Chapter 3 starts below or click on the links at left to jump to another section.

This chapter begins with information about the brain and how emotions are centered in a lower brain level, which is out of our awareness. Therefore, a conscious decision to change an emotion is ineffective. One can make oneself aware of the specific details of the mental image or the remembered sounds connected to the emotion. This provides a pathway to the unconscious area of the brain. Making the mental image smaller, less colorful, farther away and less distinct will lessen the emotional impact. Making the mental image bigger, brighter, closer, more distinct and colorful will increase the emotions you feel.

Billy was determined to get his life back and experience the life he had before meeting Dahmer. Up to this time he still had still not talked about many of the humiliations he experienced, particularly the anal rape. He was willing to face the shame and guilt of admitting this and to do whatever it took to make changes in his life. He already felt comfortable with me and trusted me. When I asked him to go inside and become aware of the mental images and sounds that occurred when he had his fear and panic, he was willing to do this. To explain how important it is to be able to become aware of unconscious processes, I need to talk a little about the brain.

Temple Grandin (2005: 52-55), in her book Animals in Translation, discusses the three brain theory. She writes that the neurologist Paul MacLean has proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three, each representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological site: He calls it the "triune brain." MacLean, now the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior in Poolesville, Maryland, says that three brains operate like "three interconnected biological computers, [each] with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory.” He refers to these three brains as the neocortex or neo-mammalian brain, the limbic or paleo-mammalian system, and the reptilian brain, the brainstem and cerebellum. Each of the three brains is connected by nerves to the other two, but each seems to operate as its own brain system with distinct capacities.This hypothesis has become a very influential paradigm, which has forced a rethinking of how the brain functions. It had previously been assumed that the highest level of the brain, the neocortex, dominates the other, lower levels. MacLean has shown that this is not the case, and that the physically lower limbic system, which rules emotions, can hijack the higher mental functions when it needs to.

He sees a great danger in all this limbic system power. As he understands it, this lowly mammalian brain of the limbic system tends to be the seat of our value judgments, instead of the more advanced neocortex. It decides whether our higher brain has a "good" idea or not, whether it feels true and right.

Grandin (2005) expresses the same concept in this way: “In other words, if you’re Mother Nature, and you’ve got a lot of lizards running around the world breathing, eating, sleeping, and waking up just fine, you don’t create a whole brand new dog breathing system when it comes time to evolve a dog. Instead, you add the new dog brain on top of the old lizard brain. The lizard brain breathes, eats, and sleeps; the dog brain forms dominance hierarchies and rears its young.

The same thing happens all over again when nature evolves a human. The human brain gets added on top of the dog brain. So you have your lizard brain to breathe and sleep, your dog brain to form wolf packs, and your human brain to write books about it. In a lot of ways, evolution is like building an addition onto your house instead of tearing down the old one and building a new one from the ground up.”

The limbic system or old mammalian brain is concerned with survival, and reactions occur very fast –too fast for our neocortex to have thought about it. However, the neocortex attaches images and sounds and on occasion smells and tastes to the emotions. This occurs fairly rapidly and at an unconscious level. However, one can become aware of those images and sounds and thereby gain emotional control. This is the crucial difference between neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and other therapies. As Grandin (page 51) points out, we do not see what is there, but what we expect to see or what fits with our way of organizing our world. It is useful to think that our neocortex has the same control over our mental images that a television camera has. The TV screen can be any size and it can be close or far away, to the right or to the left, up or down or center. The picture can be in black and white or color or any tint of color. It can be a still image or a movie. It can be in focus or fuzzy. The people can be life-sized or smaller than life or bigger. You can zoom in or zoom out. The background can stand out or fade away. Your mind can do anything that Photoshop can do. It can put people in a picture, remove them or make the eyes a different size. Your mind can do the same thing with imaginary sounds. You can make the sounds louder or softer, higher pitched or lower pitched, distorted or clear. The sound can come from within your head or anywhere around you. You can give a person an entirely different voice. The emotion comes first and then we make the mental image, which is coded in such a way as to make a connection with the emotion we felt. The image of the person may be distorted depending on the emotion. Most of our expressions can be taken literally such as love is blind. The image is distorted to eliminate any faults. If the emotion is negative, then the image may be distorted to reflect that negative emotion. If the emotion is fear, the person may be seen as large and towering over us. When one feels contempt, the person may be seen as smaller than life-size. If the emotion is shame, then people may be seen as large with big eyes looking down on us. It is important to realize that emotions originate very quickly in the mammalian brain, and that this is an unconscious process, which doesn’t involve our conscious thoughts initially. Many people have the misconception that they are in control of their emotions. To support this belief, they make justifications for the emotion. “I am mad at John Doe because he did such and such.” This justification often becomes a sound movie, which plays over and over again in people’s heads, each time reactivating the feelings of anger and resentment. When I have seen couples in therapy, one will often complain that the other is still harping on something that happened 30 years ago. The positive intent of the person’s part that maintains the anger is often to protect the person from future injury or slights. However, this is not an effective way of achieving that. So how can one get rid of the negative feelings?

One of the most difficult concepts to get across is that the mental picture of a person is the coding made by the neurons in your brain. None of our images is a true picture. The United States has to be distorted in various ways so that a map can be made. Likewise we distort the information in various ways so that we can make a mental image, and those images produce certain feelings. If you grew up with an abusive parent, then that monster image can haunt you all your life. The brain does not evaluate whether a program is negative or positive; it just keeps running the program unless it is changed. Once a person can be aware of the image, he can make changes in the image much like a TV cameraman can do. There is some variation between individuals, but generally to intensify the emotion, make the image big, bright, close, in color, as a movie, and in sharp focus. To diminish the intensity, make the image small, far away, black and white, a still picture and out of focus. The image that you saw through the lens of your eyes is called an associated image and has the original emotional intensity. The image as seen through the lens of a TV camera is called a dissociated image, and you see yourself in the image. The image tends to dissociate you from the emotions and make the feeling less intense.

To change the negative feeling, go inside and become aware of the images and sounds connected to the feeling. Then experiment with changing the images and sounds to find out which change is most effective in creating a lessening of the negative feeling.
The images of Dahmer were so intense that Billy had difficulty in making changes at first. Billy said that Dahmer had a particular expression that he had never seen on anyone else. I asked him to change that picture. I suggested he move it away and make it smaller. He said it wouldn’t change. I asked him to see the image as reflected in one of those mirrors in a science museum that make one look fat. He could not do this. I think this was because he still had the belief that Dahmer pounded into him, “You can never be free of me.” As therapy progressed, he was able to make those changes not only in the therapy sessions but also on his own.

Many individuals heard negative messages about themselves as children and continue to hear that message. When they hear the internal voice, it often uses “you” instead of “I”. e. g., “You will never amount to anything.” “You are a bad seed.” “You are just like your father with his temper.” This voice has a tremendous effect on the person’s self image. People try to get rid of the voice but that doesn’t work. It is like an arrow to the left with a line through it indicating “no left turn.” The left turn signal is still there. The brain is highly selective regarding what data to remember, but once selected they are difficult to erase. It is easier to change the voice. I give clients several choices including ones they think of on their own. You can imagine putting the voice on a 45-rpm record and playing it at 33 speed, or the reverse, putting it on 33 record and playing it at 45 speed. You can make it the voice of a rap star or your favorite singer, or a cartoon character like Sylvester the cat. A woman client was a social hermit because when she was outside, she would hear people saying bad things to her. She wasn’t sure whether the people actually said the comments or not; she had borderline hallucinations. I gave her several choices, but the one she came up with was to make the voices sound like Mickey Mouse. She still hears the voices, but they don’t bother her. She is active socially. She applied to rehabilitation, received funding for college, and has completed her first semester with A’s and B’s. She has reconnected with her family and has applied for a sales job.
Billy learned to change his mental images to minimize the emotional impact. He became comfortable going inside (a term I use to indicate paying attention to internal sights, sounds and feelings), and he gradually became aware of previously unconscious processes. He was able to use this ability to cure his panic attacks, which he had when going into a crowded situation like a store. (This is described in Chapter 3.5 Panic Attack) He eventually was able to shrink the image of a person down so that the image could be put on the head of a pin. He said, “And I can throw the pin away.”

Billy’s change in his image of Dahmer showed up in his dreams as illustrated in the following quotes: “I have nightmares, but they are more bland. In one nightmare, Jeff (Dahmer) dressed up as a clown. It was hilarious in the dream. He was so out of character. He was using somebody else’s identity and it was not working. The walls in the dream were blue and purple. I remember his having this big red nose like clowns have. I felt like squeezing it. It was kind of okay in the dream.” I asked him what he thought the dream about Jeff being a clown was trying to tell him. He said, “I think he is trying to tell me that everything is okay and you can laugh at him. He did have a comedic side. He had a lot of charisma. He was able to manipulate and make people laugh. He handled people. It was a job for him. His job was to manipulate people so that he could kill them. I do exactly the opposite. I try to help people. When I get mad, I still talk with a northern accent. My family can tell when I am getting mad when I start talking with a northern accent.”

Emotional Management Suggestions

It is possible for you to change your internal images and to control the response you get from them. One way to increase the intensity of a pleasant memory, is to make the internal picture of the memory bigger, brighter, closer, in color, and a movie. You can have the opposite effect if you move the picture away, make it smaller, dimmer, black and white, and a “still” picture. This reduces the intensity of the emotion. Similarly, if you have a negative image of a situation, for example, when you were embarrassed, by making that image bigger and brighter, the embarrassment increases. If you change that image by moving it away, making it smaller, out of focus, dimmer, a still picture, and in black and white rather than color, then the intensity of your feeling is much less. Basically, this is an example of how you can control your brain and your emotions.

There are two ways in which you can experience visual images. If the image is what you saw through your own eyes, then this is called an associated image. If the picture was taken outside of yourself through a video camera, then this is called a dissociated image. When making a dissociated image, then you have much less emotional response. When you have an associated image, then you experience the feelings you had at the time. You can take any memory that is unpleasant or not particularly useful and see what happened as though the whole scene was taken with a camera and shown on a movie screen. Then your emotions become much less intense.

Billy suffered from nightmares and flashbacks. When he had a mental image of any of the numerous traumas that he endured from Dahmer, he would feel all the panic, fear, shame, guilt, physical pain and muscle tension that he experienced in the original trauma. Not only did Dahmer torture Billy for the eighteen months that they were roommates in the Army, his memories tortured Billy every day and night for twenty four years thereafter. To do away with this continuous torture was my first priority.

All of the therapeutic interventions that I used with Billy worked together and dovetailed with each other. Stopping his nightmares and flashback involved creating an alternate past as a way of changing his limiting beliefs, (see creating an alternate past (Chapter 3.8), curing his panic attacks (Chapter 3.5), reducing his guilt and shame (Chapter 3.6), and resolving internal conflicts (Chapter 3.3).

The method I used most frequently was the fast phobia cure. This is one of the first treatment methods developed by neurolinguistic programming (NLP). An example of a true phobia is that of a five year old girl who saw a snake’s head spin in the air after being cut off by a hoe. For thirty years, anytime she saw a snake, she was literally petrified with fear. After treating her with the fast phobia cure, she was able to touch a snake I had wrapped around my arm. Brain pathways change very rapidly. The total time that I treated her was less than thirty minutes.

I picture in the brain a pathway from the image of the snake to the fear which occurred when first seeing that image. When the brain has an image of the snake while at the same time the emotions are calm and relaxed, the brain will select that pathway and the prior pathway will be abandoned. Learning the phobia was a one-time learning, and learning this new pathway is also a one-time learning.

This method depends on dissociation, in fact, double dissociation. An associated mental image is when you see what you actually saw at the time--in other words, the picture projected on your retina through your pupils. You will experience the feelings you had at the time. A dissociated image is when you see yourself in the picture as though the image was taken by a video camera. This detached view disconnects you from the feelings that you had at the time.

It is easy to test this process out. Make a mental image of what you actually saw at a time when you had strong positive feelings. You will notice that you tend to re-experience those feelings. Make that mental image bigger and brighter and closer to you and the feelings will increase. Made the image smaller, move it away from you, and you will notice a decrease in the intensity of the feelings.

Now remember an experience when you had negative feelings. When you make an associated image, seeing what you actually saw with your eyes, you will re-experience the negative feelings. Often when a loved one irritates a person, he or she will make the image big and bright and increase the irritation. This then alters the person’s expression, tone of voice and demeanor in ways that are totally out of his or her awareness. This has a negative effect on the relationship. What is much more useful is to make a dissociated image and see oneself in the picture. Then the negative feelings are less intense. The negative feelings decrease even more if one makes the image smaller and more distant. Now you have one way of having control over your emotions. Throughout the website, I will point out ways that Billy has been able to take the tools of NLP and use them outside of the office setting.

In the example above of the girl with the snake phobia, once she was able to be calm and relaxed while seeing a movie of that snake being beheaded, that phobic reaction was immediately gone. I wrapped a snake around my arm. She didn’t like the snake but she was able to touch it. I asked her to try and get the old fear back and she could not. Flashbacks of physical and sexual abuse work the same way.

So how can people become calm and relaxed and remain that way while seeing the images of the trauma? The way this is done is for the person to see himself seeing the images. The client imagines a movie theater and he sees a black and white photograph of himself on the screen. He takes a seat in the movie theater and sees himself on the screen. Then he floats out of his body and goes up to the projection booth. He doesn’t see the screen. He sees himself in a seat in the theater watching the movie screen. Then the movie runs until the traumatic incident is over. The therapist is watching the client, and if he starts to get anxious, then the therapist can stop the process and do something else so the client won’t collapse into the feelings. I have had the screen be farther away or smaller. I have had the client imagine that he was looking through a window that was shattered so that he couldn’t really see himself there but he knew the movie was running. After the movie is over, the added step is to walk down the aisle, make the image at the end of the movie in color, and have the client be inside the movie and feel himself going backwards as the film is rapidly run backward to a time before the incident happened.

Many of my clients including Billy have learned to use the procedure for all sorts of situations. Basically any time a person has a mental picture of an incident and negative feelings are produced, the person can use the fast phobia procedure. In addition to fear and panic, the negative feelings could be shame, guilt, embarrassment, resentment, or irritation. Shame and guilt are a little more complicated because a violation of a standard of behavior is involved. If one has violated a standard of behavior, then one would need to plan how to uphold that standard in the future. If a person feels guilty because he has violated a standard of behavior he has for himself, then he would need to plan how to uphold that standard in the future. Then the fast phobia procedure would be useful in reducing the guilt.

In the first session after gathering information and establishing rapport, I explained the fast phobia cure to Billy, and he said that he had always felt safe and comfortable with me. This was very important. I usually sit beside a client rather than face to face when I am doing an intervention. An important part of the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) therapy is to ask the client about the mental images he makes, particularly where he sees the image. If you are sitting face to face, he will often be seeing the image in the space where you are sitting. Also, when sitting beside the client, I can use anchoring. An anchor is the term for the stimuli that is associated with a particular emotion. For instance people often carry a picture of a loved one in their wallet. Seeing the picture brings back those feelings he or she had with that person. Perhaps you have a memento on a key chain, and touching it can anchor back to feelings connected to the gift. When you touch someone who has strong feelings, that specific touch will anchor those feelings.

I asked Billy to become relaxed, comfortable and safe. I could see that he was relaxing from the smoothing of the facial muscles and the lowering of the shoulders. I touched him on the arm (thereby anchoring the feelings of relaxation) and told him to hold on to those feelings. I continued to touch him which continued the anchoring throughout the intervention. I also breathed in rhythm with him. As my chest would rise with inhalation, there was a slight change in the pressure of my hand against his arm. People have never told me that they were aware of my pacing their breathing. This is a very powerful tool for maintaining rapport and occurs out of the client’s awareness. I added these features because of the intensity of Billy’s feelings of fear and panic. I wanted to do everything possible to insure that he didn’t collapse back into the fear and panic. I then asked him to pick a time to start the movie before the abuse started with Dahmer. Then I asked him to pick an ending point about one third of the way through his 18 month experience when no abuse was occurring. I had him picture a black and white photograph of himself on a screen . Then I followed the procedure of having him sit in the theater, float up out of his body and go up to the projection booth. He could then see himself sitting in the theater seat but could not see the screen. He was able to let the movie play while maintaining a relaxed feeling. I then had him turn the ending picture into color, and be inside the film and rapidly run it backwards. I had him do this five times. Each time I had him run the movie backwards even faster. I even added a swooshing sound to indicate the length of time. I think increasing the speed tends to involve more of the unconscious in the process. I repeated the process for the middle third of the time while he was Dahmer’s roommate and then the last third of the time.

Often with a single episode of trauma, one intervention will stop the nightmares and flashbacks. Often with multiple trauma, selecting the most intense one will generalize to the rest.

Billy noted a change, but because of the intensity and severity and duration of the trauma, this first fast phobia cure did not eliminate the flashbacks and nightmares. Over the next ten months, I repeated some version of this procedure at least eighteen times. He noted that he no longer saw Dahmer’s face; he saw his hair but there was a blank space where his face was.

In the next few sessions, Billy remembered specific traumas, and the phobia cure was repeated. He remembered being choked until he passed out. I did the fast phobia procedure of that specific time. He had less fear when remembering being choked. However, his neck pain continued. I realized that the visual images of the trauma also affected his muscles. His muscles remembered how the muscles responded to being choked, and he experienced that muscle tension and the pain associated with being choked. When he had the visual image of being choked, he no longer had the intense fear and panic; however, he still had the muscle tension and pain that he had had. I realized that it was not enough to have him relaxed and comfortable; I needed to relax the muscles that he had tightened up when he was choked I had him remember when he was a child and played hopscotch and his muscles were loose and limber, particularly his neck muscles. I anchored that feeling in his muscles and then had him view himself viewing the movie. Then the muscle tension in his neck and his neck pain went away.

