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
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.