using it uses his own actual resources. This is crucial for shame-based co-dependents who have such poor awareness of their own inner strengths and believe that they must be helped from the outside. Using a person's own strengths and resources is what good therapy is all about. The power is in the one we're trying to help. All of us already have all the resources within ourselves that we need in order to change, but toxic shame blocks our awareness of our strengths.
The second thing I like about this technique is that it can be tested Toward the end of my work with the aforementioned client, I asked him to relax, close his eyes and go to that second grade classroom on report card day. I had him touch the first anchor he had made with his left thumb and finger. I let him feel that previously anchored shame experience and asked him to pay attention to any changes in the experience. I noticed his face, and calibrated it with what I remembered before. My client reported significant change in the experience. I noted it also.
When we first made the anchor, his head dropped down, he furrowed his brow, his breathing was rapid and his cheek color reddened. When he
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tested it two sessions later, he held his head upright, his breathing was more relaxed and his skin color stayed the same. These are neurological cues that match his reported re-experience of the old pain. This technique can be summarized as follows:
Giving Back The Hot Potato
1. Take three to five minutes, close your eyes and just focus on your breathing. Be aware of the differences in how the air feels as you breathe in and out. Let yourself totally relax.
2. Let your mind drift back in time to a shame experience with someone.
As you feel the upset or distress of that experience touch your left thumb to one of your left fingers. Hold it for 20 seconds . . . Take a deep breath, let your thumb and finger relax. Shift your awareness to something familiar, like the house you live in.
3. After focusing on something familiar, think of a resource or several resources you now have that if you had had during the shame experience, you could have handled it differently. (For example, you are more articulate now. You are more assertive now. You have a resource group now.)
4. Think of a time when you were using the needed resource (an actual experience from any time in your life) and go into that memory in as much detail as possible. What did you have on? What color was the other person's hair, eyes, etc?
5. When you feel that resource (you feel assertive — you are being assertive), touch your right thumb to any finger on your right hand.
Hold for 30 seconds . . . Take a deep breath and let your thumb and finger relax. Repeat the above with any other resource you feel would have helped you in the past shame experience.
6. Let your awareness return to some cunent familiar scene (like your bedroom or the car you drive).
7. Now imagine that you are preparing to return to the past shame theme.
Imagine you could go back in time with the present resources you have just anchored. Imagine you are going to redo the experience in a way that uses the resources you just anchored.
8. Now touch your two anchors (your left thumb and finger and your right thumb and finger) simultaneously. Go back into the shame memory and redo it. Tell the shaming person how angry you are and whatever else you want to say and do. (Do not change any of their behavior — only your own). Stay in the experience until your internal experience feels, different. If you have difficulty doing this, come back to the present and anchor more resources. Then go back and change
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the memory, using the new resources. Remember to give him back his shame — the shame that they avoided by acting shameless.
9- Wait a minute or two and then remember the past experiences with no anchors to discover by your own sensory experience if indeed this memory has been subjectively changed.
10. When the past experiences have been changed, future pace them.
Imagine the next time a situation or context will arise which is similar to the above past experiences. As you imagine the future context, imagine yourself having the resources in this context. Use no anchors.
I recommend that you either memorize this sequence of instructions or put them on a tape recorder.