Making a decision may seem easy - know what we want, create some options, evaluate the
consequences of the options and select an option likely to produce optimum
consequences. And yet we live in a world dominated by short term decisions that
benefit few people (E.g.: politicians looking no further than the next
election). We live in a world where your image may be more important than your
reality, where your assets may be more important than the quality of your life.
(As my bank manager said "Many people
borrow money they can hardly afford to repay, to buy things they don't need, to
impress people they don't like!"). We live in a world where many people
continue to make the same old decisions and repeatedly suffer the same old
consequences. I believe that we always make the best decisions available to us.
But why do we often decide to suffer? We
may make decisions with a hidden agenda - we may hope for hidden advantages.
Sometimes we can hide our own hidden agenda from ourselves!
Our decisions reflect our desires. If we make negative goals (E.g., "
don't want to suffer"), we motivate ourselves to avoid a problem
by focusing on the problem! Our
unconscious minds seem to have difficulty representing negative goals. Don't
think of what you don't want! This
may be rather difficult - a solution is to think of what you want instead.
However we can use negative goals powerfully in hypnosis - "You
don't have to relax - now - and you don't need to consider the consequences of
negative goals you have set in the past".
Our decisions reflect our congruence. If we have a conflict, (E.g., "Part
of me wants this, but part of me doesn't"), we may either avoid making a
decision, or we may act incongruently and later find ways to sabotage ourselves.
Why do we not make decisions and act with 100% congruence? Because finding a
100% congruent goal is difficult. Finding a 100% congruent goal takes time. We
may feel bad about having a conflict, and let the unpleasant feeling motivate us
to avoid the self-discovery required to resolve the conflict. Few people are
aware of how their lack of congruence influences their decisions.
Our decisions reflect our specificity. If our goals are abstract (E.g., "I
want to succeed"), without a plan for achievement, we have little hope of
success! If our goals are wishy-washy (E.g.: "I want to learn a second
language"), without specifying exactly how much of what language, we may
lose energy. And if we make goals without deadlines, (E.g. "I want a
wonderful relationship - sometime"), we can endlessly procrastinate taking
concrete action. Few people seem aware of how the format of their desires
influence their decisions.
Our decisions reflect our beliefs. If we believe "There are infinite choices
available for every decision", we are less likely to have tunnel vision about a
single option. If we believe "I do not deserve success", we may decide to
fail! If we believe "All wealthy people are corrupt", then we may decide not to
be wealthy - or we may decide to become corrupt so as to become wealthy! If we
believe we are Souls with the possibility of fulfilling ourselves in our
physical lives, we may decide to focus on the long-term social consequences of
our actions. Few people seem aware of how beliefs influence their
decisions.
Our decisions reflect our relationships with ourselves (E.g.: "Do I like
myself? Am I proud of my actions? Can I be happy in the future"?) and our
decisions reflect our relationships with other people, past and present (E.g.: "Is
it OK if I am more successful than my father", "Will success damage my
relationship with my life partner", "Will failure motivate my family to
give me the attention that I want from them"). Few people are aware of how
their relationships influence their decisions.
Our decisions reflect our Sense of Life. (E.g.: " Am I angry about how I
allow myself to be treated?” "Am I afraid of expressing my anger?” "Am
I sad that I do not maintain my boundaries?” "Will success allow me to
express my emotions?") Few people seem aware how emotions influence
their decisions.
It seems that our decisions reflect what we really want in our lives,
and what we really want may be incongruent with our stated, conscious
goals. If we look at the results of our decisions, even those actions that are
seemingly poor, we may find that those decisions accurately reflect our desires,
our beliefs, our relationships and our Sense of Life. Are you living the life
you decided to live?
Sense of Life
Janelle Doan (a Canadian project-manager), Annegret Hallanzy (a German family
therapist) and I created a methodology to help people make decisions congruent
with their Sense of Life. Our sources included accelerated learning, expert
modeling, neurolinguistic programming, systemic family therapy and Polynesian
healing. The first step is finding the motivation to change. The next step is
fully experiencing one's full Sense of Life. The next is evaluating how one can
express this Sense of Life in relationships, and the next is resolving past
emotional trauma. A final step is choosing appropriate role models for living.
Together, this methodology supports a person in making congruent decisions
towards achieving self-selected important goals, while sequentially resolving a
person's internal conflict, relationship and emotional issues. And, during this
resolution, many mental health issues and physical symptoms may vanish.
My motivation to become involved in a "soft" science (I come from a
background of physics) originated as a desire to find effective techniques for
teaching physics to the staff of a nuclear power station. I explored relaxation
techniques, musical backgrounds and visual imagery with some success, and while
I gained a strange reputation as a teacher, my techniques were effective in
raising average marks to previously unheard-of levels. I found that the most
effective methods for accelerating learning were to help students to change
their limiting beliefs, such as "I cannot learn physics".
Accelerated Learning
For example, most people look up to visualize. But when a child looks up to
remember a visual eidetic image, a teacher may say "The answer isn't on
the ceiling Johnny - stop daydreaming and look at your book". Looking down
is pretty good for talking to oneself, but talking to oneself is a poor way to
remember diagrams and charts. Also, few teachers know HOW people learn well. For
example, most good spellers spell by looking up, visualizing a word, and waiting
for a feeling. If the feeling is "rightness" the person "reads" the letters off
the image. If the feeling indicates "wrongness", the person makes another
visualization. A lesser speller often writes the word on paper, looks at it and
checks the feeling for “rightness” or “wrongness”. A poor speller tries to
"spell it out" auditorially - which is slow (and a horribly ineffective pattern
for irregular English spelling). A terrible speller may switch between negative
self-talk and unpleasant feelings (and the feelings may become evidence for a
decision that one is learning-disabled or stupid! Teachers may encourage such
decisions!) Although encouragement or counter-examples may change such
decisions, teaching an effective learning strategy makes such decisions
irrelevant!