For twenty five years, he woke up every morning in pain. Dahmer often beat him on his bones (his head, shin, knuckles, toes and knees). He said Dahmer knew what would cause the most pain. He had flashbacks not only to the fear but also to the bone pain. I needed to do the fast phobia procedure and have him not only be relaxed but also to have a different feeling in his bones. I had him remember the feelings in his bones when he was an adolescent and was free of pain. I had him hold on to that feeling while experiencing the fast phobia procedure. This was useful in reducing the pain he felt.

A few months after I did this procedure, he said that he still experienced a lot of pain in his fingers and he showed me how bent his fingers were as the result of the beating with the iron bar. He said the immediate pain was so intense that sometimes he would go numb. At times he had wished that Dahmer would hit him so hard that the fingers would go numb. I asked him to remember a time before he went to Germany when his hands felt really good. He remembered standing up in a convertible with the wind blowing in his hair and a girl at his side. His hands were on her body and she felt very soft. I began a hypnotic induction and asked him to memorize that feeling and to double the intensity and triple the intensity. Then I did the usual fast phobia cure. I asked him to be in the projection booth of a theater and to be unable to see the screen but to see himself in a seat in the theater watching the screen. Then I had him watch himself watching a movie of Dahmer hitting him with the iron bar. Then I had him be inside the film and run it rapidly backwards. I had him repeat this a dozen times. When he came out of the trance, he remarked how good it felt.

He said he had been in a bar, and a man slammed a beer bottle down. Billy said, ”I just about jumped out of my skin.” He felt like he had no skin--that he was defenseless. I had him imagine that he had a space-age strong transparent shield covering his body and protecting him. This seemed to help his startle reaction. I thought I could use this fantasy to alter the movie he had seen about Dahmer hitting him with an iron bar. I had him imagine he had this transparent, impervious shield all around his body. I had him imagine that no matter how hard Dahmer hit him with the iron bar, he did not feel it because of the shield. I asked him to see this as a movie. Then he imagined frustration and bewilderment on Dahmer’s face. He laughed at Dahmer and really enjoyed this altered movie. I think one sign of change is when the client can see humor in a situation that was formerly dead serious.

Billy felt a lot of shame and guilt related to having been anally raped by Dahmer. I had him do the usual fast phobia procedure. This reduced the fear and panic. However, those memories had been interfering with his sex life. I had him recall sexual experiences he had had before going into the service. He remembered with pleasure that one girl gave him a present of sexual intercourse before he went off to the service. He had some delightful exploratory sexual experiences. The feeling was one of sexual pleasure, fun, and feeling that there was nothing wrong with it. I had him hold on to that feeling while he saw himself see the movie of being anally raped. This resulted in a decreased feeling of shame, guilt and feeling dirty, and sexual problems were less intense. The very intense physical feeling of being dirty is common among sexual abuse victims. For many months after he was away from Dahmer, he took several baths a day.

One of the aspects that really bothered Billy was the feeling that he had no control. It was natural for him to have this feeling since Dahmer did have so much control. I wanted to use the phobia cure to get rid of those feelings of no control. Dahmer probably used ketamine to drug Billy. Billy would awaken tied with ropes in a spread eagle fashion. Dahmer alternated between saying he loved Billy and petting him and beating him. He also anally raped him and stuck his finger up his anus. Billy felt particularly out of control remembering these incidents. I asked him when he felt most in control. Billy said “I like the feeling of doing a wheelie on a bike. I have always had that ability. It just came natural. I can do a wheelie and stay up for long distances. I can do it with just about any bike except a Harley. They are too heavy.” I had him hang onto the feeling of doing control during a wheelie while seeing a movie of the sexual trauma he endured. Then as usual in this procedure, I had him step into the movie at the end and run it rapidly back to before it happened. The more severe the trauma, the more I have the client repeat seeing the movie and running the movie backwards. I had him repeat this probably a dozen times. This helped him to have a feeling of control over his life.

Billy commented on the fast phobia procedure, “I often do it over and over again. Each time I do it, it gets longer and harder to remember---The memory gets smaller. I feel like I don’t have to be on guard all the time.” He has learned to use this as a tool and is able to do it without my assistance. Many of my clients have learned to use this on their own. One client had frequent flashbacks to embarrassing moments. He would feel very embarrassed, and he had no idea what would trigger these flashbacks. He learned that whenever he had a flashback, he could run a movie of the incident He would then be inside the movie, run it backwards and the embarrassment would be gone. He could do this quite rapidly.

Billy was beaten with an iron bar. After several interventions he said, “I see the iron bar but it is different. It is spinning like a windmill. It is less scary that way.” This was in session #7. He also reported a dream which was not a nightmare. Billy said, “I had a dream that I was on a ship and I was lonely. I met a guy, but we didn’t have time to talk. I remember sitting on the bow of the boat and feeling the ocean breeze.” It is significant that he was beginning to have dreams which were more normal in nature.

Over time Billy’s image of Dahmer faded and became less distinct. The first change was that he didn’t see his face any more. He did not exhibit the mannerisms of Dahmer. Only when he was angry did he have the northern accent of Dahmer. The flashbacks stopped.

Billy was with Dahmer almost to the exclusion of other people. He developed a dependency on Dahmer. People often choose the familiar over the unfamiliar even though the familiar may be quite terrible. The first panic attack that Billy remembers having was when he went to the bathroom alone. Dahmer usually went with him. The room began to spin. He felt nauseated; he felt weak, frightened and panicky. I had him do the fast phobia procedure with this experience.

He reported frequent panic attacks in a variety of situations. He said that he had had two car wrecks recently. No one was hurt and the only damage was to his car. The accidents were the result of having a panic attack while driving. He said that when he panicked, what he saw would jump out at him. I think what happened is that he would steer to avoid what he saw jumping out at him. He said he ran over the curb in a parking lot. I had him remember those panic attacks and do a fast phobia procedure with those memories.

The fast phobia cure was used in a variety of situations throughout the course of therapy.
This is a summary of the benefits of the fast phobia cure.
1. It lessened the intensity of the nightmares and flashbacks and eventually eliminated them.
2. This was evidence to him that change was possible. For someone who had gone 24 years without significant change, that was very important.
3. Since following directions had worked, he was willing to do whatever was asked of him in other interventions. However, one of the important principles of NLP is to ask about and deal with any objections before going ahead with the intervention.
4. He learned to access mental images and sounds that were previously out of his awareness.
5. He was eventually able to see humor in situations that had been dead serious.

Emotional Management Suggestions

Many of my clients including Billy have learned to use the procedure for all sorts of situations. Basically any time you have a mental picture of an incident and negative feelings are produced, you can use the fast phobia cure procedure.
To learn to do this on your own, select a mildly traumatic or irritating event. Use whatever procedure allows you to have a relaxation response—meditation, music, sitting in your favorite chair, yoga, chanting, or imaging your favorite scene in nature. You need to maintain the relaxed feeling throughout seeing the movie. Have a special someone hold your hand if you think that would help. The movie will start before the incident and end after it is over.
1. See projected onto the screen a black and white photograph of yourself before the incident.
2. Take a seat in the imaginary theater.
3. Float out of your body and up to the projection booth. Check to make sure you are relaxed and comfortable.
4. You cannot see the screen and what you see is yourself in the theater seat watching the screen. Then watch yourself seated in the theater watching the movie of the incident.
5. After the movie is over, change the black and white image of yourself at the end of the movie to color.
6. Imagine stepping into the image on the screen, so you are inside the film, as you run the movie backwards rapidly to a time before the incident happened.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 several times.
8. Test your results. You will be surprised that the old feeling is no longer there or at least is a lot less intense.

Then you can repeat with an incident with more intensity of feeling. The crucial element is to be able to remain relaxed while watching yourself watch the movie.

This chapter describes a process for resolving internal conflicts. At a less intense level, we all have internal conflicts. Use of will power can be helpful, but it often backfires. Billy had many internal conflicts. In order to survive Dahmer, he had learned to be numb to any emotion. He still believed it was dangerous to feel anything, and yet he wanted to feel alive and feel emotions like anyone else. He wanted to relax and feel comfortable, and yet he still believed that he had to be on guard all the time or he would be killed. I assume that every part of a person has a positive intent; the result may be negative, but the intent is positive. Resolution of an internal conflict involves finding a common ground between the conflicting parts and creating more effective ways of accomplishing the positive intent.

I was snorkeling off Pelican Beach in Belize. About thirty feet off shore a wall of rocks had been built in about 5 feet of water. The rocks were about two feet below the surface. As I was going over this wall of rocks, I saw a moray eel with a head and body about four inches across and about four feet long. I could see the body as it went under the rocks. The stories that I have heard about moray eels terrified me. I have heard that the eel will bite and grab hold and the jaws will lock. It will expand against the rocks and there is no way to get free. There are stories of divers trying to kill the eel with a knife, but as their air ran out, they resorting to cutting off a foot to get free. I made as little movement as possible as I floated over the eel.

Jeffrey Dahmer’s hold of Billy was like the moray eel and persisted even after Dahmer’s death. In his head Billy still heard Dahmer’s words, “You will never be free of me. I will be with you always.” Billy had beliefs about what he needed to do to survive. “I must always be on guard or I’ll be dead.” Even after the newspaper accounts of Dahmer’s death, Billy didn’t believe he was dead and thought he might be back anytime. He felt he needed to feel numb—to be dead to the world—in order to survive. Billy said that he wanted to feel emotions like anyone else. He wanted to cry even if that was painful, so he would know he was alive; yet he didn’t believe that was possible. The challenge for me was to help Billy break the hold, which the memory of Dahmer still exerted on him.

The first step in his believing that change was possible was having him experience a reduction in his level of anxiety, which was
accomplished with the use of the fast phobia cure.The challenge was how to help him resolve the internal conflicts. I asked him to hold out his hands, and told him see one side of the conflict in one hand and see the other side of the conflict in the other hand. On one hand, he believed he must be alert and on guard all the time, or he would again be a victim, and maybe die. On the other hand, he wanted to get his life back – to feel normal and to be able to relax. Another internal conflict was that he wanted to be able to cry—to be able to feel normal emotions—to feel that he was alive. However, another part of him was afraid to let his guard down.

Another conflict was revealed in an interesting way. I had him make a mental picture of Dahmer. I asked him to experiment by moving the picture closer. As would be expected, the feelings of fear intensified. As he was following my request to move the picture away, he became terrified that he would die. His terror resulted from the times he was tied up with Dahmer hitting him. Dahmer was acutely aware when Billy was not focusing his attention on him. In that situation, one defense is to dissociate—to see the situation from above and feel like it is happening to someone else. When a person dissociates, blinking slows and the eyes focus straight ahead as if on a distant object. Dahmer evidently picked this up. Billy felt if he did not pay attention to Dahmer, he would be killed. When I asked him to move the mental picture of Dahmer away, that fear returned as a flashback. Billy wanted to forget Dahmer, but was afraid he would die if he did. The goal was to resolve these conflicts – but how?

Our culture often views problems using the analogy of a battle, in which one side wins and the other side loses. Most people think of their internal struggles in this way. Quitting smoking should obviously win over continuing to smoke. Losing weight should win over continuing to overeat. However, battles won that way are often short-lived. Will power is used to suppress one side, and often that side rebels and turns the tables.

Professor David Zarefsky teaches a course for The Teaching Company called “Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning.” In his notes about how to argue effectively, he says, “People argue when some controversy or disagreement exists between them. The assent of the other party is desired and must be freely given. Respect for the other party and a desire and confidence in the results make it necessary that the assent be freely given. A person who argues accepts risks, since the person can be shown to be wrong, which can be unsettling and involves loss of face. The person also risks having to alter his or her belief system to take into account something new. The parties assume these risks mutually.”

I think this can be applied to an argument between the two sides of an internal conflict. Each side should respect the other side. One of the principles of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is that each part of a person has a positive intent. In other words, each part is trying to do something for the person. Each side should be able to listen to the other side and consider the possibility of being able to gain knowledge or resources.

In the second session Billy began to deal with the conflict between wanting to feel emotions, and fearing letting down his guard in any way. I wrote down on one sheet of paper, “I want to feel alive,” and put it on the floor on the right. I wrote, “I can’t let my guard down” and put it on the floor to the left. Months later I asked him what had helped him and he said, “You put those papers on the floor, and I could see that I had options.”

I asked him what being on guard accomplished for him. He said he must constantly remember what happened. I asked what remembering accomplished for him, which was even more important. He felt he needed to be cautious… if he was cautious all the time, he felt that he was in control. I asked him what being in control accomplished for him and which was more important. Billy said, “I don’t want to let anyone get hurt. If you don’t trust anyone, then you can’t be let down.” I asked him what that accomplished for him, and he said that he wanted to be level, that he didn’t want the intense fears.

Then I dealt with the other side, and had him look to the right at the other sheet of paper. Feeling emotions---what would that do for him which was even more important? He said that he wanted to be able to cry, to have passion in his life, to love his wife and kids more. I asked him what experiencing emotions would give him and which was even more important, and he said he thought that experiencing emotions would make life easier.

Then I could point out to him that the two sides have similar goals. The goal of being level (which meant not having such intense fears) and the goal of life being easier were similar. The next step was to explore what one side could offer the other side.

He felt that feeling more emotions could make him more vulnerable, and the part that wanted to feel more could use some protection. So this part borrowed, from the other side of him, the ability to be on guard and protect himself.

The side of himself that keeps his guard up realized that to be more level, he needed to have some positive feelings to offset the fear, pain and numbness. This side needed that feeling which the other side could provide.

I asked him to hold his hands out and see the side that wanted to feel emotions in the right hand and to see the side that felt he needed to keep his guard up in the left hand. I told him to slowly begin to move his hands together. I asked him if any part of him had any objection to the two sides merging. He nodded, “No.” As his hands came together and his fingers intertwined, he leaned back in the chair, his expression softened, and his hands moved to his chest. This procedure is called a visual squash and is useful in integrating opposing beliefs or viewpoints. Other internal conflicts were dealt with in a manner similar to that described above.

Emotional Management Suggestions

To help yourself in dealing with an internal conflict, you need to be aware of the conflict. Physical symptoms are often the result of unresolved internal conflict. An assumption of (NLP) is that every part of you has a positive intent. One hint is to notice how you express the physical complaint, and assume that this expression is literally true. “I have a pressure headache.” “I feel like I can’t swallow” (what someone is pushing you to accept). “She gets under my skin.” “My skin crawls.” Go inside and ask your unconscious what having that symptom is trying to do for you. One man had frequent headaches, which prevented him from working. The headache was essentially saying, “When the pressure gets so high, I am going to force you to quit work for a while.” The challenge is to find other ways to fulfill the positive intent. This man had a lifelong pattern of committing himself to projects without considering how he was going to get the time or energy to fulfill the commitments. After he changed this pattern, his headaches became infrequent. Sometimes, when he felt a headache coming on, he was able to bargain with the part of him that produced the headache. He said to himself, “If you hold off the headache today and allow me to finish this commitment, I promise I will take a break tomorrow.” The headache held off, but, of course, he had to honor his promise to take a break the next day.

Having to rely on will power is another indication of an internal conflict. The power of the will is used to keep another part of the person under control. The person often views that part of himself as his enemy. If that part takes over, then the person may say to himself like the comedian Flip Wilson quipped, “The devil made me do it.” The person disowns part of himself. A presupposition of NLP is that every part of each of us has a positive intention. I have often asked people who are struggling with their weight what the part of them that overeats wants to accomplish. Some responses have been: “It pleases my mother.” “I want to get my money’s worth.” “It is the one thing that I can do for myself.” “Eat because the people in China are starving.” “My mother believed that as long as you were sitting at the table, you should be eating.” “It is a sin to waste food, so I have to eat everything on my plate.” “As long as I am eating I won’t be lonely.” “If I am fat, then guys won’t hit on me, and my husband won’t be jealous.”

If you are achieving a goal through will power, I am not advising you to give up that accomplishment. Ask the part of yourself, that you are controlling through will power, what that part is trying to do for you. I assume that part has a positive intent, although the end result may be negative or self-destructive. Go inside and wait for an answer. Often the answers seem strange. If you have been trying to get rid of that part of yourself, it might take a while for that part to trust enough to give an answer. Once you have an answer, then you need to find more effective ways of accomplishing the same thing. It is best to come up with at least three new options.

This chapter is about emotional numbing, which can be a way of adapting to an abusive situation, but later the numbing results in feelings of alienation.

Billy talked a lot about the effect of the trauma on his emotions.  He said, “I have a numb feeling.  I am numb to the world.  I would like to feel emotions like everyone else.  I would like to laugh to feel alive.  I can’t cry.  Dahmer beat me harder if I cried or screamed.  You find a way not to make a sound.  The first hit hurt the worst.  When Dahmer broke my hip, he went with me to the infirmary. I told them that Dahmer did it, but he convinced them otherwise.  They sent me back to the room with him.  Then he forced me to dance with him.  When I cried out in pain, he told me to shut up and he pulled my hair.” 

Emotional numbing is a frequent symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and results in a feeling of alienation from humanity.  Often the only emotion the person feels is anger, which results from identification with the abuser.  Something unexpected will trigger anger.  The person feels a loss of control and will often say, “That’s not like me to behave that way.” Billy said, “I get angry at the strangest things.”

Crying was something Billy wanted to be able to experience.  He said that feeling something unpleasant was better than not feeling at all.  When Dahmer beat him until he stopped crying, he had the belief that crying was a weakness.  Once when he was talking about a favorite aunt who had recently died, his eyes teared up just for a moment, and then he stopped himself, feeling that crying is a weakness.  I asked him to remember when Robert Kennedy was crying doing a televised eulogy for his brother John.  I asked him if he thought that Robert Kennedy was weak when he cried or that perhaps a strong person can allow himself to be seen crying.  So is crying a sign of weakness or of strength? This helped him to be able to let the tears flow. 

