The
Drop Down Through & The Mind Back-Tracking Techniques
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Will
the Thought in the Back of Your Mind
Please Stand Up?
L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D.Min.
Back to the experience out
of which our map came! In NLP, this describes the heart and
passion of using the Meta-Model. We start with Surface structures
and meta-model them in order to get back to the Deep structures.
The Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology
model, in which NLP falls, postulates that behind every emotion
lies a "thought." This "thought" may involve
an understanding, awareness, sensory representation, belief,
value, decision, etc. From this awareness that "beneath"
(or behind) every emotion lies a thought comes the idea of
"back-tracking" to the thought out of which it came.
Ellis (1976) in Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) and Beck (1976)
each searches with a client to discover the person's evaluative
judgment that drives the emotion.
This understanding also fits
the diagrams on the levels of abstraction that Korzybski (1941/1994)
developed in describing the nervous system's modeling process.
We start at the bottom in the unspeakable territory which
we can never reach by words and which exists "out there"
beyond the nervous system. But then we "abstract,"
(e.g. summarize, bring in, and transform) from the territory
to make our neurological "maps" of that territory.
Then, moving up two or three levels, we finally reach the
speakable level of words, a linguistic map of various neurological
transforms. In Science and Sanity, in a section on semantic
reactions, Korzybski suggested a semantic experiment to discover
the "meaning" of any given term. The effective of
the experiment leads a person down further and further into
the deep structure, into deeper levels of neurology...
"Here we have reached
the bottom and the foundation of all non-elementalistic meanings--meanings
of undefined terms, which we "know" somehow, but
cannot tell. In fact, we have reached the un-speakable level."
(p. 21).
Sometimes we need to go back
down to the territory and re-map in more appropriate and accurate
ways. This Bandler and Grinder (1975) built into the meta-model
(as a model of human modeling processes) using the deep and
surface structures of Chomsky. So dropping down back to the
experience out of which we do our mental mapping describes
an insight of the Meta-Model as well as a technique.
This technique involves a backtracking
to the neuro-linguistic constructions. In doing so, we imagine
"going back" or "dropping down" to a lower
or prior level of abstraction. To accomplish what? Typically
we use this "Drop-Down Through" or Mind Backtracking
Technique to assist ourselves, or others, in releasing negative
emotions, especially those in which we may feel stuck. Via
this process the negative emotions will release as we move
back or down to previous levels of abstraction.
What lies at the bottom? The
Void, the Nothing, the Unspeakable realm, the quantum, God,
ultimate reality, etc.
Arising then, first from Korzybski,
through the Cognitive Psychology models, then through Bandler
and Grinder, Tad James first developed this specific technique
as a Time-Line TherapyTM
technique. We here first present Tad's process, then one developed
by John Overdurf to streamline the process, then our own development,
Mind Backtracking.
The Pattern
1. Find the first event.
"What is the root cause of this problem, the first
event which, when disconnected, will cause the problem to
disappear? Tell me about the first time you felt this emotion..."
2. Go back to the first event
on your time-line. "I'd like to ask your unconscious
mind to float up... above your time-line (The line that
represents your life history.), and then to go back into
the past... and as you do you can go back to the event itself
and drop down into it." Fully associate the client
into the kinesthetic of the event. Have him/her fully describe
where and how he/she feels the emotion.
[Note: Do not associate
yourself or another into the event if it has the qualities
or character of a trauma; always run the V/K dissociation
pattern or some other dissociative technique first to release
the negative emotions.]
3. Preserve the learnings.
"As you re-visit that event, notice and describe the
emotion/s you now feel? What learnings have you made here
that you would want to preserve? What do you need to learn
from this event, the learning of which will allow you to
let this all go, easily and effortlessly?"
4. Drop-down through. "As
quickly as you can, allow yourself to drop down through
the emotion as you do a kind of kinesthetic 'free-fall'
through it and do this as quickly as you can... and say
aloud the name of the emotion that you find underneath this
first experience..."
5. Repeat this process again
and again. "And as quickly as you can, just drop through
that emotion, the emotion you found underneath the original
one. And what do you find underneath that one?" Continue
this process until you float down all the way through and
come to the "void," or "nothing," to
that unspeakable stage of experience and notice, as you
do, how you come out the other side to an experience that
has a positive kinesthetic to it. Then free-fall another
time to a second positive kinesthetic.
[Usually you need only to
go to two positive emotions. If looping occurs more than
once, use an inductive language pattern to exit the loop
to a deeper level of meaning. End the process when you reach
the second positive emotion or the client's highest resource
frame. You should see and experience an obvious physiological
shift. This suggests the chain of emotions below or behind
emotions have collapsed together.]