For example, changing a person's subjective experience of time can be
extremely useful in education. Typically, we have a mental "speed", often
limited by sub-vocalizations (E.g.: How fast can you mentally count all the
integers from one to one hundred? It is much more efficient to do this visually
without sub-vocalizing - for example "seeing" the numbers from one to one
hundred sequentially, without mentally verbalizing them. And it is even more
efficient to "see" the entire number set from one to one hundred
simultaneously!). We can all change subjective time flow - for example the
minute that seems like an hour when we're in a crisis, or the hour that seems
like a minute when we are enjoying ourselves. Using a hypnotic "double
dissociation" to allow a person to stop sub-vocalizing, while simultaneously
increasing the subjective time ratio from 1:1 to around 300:1, allows lightening
fast cognition, without conscious "brakes". This is often a superb strategy for
organizing knowledge that one has already learned - for example prior to an
examination.
Accelerated Healing
I explored applying hypnotic techniques for accelerating learning to
psychotherapy, and later I explored applying accelerated learning to the healing
of our own bodies. My first results were peculiar. Accelerating the healing of a
disease often shortened the disease duration but increased the
severity of the symptoms! And removing symptoms by direct hypnotic
suggestion often caused different symptoms to suddenly arise! Something was
missing in my rather mechanistic approach. People do not let go of their
suffering so easily. But why not?
I particularly liked the concept of sub-identities, ego-states or parts
used in many therapies. This notion is that certain skills may be
state-dependent - i.e. the skills can only be used in a specific emotional
state. (E.g.: "I can only be creative when I am angry!") I explored
existing techniques for changing the meaning or boundaries of parts,
(including many therapeutic techniques that now seem very unhealthy), and became
adept at working with parts. Later I came to see parts as
dissociated "personality packages". Each part had it’s own values,
beliefs and behaviors, and a part was often childlike. (E.g.: "When I see a
physics formula, part of me wants to scream").
In 1989, I was invited to teach in Hawaii, where I met a native healer, Papa
Auwe (a kahuna La'au Lapa'au). Papa Auwe used many healing concepts that
transcended my hypnotic skills. His work included helping clients learn from
their diseases, as if each symptom was a teacher. (Papa Auwe: "It is more
important that a person learn from a disease than that they heal it! ") He
also focused the importance of helping a client heal their relationships! I
returned to Hawaii many times to study with Papa Auwe and other healers.
Another Hawaiian concept is that we keep ele’ele eke or “black bags”
in our bodies. In a "black bag" are the emotions from an experience and a
younger version of us - as if some part of ourselves is still experiencing the
traumatic experience. The location of this "black bag" in the body may be
associated with disease. "Opening a black bag" can open the possibility of
accepting and integrating a hitherto rejected younger version of oneself. Hmm,
more parts! However, instead of being "fragmented ego states", a Hawaiian
healer may treat such parts as "lost children".
I was simultaneously interviewing people who had "spontaneous" remissions
from the physical symptoms of serious disease, and, if they were willing,
hypnotically investigating their healing process. Many times, in many ways, I
heard people say "The disease became my friend" or "The pain became my
teacher". It is as if a part could create a disease. If this part
was fully accepted, the disease might vanish! Such people often commented on how
they had redefined their "toxic" relationships. Exploring the advantages of a
disease in a person’s life seemed to indicate that disease symptoms resolve some
deep issue in the person’s life. Although the information was confusing, the
deep issues seemed to be in four groups - inner conflict, relationship problems,
and overwhelming emotions from past traumatic experiences and copying poorly
chosen role models.
Another source of information was neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a
meta-philosophy from which are derived many techniques that are useful for
duplicating expertise. I found some NLP to be profound, particularly work on
"Identity Metaphors" - how to recognize and change the metaphors by which we
make life decisions. I became a NLP trainer and combined this work with
accelerated learning and Hawaiian healing. This opened many doors - one was
"dreaming together" - the ability to join a person in their metaphoric
experience of identity which I now call "interactive metaphors". But I still
sought a bigger picture.
In 1992 I met a Canadian project-manager, Janelle Doan (called a professional
angel by many of her friends). With an exuberance of joy, Janelle lived
the principles that I was teaching. Janelle and I subsequently researched human
bonding, which is one basis for the relationship phase of this changework, and
we explored some of the metaphysical implications of the Hawaiian techniques.
Some of the techniques access unusual states, the descriptions of which would
normally be associated with religious experiences.
In 1993 I met a family therapist, Annegret Hallanzy, who was
investigating similar issues. We worked together in Bavaria and Poland to
explore the Hawaiian healing rituals. Our results were beyond our
expectations - many of the seemingly esoteric techniques used by Hawaiian
healers could be translated into a philosophy that generated a specific,
effective, non-esoteric tool set.
This synthesis represented a very big picture indeed. As so many people
claimed to experience a sense of SOUL - in 1994 I began calling this Soul
Centered Changework, and later Soulwork Systemic Coaching.
This is part 1of the keynote speech, for
Part 2 - Click here