It seems that an individual can consciously be aware of a limited number of items at one time.  Billy’s anxiety made him acutely aware of any threatening or negative element in his environment; at the same time it limited his noticing anything else.  When he became less anxious, he became aware of other things, such as birds singing, flowers, or a butterfly, and he was also able to notice positive emotions.

This chapter describes the process for curing panic attacks.  Billy’s panic attacks resulted from his distorting the mental image in various situations so that what he saw was more frightening than the actual happening.

He reported frequent panic attacks in a variety of situations.  He said that he had had two car wrecks recently. No one was hurt and the only damage was to his car. The accidents were the result of having a panic attack while driving. He said that when he panicked, images would jump out at him, and he would steer to avoid the image and would run over the curb. 

Billy described one of his panic attacks: “I had a panic attack in a department store. There were so many people there.  When there were a few people there, I could feel some ability to monitor conversations, but with so many people, I was confused.  This reminded me of when I was in Germany, and I went to the bathroom by myself and had a panic attack. I felt the room spin, and I was confused. I had felt secure in the room with Dahmer.  Also, in the store I saw people bigger than they really were.  People did not have any faces, just hair and mouths.  They all looked at me and were talking directly at me.”

Billy needed to have his son or someone else shop for him at large stores, or he would have a panic attack as soon as he tried to go inside. To help him with this problem, I asked him to compare his mental image of several people at a family reunion with his mental image of the people in the store. He was comfortable with a family reunion. The mental image of the people in the store was that they were very large and had big eyes looking down at him. The conversations he heard became loud, jumbled, and incoherent. I used the technique called “bridging over.”  Specific details of the mental image and the sounds, particularly voice tones, of the symptomatic state are elicited. Then an analogous situation in which the person doesn’t have the symptoms is visualized.  The goal is to find the differences between the two images and then make the symptomatic image like the nonsymptomatic image.  The difference between the image of the store and the family reunion was that the people in the store were bigger than life size and had big eyes.  He was asked to make the people in the store life-sized and to have normal eyes.  The conversations in the store all blurred together, and those conversations were made like the conversations at a family reunion.  After this, Billy was able to go into that store without having a panic attack.

Related to the panic attacks was the feeling Billy had that people were always watching him; this resulted in the feeling he always had to be on guard. It is usually easier to change an unwanted image than to get rid of it, so I asked him to make several changes in the mental picture of people watching him. He reported that when he made them smaller, there wasn’t much change.  When he made the mental image distant and in black and white, that made it better. I then asked him to make them look like paper doll figures. He really liked that, and thought they looked kind of funny.  Once he found out that this worked, he began using this technique as a tool in a variety of situations. 

A few months later Billy reported that he realized he was no longer afraid of having a panic attack.  This is quite interesting because one of the frequent stimuli causing a panic attack is the fear of having one.

Emotional Management Suggestions

This chapter is about the shame and guilt that sexual and physical abuse victims experience and how these feelings keep a victim from seeking help.  Billy at first denied the physical abuse; however, even after he was able to talk about it, he still denied the sexual abuse.  A major step in his recovery was a decision to tell all, which was made 24 years after the abuse occurred. 

Victims of sexual and/or physical abuse feel shame and guilt about being a victim.  This is pervasive and it is difficult to explain.  Occasionally a child who does tell about sexual abuse will be admonished, “Why did you make up such a terrible lie?  Shame on you.”  Often the reporting of sexual abuse can result in breakup of the family, and the victim can feel guilty for having caused that. 

I think that society does tend to look down on sexual abuse victims.  There are some cultures in which, when a woman’s virginity has been violated before marriage even by rape, the family is disgraced and the woman is punished.  When a man is raped, that is often viewed as a violation of his manhood.  Victims are reluctant to tell their story.

Like many victims, Billy felt shame and guilt over having been physically and sexually abused.   After Dahmer’s arrest, Billy was interviewed by the press.  His first reaction was to deny that anything unusual had happened.  When I saw him in 1994, he admitted to the physical abuse, but when I asked him if there had been any sexual abuse, Billy replied, “No, if he had tried that I would have killed him.”   In 2004, a TV producer suggested doing a documentary film of his experience with Dahmer. Billy decided that this would be a step in getting his life back and decided to tell everything.  Once he decided this, he was impatient for his story to get out.  He was pleased and relieved when the following story was printed in the local paper. 

He received money for doing interviews with the media, and he said that he felt guilty when he had that money; he gave it away to his siblings.  He has given money or a  vehicle to a person who is down on his luck and in desperate straits.  He feels better when he does this.

Sometimes there is a logical reason for guilt and shame when someone has knowingly and willingly violated standards of behavior.  However, people feel guilty when they have been subjected to violence and abuse.  I think there is a largely unconscious bias against people who “allow” themselves to be victimized.  Several men upon hearing Billy’s story have responded with, “Well, I never would have let this happen to me.”  Many victims feel humiliated when they are in a helpless position. I have not been able to change a person’s guilt or shame through logic or reasoning.   I helped Billy change guilt feelings going back to early childhood, which was discussed in Chapter 3.8 Creating an alternate past Chapter 3.2 Fast phobia cure Chapter 3.8 Creation of an Alternate Past. In Chapter 3.2 Fast Phobia Cure I was able to have him experience the feelings of control and the feelings of sexual pleasure to replace some of the guilt feelings. 

Individuals often feel guilty because they didn’t know at the time what they know now.  Billy felt guilty that he had not killed Dahmer.  He had no way of knowing then, how many lives would have been saved, if he had killed him.  A woman felt that she was at fault in her husband’s death, because if she had not been late, then he would have left earlier, and would not have had the fatal accident.  Why do so many people feel guilty following a catastrophic event over which they were in no way responsible?  I think we all retain some of our childhood belief in magic.  When there is a death or accident or the house burns down, we don’t want to accept it, and we begin to think magically about how it could have been different.  We think of how we could have acted differently, so that it would not have happened.  Then we begin to mentally picture that the death or the accident did not occur, and then we feel guilty because it did. 

Often guilt occurs when two standards of behavior are in conflict, and whatever is decided, one standard or the other is violated.  A simple example would be that you’re on the phone with someone who wants to talk and you have to leave now to be on time for an appointment.  You believe in being polite and in being on time.  You have to violate one standard or the other.  Billy had seriously considered killing Dahmer when he was passed out drunk and trying  to make it look like an accidental fall.  However, he doubted if he could get away with it, and the consequence would have been that he would have spent his life in prison in Germany, never seeing his family again.

The bridging over procedure is also described in Chapter 3.12 and was used to deal with this.
Click on Chapter 3.12 Resentment

Emotional Management Suggestions

If guilt is because you knowingly violated a standard of behavior, then you should plan how to uphold your standards in the future.  If someone pushed your button and you responded automatically, go to Chapter #1.  If it was related to anger or resentment, I refer you to those chapters. 

The procedure I use most frequently in changing guilt that is not reasonable or logical is that of “bridging over” which is also described in Chapter 12. In this procedure you make two mental images and become aware of the differences between the two images. Then you change the image that makes you feel guilty to be like the image that doesn’t make you feel guilty. 

1. Feel the guilt and then be aware of the mental image that produces that guilt.  Where do you see it?  How far away is it?  Is it in the center or up or down or to the right or the left?  How big is the image?  Are the persons life-sized? Is it a movie or a still picture; is it in color or black and white? This is picture #.1
2. Think of an analogous situation in which you don’t feel guilty.  For the analogous situation of feeling guilty because there were conflicting standards of behavior, I use the example of being on the phone and the person doesn’t want to end the conversation, and you need to leave to make an appointment.  Hopefully, you didn’t feel guilty when you had to hang up.  If you are feeling guilty without any logical reason because you did or didn’t do something which would have prevented a tragedy, then remember a situation in which had you acted on hindsight and had done something differently, then some undesirable event would not have occurred.   For example, you suggested going to a restaurant and your whole family came down with food poisoning, and you didn’t feel guilty about suggesting that restaurant. As with picture #1 become aware of where you see the image, etc.
3. Then notice the differences between the two mental images.  Usually distance, location and size are the most important.
4. Then make picture #1 to be like picture #2.  If you have any difficulty moving or changing the picture, ask yourself if there is any part of you that objects in anyway to the changes. 

In this chapter I relate my theory of why Dahmer alternated from being cruel and sadistic to acting as if he wanted to be loved. 

Each of us desires to make sense of the world in which we live.  We want to know what to expect so we can plan how to cope with difficulties; we like to feel that we can predict what will happen.  

If Dahmer had always been cruel, selfish, sadistic, and controlling, it might have been easier for Billy to know what to expect.  Some of the time he presented himself to others as Billy’s protector, mentor, and friend.  Dahmer read extensively and often taught Billy about anatomy and physiology. He spent hours drilling Billy particularly about bones and their names, and he seemed concerned with teaching him. 

What was most confusing was the switch from being extremely cruel to being loving.  There were times when Billy woke up from a drugged sleep tied up with ropes. At that point, Dahmer might pet him as he would a woman, telling Billy he loved him, or asking Billy if he loved him. Then suddenly Dahmer would change and beat him with an iron bar across the bones, particularly the shins, knees, ankles, and head.  Several times he anally raped him.  On other occasions he might beat him first and then pet him while saying that he loved him.  For the first few months that I saw Billy, he asked me repeatedly for an explanation of why Dahmer acted this way. 
   
Ordinarily I don’t like to interpret someone’s behavior, since this is speculation. I like to answer “how” questions.  How do you create certain feelings or behavior and how can you change them?  “Why” questions are often not very profitable. For instance:

Q:  Why does she get so angry when I am only trying to help her?
A:  Because she feels you are trying to control her.  
Q:  Well, why does she resent me trying to control her?
A:  Because her father was a control freak.
Q:  Then why was her father such a control freak? And why doesn’t her sister have the same problem she does? 

This type of questioning leads to an endless regression. However, Billy seemed to need an answer for his “why” question: “Why did he love me one minute and hit me the next?” 
 
The challenge was to come up with an explanation that would help Billy make sense out of what had happened to him.  In a television interview, Dahmer had talked about how he drugged his victim, killed him, and had sex with the body.  He said this was the only way he could be in complete control. I assumed that having complete control of Billy was very important. The perplexing part is how to explain the radical shift in his behavior. I gave him the best explanation that I could imagine.  I postulated that Dahmer had a very intense internal conflict for which he had no solution or resolution.  One side of Dahmer felt secure only when he was in complete control.  The second side felt secure only when he had assurances that he was loved, respected, and admired.  To be in complete control, he needed to drug Billy, tie him up, and beat him.  However, the more he acted in this way, the more lonely, isolated, and unloved he felt.  Then the second side of him would take over, and he would want assurances that he was loved, respected, and admired.  Since he beat Billy to get him to make statements of respect or love, then he could never really feel loved or admired.  The more Dahmer tried to “pet” Billy and profess love for him, the more helpless and out of control he felt, and the first side would take over.  Neither side was satisfactory, nor stable, so he swung back and forth between them. This created an intense internal conflict within him, which is probably one of the reasons that he stayed drunk much of the time.  I speculated that each side of him hated the other side. The side that wanted complete control hated the part of him that wanted to be loved, and the side that wanted to be loved hated the part of him that was controlling and cruel. Billy said that this made sense to him.  The explanation seemed to give him some resolution of his confusion. He was familiar with internal conflict within himself, which has been discussed in a previous chapter.

A few months later Billy was still wondering about Dahmer’s change from beating him one minute and then petting him and saying that he loved him a few minutes later.  When Dahmer was beating him, he knew that the petting and professing of love would follow, and when he was being petted, he knew that the beatings would follow. 

He had read Lionel Dahmer’s book, A Father’s Story, and he speculated that there must have been other things that happened to Dahmer to result in his behavior.  He doubted that Lionel Dahmer had told everything. 

Billy talked about how Dahmer could at times seem like a nice guy.   He enjoyed teaching Billy, particularly about anatomy and physiology.  Billy said that Dahmer got frustrated with him when he couldn’t remember the steps of the Krebs cycle.  He taught him to play chess and would carefully explain each move.  Billy says that he has blocked out all his experience with chess and now has no idea how to play.  Dahmer had a large chart on the wall showing the bones and muscles of the body.  When Billy took courses in college to be certified as an emergency medical technician, he said that he already knew most of the material from what Dahmer had taught him.  During the teaching sessions, Dahmer was in control and demanded Billy’s total attention.  Billy learned that if he was a good student, Dahmer was pleased, and he was less likely to be beaten. 

Billy said that Dahmer would pet him and masturbate at the same time.  He asked for an explanation.  I speculated that Dahmer had intense internal conflicts as described above and that he sexualized this tension.  He masturbated to relieve this tension, but the relief was partial and temporary. 

Billy thought that Dahmer wanted to control his sexuality and prevent him from performing sexually. Billy thinks that is why Dahmer operated on his prostate gland.  While Billy was drugged, Dahmer cut into his prostate and evidently removed some tissue.  Billy said that he must have used sterile technique because he didn’t get infected.  This wound slowly healed. He said that between his testicles and anus, there is some thin skin over a depression in his perineum in the area of the prostate. Although he has been reluctant to tell his primary care physician about this, he did ask me to include it in my writing.

At times of crisis and stress, children often form beliefs that play a major factor in shaping their lives.  I speculated with Billy about what beliefs Dahmer might have made.  At age 6, he had had a hernia operation, and his father Lionel (see References) reported that he had a lot of pain afterwards and even asked if his penis had been cut off.   Could Dahmer have formed the belief that you can’t trust anyone to protect you and the only way you can be safe is to be in complete control and be the one who gives pain to others?

This chapter discusses how, through the use of fantasy with rich sensory details, an alternate past can be created with much the same emotional impact as the original memory. This is a way of revisiting and changing childhood experiences, which resulted in fixed, limiting beliefs. Resources are added to the individuals in childhood situations, so that their interaction is different, and a new belief, which is more useful, flexible and resourceful, can be created.

About twenty years ago, some psychotherapists believed that childhood sexual abuse was responsible for many problems in adult life. Clients were asked to try to remember any sexual abuse. There is considerable evidence if therapists pushed this hard enough, then clients would search for memories and begin to manufacture sexual abuse events that they believed were real but which never happened. The imagined events produced feelings created by events that never happened. If a person can create an imagined past of negative events that produce symptoms, why not create an imagined or alternate past of positive events which add resources to the person’s life?

An imagined past and a real past are not that different, and are processed in the same areas of the brain.

Imagined details do sometimes intrude on our memories of real events. Numerous studies have been conducted on this phenomenon. Psychologist Elisabeth F. Loftus (2005) (see References) and others at the University of Washington discovered that after reading a booklet which described recollections of being lost in a supermarket, many subjects suddenly reported recalling how they, too, had gotten lost as children. Before reading, they reported being unable to recall such scenes. Afterward, they unknowingly smuggled images from the book into their own memory base.

A real event has more sensory details than the imagined event. However, a richness of sensory detail can be added to the imagination. For example, I may ask a client to go back to his childhood and imagine endowing his father with personal resources that would have changed him. To add sensory richness to the fantasy, I ask him to see the changes that this makes in his father’s expression, the lines in his face, his posture, the tilt of his head, his gestures, skin tone, and the way he walks. I will also ask him to hear changes in the pitch, rhythm, timbre, speed, volume, and inflections of his father’s voice.

Two individuals remembering the same event will often remember it quite differently. The brain is very selective in what is stored in memory, and our memory is affected by our viewpoint and biases. A woman had a delightful time at a party, but toward the end of the evening, someone spilled wine on her dress, and she said, “My whole evening is ruined.” She can remember the evening as a disaster and forgetting the great time she had before the wine was spilled. If she realized that she had control over her memories, she could change that mental image of the ruined dress from being large, bright and up close to being small, far away and dim, and could make the images of the delightful time that she had big, bright and up close. Since our memory of the past is not very accurate anyway, why not create a past that is more useful?

An alternate past is a way to change limiting fixed beliefs that originate at times of stress during childhood. Once formed these beliefs become part of programs that the brain runs automatically. The program, at the time it originated, was probably the best course of action in that situation with the resources the child had at that time. However, as time goes on, the brain does not evaluate whether the program is useful or not. The program and fixed beliefs are connected to emotions that are not controlled by the conscious mind. Logic and reasoning have little, if any, effect.

An analogous example is the Japanese soldiers after WWII. The Japanese had soldiers on many Pacific islands. The Allies invaded Guadalcanal and another island one airplane flight away, thereby skipping several islands. After the war, the Allies played the emperor’s surrender speech and told the Japanese on these islands, which had not been invaded, that the war was over. However, some soldiers continued to survive to carry on the fight. The last Japanese soldier came out of hiding forty years after the end of the war. Like the Japanese soldiers, our limiting beliefs are out of date and self-damaging. People have expressions like “Why do I keep shooting myself in the foot?” “Why do I get so close to success and then blow it?’’ “ Why do I fall in love with the same kind of guy?”

Bruce Lipton, Ph. D. wrote in The Biology of Belief
(Pages 169-170)
The two minds are truly a phenomenal mechanism, but here is how it can go awry. The conscious mind is the “self,” the voice of our own thoughts. It can have great visions and plans for a future filled with love, health, happiness, and prosperity. While we focus our consciousness on happy thoughts, who is running the show? The subconscious. How is the subconscious going to manage our affairs? Precisely the way it was programmed. The subconscious mind’s behaviors when we are not paying attention may not be of our own creation because most of our fundamental behaviors were downloaded without question from observing other people. Because subconscious-generated behaviors are not generally observed by the conscious mind, many people are stunned to hear that they are “just like their mom or their dad,” the people who programmed their subconscious minds.

