Timeline Therapy

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You may have heard of NLP in the past, it’s a set of strategies, tools and techniques devised for rapid results. NLP applies to all areas of life, from communication to motivation, from influence/persuasion to solving any psychological problem such as phobias.

So what is timeline therapy anyway?

How do you personally represent time? What I mean is, how do you picture the past and the future in your mind? For white Anglo Saxons, time is visualised from left to right, the past being to the left and the future being to the right.

This is why it is often hard for westerners to emotionally associate to our past or visualise the future in vivid detail, it becomes dissociated. Then there’s “Arabic time”, this is used by those in the East, particularly the Middle-East countries such as Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt etc.

I challenge any westerner to do business in any of these countries, it becomes difficult because these cultures find it easier to meet deadlines at a more rapid rate because they are able to fully associate and visualise the future that exists in front of them.

Their experience of time becomes a series of present moments, after all, there is no other time than right now, think about that one.

Visualising time this way also makes it easier to associate to the past and visualise the future.

So what does all this have to do with timeline therapy?

Ok Ok, I’m getting to that. It's a form of therapy designed to serve many purposes. It can be used to heal old psychological wounds and help people to move on from past problems and for the purpose of this article; timeline therapy can be used to fully associate to your own true identity.

I have had personal experiences with this technology where I have been experiencing massive pain in a given area of my life and was taken through a timeline therapy session that literally banished the negative emotions and radically reduced the intensity.

So how can timeline therapy be used in a practical situation?

I want you to try something for me. Think of a moment in your past that was really painful, fully associate emotionally to that moment. Now observe the emotions you are feeling, are they intense? Make note of these emotions.

Now I want you to pay attention to the pictures you see when you remember this moment. Are they big, bright and colourful? Or are they small and dull? Are they moving or still? Are they hard to remember, blurry or out of focus? If they move, are they moving fast or slow?

Do the same for each of your senses. Pay attention to the sound qualities and volume, the smells etc.

Next, go back to the same moment and play around with the “sub-modalities” (the colours, sounds and everything else I just described). Change the picture, change the volume, change the focus and the distance that it appears and everything else associated with the memory.

It has been said by many scientists throughout time that if you revisit and question a memory, that memory is never the same again.

Take notice of the changes in emotion or the intensity of the emotions when you change the way the memory looks, sounds, smells and feels. Does anything change emotionally? This is part of how it works; you literally change the way you represent your past and visualise your future, you essentially re-wire your neurology, which is what NLP is all about.

The awesome part about this is, you get to control it, you get to choose what changes take place.

Do the same thing for the emotions and moments you want to experience more often, make them more intense.

How can you use timeline therapy to associate to your “inner-self”?

Once you know how, using it in this way is pretty simple. Go back to a vivid memory in your past, preferably a defining moment when you really felt comfortable with yourself and who you were. If you say that there was no such time then look harder, everyone has had at least a fleeting moment when they felt this way.

Now do the same as you did previously by noticing the “sub-modalities” such as picture, volume, smell, moving or still, bright or dull etc. Fully associate to this emotion, feel the emotion in the present moment. This may take a few attempts but once you get it, you will have a profound sense of self.

While you do this exercise, pay attention to all the details, even the ones you think are insignificant. How can you feel this way all the time? Once you successfully do this exercise you will know how. You will begin to be able to recreate the emotion of your true identity by accessing these same sub-modalities. This will in turn create more recent moments where you were able to associate to your true self and it will become easier to naturally unleash the best parts of YOU.

Practice this technique and you will gain an increasingly regular feeling of total peace and fulfilment.

Of course, in written form, it may be hard to apply timeline therapy and this is by far not a comprehensive explanation of it, but I regularly research the internet for tools and resources on everything including NLP. I will be posting more on NLP and timeline therapy very soon.

Keep an eye out for more NLP tools and resources and more on timeline therapy.

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