6. Meta-State the
negative emotions with the positive emotions. For instance,
below I (BB) elicited the following emotional states from
a client:
1) Abandonment,
2) Scared,
3) Lonely,
4) Helpless,
5) Nothing
6) Jesus (The person's highest meta-frame so I stopped
him at this state.)
A very helpful addition to
the original Drop Down Through Technique is to say after
dropping down through to the resource states, "And
what happens to 'abandonment' in the presence of Jesus?"
The client said, "It is gone." "Good,
and what happens to being 'scared' in the presence of Jesus?"
"It is gone." "Good, and what happens
to 'loneliness' in the presence of Jesus?" "It
is gone." "Great, and what happens to 'helplessness'
in the presence of Jesus?" "It is gone. They are
all gone."
In doing this we are adding
the meta-stating process of bringing to bear a higher
level on the lower level. In this case, the interaction
will negate the negative states. On numerous occasions I
(BB) I have learned that adding this meta-stating process
will totally eliminate the problem. You can re-associate
the client into the original problem and it will be gone.
If so, skip to future pacing #11.
7. Float above your experience
and time-line. "As you return to the experience that
began this experience, float up your time-line, and
go back in history to well before the beginning of the event,
or any of the chain of events that led to that event, and
turn and look towards now."
8. Solidify and test for
the disappearance of the negative emotions. "Now where
has the old emotion/s gone? ... Yes, it disappeared."
"Now, just float right down into the event and notice
just how fully the emotion has completely disappeared from
what the way you used to experience it... Do you find the
emotion totally gone? Good, return back up above to your
time-line to fifteen minutes above and before the painful
event." [Continue to re-run this process until you
access the positive kinesthetic.]
9. Come back to now. "Now,
come back to now, above your time-line only as quickly as
you can let go of all the _____(name the emotion)____ on
the events all the way back to now, assume the position
above and fifteen minutes before each subsequent event,
preserve the learnings, and let go of the _____(name the
emotion)____ all the way back to now." [Break state.]
10. Test. "As you recall
some event, any event, in the past where you used to feel
that old emotion, go back there and try to see if you can
feel it, or you may find that you cannot."
11. Future pace. "I
want you to go out into the future to an unspecified time
in the future which if it had happened in the past, you
would have felt _____(name the emotion)____, and notice
if you can find that old emotion, or you may find that you
cannot. OK? Good come back to now."
The Pattern Simplified
John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorn
(1996) have simplified this Drop-Down Through Process into
the following five steps.
1. Elicit a word which corresponds
to emotional state. Identify a value or unwanted emotional
state in the form of some nominalization: anger, fearfulness,
timidity, etc.
2. Invite a person to "just
drop down through that emotion . . . until you come to what
you find underneath it..."
3. Continue the Dropping
Down Through. Continue to repeat this process until you
have generated a chain of states that run all the way through
to a "void", "nothing," an unspeakable
stage, etc. and comes out the other side to a positive kinesthetic
state.
4. End the process when you
reach the non-mirror image reverse of the first word (e.g.
the undesired emotional term). Unless you come out immediately
to the obvious non-mirror image reverse, go to the second
positive kinesthetic. You will find an obvious physiological
shift which indicates that the chain has begun to collapse
at that point.
5. Repeat this whole process
with another emotional state. Do this until you have only
accessed a positive kinesthetic. You may find that various
chains interconnect. In these cases continue running the
"branches" of each chain until you reach only
a positive kinesthetic.
6. I (BB) highly suggest
utilizing the meta-stating process in #6 above.
Demonstrating Dropping-Down Through
For me (BB), the stages of
dropping down through that one recent client had with this
process involved the following "chain" of states:
- Abandonment
- Scared
- Lonely
- Helpless
- Nothing (a void, here a
person will feel or experience "nothing" and so
will have a "blank" so to speak)
- Jesus. This client dropped
straight into "Jesus." I wrote in my notes, "A
big one. She really had a phenomenal experience."
The following one represents
another case, and a classic example of what we usually get
with this process. Often I look at this as a kinesthetic free
fall down through the outcome chain that one might get from
using the Core TransformationTM
process. Here you can take a person back on their time-line
and come forward with each painful internal representation.
In the process you thereby provide a re-imprint. From another
recent client, I got this classic list: 1) Confusion, 2) Shock,
3) Fear, 4) Worry, 5) Fear for dad (different from above),
6) Fear of losing house (different fear, dad arrested for
gambling by the police), 7) Nothing. 8) Safety, 9) Christ.
At this point the client started laughing out loud.
Some caveats. Like all
NLP techniques, this process will not always work. When a
person drops down through, he or she may not always get the
classic negative emotions, the void, and then two positive.
Sometimes you get different mixtures --scramble eggs. Tad
recommends that a person follow these directions precisely
and to do so only with individuals, not groups.