The learned behaviors and beliefs acquired from other people, such as parents, peers, and teachers, may not support the goals of our conscious mind. The biggest impediments to realizing the successes of which we dream are the limitations programmed into the subconscious. These limitations not only influence our behavior, they can also play a major role in determining our physiology and health. As we’ve seen earlier, the mind plays a powerful role in controlling the biological systems that keep us alive.
(pages 170-171)
While the “thinking-self” nature of the conscious mind evokes images of a “ghost in the machine,” there is no similar self-awareness operating in the subconscious mind. The latter mechanism is more akin to a jukebox loaded with behavioral programs, each ready to play as soon as appropriate environmental signals appear and press the selection buttons. If we don’t like a particular song in the jukebox, how much yelling at or arguing with the machine will cause it to reprogram its play list? In my college days, I saw many an inebriated student, to no avail, curse and kick jukeboxes that were not responsive to their requests. Similarly, we must realize that no amount of yelling or cajoling by the conscious mind can ever change the behavioral “tapes” programmed into the subconscious mind. Once we realize the ineffectiveness of this tactic, we can quit engaging in a pitched battle with the subconscious mind and take a more clinical approach to reprogramming it. Engaging the subconscious in battle is as pointless as kicking the jukebox in the hope that it will reprogram the play list. The futility of battling with the subconscious is a hard message to get across because one of the programs most of us downloaded when we were young is that “will power is admirable.” So we try over and over again to override the subconscious program. Usually such efforts are met with varying degrees of resistance because the cells are obligated to adhere to the subconscious program.

Steven Heller Ph.D. (1987) described the phenomena this way in his book on hypnosis, Monsters and Magical Sticks.

Some people are very much like soft, plush, wall-to-wall carpeting: They tend to keep the imprints of those who walked on them in the past. Once this happens, these “imprints” (belief systems) supplement, and in many cases, supplant so-called reality. When an individual’s “mosaic of single images” is continually interpreted in a stereotyped way, he becomes stuck, and his range of choices is limited. If his belief systems tell him that no one likes him, or she always fails, s/he may continue to distort or deny reality to support his “world image.” If we again examine a traditional version of hypnosis (hypnotic belief systems) which holds that hypnosis is the communication of ideas and attitudes that take a firm hold on an individual’s inner belief systems and then lead that individual to respond to the “implanted suggestions,” we can see more clearly the relationship between hypnotic phenomena and belief systems. The child who is told never to say no, or that he should not try to be better than elders, may grow up and act on those suggestions as if they were absolute laws—part of the Ten Commandments. That person “knows” that any violation of such commandments will bring great harm and pain. Now, that’s not true in reality, but it is true in that person’s inner world—based on his belief systems. That person is operating under the hypnotic phenomenon known as “negative hallucination” that leads him to continually deny external information that would prove that his belief systems are not necessarily accurate. Instead, he continues to be sad, miserable and depressed because his inner belief systems hypnotize him into following the very steps that cause those “suggestions” to bear that sour fruition.

I believe that one of the first and, perhaps, most important tasks at hand, is to discover what keeps that individual from having new choices that would lead to being “unstuck.” To make those discoveries, it is my belief that you must examine their belief systems. Once you begin to understand (better yet, recognize) which belief systems are keeping them stuck, you must then begin to work with the individual you have and not the one you may have hallucinated. Using the individual’s known—and perhaps, painful—belief systems to lead them to new destinations, is a graceful way to bring about change.

Transactional Analysis gave the term “life scripts” to these beliefs. Robert and Mary Goulding, Authors of Redecision Therapy, (1979) describe their method of changing these limiting fixed beliefs. Another method by Virginia Satir to change fixed limiting beliefs was to lead a person through a family reconstruction.

Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) uses the concept of imprinting. When a duck is born, whatever it sees within the first minutes out of the shell is imprinted as its mother. Usually this is the mother hen. However, if what the duckling first sees is a man’s boot, then the duckling will have that image imprinted in its brain and will behave as if the boot is its mother for the duration of its life. Likewise beliefs formed during childhood at times of crisis are imprinted on the brain and last a lifetime unless effective methods are used to change the fixed limiting belief. Reasoning, logic, will power, or a sincere desire to change do not work. What different effective methods have in common is going back to the emotions involved in the original situation.

So what are fixed limiting beliefs and how does one recognize them? The beliefs are stated in absolute terms; there is no flexibility. These words are commonly used: always, never, don’t ever, have to, must, and can’t. People are either this way or that way with nothing in between. The specific words from parents or other authority figures are often remembered, and a person often refers to herself or himself as you instead of I. Some examples follow: “You’ll never amount to anything.” “You must clean your plate.” “You never waste food.” “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.” “Nice girls don’t use four-letter words.” “You come from bad seed.” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “If anything good happens, something equally bad will follow.” “You can’t refuse anyone.” “As long as you are sitting at the table you have to keep eating.” “Any time you have fun, you will be punished.” “You have to do whatever anyone asks you to do.” “You’re stupid.” “You’re bad.” “You’re not as pretty as your sister.” “You have your father’s temper.” “You can’t control yourself.” “You shouldn’t ask for anything from anybody.” “You shouldn’t upset anyone.” “You can’t trust men. They are all the same.” “You can’t trust women. They are all the same.”

To change the belief, a client needs to go back emotionally to the original situation when the belief was created. Most clients are aware of the emotion connected with the limiting fixed belief. They are asked to be aware of the emotion and take it back to the earliest time that they remember having that emotion. Usually this is early childhood—elementary school days or earlier. What is the situation and who is involved?

Then an alternate past is created. The client is asked to assume that the primary person or persons involved had a positive intent in their actions, although the result of the actions may have been destructive. Ask the client to change the primary person by giving to him or her personal resources that would have enabled him or her to carry out the positive intent more effectively. Then the client is asked to see and hear the difference that this resource is making in the person. Then the clients are asked to see and hear how the interaction is different. They are then asked to experience in their imagination being that person with that resource. Then the clients are asked to step back and see themselves as a child, and decide what resource or resources they would have needed to have coped with the situation in a more useful way. They are asked to see and hear how the resources would have changed their image of their younger self. Then they are asked to step into the body of the younger self and experience having those resources and thereby reacting differently. While still experiencing being the younger self, they are asked to decide the belief that they have now that replaces the old fixed limiting belief.

The fixed limiting belief is not changed to the opposite; that would also be limiting. “”You can’t trust men” is not changed to “You can trust men” but to "You have the ability to decide whom you trust.” “If I have success then something terrible will happen” is replaced with “I am talented and work hard and success will naturally follow.”

People’s lives are structured around these beliefs, and when the belief changes, their strategies and relationships change automatically.

Another important benefit of an alternate past involves the negative images clients have of significant people in their past, particularly their nuclear family. The memory of an abusive parent is contained in a client’s brain cells. That negative image is part of each client and has effects on their feelings and behavior. In an alternate past, a cold and seemingly uncaring mother may be given the resource of having the feeling that she is loveable and loved and has the ability to be warm and gentle. One woman said she realized how much her mother could have accomplished, if she had had the resources that she gave her in the alternate past. Then she said, “But she didn’t have those resources, so how could she have been different? The only way that she knew to make contact with another person was through arguing and fighting.” This softened her view of her mother and since her memory of her mother is part of her, this also softened her.

Many clients have objected to creating an alternate view of a person who has been abusive and violent. The client might say “I need to protect myself against this individual. If I have an alternate view of him or her, then I become more vulnerable.” I explain that creating a more human view of this “monster” does not change your memory or your judgments. You still have the same information and can keep the decisions to protect yourself. If anything, the softened view will result in your having less of an automatic emotional response. The emotional responses may have made them more vulnerable. When frightened, some people freeze up and others initiate verbal or physical attacks, which, of course, make it more likely that they will be hurt again.

Some people object because their memory of a person is the truth and they shouldn’t change the truth. One woman in response to my request to have an altered view of her brother stated angrily, “He doesn’t deserve to be thought of as nice because he wasn’t.” I explained that she wasn’t changing her brother; she was changing neuronal pathways in her brain.

Billy was not only tormented by the memories of Dahmer’s torture and control of him but also by the realization that at times he identified with Dahmer. Particularly when angry, he took on Dahmer’s northern accent. In Chapter 2.11. Anger and Rage, I describe how Billy gets a look which frightens people, goes into a rage and sometimes has amnesia for what happened. At those times the part of him that identifies with Dahmer gains control. Fortunately, he has not become physically violent; creating an alternate view of Dahmer lessens the identification with the monster Dahmer.

It is natural to identify with the one who has the power, and the abuser often is viewed as powerful. I have seen a number of women who were physically abused by their mothers and as young girls made the promise, ”When I have kids, I will never beat them.” However, one woman had no other model of how to be a mother, and she set no limits with her kids because she didn’t know how. The kids drove her up the wall until she hit her child, and then felt terrible that she had violated this promise she had made to herself. When she reached a threshold of frustration, she identified with her abusive mother.

There are three beneficial effects from creation of an alternate past: 1) The client is able to replace limiting fixed beliefs with beneficial flexible beliefs, 2) He or she is able to humanize and soften mental images of people from the past that previously were seen only as negative and harmful, 3) The negative impact of the victim’s identification with the abuser is minimized as an alternate image of the abuser is created.

Creation of an alternate past was core to Billy’s treatment and for several months almost every session involved some addition to it.

Billy had decided in order to get his life back that he needed to tell everything that Dahmer did to him; this involved dealing with the shame connected with these memories. The shame and guilt were based on the belief that there was something basically bad or wrong with himself. His beliefs went back to childhood and those feelings were greatly intensified during the experience with Dahmer. I created alternate memories to change his early beliefs connected to guilt. His older sister has a congenital heart condition, and this limited her physical activities as a child. He often carried her to his play activities, but he resented this and sometimes went without her. He remembers pushing her off the couch, even though his mother had told him to take care of her. Billy’s father left when he was a toddler. He was one of eight children, and his mother was working two jobs. I had Billy give to his mother the ability to notice just briefly each of her children and give each a moment of special attention. He gave to his sister the ability to empathize with him and to realize and accept that at times he wanted to play with friends without her. He gave to his seven-year-old self the feeling of being loved and appreciated. Reliving the experience enabled him to feel good about himself and to feel loved and appreciated.

When he was ten years old, he had to do something that made him “feel like crap.” His mother told him to pick up a concrete block and drop it on a rat trapped in a trash can. He killed flies, but didn’t believe in killing anything else. He had the dilemma of two conflicting standards of behavior: to obey his mother and to avoid killing animals. The resource that he gave his ten-year-old self was pride in his belief about not killing anything. He had been strongly influenced by reading about Victor Frankel, who survived the holocaust. Dr. Frankel wrote that the Nazis controlled whether he ate or lived, but they didn’t control his mind. He continued to feel love for his fellow human beings.

Billy felt guilt that he had not killed Dahmer. When he had faced the decision of whether to kill Dahmer, he had struggled with conflicting standards. One standard was to protect himself and insure survival. The other was a desire to reconnect with his family. He thought his plan of explaining Dahmer’s death by saying that he fell out of bed drunk and hit his head would not work, and that he would spend his life in prison in Germany.

I tried to create an alternate past by having Billy give Dahmer resources. When he visualized Dahmer, he was not able to make any changes in how he saw him. Billy talked about how he thought there must have been traumas in Dahmer’s early life that his father, Lionel, had not written about in his book A Father’s Story. Billy said Jeffrey Dahmer had said, “I don’t have a mother and my father was a bastard.”

I realized for Billy to be able to create an altered image of Jeffrey Dahmer that his parents would have to be different, and for them to have been different, their parents (Jeffrey’s grandparents) would have to have been different.

Joyce (Jeffrey’s mother) had some history of mood instability and in the alternate past, she was given different genes so that her moods were stable. Lionel (Jeffrey’s father) was born without the genes that led to his being obsessed with fire. I directed Billy in imagining a very different childhood for Jeffrey. He was fed when he was hungry and changed when he was wet. He was cuddled when he was afraid. Like most children at a beach, he gradually became more adventuresome. He would leave his mother, stick one toe in the water come back to Joyce to check, and then venture forth a little further before returning. He was able to be adventuresome and still feel safe, and when he had a nightmare, he could go to his mother and be comforted.

We continued to create an alternate past in which young Jeffrey learned to trust. When his father threw him up briefly in the air, he was careful to gauge the amount of the throw, so it was enough to be thrilling but not enough to be scary. When he was pushed on the swing, it was hard enough to be exciting but not too frightening. He learned the trust game of standing stiff with arms out and falling backwards into his father’s arms. He was tickled but only so long as it was funny and desired. The family had dogs, and Jeffrey was able to watch the mother keep order in her litter of puppies. He noticed that the puppies learned from each other how hard to bite. The puppies loved to play, and when one pup bit too hard the others wouldn’t play with him. The dogs would indicate when it was a play fight. The dog would play bow. With the hind end up, the dog would extend the legs outward and bow down. This means “We are playing.” Jeff learned, as a child with his playmates, that you could play box and play wrestle and no one would really get hurt. When he saw monsters in his dreams, his father might say, “What would you need to have in your dreams in order to face that monster and control it?"

His parents set limits, and there were consequences that were adhered to. So Jeffrey learned that when his parents said something, they meant it. He learned to believe what they said. Therefore, when his mother and father said, “I love you,” he believed them.

Billy has a vivid imagination, and when I asked him to create this alternate past, he was intensely involved and appeared to be in a trance. I waited silently for him to nod before I added the next step.

I asked him to imagine what his life in Germany would have been like with Dahmer, as created in his alternate past. I suggested that they might have taken up dueling with protective clothing so that no one was hurt. They have had enjoyable times together, and he would have had other friends instead of being socially isolated.

Billy was asked to give the alternate past a representation in his mind: a glow, a light, or a color. He chose the color of the ocean off an island, that beautiful shade of blue. Seeing this “blue” has been very important for him. He even has delightful dreams in which he sees this color. Billy has learned rapidly to use whatever tools are given him. When he feels slighted, ignored or made fun of and he becomes angry and starts to blackout, he will direct himself to see “blue”, and will prevent the black out.

As part of the creation of the alternate past, I had Billy imagine being Jeffrey Dahmer and having the childhood experiences that were created for Jeffrey. Since Billy’s father left when he was two years old, and he didn’t see him again until he was sixteen, these were experiences that he had not had with his father.

Billy did have a father figure, his uncle, whom he called “Pops”. Pops was a veteran of WWII. Billy and his mother took care of Pops when he was ill with cancer. Pops had told Billy that he loved him shortly before he died. I had Billy imagine that Pops had the resource to be able to listen to him tell his story of what happened in Germany. Pops would have responded, saying that Billy had done what he needed to do to survive, just as Pops had had to continue in the relative safety of a foxhole even though that meant letting his feet freeze. This helped Billy to feel less guilt and shame.

As mentioned in the chapter on resentment, much of Billy’s resentment was directed at the Army personnel, who could have helped him get out of the situation with Dahmer but who did not listen to him and even mocked him.

I helped Billy create an alternate past of one of the army personnel in his barracks who could have helped him but instead mocked him. He gave several resources to this person: 1) patience to listen to him, 2) discipline to do his job, 3) confidence in himself so that he wouldn’t be taken in by Dahmer. In this alternate past he believed Billy, went to the commanding officer, and Dahmer was court-martialed. He was asked to imagine the seventeen-year-old Billy having maturity. In this fantasy, the first time Dahmer put that bone-crushing grasp on him, he would have fought him. He probably would have been court-martialed for what he did to Dahmer, but he would have been out of there. In this fantasy, he became aware of how much he had wanted his mother, and a tear came to his eyes, but he did not cry. I asked him, “What happened?” When he started to cry, he got a weak feeling, similar to when Dahmer beat him more when he cried. I asked him to substitute the image of Dahmer beating him because he was crying with the image of Bobby Kennedy on national television crying at his brother’s funeral. Copious tears began running down his creeks and he said, “This is the first time I have cried like this in over twenty years.”

Through creating an alternate past and other therapeutic procedure, Billy was able to change several limiting beliefs. As mentioned above, he was able to change the belief that there was something wrong with him because of what Dahmer had done to him. He no longer believes the following:1) I can never be free of Dahmer, 2) I must be on guard all the time, 3) I can’t feel emotions like a normal person, 4) I can’t cry, and 5) l can’t go into a crowded store.

He made the following comments, “There have been a lot of changes. I am going to blues and purples. I have a black truck, and that is kind of depressing now. I feel good waking up in the morning even on a crappy, crappy day. I know there is always a way to fix something. I never give up. Depression is when you feel there is no reason to wake up, no other option. I now have ten different ways of doing things. I just feel a lot better physically. I don’t have as many complaints. I still have an anxiety attack occasionally. I have nightmares but they are blander. In one nightmare Jeff (Dahmer) dressed up as a clown. It was hilarious in the dream. He was so out of character. He was using somebody else’s identity, and it was not working. The walls in the dream were blue and purple. I remember his having this big red nose like clowns have. I felt like squeezing it. It was kind of okay in the dream.
Thank God he is dead. For a long time I felt he might come back. I thought any minute that that sucker was going to knock on the door.”

Emotional Management Suggestions

You do not have to be a victim of your memories. Phobia Cure provides some tools to change the mental images and internal conversations to minimize or eliminate the negative impact. Creating an alternate past is an additional step after using those procedures. If you have lost contact with a person or he or she is deceased, and you feel that it would have been beneficial for a certain interaction to have taken place, you can create an alternate past. You may have had a cut-off or feel there are unresolved issues, or just wish that you had been able to be emotionally closer to that person. Give to the other person the personal resources that would have enabled him or her to have the desired interchange. See and hear how having those resources would have changed him or her. The more sensory details you can imagine, the more impact will this have. Then give to yourself the resources you will need to have this interaction. First see and hear yourself having the interaction. Then step into your body and experience what it feels like as you have the interaction.

