Tool: Neutralize Unpleasant Memories

Improve Your Past

Most people think you can't do anything about your past. But you can! That's because your past isn't as much about what happened as it is about how you feel about what happened.

I teach my clients a couple of simple, quick techniques from the field of NLP that they can use to change the way they feel about irritating and moderately unpleasant experiences.

Experience is coded in our brains along sensory lines, that is: auditorily, visually, kinestethically, gustatorily, and olifactorily. And because our brains are exquisitely precise in how we store information, often all we need to do to change the way we feel about an unpleasant experience is to create slightly different alternative imagined sensory experiences.

Because it's easiest to create alternative imagined experiences visually and auditorily, I generally work with these to change how someone feels about a past experience.

Typically what happens with an unpleasant past event is that one experiences a recurring unpleasant feeling, that they'e prefer to not have, when they remember the event. You can use a technique from my NLP toolbox to change the way you feel about such events to a more neutral, "that's something that happened," feeling.

Caution: Don't attempt to use the following techniques on traumatic or phobic unpleasant memories. The reason I issue this caution is that you need to work with someone who is an expert using change techniques on those types of experiences, someone qualified and with a good track record for respectful, safe, and comfortable work.

Auditory Technique:

1. Mentally play the audio tape that you hear in your head when you remember the incident.
2. Play the tape again, but this time slow it down and hear the words v e r y   s l o w l y.
3. Play the tape again, this time speed it up so that you hear the words very fast in a high squeeky voice.
4. Play it again, this time in a Donald Duck voice.
5. Play it again, this time with a circus music background.
6. Play it again, this time in a Mae West or other sultry voice.
7. Play it again, this time in a Goofy voice.

Usually replaying the tape five or six times in succession in distortion mode will be all you need to change the way you feel when you remember the incident.

Visual Technique:

1. Remember the visual image you have as a representation of the incident.

2. Notice if the picture is close to you or at a distance, whether it is in color or black and white, if there is movement or if it's a still picture, whether there is sound or not, if it has a frame around it, what it's shape is, whether it's clear or foggy, whether you are viewing it from inside the picture, or outside, etc.

3. Change the above elements, one at a time, noticing, with each change, if it affects the way you feel. If your picture is in color, change it to black and white. If there is movement, make it a still shot. If it is close to you, zoom it to a distance away from you. If it's clear make it foggy or smudgy, etc. If any change feels less comfortable for you, change that element back to what it was originally.

People vary as to which elements make the feeling shift for them, but typically sending a picture into the distance changes the feeling component to a less intense feeling, as does dulling color or making things less clear. But you need to adjust the particular elements that shift it for you.

4. Another visual distortion you may want to try, in addition, is to change some part of the picture content. A client of mine had a persistent troubling visual memory of being wronged by three people. We used the above techniques, and though they helped, she still had a residue of unpleasant feeling when she remembered the situation. So, innovating, I asked her if she could change the most dominant figure by placing a pig's head on the person. She said she could, and that it made a big difference. Then I asked her to make the less dominant troublemakers smaller pigs, and have them all say, "Oink, oink, oink." She began to laugh, saying that really worked for her.

5. You can also send the picture into the distance until it is a small dot, then have the dot pop and disappear.

Try these techniques on the moderately unpleasant and irritating memories you experience, and notice how they become rather unimportant and neutral in the way you feel about them afterward.