On my (MH) first experience
with this process, I picked a recent incident to which I responded
with anger and upset feelings. Then, as I did the kinesthetic
free-fall--I first fell into 2) hurt, then I moved into 3)
fear, then into a strange emotional state, one wherein I felt
a strong sense of life itself feeling 4) unfulfilled, after
that, I felt, as Alice in Wonderland, falling, falling, falling...
I hit the Void of Nothingness. Falling after that took me
to the chaos of God's World where I had a sense of his spirit
moving upon the waters bringing order out of chaos.
Mind BackTracking
As you can imagine, some people
will not like the metaphor of falling or going "down."
So for them, playfully using the metaphor of going "behind"
enables them to use the same process.
This process may remind you
of the Kinesthetic Stepping Back technique [I (MH) wrote this
in "Spirit of NLP" (1996)]. In that process we take
a state of some distress, and step back from it on our time-line
so that we can then look at it. There in front of us we see
(dissociated, from a spectator's point of view) our Future
Self in that distress state! Yet as we have stepped back,
we have accessed another state, one with more resources and
one in which we can begin to stack and store other resources.
"What resource/s would change that future experience
and make it less painful or distressful?"
Once we have accessed those
resources, we step back again. Now we see our future self
playing and accessing resources for a future distressful state.
Here again we can imagine additional resources that would
help that future self. And so continuing moving back on one's
time-line, associating into more and more resources as moving
back, and gaining increasing perspective on the future self.
When a person has backed up
numerous times and anchored resources at each spot on a kinesthetic
time-line, then the neuro-linguistic programmer could assist
with languaging and anchoring moving the person forward in
"time" reanchoring and re-experiencing the resources
until coming up to the present (where the process began) now
completely re-organized.
Similarly, in backing up or
"backtracking" to the cognitive-behavioral state
out of which the anger/upset came, I landed first at hurt,
then fear, etc. Visually I had the experience of running my
movie backward--and had a strong kinesthetic sense of quickly
zooming back and did so until it came out of a void and then
out of God's chaos.
The Mind BackTracking Pattern
With this pattern, we begin
with the statement and continue to use this as the driving
force:
"And, behind that thought
whirling in your mind lies another thought.... So as you allow
yourself to notice what thought do you find back there?"
Using this directional question
that swish the mind backwards offers a profound and simple
way to take a client back to the Void of nothingness and then
on to various resources.
Conclusion
How does this process work?
It operates by associating into a problem, getting the "thought"
that drives it, and then asking a series of backtracking questions
about the "thought" (ideas, representations, etc.)
behind it that propels it forward into becoming one's frames
or generalizations. In doing this, we go (or we take other)
back to the experience out of which it came and ultimately
to the Void. When we get there we have arrived at the place
of pure potentiality.
As such, it provides a valuable
tool for those whose primary representation systems involve
something other than the visual modality (e.g. auditory, kinesthetic,
and/or auditory digital).
And the value of getting one
back (or down) to the Void--the unspeakable dimension before
abstracting? It opens us up to new potentialities as it gives
us new ways to remap. It also gives us a deep neurological
or unconscious understanding of the difference between map
and territory-- "maps are but maps," they never
exist as territory.
Though Bob did not future pace
or re-imprint in this case with Susan, he very well could
have brought her forward and have her re-imprint her entire
time-line with the resources that she found in that place
of pure potentiality. This usually offers an additional reinforcement
of the process.
Authors
Michael Hall, Ph.D. does NLP
Training, specializing in Meta-States Training, 1904 N. 7th.
St. Grand Jct. Co. 81501.
Bobby G. Bodenhamer, D.Min.,
therapist and NLP trainer director NLP of Gastonia NC. 1516
Cecelia Dr. Gastonia, NC. 28054.
This pattern appears in their
co-authored work, soon to be published, Time-Lining: Patterns
for Adventuring in "Time."
References
Beck, A.T. (1976). Cognitive
therapy and the emotional disorders. New York: International
University Press.
Ellis, Albert and Harper, Robert
A. (1976). A new guide to rational living. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
James, Tad. (1989). Master
Time Line TherapyR Training Manual.
Hall, L. Michael (1995). Meta-states:
A new domain of logical levels, self-reflexiveness in human
States of consciousness. Grand Junction, CO: ET Publications.
Hall, L. Michael. (1996). Dragon
slaying: Dragons to princes. Grand Junction, CO: ET Publications.
Hall, L. Michael. (1996). The
spirit of NLP: The process, meaning and criteria for mastering
NLP. Carmarthen, Wales, England: Anglo-American Books.
Korzybski, Alfred. (1941/1994).
Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian
systems and general semantics, (5th. ed.). Lakeville,
CN: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co.
Overdurf, John; Silverthorn.
(1996). Beyond Words Audio Cassettes.
©1997-2002 Bob Bodenhamer D.Min.
and L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. All rights reserved.
www.neurosemantics.com
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