If you feel stymied because you repeat the same self-defeating pattern over and over again, despite decisions to change the pattern, then look inside for a fixed limiting belief going back to childhood. The belief can usually be stated quite simply in absolute terms. I think it would be very difficult to change a limiting belief without professional help. The procedure listed below is given to provide some guidelines for yourself or whoever is helping you with it.

To change the belief, you need to go back emotionally to the original situation when the belief was created. You will probably be aware of the emotion connected with the limiting fixed belief. Be aware of the emotion and take it back to the earliest time that you remember having that emotion. Usually this is early childhood—elementary school days or earlier. What is the situation and who is involved?

Then create an alternate past. Assume that the primary person or persons involved had a positive intent in their actions, although the result of their actions may have been destructive. Change the primary person by giving him or her personal resources which enable him or her to carry out the primary intent more effectively. First, see and hear the difference that these resources are making in the person. Second, see and hear how the interaction is different. Third, experience in your imagination actually being that person with those resources. Forth, step back and see yourself as a child, and decide what resource or resources you would have needed to cope with the situation in a more useful way. Then see and hear how the resources would have changed the younger you. Then step into the body of the younger you, and experience having those resources and reacting differently. While still imaging being your younger self, decide the belief that you now have which replaces the old limiting belief. Imagine how having had that new belief would have changed past situations. Then imagine how having that new belief will be changing your future.

In this chapter I describe how Billy’s identification with Dahmer was manifested in various mannerisms, sometimes with outbursts of anger.  We tend to identify with who has the power and control, and victims identify with the abuser, particularly if the abuse has extended over a period of time.  The victim then often hates the part of himself or herself that is like the abuser.

Early in therapy Billy talked a lot about how distressed he was when he had mannerisms like Dahmer. He said, “He had a northern accent.  When I am angry I have a  northern accent.  I tend to dress like Dahmer dressed.  He would hold his lips a certain way--a thin line, pursed together. He had a certain look in his eyes.  He rotated his body a certain way.  Dahmer would lunge and hit and choke and not say a word.  He loped when he walked.  He was silent.  It was hard to tell when he was angry; there was no way to know before he attacked.  He had a lot of charisma.   He could convince anybody of anything.”

Billy identified with Dahmer when he was angry.  Billy had felt that his life depended on reading Dahmer’s moods, and he retains this ability to pick up the nuances of other people’s emotions. His anger was triggered by an expression or tone of voice that indicated that someone was not listening or was making fun of him.  I helped him to change the look or tone of voice so that it had less effect on him. Often a parent or sibling becomes a role mode, and the identification is useful.  It is a problem when  the person identifies with abusive behavior or mistreatment. The identification and resultant undesired behavior often occurs at a time of stress, particularly when the other has an expression, gesture or tone of voice that mimics that of the abuser.  The person often hates the part of himself that behaved like the abuser.  The frequent comment, “I don’t know what got into me.  I’m not like that.”

In the preceding chapter I discussed creating an alternate past and how that influenced identification with the abuser. So the creation of an imagined past can be quite effective.  Billy’s memories of  Dahmer are coded in his brain cells. Changing that coding in Billy’s brain did not change Dahmer.  However, creating an alternate view of Dahmer as being more human and having some positive intentions changed the effect of the identification. Another way of stating it would be that Billy identified with a softer, humanized Dahmer, and this was more useful to him.  In the later stages of therapy, I asked Billy what part of Dahmer would be useful to identify with.  He said that Dahmer was able to talk to anybody and was very convincing. Billy said he would like to be able to talk to people and have influence on them as Dahmer did. However, Dahmer had lied and he didn’t want to do that.

Emotional Management Suggestions

So what can you do if you have an undesirable behavior which occurs at times of emotional stress?  If you are mistreating others as you were once mistreated, you are acting out of identification with the person who mistreated you. There are usually triggers that initiate the behavior.  The content is less important than how the person looked or how the person sounded.  First, figure out whether you respond more to what you see or what you hear.  It is easier to change the trigger than it is to eliminate it.  If you respond to a tone of voice, you could make the voice sound like Sylvester the cat, or Mickey Mouse, or your favorite singer, or blend in with your favorite or silliest music.  If you respond to a certain expression, you could see the person as a toy soldier, or as a paper doll, or any cartoon character.  Select the changes that are most effective in minimizing your emotional response.  Then go back in time and imagine making those changes in situations in which you previously had little control.  Then go forward in time, and imagine making the changes in situations which are likely to occur in your future.  The more you repeat this, the sooner the new program will become automatic.

This chapter describes the use of hypnosis.  During hypnosis some of the conscious logical left-brain processes were by-passed with easier access to unconscious and right brain resources.  Billy was able to achieve deep relaxation while feeling safe and enjoying positive happy memories of times before he met Dahmer. 

Dahmer had beaten him harder when he cried, so he learned not to cry.  He wanted to be able to cry, but he couldn’t.  Therapy for this involved the use of hypnosis. 

Several years ago I had another client who had "learned” not to cry. She had suffered terrible sexual and physical abuse as a child.  She had been in therapy for twenty years when I saw her.  I said, “Well, what can I do?”  She said that she had never cried and wanted to be able to do that.  I induced a hypnotic trance, and suggested arm levitation.  The suggestion is made that the arm will lift on its own without the client deciding to lift the arm.  I suggested that when her hand reached her eye that the dam would break. She did not cry. I repeated the arm levitation with the other arm with no better results.  Then I said that the dam would break when her two hands touched each other.  Then she made a cry I have never heard before or since and never want to hear again.  She then was able to cry. 

When I mentioned hypnosis to Billy, he was leery of it and expressed concern about losing control.  One day I began a hypnotic induction.  It just felt like the right thing to do; I had not planned it ahead.  Since he was afraid of losing control, I was careful to give him permission to ignore any of my suggestions.  As part of the hypnotic induction, I timed my breathing with his, and on expiration I would lower my tone of voice and would suggest relaxation.  I added “or not” at the end of any suggestion, which gave him the option of whether or not to follow the suggestion.  For example, I said, “Your eyes may be more comfortable closed or not”.  One goal of hypnosis is for the person to have more access to resources that are largely subconscious.  A degree of confusion is sometimes useful, so I said, “You don’t know all that you know that you know, and it is all right not to know all that you know that you know, as long as you know that when you need to know it, you will know it.” Because Billy needed more access to positive memories, I spent a lot of time suggesting that he remember and reexperience delightful, joyous, wonderful memories from his childhood. 

He achieved a deep level of trance.  I suggested arm levitation and when his hand touched his cheek, I suggested that the dam would break or not. He did not cry except for a fraction of a second. When he came out of the trance, he said, “You snuck that one in on me”.  He said that at one point he had tried to open his eyes, but could not.  I asked him how long it seemed and he said, “five minutes”.  It had been an hour.  The relaxation achieved in the trance helped him to question some of his fixed beliefs such as “I can never relax,” and  “I have to be on guard all the time.”  With time he was able to cry and feel sadness.  See Chapter 3.8 on creating an alternate past for more details.

After the first hypnotic suggestion, hypnosis was used a few more times with Bill. He liked the relaxation.    During one particular session of hypnosis, I decided to approach the internal conflicts he had by stressing the options that he had, so I told him that his unconscious mind and his conscious mind could get together and agree on the following:

After he came out of the trance, he said he was not as relaxed this time. While he was saying this, he kept moving his hand up and down above his thigh. I responded that I thought I had asked a lot of his unconscious mind, and that was probably why he was not as relaxed.

This chapter deals with the problems of anger and rage, which persisted even after most of Billy’s symptoms had been alleviated. The goal of treatment was to create in Billy a way of achieving relaxation and calm, to install the relaxation procedure, and to time it to kick in just before he previously had gotten angry. 

There were a few incidences in which Billy felt anger and rage.  He was not violent, but his expression was so intense that the other people involved became afraid.    What happened was that Billy wanted to tell his story, and he can be quite talkative.    I think he felt, because of all his suffering, that other people owed it to him to listen.  This caused problems.  I had phone contact with one person who had experienced Billy in a rage.  This person said that Billy’s expression was so frightening that the person started carrying a gun. 

The two situations that created anger in Billy occurred when people treated him as many in the Army had treated him, specifically if someone did not listen to him, or if someone made fun of him.  As far as I know, since I started seeing him, he has not actually been violent, although he did have rage reactions. 

When I worked with Billy, I had already done several interventions, which lessened the rage reaction: 1).  In the creation of an alternate past the color blue had significance;  2).  Fast phobia cures had been done in situations in which he previously felt he had no control. He utilized the feeling of control he has when he does a wheelie on a bike;  3). He had gained control over his internal images. When a person aroused negative feelings in him, he was able to shrink the internal image of that person which diminished the emotional impact.  He said, “I can shrink him and put him on the head of a pin.”

Daniel Amen,(1997) in his book Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, (pages 204-205), writes that temporal lobe problems may be associated with frequent attacks of rage. He gives several prescriptions for optimizing and healing the temporal lobes.  He says that all forms of vocalization including singing, chanting, yodeling, humming, reciting poetry and simply talking can be therapeutic. However, nothing beats toning. Toning means making sounds with elongated vowels for extended periods of time. Since the temporal lobes are involved in rage reactions and toning is therapeutic for the temporal lobes, I decided to create a program for Billy tailored to his specific situation.   An alternate past had previously been created, and he gave it the color of the blue of the ocean off an island.  The blue color was associated with calmness, with relaxation, and an optimistic view of life.  I ask him to use a long drawn out “blue” as a toning.  I asked him to feel relaxed, comfortable, and in control as he said the word “blue”.  Then I had him repeat it over and over again.  I told him that each time he said, “blue” the relaxation, comfort, and feeling of control would double.

I had him go back to a situation previously in which he had not been able to tone bluuuuuee and have this feeling of relaxation.  I asked him to feel the difference the toning would have made and to see the freedom that it would have given him in that situation. I had him repeat this for two or three more situations.  Then I had him imagine a situation in the future that might arise in which it would be useful to hear this internal sound of bluuuuuee and to feel that relaxation. I asked him to feel the difference that this is making in his future and to see the freedom that it is giving him in his future.   I asked him to repeat this for several possible instances in the future. Anger and rage occur at a subconscious level; therefore the reprogramming needs to be at a subconscious as well as conscious level.  I changed my voice tone and cadence of speech to be like the voice I use in inducing trance.   Billy has become quite skillful at going into a trance state in which he is able to create the internal scenarios that I ask him to do. In spite of strong provocation on a couple of occasion, he has not had a rage reaction since then.

I had heard from several people second hand reports of incidences that involved Billy.  The reports were that he had gotten disturbed and was persistent in demanding someone’s attention.  These incidents seemed to involve his wanting to tell his story at some length and the other person not having the time or desire to listen.  I was finally able to talk to someone who had talked directly to Billy.  She referred to him as the “Dahmer person.”  She said he had come into the office of a documentary film festival and asked about a film about Dahmer.   She said he wanted to talk and tell her about himself, and she was quite busy at that time, and did not have time to listen.  He was persistent, and they even thought about calling the police.

After debating whether to tell him what she had said, I decided to do so.  He was quite defensive at first but later said he wanted to apologize for embarrassing me.  About three weeks later he said that he no longer gets irritated with people.  He said the turning point was when I told him what the woman at the film festival had said.  He said that he thought about how he was coming across to people and decided that the image he projected was not “him.”  He felt he was different from how he was coming across to others. One of the principles of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is that communication is not the message you mean to send, but rather it is the message that the other person receives. He began thinking about how he was appearing to others, and that enabled him to react calmly.

Emotional Management Suggestions

Violence occurs when you feel you have no other choice.  Remember when you felt angry.  Did you feel as though you were powerful and had lots of choices, or did you feel like you were at the end of your rope and didn’t know what to do?  Having choices minimizes the risk of violence.  So if you have times when you go into a rage or even get angry, how can you use something similar to what was effective for Billy?  First, check if there is any part of you that has any objection to being able to control the anger, and if you are willing to make a firm commitment to change.  Next would be to have a way of obtaining a relaxation response.   Some examples of effective means are meditation, progressive relaxation, prayer, chanting, yoga, and listening to music that creates a relaxed state.  Popular magazines are full of these techniques, and most of them are effective.  The trick is to be able to have that relaxed state when you need it.  If you are similar to most people you have what I call triggers or buttons, which automatically shift you into an angry state.  The moment just after that trigger is fired is when you need the relaxed state.  You might assume that what the person said fires the trigger, but it is almost always how the person said it. The reaction is too quick for the person to have thought about it.  I ask clients. “Can your trigger be pulled if you see the person but don’t hear him or her?” Then can your trigger be pulled if you hear the person but don’t see him or her.  That way you can determine whether the trigger is visual or auditory.  Auditory triggers involve tone of voice, pitch, rhythm, accent, volume, and timbre.  Visual triggers involve posture, finger- pointing, expressions, looking down one’s nose, in your face, blank stare, look of disgust or distain.  Do some research on yourself; find out specifically what the trigger is.  Usually the trigger originated with a parent or sibling. 

This chapter is long, and has many examples of interventions. I talk about the brain and its evolution. I discuss theories about how I see the brain operating, and how this way of thinking gives us tools for having control of our emotional lives. I explain how anger and the resulting resentment have a positive purpose. These two emotions are instinctual and therefore based at a brain level that is below the threshold of our awareness. Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. I explain how to keep the positive effects, while getting rid of the bitterness that poisons so many relationships and families.

I am puzzled about why resentment plays such a pervasive role in so many lives. The Oxford dictionary defines resentment as “bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly.” The World Book defines it as “The feeling one has at being injured or insulted: indignation: the act of showing this feeling by action or speech.” The initial reaction to being insulted or injured is to feel anger. Anger is useful if one needs to defend oneself physically. But the physiological response can be detrimental—hypertension, muscular tension, and a score of stress-related illnesses. Resentment is left even when anger fades away.

What is the function of resentment? It serves to keep alive the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, the animosity between the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus, the religious battles in Ireland and the Middle East. In our society we don’t usually physically attack people toward whom we feel resentment. So what purpose does it serve? Children believe in magic and as we grow up and mature, we like to think we stop believing in magic. But do we? Many of us believe that somehow holding the resentment is going to punish magically the other person for the insult or injury done to us.

Fear is useful to avoid danger, has survival value, and does not operate at the level of the cerebral cortex but at a more primitive brain level. I suggest that resentment likewise operates at a more primitive brain level and is not altered by reasoning or logic. I will use game theory to show how resentment plays a prominent role in human evolution. In his book Nonzero, The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright (2000) discusses game theory and how it relates to evolution. Game theorists describe human interaction as a game and evaluate the game depending on how much each player wins or loses.

The founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern made a basic distinction between zero-sum and nonzero-sum games (Pages 4-5). In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant’s gain is the other’s loss. In nonzero-sum games, one player’s gain needn’t be bad news for the other(s). Indeed in highly nonzero-sum games, the players’ interests overlap entirely. A merchant and a customer, two members of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes, but not always, find their interests overlapping. To the extent that their interests do overlap, their relationship is nonzero-sum or sum-positive. Alternately, negative (lose-lose) nonzero-sum games can be played as well.

There is reason for altruism (or the playing of sum-positive games) to survive and be passed on in the genes. If a hunter who kills a large animal shares his kill with his neighbor and his neighbor reciprocates, this is a sum positive game and both benefit. One chronicler of Eskimo life has observed, “the best place for (an Eskimo) to store his surplus is in someone else’s stomach”

Wright (page 24) also states that one problem with altruism is that of cheating or parasitism. People may accept your generosity and never repay it. (Game theorists call this “free riding”---contributing nothing to the pie of positive sums created by collective action, yet cheerfully eating a piece.) Moral indignation (or resentment) works well as an anti-cheating technology. It leads you to withhold generosity from past non-reciprocators, thus insulating yourself from future exploitation; and all the grumbling you and others do about these cheaters leads people in general to give them the cold shoulder, so chronic cheating becomes a tough way to make a living.

Over millions of years of biological evolution, people everywhere have developed an innate tendency to monitor the contributions of others, whether consciously or unconsciously. In all cultures, workplaces feature gossip about who is a slouch and who is a team player. People scan the landscape for the lazy and the ungrateful and then rein in generosity accordingly.

Wright (Page 57) describes how a village will unite to fight off an attacking group. One great way for a village to fend off assault, or to conduct assault, is to ally with another village. Once this alliance exists, any enemies have good cause to find their own allies. An “arms race” of organization that expands the social web outward, weaving more and more villages together. What enables these villages to act together is a common resentment, anger, and hatred of the enemy. This is another explanation of the powerful force that resentment has played in human evolution.

Resentment eats at you and poisons your physiology. Is the answer forgiveness? The Oxford American Dictionary defines forgive, “stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw or mistake. Roget Thesaurus list of synonyms is, 1) she would not forgive him: PARDON, excuse, exonerate, absolve: make allowances for, feel no resentment toward, feel no malice toward, harbor no grudge against, bury the hatchet with: let bygones be bygones: let off the hook; 2) you must forgive his rude conduct: EXCUSE, overlook, disregard, ignore, pass over, make allowances for, allow: turn a blind eye to, turn a deaf ear to, wink at, indulge, tolerate.

Resentment is the emotion that drives the monitoring of another’s contributions. Many of the synonyms listed above imply that forgiveness involves ignoring the offense or injury and not altering one’s behavior. For this reason I usually speak of getting rid of resentment rather than forgiving. Before I ask the client to make the change that would eliminate the feeling of resentment, I ask if there is any part of the person that has any objection to the change. Another way of getting similar information would be to ask, “What does the resentment accomplish for you?” One of the presuppositions of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) is that every action or emotion has a positive intent.

There are three categories of objections: 1) Getting rid of the resentment would mean condoning the harmful behavior. A frequent response is that the person doesn’t deserve it. “I’m not going to let him off the hook. He deserves all the ill feelings I have towards him.” 2) The resentment serves a useful function such as protection against further harm. Clients have said, “ I’ve been hurt too many times, and I am not going to let it happen again. I need the resentment to protect me from being harmed by this person.” 3) The resentment is needed for the person’s self esteem. She might say, “I’m not going to allow myself to be beat up like my mother did. If I put up with this, I will be a wimp.”

Through explanations and reasoning I can usually deal with the objections. However, the resentment itself appears to be unaffected by cerebral processes, such as reasoning or will power or a conscious decision. Resentment has survival value and operates lower in the brain and at an unconscious level.

I answer objections with, “You can defend yourself just as well if not better without the resentment. Resentment limits you to attacking the other or withdrawing. Without the resentment you have more freedom in how you respond. You can see the interaction from differing viewpoints and perhaps even with humor. You can keep all your information, judgments and evaluations of the other person intact. Your thinking process, your judgments and decisions are separate from your emotions. The resentment eats at you and affects your blood pressure and your immune system. You are better off without it.

“You think of yourself as a person who can stand up for herself. It is important that you keep that value, and to plan how to prevent a recurrence of the harm. You don’t need the resentment to do that. You can keep all your information and judgment about the person. You can decide in what way you can trust the person and in what way you cannot. Perhaps he has hit you and you can’t trust him to control his temper, but you can trust him to play ball with your kids.” I point out that getting rid of resentment does not mean that you are more vulnerable in the future. For quite a while I wondered why the person being apologized to was more uncomfortable than the person apologizing. I finally realized that there was a presupposition in the apology, which was, ‘If you forgive me, then you must treat me as if I never did it.”

Holding on to the slights and grudges plays a destructive role in on-going relationships. It is bad enough having resentment towards people that you can ignore and keep out of your life. However, what if the person you resent is your neighbor or fellow worker or even worse –your boss. We often think that we can hide our emotions and that it doesn’t affect how we interact with others. Some clients have felt sure that they were not allowing the resentment to influence their behavior; yet when they got rid of the resentment, the relationship with the other person changed. Resentment operates at an unconscious as well as conscious level. When you give up your resentment toward someone, your relationship with that person changes even though you may not be aware of changing anything. The major portion of the change is at an unconscious level and is non-verbal. Examples are posture, tone of voice, pitch of voice, rhythm of speech, expressions, and gestures.

What if the resentment is directed at a family member? You are discussing something really important with your husband, and he turns to watch the football game. You clam up and feel belittled and resentful. This is the first whammy. After the game is over, he wants to talk about his day or may even refer back to what you were discussing. By this time you are in no mood to be pacified and you give him the cold shoulder. This is the second whammy. He then reacts by thinking of what has annoyed him and begins to criticize the amount of money you spend on clothes. This is the third whammy and this can go on and on.

In the Movie, The Upside of Anger, a woman believes that her husband, without saying a word to anyone, abandoned her and their four daughters. She assumed that he went to Sweden with his beautiful young secretary. She phoned the secretary in Sweden and heard a man’s voice answer and was sure it was her husband. The younger daughter who narrates the film said her mother was the sweetest, nicest person in the world before this happened. The story is how her anger and resentment poisons her life and her relationship with her daughters. She justifies her drinking and unpredictable explosive outbursts and asks others to see what a victim she is. The odd twist at the end is finding the husband’s body in an abandoned well on their property. He had not abandoned her.

It was a tragedy that this bitterness, which poisoned her life, was based on the false assumption that her husband had left her for another woman. However, if the basis for her anger and resentment had been true, does that make it any less of a tragedy? She changed and became a bitter, volatile, self-centered alcoholic. In the movie the bitterness was gone, and she softened when she found out that the feeling was not justified. But why let the anger and resentment ruin your life, whether it is justified or not?

The effect of resentment on success or failure of marriages has been documented by John Gottman (His work is discussed in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, pages 32-33), who has studied over three thousand couples in his “love lab.” The couples’ interactions were videotaped. He developed an elaborate coding system. If he analyzes an hour of a videotape of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 % accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt. “You would think that criticism would be the worst,” Gottman says, “because criticism is a global condemnation of a person’s character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism because you are trying to put the person on a lower plane from you. It is hierarchical.” Resentment is probably the first step in those four patterns of interaction.

Resentment is usually not changed by a thinking process and has a lot in common with flashbacks. In a flashback the visual mental image of the original trauma follows a pathway in the brain to the emotions connected to the trauma. The mental image that you make the moment you have that anger is the image that comes to your mind whenever in the future you see or think of that person. There is a pathway in the brain from that image to the feelings of anger and resentment. A phobia is not cured by any reasoning or logic nor is resentment. Changing that pathway cures a phobia. Coupling the image with calm, relaxed emotions does the trick. Likewise, anger and resentment are gone when that pathway changes.

In the phobia cure, the new pathway used a calm, relaxed state. With resentment, what do you need to create a new pathway? You want to find an analogous situation in which you didn’t feel resentment or anger. What are the possibilities?
(1) Go back in time to when you were so much in love that it didn’t matter when he didn’t notice that you got a new hairdo. In general, go back to an earlier time when you had positive feelings and were not sensitive to things that bother you now.
(2) Someone caused you pain or harm, and you didn’t feel angry. A young child playfully hits you, it hurts but you don’t get angry. You are rushing to get somewhere and step around a corner and bump heads with someone.
(3) You have a friend who just blurts out whatever comes to her mind. That is just how she is. She says some critical things about you and you don’t get angry.
(4) Remember a time when you felt so good about yourself that nothing seemed to bother you.

The next step is to determine the specifics of the mental image that produce the resentment. The image of this person is not just any image of that person, but it is the specific image you made at the time you got angry or felt hurt. Most people are not aware of this, but the mental image you made has a specific location in space. Determine where you see it. How far away is it? Is it eyelevel or up or down? Is it in the center or to the left or the right? How big is the person? Is s/he life-sized or bigger than life or smaller than life? Position and size are usually the most important aspects. I will refer to this as picture #1.

Then make a mental image of the analogous situation in which you did not feel resentment. This is Picture #2. As with Picture #1, find the location of the image and its size.

The next step is to deal with any objections to getting rid of the resentment. The person may not be aware of the objections until he starts to move Picture #1 to the position of Picture #2. Any new objections need to be dealt with. Then continue to move Picture #1 to the position of Picture #2 and, if there was a difference in size, make the person in Picture #1 be the size of the person in Picture #2. Then test to make sure the resentment is gone. This procedure is called bridging over. I will give some examples of this procedure.

The following is a condensed version of a therapy session with Billy, which dealt mainly with resentment. In doing therapy I concentrated on the effects of the trauma inflicted by Dahmer. I had not fully appreciated the effects on Billy of the people who could have helped him but did not. He has resentment toward those in authority whom he told about his mistreatment by Dahmer. They did not help, and they even made fun of him. I wonder how often in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) this aspect of the treatment is gets overlooked. How often does the therapist miss the resentment that a daughter feels towards her mother who did not believe her, or did not protect her from the mother’s boyfriends? What about the resentment that victims of a priest feel toward the parish that merely transferred the priest to another parish?

I said to Billy that the main issue we needed to deal with now was his resentment toward Paul (not his real name). Billy’s facial expression changed, his complexion darkened and tears briefly came to his eyes. I said, “ I see the tears.” He said, “He hurt me. He hurt me a lot. It is hard to think about. It is hard to talk about. There is a lot to swallow. Paul found it all amusing. I’m sure he knew everything—the black eyes, the injuries. He made poor decisions. He didn’t listen. Still when people do not listen, I get upset. I haven’t gone into a rage like I used to before you taught me to see “blue”. I felt he went behind my back. Dahmer would go into his room and I would hear them laughing and stuff. I think of Paul and Dahmer the same way. I feel the same way towards both. I hate it when people smile at me when I am in distress. He let me suffer and suffer and suffer. How the hell did he not hear me screaming? I know how it feels to be choked until you pass out. I know how it feels to be hit until you pass out. I got through it.”

There was another person Billy resented who told him, “The next time you get hurt I am going to bring you up on charges.” Billy explained that in the Army if you get drunk and break a leg you can be charged with damaging government property and in the military you lose all rights. You do not have the right to remain silent. You do not have the right to an attorney.

Billy thought that because Dahmer had kept him from getting mail, phone calls, and receiving assignments that there must have been others involved. He felt that they must have known what was going on, and he wondered why they went along with Dahmer.

I offered an explanation. I said that I had read an article about bullying in schools. Mechthild Schafer (2005) in an essay called, “ Stopping the Bullies,”(See References) describes how school can be torture for children who are targeted by abusive students. Children who bully are often physically abused at home. They seek to enhance their position by humiliating a weaker student. He wrote that children can be very skilled in systematically using their social clout at the expense of weaker schoolmates, the goal being to enhance their own position. Mobbing thrives in hierarchical settings because it allows dominance and strength to reign as the measure of an individual’s social value. It is therefore not surprising that prisons and military bases are often the scenes of mobbing. Over time other students tend to go along with the bully; if the student is an ally of the bully, he or she is less likely to be chosen as a victim. Many students join in the humiliation of the victim. I suggested that a similar scenario could have occurred with the people around Dahmer. At first the intent was to keep from being victims themselves, and after a while they began to join in as a way of enhancing their own position.

Billy could accept that Paul’s intent in siding with Dahmer was to protect himself—to keep himself from becoming a victim.

Billy said that Paul acted gay—that he was effeminate, and that sometimes Dahmer had some effeminate mannerisms. Bill suspected that Paul was giving Dahmer blowjobs, but he said he had no evidence to support this.

Billy speculated, ”If Paul had not been homosexual, I would have been dead. The right thing for him to have done was to pull me out of that situation immediately. But if Paul had pulled me out, there was the possibility that I would have died. Paul let Dahmer know that he could go on without fear of getting caught. If Dahmer hadn’t known this, he would have killed me.”

Billy said, “ I never showed up for formation. I never showed up for work assignments and yet I get promoted. The crazy military was really screwed up. The Army had not recovered from Vietnam and most soldiers got drunk every night. Everyone there had been to Nam except for Dahmer and me.”

He said a soldier from another barracks started going to Paul’s room. Dahmer would go to Paul’s door and knock and get no answer, and he went to his room repeatedly all night long. Dahmer seemed very upset which increased Billy’s torture. Paul and Dahmer had a falling out; they didn’t talk to each other. Soon after that, Billy said he was sent on an assignment to the field. He said, “ When I came back that sorry SOB (Dahmer) was gone. I heard that they had to drag him out of there.”

Billy began to free associate, “Dahmer had a moustache. He was trying to hide something. Everything seemed thought out so well. They knew. Everything seemed rehearsed. Was it supposed to be that way? Dahmer had a job to do –to molest---to beat---to rape--- and to scar me up. Paul had a job to ignore my cries for help. Paul didn’t want to tell.”

Now the challenge was to lessen the resentment in Billy. This resentment affected any interchange in which Billy felt he was not being listened to. Since he tends to be very talkative, this was a fairly frequent problem. I said I thought resentment in certain contexts was useful. If someone had injured you in battle, then the resentment might prepare you to be ready to defend yourself when you met that person again. I explained that getting rid of resentment and forgiving were not the same thing. Forgiving the person usually implies that you act as if the behavior did not occur. Getting rid of resentment does not mean that you excuse the other person, alter your opinions, or in any way make yourself more vulnerable. Feeling resentment usually means that you have two choices—to attack or to withdraw. Without the resentment there is the possibility of humor, of seeing the situation from different viewpoints and responding in a calm manner. Resentment changes the way you come across to another person. Those changes are usually out of your awareness—changes in voice tone and rhythm, gestures, expressions and body language.

Reason, logic and the religious belief that one should forgive do not usually get rid of the resentment. I used a procedure called bridging over. The first mental image that you ask the client to make is of the person that creates the feeling of resentment. The second mental image is of an analogous situation but is one in which the client does not feel resentment.

I recalled a situation Billy told me about. He was three years old and he had not had breakfast. While he was with his mother and older sister shopping, he got hungry and felt desperate for food, but his mother did not listen to him and continued shopping. When they got home he got something to eat. He did not feel resentment towards his mother.

Billy’s mental image of Paul that created the resentment was of Paul living a normal life, he was drinking with a boyfriend. There were lots of plants there but no color or flowers. The image was of Paul having suffered no consequences from the experience with Dahmer, while Billy had suffered so much. I asked him to describe the image and where he saw it. The mental picture was arm’s length away, and to the right. It was in color and there was movement like in a movie.

The second mental image was of his mother in a red dress and wearing red lipstick. He saw the three-year-old Billy holding her hand. It was also arm’s length away, and in color, and a movie. He could hear her voice. The differences between the two images were that Paul was smaller than life-size and his mother was life-sized. Her image was in front and Paul was off to the right. The tone of voice was different.

I asked him if he had any objection to making the picture of Paul like the picture of his mother. When he said, “No”, I asked him to make the image of Paul life-size, move it to the center, and to change his laughing tone of voice to be like his mother’s tone of voice.

As he followed my suggestions, his facial features softened indicating a change in his feelings. I asked him to imagine a situation when this new feeling would have made a difference, to feel the difference it would have made, and see the freedom it would have given him. I had him repeat this for two more situations. He had his eyes closed doing this and appeared to be in a trance. He came out of the trance, smiling and remarked how different that would have been.
After the Emotional Management Suggestions, I have added several examples of treatment of clients who had problems with resentment.

Emotional Management Suggestions

You may want to get rid of resentment. The suggested procedure is the same as described earlier in this chapter as bridging over. The first picture is the mental image you have of the person as you feel the resentment towards him or her. Be aware of the location of the image—how close—eye level or above or below—center or to the right or the left. How big is the person—life-size or smaller or larger than life? The second picture is an analogous situation in which you didn’t feel any bitterness. The picture may be of a time when you had positive feelings towards this person. It may be of a time when a person harmed you or slighted you and you did not feel resentment. Examples are listed earlier in the chapter. Find out all the details about the second picture that you did for Picture #1. Except in rare instances, the mental images will be in different locations. As you start to move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2 be aware of any objections that you feel. If you have trouble moving the picture, stop and figure out what objection you have. Then move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2 and if there was a difference is size, change that. Give yourself a few minutes and then check the results by remembering the person you used to resent. Be delighted at the power you now have over your emotions. Feel the difference this is making in your future and see the freedom that it is giving you.

The following are several clinical examples of clients with resentment problems. I remember a mother who was having problems with her teenage daughter. Her daughter got up in her face and screamed at her. This pushed the mother’s buttons and she screamed back. She had a mental picture of her daughter above her a few inches away as she put it, “up in her face”. She had a good relationship with her daughter when she was a preteen. In the mental image of her daughter as a preteen, she saw her daughter at eye level and arm’s-length away. She objected, saying that if she didn’t get angry, she would not have any control. I said,” Don’t you think that you would be more effective if you gave consequences in a calm tone of voice instead of screaming at her?” After dealing with her objections, she did change the mental image of her teenage daughter to be like the preteen image --at eye level and arm’s-length away. She also changed her daughter’s tone of voice. Two weeks later I saw her and asked, “How are things with your daughter?” She said, “Oh she’s changed completely. She comes in my room and tells me about school and everything that is going on.” I am sure the mother changed in ways that she was not aware of and that her change made a change in the daughter.

I would like to relate a session with a woman I will call Karen. I had been seeing her for some time and she had made remarkable changes in her life. She had a business relationship in which the other party whom I will call Marge was not fulfilling her part of the contract. She had resentment and anger towards Marge and was aware of how the resentment would affect her ability to negotiate with her. Resentment can affect the way you relate to the other person, largely in ways out of your awareness. It affects your tone of voice, your gestures, your expressions, and your posture without your having made a conscious decision to change anything. The changes occur automatically.

I used the bridging over procedure described earlier. The first mental image I asked Karen to make was of Marge when she feels the resentment. The second picture I asked her to make was of someone who had promised to do something and had not done it but she did NOT resent this person. These two situations are analogous except she felt resentment in one and not in the other. She thought of a friend whom I will call Joella who promised to do things and sometimes did and sometimes did not. That friend has a drinking problem, and Karen excused her on that basis and did not feel resentment.

I asked her to tell me about the mental picture she made of Marge. She saw her off to her left side a little more than arm’s length away. She was quite small with her mouth was going up and down and jabbering.

The second picture of Joella was different in that it was off to the right and closer—an arm’s-length away. She was life-sized. Her mouth was also going.

I then asked her if any part of her had any objection to making the picture of Marge to the right instead of to the left and to move her closer and to make her life- sized. She said that what came to mind was that she wanted to punish her. I said that this was another example of how people believe in magic—that somehow her having that resentment eating at her was going to punish Marge. I asked her what the part that wanted to punish Marge hoped to gain from punishing her. She said, “For her to acknowledge that she treated me badly. Or for me to tell her that she is not such a great person.”

I asked her again whether she had any objection now to moving the picture and changing it. She said that she had the visual picture of Marge floating off in the distance. She said, speaking to the imagined Marge, “I can keep you floating up there or I can let you into my world. I feel power over these images. Like in a fairy tale, I can say that you’re banished, or off with your head. I can be the wicked queen or a nice queen. I can allow you in my presence or not. Or I could have you peeling potatoes for the rest of your life.” We discussed that what she now had control over was not Marge but her mental image of Marge. That mental image was within her and she could control that image. She went on to say, “Nobody has the right to be in my life unless they are useful to me. If they besmirch me, I will send them into the distance.”

She extended these ideas further. She said, “I can do this with my parents. I can shrink them down to nothing or I can bring them back at my will. I am the queen of my own life. I can banish anyone or bring them back. I can turn them into a frog, give them donkey ears, and blow them up like a balloon. Or like the witch in the cartoon I can go zap and have the person disappear in the distance.

“We can give ourselves a magic baton and make anything happen that we want. We act as if our view of reality is solid. It is only our perception of reality, it is not reality. Our perception of the world is not the world. Therefore, we can change any of our perceptions.”

She began to wonder how to apply this ability to emotions and relationships. She thought that in physically abusive relationships, the victim is seen as smaller and lower down. The aggressor is seen as large and on top –heavy –weighting the victim down. She said, “You could topple the abuser down and see the two side by side.” Continuing her discussion of relationships she said, “You could see relationships as the two people moving closer or moving farther apart. You could see one moving towards and the other moving away. You could see one circling the other. You could make them like holograms in space and then you could do anything with them.”

She said that as a child she learned the only way to deal with an abusive relationship was to tolerate it as long as you could and then leave. She said, “Before if someone was a problem, for instance, an alcoholic, then I would pretend the person didn’t exist. The people you hate don’t go away. If you deny they exist, you give them power. It is better to keep the person at a distance and keep an eye on him or her.”

We began talking about emotions, and I told her that I would ask questions about emotions such as “Where in your body do you feel it? How big is it? How heavy? Does it stay the same size or does it radiate? What is the temperature? Is it hot or cold? Give it a color.”

She said that she felt emotions outside herself—like she was bathed in the emotion. If she felt happy, it was like she was in warm water; if she were sad, the water would feel cold. I said that temperature depended on the movement of the molecules and that she could picture the molecules moving faster, thereby giving herself a mechanism for feeling warmer.

She said that she feels like some people don’t want to take responsibility for their lives. If they felt in control of their lives and they still felt bad, they would have to admit something was wrong. They would rather blame someone else or give the responsibility to God. She said at one time in her life, she had felt that it was more important to blame someone for the pain than it was to eliminate it. It was more important to blame someone else than it was not to suffer.

I think that when Karen felt she didn’t have any control over her emotions she did not take responsibility for her moods and blamed someone else. Once she had some tools for making a change in her emotional state, then she took responsibility for her emotional states. This is generally true. When we feel we can’t do anything about something, we tend to want to blame someone else. The more control we have over ourselves, the less we feel the need to control others.

An example of this is a pedophile I treated. He described how he could spot a needy girl a block away. He told me details of the trust game he would play with her so she would allow him to do more and more intimate things with her. He said that more than 95 percent of his thinking time was invested in this. He expressed no guilt. He was controlling his behavior because he didn’t want to go to jail, or at least he told me he was controlling it. The success rate of psychotherapy with pedophiles is very low, and as far as I know there is no evidence that it works. I felt I was not having any success. The only success has been when drugs are given to reduce the testosterone level. I elicited the help of a drug company to provide the free medication and I started him on a large dose of provera orally, which reduced his testosterone level. The amount of time he spent thinking about little girls decreased, and for the first time he felt he had some ability to control his behavior. Only then did he express guilt and regret for what he had done. Unfortunately, after a few months of drug therapy, he dropped out of treatment and I lost contact with him.

In my experience, the reason that clients have not been successful in changing their lives is not because they haven’t tried as hard as they could; it is because what they were doing was not working. I often say to clients, “If at first you don’t succeed, then try, try again. Then do something else. You know that is not working. Anything else you do has a better chance of success than what you have been doing. “ When something doesn’t work, the natural tendency is to try harder, do more of the same thing, and do it more intensely. I am tempted to use a political example here like Vietnam, but I will resist the temptation. One of the main goals of this written work is to give the reader some simple ways to have control over emotions and behavior. This is done at the end of most of the chapters.

One of my main goals with clients is to give them tools that they can use outside of the formal therapy setting. I asked several clients who had had previous therapy how this therapy was different. There were several common themes. Clients felt that with this therapy they developed tools which they could use to give them control over their lives. Several mentioned that I gave personal examples, which were particularly helpful.

However, many professionals believe that a therapist should not talk about himself. The American Psychiatric Society publishes Psychiatric Annals. A recent issue was devoted to medical ethics, particularly boundary violations in therapy. A boundary violation is when the therapist uses his position of authority to exploit the patient. The therapist uses the relationship to meet his personal needs rather than put the needs of the patient first. One of the listed violations was talking to the patient about personal information, particularly problems. I think it is appropriate to talk about personal problems that I have successfully dealt with. I want to give clients the feeling that we are all in this together. We all try to do the best we can do to live life as fully and completely as possible and to have close relationships with family and friends. I think it is inappropriate for a therapist to talk about problems that he or she has not successfully dealt with. If a therapist has negative feelings that he or she needs to talk about, then it is the therapist’s responsibility to find someone to talk with other than patients.

After I have successfully dealt with a personal issue, then I think it is often useful to tell my clients about it. For example: I believe that my immune system protects me from my prostate cancer. To keep my immune system functioning, I need to deal with any internal conflicts. The first sign is usually a physical symptom, and I go to my wife to help me work it out. She’s great and I can really rely on her. After the internal conflict has been resolved and the physical symptom has gone away, then I can tell my clients about the process I went through when it is relevant to his or her situation.

This chapter summarizes the therapy and makes use of Billy’s comments about the changes in himself.  He is no longer preoccupied with Dahmer and is considering the options about how he wants to spend his time and energy.  Although he is continuing in therapy, the issues are not about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); they concern problems that many people have, such as quitting smoking and improving his relationships with his family, particularly his adolescent son. 

The American Psychiatric Association notes that PTSD includes distressing symptoms of: (a) re-experiencing a trauma through nightmares and intrusive thoughts; (b) numbing by avoiding reminders of the trauma, or feeling aloof or unable to express loving feelings for others, and; (c) persistent symptoms of two or more of the following problems: Sleep problems, irritability and angry outbursts, difficulty concentrating, hypervigilance, and exaggerated startle response.  Billy had all of the symptoms mentioned by the APA, and now the symptoms are gone or minimal.

Perhaps this is best expressed in Billy’s own words.  The following are some of the verbatim comments that Billy made regarding the changes he’s made in therapy with me. ”I woke up this morning free of pain. That is the first time in twenty five years I can remember not having pain when I wake up. I felt good. I wanted to get up and do things.  I don’t sleep as late as I used to.”

Other comments Billy made were, “There have been a lot of changes. I am going to blues and purples. I have a black truck and that is kind of depressing now. I feel good waking up in the morning even on a crappy, crappy day. I know there is always a way to fix something. I never give up. Depression is when you feel there is no reason to wake up, no other option. I now have ten different ways of doing things. I just feel a lot better physically. I don’t have as many complaints. I still have an anxiety attack occasionally. I have nightmares but they are more bland.”

Two months later he said, “I realized that I am not afraid of having panic attacks any more.  When I had panic attacks, I was afraid all the time of having the next one.  Each panic attack was different.  It is curious how the mind does that.”   After about six  months of therapy, Billy still had a few nightmares, but the content of the nightmares had changed. He said, “In one nightmare Jeff (Dahmer) dressed up as a clown.  It was hilarious in the dream. He was so out of character. He was using somebody else’s identity and it was not working.  The walls in the dream were blue and purple.  I remember his having this big red nose like clowns have. I felt like squeezing it. It was kind of okay in the dream.”

I asked him what thoughts he had about the dream in which Dahmer was a clown. He said, “I think he is trying to tell me that everything is okay, and you can laugh at him. He did have a comedic side. He had a lot of charisma. He was able to manipulate and make people laugh. He handled people. It was a job for him. His job was to manipulate people, so that he could kill them.  I do exactly the opposite. I try to help people.  When I get mad I still talk with a northern accent.  My family can tell when I am getting mad because I start talking with a northern accent.

“Thank God he is dead.  For a long time I felt he might come back. I thought any minute that that sucker was going to knock on the door.”

I asked Billy the difference between a nightmare and a dream.  He  said, “A nightmare is something you can’t get out of.  It is not joyful; it is not relaxing. It is kind of like flashbacks of the past, but now there is some new stuff in it. Dreams are not painful, normally. They are sort of nice. There is a story line. There are no surprises.”

Billy said, “My air conditioner went out, and I went to this air conditioner repair place. I met this man, and was very comfortable around him.  I could feel the goodness in him, whereas before I could not feel that in people.  I would think it was a façade.  Before, my extreme ability to read people was only to look out for negative things, and now I can use that ability to see positive things in people.

As a therapist I have experienced a client making changes but then reverting back to the old symptomatic behavior.  I have listed below the criteria I use to evaluate whether  a change has become permanent.

1.  Friends and family who don’t know the details of the therapy tell the client that he/she is different.  Often they can’t say exactly how.
2. I have suggested the possibility of the client going back in time and reverting to the old behavior, and the client has a midline negative body response like a sick feeling in the middle of the chest.
3.  The client describes doing a behavior, which has been reprogrammed in therapy, and the client does not remember that it was ever discussed in therapy; this means the new behavior has been integrated at an unconscious level.
4.  There is a mild reaction to both praise and criticism.
5.  Client sees humor in situations which were formerly dead serious.
6.  At my suggestion the client tries to relive old anxieties, fears, guilt, or resentment and cannot get the old feeling back.
7.  The client’s intense negative feelings toward family members soften, accompanied by an increased confidence and ability to relate to those persons and to the memories.
8.  Relationships are no longer initiated or maintained as a need to be with someone. “I don’t have to have a man/woman in my life now. It would be nice, but I don’t have to have it.”

Billy’s son Kip was born in 1988, and although Billy was not married to Kip’s mother, he was involved in his care until the mother left town with him at age 6 months.  Kip began living with Billy off and on when he was 3 or 4 years of age. Billy legally obtained full custody of Kip when he was 10 years old.  Billy became very dependent on Kip, because he was the person who could calm him down when he had a panic attack, which happened almost every night.  Billy felt more anxious when Kip was not around, and Kip stayed home to take care of his father.  This severely limited Kip’s activities outside of school hours.  He did not have a chance to play with his friends, etc.  Billy had panic attacks in stores and therefore Kip had to do the shopping. Beginning at age 12, Kip drove Billy to the hospital numerous times when he was having a panic attack.

Kip was used to having a lot of responsibility and also considerable control.  When Billy no longer had panic attacks and was not anxious, he began to assume responsibilities as Kip’s father, and gave consequences, and eventually stuck to the consequences.  There was a period of tremendous upheaval as their relationship changed.

This brief chapter is a collection of my favorite sayings and beliefs.  When I remember how each one originated, I will note that.

Everyone does the best  s/he can do at that time in that context with the personal resources s/he has then, and when s/he can do better s/he will.  (Virginia Satir)

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.  Neurolinguistic programming (NLP)

There is no failure, only information (NLP)

If you don’t at first succeed then try, try again; then do anything else because you know that is not working. 

The more control you have over yourself, the less desire you will have to control others. 

A well formed goal is stated in positive terms (i.e., if you don’t want something, state what you do want instead), is measurable, and the success or failure is within your control.  It is large enough to be significant and small enough to be achieved in a reasonable amount of time.  One considers the effect the change might have on others.  (NLP)

Communication is the message received, not the message sent.  (NLP)

Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. 

Emotions occur in the blinking of an eye, which is too fast to be a conscious process.  Reasons and justification for the emotions are added later by the conscious mind.

The most frequent cause of a panic attack is the fear of having another panic attack.

More information often obscures what is relevant. More is often less. 

I’m not aging… I am saging.  (Suzi Smith)

It’s easy to think of what you don’t want; be creative and think of what you do want.

This chapter is about using neurolinguistic programming (NLP) to help yourself manage your emotional life. There are several paragraphs on brain functioning which are summarized, in the following paragraph. Then I talk about some general principles, followed by the Emotional Management Suggestions found at the end of the chapters.

Most of our brain functioning is out of our awareness, and this includes our emotions. A conscious desire and decision to change an emotional state is ineffective. Some knowledge of the brain functioning is useful in knowing what we do control. In the article to follow, I have underlined what I think is particularly significant. Basically what you need to realize after reading the information about the brain is that 1) our reptilian brain is much like the brain of serpents and it functions out of our awareness. The mammalian brain is on top of the serpentine brain and it also functions out of our awareness. Our primate brain, which is called the neocortex, is on top of the old mammalian brain; 2) We are conscious of some of the functioning of the neocortex, and it is through the connections of the neocortex to the old mammalian brain that we have any awareness of the functioning of that part of our brain; 3) Our emotions, instincts, sexual attractions and value judgments are all centered in the old mammalian brain and are not changed by consciously deciding to change them.

The following is an excerpt from a sub-page of www.kheper.auz.com but any query at an internet search engine with the buzzword "Paul McLean" and "triune brain" will report numerous links.

The Triune Brain

Archipallium brain (reptilian brain)

paleomammalian brain (limbic system)

Neopallium brain (neocortex)

The neurologist Paul MacLean has proposed that our skull holds not one brain, but three, each representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological site: He calls it the "triune brain."  MacLean, now the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and behavior in Poolesville, Maryland, says that three brains operate like "three interconnected biological computers, [each] with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory".   He refers to these three brains as the neocortex or neo-mammalian brain, the limbic or paleo-mammalian system, and the reptilian brain, the brainstem and cerebellum.  Each of the three brains is connected by nerves to the other two, but each seems to operate as its own brain system with distinct capacities. This hypothesis has become a very influential paradigm, which has forced a rethink of how the brain functions. It had previously been assumed that the highest level of the brain, the neocortex, dominates the other, lower levels. MacLean has shown that this is not the case, and that the physically lower limbic system, which rules emotions, can hijack the higher mental functions when it needs to.

It is interesting that many esoteric spiritual traditions taught the same idea of three planes of consciousness and even three different brains. Gurdjieff for example referred to Man as a "three-brained being".  There was one brain for the spirit, one for the soul, and one for the body.  Similar ideas can be found in Kabbalah, in Platonism, and elsewhere, with the association spirit - head (the actual brain), soul - heart, and body in the belly.  Here we enter also upon the chakra paradigm - the idea that points along the body or the spine correspond to nodes of consciousness, related in an ascending manner, from gross to subtle. The Reptilian Brain.  The archipallium or primitive (reptilian) brain, or "Basal Brain", called by MacLean the "R-complex", includes the brain stem and the cerebellum, is the oldest brain.  It consists of the structures of the brain stem - medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon, the oldest basal nuclei - the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs.  In animals such as reptiles, the brain stem and cerebellum dominate.  For this reason it is commonly referred to as the "reptilian brain".  It has the same type of archaic behavioral  programs as snakes and lizards.  It is rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid, it is "filled with ancestral memories".  It keeps repeating the same behaviors over and over again, never learning from past mistakes (corresponding to what Sri Aurobindo calls the mechanical Mind).  This brain controls muscles, balance and autonomic functions, such as breathing and heartbeat.  This part of the brain is active, even in deep sleep.

The Limbic System (Paleomammalian brain).  In 1952 MacLean first coined the name "limbic system" for the middle part of the brain.  It can also be termed the paleopallium or intermediate (old mammalian) brain.  It corresponds to the brain of the most mammals, and especially the earlier ones.  The old mammalian brain residing in the limbic system is concerned with emotions and instincts, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sexual behavior.  As MacLean observes, everything in this emotional system is either "agreeable or disagreeable".  Survival depends on avoidance of pain and repetition of pleasure. When this part of the brain is stimulated with a mild electrical current various emotions (fear, joy, rage, pleasure and pain etc) are produced.  No emotion has been found to reside in one place for very long.  But the Limbic system as a whole appears to be the primary seat of emotion, attention, and affective (emotion-charged) memories.  Physiologically, it includes the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala.  It helps determine valence (e.g., whether you feel positive or negative toward something, in Buddhism referred to as vedena - "feeling") and salience (e.g., what gets your attention); unpredictability, and creative behavior. It has vast interconnections with the neocortex, so that brain functions are not either purely limbic or purely cortical but a mixture of both. MacLean claims to have found in the Limbic system a physical basis for the dogmatic and paranoid tendency,  the biological basis for the tendency of thinking to be subordinate feeling, to rationalize desires.  He sees a great danger in all this limbic system power.  As he understands it, this lowly mammalian brain of the limbic system tends to be the seat of our value judgments, instead of the more advanced neocortex.  It decides whether our higher brain has a "good" idea or not, whether it feels true and right.

The Neocortex, cerebrum, the cortex , or an alternative term, neopallium, also known as the superior or rational (neomammalian) brain, comprises almost the whole of the hemispheres (made up of a more recent type of cortex, called neocortex) and some subcortical neuronal groups. It corresponds to the brain of the primate mammals and, consequently, the human species.  The higher cognitive functions which distinguish Man from the animals are in the cortex.   MacLean refers to the cortex as "the mother of invention and father of abstract thought".  In Man the neocortex takes up two thirds of the total brain mass.  Although all animals also have a neocortex, it is relatively small, with few or no folds (indicating surface area and complexity and development).  A mouse without a cortex can act in fairly normal way (at least to superficial appearance), whereas a human without a cortex is a vegetable. The cortex is divided into left and right hemispheres, the famous left and right brain.  The left half of the cortex controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain the left side of the body.   Also, the right brain is more spatial, abstract, musical and artistic, while the left brain more linear, rational, and verbal. The web site The Brain From Top to Bottom stated, “Information from an external stimulus reaches the amygdala (which is a part of the old mammalian brain) in two different ways: by a short, fast, but imprecise route, directly from the thalamus which is part of he old mammalian brain): and by a long, slow, but precise route, by way of the cortex. It is the short, more direct route that lets us start preparing for a potential danger before we even know exactly what it is.

In summary the statements above indicate that the old mammalian brain (limbic system) functions out of our conscious awareness and controls our emotions. But the Limbic system as a whole appears to be the primary seat of emotion, attention, and affective (emotion-charged) memories.  Our value judgments also are centered there. As he understands it, this lowly mammalian brain of the limbic system tends to be the seat of our value judgments, instead of the more advanced neocortex.  It decides whether our higher brain has a "good" idea or not, whether it feels true and right. Blink of the eye actions and decisions are centered there also. Information from an external stimulus reaches the amygdala (which is part of the old mammalian brain) in two different ways: by a short, fast, but imprecise route, directly from the thalamus (also part of the old mammalian brain): and by a long, slow, but precise route, by way of the cortex. Malcolm Gladwell has written a best seller, Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking in which he discusses the actions, decisions and judgments that are made in the blinking of an eye –too fast to be a conscious process. Sometimes this can be life saving as in the case of a firefighter, who suddenly told his crew to get out now, seconds before the floor collapsed. He claimed it was ESP, but he was able to remember what made the fire unusual. The kitchen fire was not being put out with water and the fire was very hot and strangely quiet. (Which was evidence that the fire was in the basement) (Page 123). Or it can be disastrous in the case of policemen who fired at and killed a man who looked dangerous but turned out to be unarmed (page 191).

What control do we have over our emotions? The input for the emotion is originally through the short, fast, imprecise route. The neocortex is involved later and the specific mental image and sound is associated with the emotion. Our emotions, our value judgments, our biases, our fixed limiting beliefs are all based in the old mammalian brain. How do we gain access to those areas in the old mammalian brain since that is out of our awareness? I like the analogy of a bar code. Each emotion has a bar code, which connects it to the neocortex. What is that bar code and how can it be specific for each individual emotion? The bar code is the specific sensory data of the stimuli, which created the emotion. The richness of the details of the sensory data is what makes each emotional bar code unique. NLP labels this submodality distinctions. Your mind can make any changes that can be made with a video camera. Where you see the image seems to be most important? Is it to the right or left or up or down? What is the size? Are people life-sized or smaller or larger? How bright is it? Is it in color or black and white? Is it in focus or blurred? How much contrast is there? Does the background fade away or stand out? Some of the submodality distinctions with auditory data are placement of the sound (where do you hear it coming from—Is it from within you or outside of you and how far away is it?), loudness, pitch, tone of voice, rhythm, timbre, and does the sound come from a specific point or is it all around you? Kinesthetic sub-modalities include where in your body do you feel it and how large is the feeling? Is it constant or rhythmic? How heavy or light? What temperature? Is it in your skin or muscles or bones or gut? Do your have a boundary or can people see right through you? Do you feel a connectedness to anything outside of you? There are a multitude of smells. The submodality distinctions are usually out of our awareness; however, by making a conscious effort we can become aware of the submodality distinctions (or bar code) connected to a specific emotion. Once we know the bar code then we can change it and that will change the emotion. Click on Chapter 3.1 Changing Internal Images In Chapter 3.1 Changing Internal Images to Minimize Emotional Impact I discuss how, by directly changing the mental image the emotion can be dampened or intensified. Click on Chapter 3.2 Fast Phobia Cure Click on Chapter 3.6 Shame and Guilt Click on Chapter 3.12 Resentment The bridging over procedure is described in Chapters 3.2, 3.6, and 3.12 as a way to deal with guilt, resentment and panic. The change is made more specific by comparing the picture of the undesirable emotional state to the picture of an analogous experience in which you didn’t have the undesirable emotion. Picture #1 is the problematic emotion and Picture #2 is an analogous situation in which you didn’t have the specified emotion. Often the major difference between the two pictures is the location. Sometimes the change is to move the picture from right to left. Why this changes the emotion doesn’t make sense unless you have the concept that this changes the bar code.

Emotional Management Suggestions

Chapter 3.1   Changing Internal Images to Minimize Emotional Impact.

It is possible for you to change your internal images and to control the response you get from them. One way to increase the intensity of a pleasant memory, is to make the internal picture of the memory bigger, brighter, closer, in color, and a movie.  You can have the opposite effect if you move the picture away, make it smaller, dimmer, black and white, and a “still” picture. This reduces the intensity of the emotion.  Similarly, if you have a negative image of a situation, for example, when you were embarrassed, by making that image bigger and brighter, the embarrassment increases. If you change that image by moving it away, making it smaller, out of focus, dimmer, a still picture, and in black and white rather than color, then the intensity of your feeling is much less. Basically, this is an example of how you can control your brain and your emotions. 

There are two ways in which you can experience visual images. If the image is what you saw through your own eyes, then this is called an associated image.  If the picture was taken outside of yourself through a video camera, then this is called a dissociated image.  When making a dissociated image, the you have much less emotional response. When you have an associated image, then you experience the feelings you had at the time.  You can take any memory that is unpleasant or not particularly useful and see what happened as though the whole scene was taken with a camera and shown on a movie screen. Then your emotions become much less intense.

Emotional Management Suggestions

Many of my clients including Billy have learned to use the procedure for all sorts of situations. Basically any time you have a mental picture of an incident and negative feelings are produced, you can use the fast phobia cure procedure. To learn to do this on your own, select a mildly traumatic or irritating event. Use whatever procedure allows you to have a relaxation response—meditation, music, sitting in your favorite chair, yoga, chanting, or imaging your favorite scene in nature. You need to maintain the relaxed feeling throughout seeing the movie. Have a special someone hold your hand if you think that would help. The movie will start before the incident and end after it is over. 1. See projected onto the screen a black and white photograph of yourself before the incident. 2. Take a seat in the imaginary theater. 3. Float out of your body and up to the projection booth. Check to make sure you are relaxed and comfortable. 4. You cannot see the screen and what you see is yourself in the theater seat watching the screen. Then watch yourself seated in the theater watching the movie of the incident. 5. After the movie is over, change the black and white image of yourself at the end of the movie to color. 6. Imagine stepping into the image on the screen, so you are inside the film, as you run the movie backwards rapidly to a time before the incident happened. 7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 several times. 8. Test your results. You will be surprised that the old feeling is no longer there or at least is a lot less intense. Then you can repeat with an incident with more intense feelings. The crucial element is to be able to remain relaxed while watching yourself watch the movie.

Emotional Management Suggestions

To help yourself in dealing with an internal conflict, you need to be aware of the conflict. Physical symptoms are often the result of unresolved internal conflict. An assumption of NLP is that every part of you has a positive intent. One hint is to notice how you express the physical complaint, and assume that this expression is literally true. “I have a pressure headache.” “I feel like I can’t swallow” (what someone is pushing you to accept). “She gets under my skin.” “My skin crawls.” Go inside and ask your unconscious what having that symptom is trying to do for you. One man had frequent headaches, which prevented him from working. The headache was essentially saying, “When the pressure gets so high, I am going to force you to quit work for a while.” The challenge is to find other ways to fulfill the positive intent. This man had a lifelong pattern of committing himself to projects without considering how he was going to get the time or energy to fulfill the commitments. After he changed this pattern, his headaches became infrequent. Sometimes, when he felt a headache coming on, he was able to bargain with the part of himself that produced the headache. He said to himself, “If you hold off the headache today and allow me to finish this commitment, I promise I will take a break tomorrow.” The headache held off, but, of course, he had to honor his promise to take a break the next day. Having to rely on will power is another indication of an internal conflict. The power of the will is used to keep another part of the person under control. The person often views that part of himself as his enemy. If that part takes over, then the person may say to himself like the comedian Flip Wilson quipped, “The devil made me do it.” The person disowns part of himself. A presupposition of NLP is that every part of each of us has a positive intention. I have often asked people who are struggling with their weight what the part of them that overeats wants to accomplish. Some responses have been: “It pleases my mother.” “I want to get my money’s worth.” “It is the one thing that I can do for myself.” “Eat because the people in China are starving.” “My mother believed that as long as you were sitting at the table you should be eating.” “It is a sin to waste food, so I have to eat everything on my plate.” “As long as I am eating I won’t be lonely.” “If I am fat, then guys won’t hit on me and my husband won’t be jealous.”

If you are achieving a goal through will power, I am not advising you to give up that accomplishment. Ask the part of you, that you are controlling through will power, what that part is trying to do for you. I assume that part has a positive intent, although the end result may be negative or self-destructive. Go inside and wait for an answer. Often the answers seem strange. If you have been trying to get rid of that part of yourself, it might take a while for that part to trust enough to give an answer. Once you have an answer, then you need to find more effective ways of accomplishing the same thing. It is best to come up with at least three new options.

Emotional Management Suggestions

The bridging over procedure is useful with a variety of undesired emotions, such as panic, anxiety, embarrassment and resentment. The suggested procedure is the same as described in the chapter on resentment. The first picture is the mental image you have of the person as you feel the anxiety. Be aware of the location of the image. How close is it? Is it at eye level or above or below—center or to the right or the left? How big is the person? Is the person life-size or smaller or larger than life? The second picture is an analogous situation in which you didn’t feel any anxiety. If you are anxious around certain people, then what people are you not anxious around? Find out all the details about the second picture that you did for picture #1. Except in rare instances, the mental images will be in different locations. As you start to move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2, be aware of any objections that you feel. If you have trouble moving the picture, stop and figure out what objection you have. Then move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2, and, if there was a difference is size, change that. Give yourself a few minutes and then check the results by remembering the situation in which you were previously anxious. Be delighted at the power you now have over your emotions. Feel the difference this is making in your future, and see the freedom that it is giving you.

Emotional Management Suggestions

If guilt is because you knowingly violated a standard of behavior, then you should plan how to uphold your standards in the future. If someone pushed your button and you responded automatically, go to Chapter 2,1. If it was related to anger or resentment, I refer you to those chapters.

The procedure I use most frequently in changing guilt which is not reasonable or logical is that of “bridging over” which is also described in Chapter 3.12. In this procedure you make two mental images and become aware of the differences between the two images. Then you change the image that makes you feel guilty to be like the image that doesn’t make you feel guilty. 1. Feel the guilt and then be aware of the mental image that produces that guilt. Where do you see it? How far away is it? Is it in the center or up or down or to the right or the left? How big is the image? Are the persons life-size? Is it a movie or a still picture; is it in color or black and white? This is picture #.1 2. Think of an analogous situation in which you don’t feel guilty. For the analogous situation to feeling guilty because there were conflicting standards of behavior, I use the example of being on the phone and the person doesn’t want to end the conversation, and you need to leave to make an appointment. Hopefully, you didn’t feel guilty when you had to hang up. If you are feeling guilty without any logical reason because you did or didn’t do something which would have prevented a tragedy, then remember a situation in which had you acted on hindsight and had done something differently, then some undesirable event would not have occurred. For example, you suggested going to a restaurant and your whole family came down with food poisoning, and you didn’t feel guilty about suggesting that restaurant. As with Picture #1 become aware of where you see the image, etc. 3. Then notice the differences between the two mental images. Usually distance, location and size are the most important. 4. Then make Picture #1 to be like Picture #2. If you have any difficulty moving or changing the picture, ask yourself if there is any part of you that objects in any way to the changes. Then after a few minutes, test your results by making the image that used to result in your feeling guilty. The guilty feeling should be gone or significantly reduced in intensity.

Emotional Management Suggestions

You do not have to be a victim of your memories. Chapters 3.1 and 3.2 provide some tools to change the mental images and internal conversations to minimize or eliminate the negative impact. Creating an alternate past is an additional step after using those procedures. If you have lost contact with a person or he or she is deceased and you feel that it would have been beneficial for a certain interaction to have taken place, you can create an alternate past. You may have had a cut-off or feel there are unresolved issues, or just wish that you had been able to be emotionally closer to that person. Give to the other person the personal resources that would have enabled him or her to have the desired interchange. See and hear how having those resources would have changed him or her. The more sensory details you can imagine, the more impact will this have. Then give to yourself the resources you will need to have this interaction. First see and hear yourself having the interaction. Then step into your body and experience what it feels like as you have the interaction.

If you feel stymied because you repeat the same self-defeating pattern over and over again, despite decisions to change the pattern, then look inside for a fixed limiting belief going back to childhood. The belief can usually be stated quite simply in absolute terms. I think it would be very difficult to change a limiting belief without professional help. The procedure listed below is given to provide some guidelines for yourself or whoever is helping you with it.

To change the belief, you need to go back emotionally to the original situation when the belief was created. You will probably be aware of the emotion connected with the limiting fixed belief. Be aware of the emotion and take it back to the earliest time that you remember having that emotion. Usually this is early childhood—elementary school days or earlier. What is the situation and who is involved?

Then create an alternate past. Assume that the primary person or persons involved had a positive intent in their actions, although the result of their actions may have been destructive. Change the primary person by giving him or her personal resources which enable him or her to carry out the primary intent more effectively. First, see and hear the difference that these resources are making in the person. Second, see and hear how the interaction is different. Third, experience in your imagination actually being that person with those resources. Fourth, step back and see yourself as a child, and decide what resource or resources you would have needed to cope with the situation in a more useful way. Fifth, see and hear how the resources would have changed the younger you. Sixth, step into the body of the younger you, and experience having those resources and reacting differently. While still imaging being your younger self, decide the belief that you now have which replaces the old limiting belief. Imagine how having had that new belief would have changed past situations. Then imagine how having that new belief will be changing your future.

Emotional Management Suggestions

So what can you do if you have an undesirable behavior which occurs at times of emotional stress? If you are mistreating others as you were once mistreated, you are acting out of identification with the person who mistreated you. There are usually triggers that initiate the behavior. The content is less important than how the person looked or how the person sounded. First, figure out whether you respond more to what you see or what you hear. It is easier to change the trigger than it is to eliminate it. If you respond to a tone of voice, you could make the voice sound like Sylvester the cat, or Mickey Mouse, or your favorite singer, or blend in with your favorite or silliest music. If you respond to a certain expression, you could see the person as a toy soldier, or as a paper doll, or any cartoon character. Select the changes that are most effective in minimizing your emotional response. Then go back in time and imagine making those changes in situations in which you previously had little control. Then go forward in time, and imagine making the changes in situations which are likely to occur in your future. The more you repeat this, the sooner the new program will become automatic.

You can also create an alternate past as described in the previous chapter.

Emotional Management Suggestions

Violence occurs when you feel you have no other choice. Remember when you felt angry. Did you feel as though you were powerful and had lots of choices, or did you feel like you were at the end of your rope and didn’t know what to do? Having choices minimizes the risk of violence. So if you have times when you go into a rage or even get angry, how can you use something similar to what was effective for Billy? First, check if there is any part of you that has any objection to being able to control the anger, and if you are willing to make a firm commitment to change. Next would be to have a way of obtaining a relaxation response. Some examples of effective means are meditation, progressive relaxation, prayer, chanting, yoga, and listening to music that creates a relaxed state. Popular magazines are full of these techniques, and most of them are effective. The trick is to be able to have that relaxed state when you need it. If you are similar to most people you have what I call triggers or buttons, which automatically shift you into an angry state. The moment just after that trigger is fired is when you need the relaxed state. You might assume that what the person said fires the trigger, but it is almost always how the person said it. The reaction is too quick for the person to have thought about it. I ask clients. “Can your trigger be pulled if you see the person but don’t hear him or her?” Then can your trigger be pulled if you hear the person but don’t see him or her? That way you can determine whether the trigger is visual or auditory. Auditory triggers involve tone of voice, pitch, rhythm, accent, volume, and timbre. Visual triggers involve posture, finger- pointing, expressions, looking down one’s nose, in your face, blank stare, look of disgust or distain. Do some research on yourself; find out specifically what the trigger is. Usually the trigger originated with a parent or sibling.

The sound “bluuuuuee” accessed the relaxed state in Billy. Then you need to find a sound that reminds you of the relaxed state. Then hear that sound and notice how that creates the desired state. Then do with yourself what I did with Billy. Go back to a situation in which, had you been able to hear that sound and feel the relaxation, it would have made a difference. Feel the difference it would have made and see the freedom it would have given you. Do this for a few instances. Then imagine a situation in the future when your button is pushed, and you start to get angry. Hear that sound and feel the relaxation; then feel the difference it is making in your future, and see the freedom it is giving you. This procedure is called future pacing. You need to rehearse this new behavior several times, so it will kick in when you need it. One of the principles of NLP is that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. So if this doesn’t work the first time and you get angry, then learn what you can from the experience. My hunch would be that there was already some change. Then repeat the exercise.

Emotional Management Suggestions

You may want to get rid of resentment. The suggested procedure is the same as described earlier in this chapter as bridging over. The first picture is the mental image you have of the person as you feel the resentment towards him or her. Be aware of the location of the image—how close—eye level or above or below—center or to the right or the left. How big is the person—life-size or smaller or larger than life? The second picture is an analogous situation in which you didn’t feel any bitterness. The picture may be of a time when you had positive feelings towards this person. It may be of a time when a person harmed you or slighted you and you did not feel resentment. Examples are listed earlier in the chapter. Find out all the details about the second picture that you did for Picture #1. Except in rare instances, the mental images will be in different locations. As you start to move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2 be aware of any objections that you feel. If you have trouble moving the picture, stop and figure out what objection you have. Then move Picture #1 to the location of Picture #2 and if there was a difference is size, change that. Give yourself a few minutes and then check the results by remembering the person you used to resent. Be delighted at the power you now have over your emotions. Feel the difference this is making in your future and see the freedom that it is giving you.

Personal Remarks.

I would like to digress from Billy’s therapy to talk about what I do to maximize flow in my life and to give suggestions to the reader. Finding flow involves positive action and planning. Sports and games are ways of creating a challenge, which require utilizing all your skills, and require your total concentration in order to meet the challenge. However, even mundane chores can be made into a challenge. I want to weed eat as fast as possible while still doing a thorough job. When mowing the lawn, I want to find the most efficient route with the fewest U-turns.

Csikszentmihalyi (1997) discusses the rewards of a good conversation. He said “The first step is to find out what the other person’s goals are: What is he interested in at the moment? What is she involved in? What has he or she accomplished, or is trying to accomplish? If any of this sounds worth pursuing, the next step is to utilize one’s own experience or expertise on the topics raised by the other person----without trying to take over the conversation, but developing it jointly. A good conversation is like a jam session in jazz, where one starts with conventional elements and then introduces spontaneous variations that create an exciting new composition.”

In summary, in leisure as well as work, a person has a higher quality of life by being active and creative rather than passive.

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