by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded and first published in 2008

Note: These are transcripts of Q&A sessions lead by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin. They have been edited for clarity.

How do you help a client tolerate their fear when they are experiencing past pain? In this discussion, Carl describes useful re-imprinting techniques upon being asked about “baseline states” by a Masters student who had just participated in a class on that topic.

Question:
My question is about baseline states, which we were talking about today. In some of the practice that I’ve done it’s kind of difficult for some people to maintain those baseline states because they’re so charged. How do you use your techniques to get somebody to stabilize sufficiently, even though these states are so hard to be in? How do you get someone to stabilize long enough to allow for things like ‘re-imprinting’ and so on?

Carl:
OK. Thank you. To respond to the first part of that: We don’t usually seek to put someone into a baseline state experience, except for practice and learning purposes if they’re students.

To respond to the second part of that: How do you make it possible for someone to be present with the past pain…to be present now, with the negative feelings that go with past pain? Those negative feelings are being generated and experienced right now, although the pain is in the past, right? The events are in the past; the pain is now.

One generally does this [help a client stay present to that pain] through the magic of rapport, rapport, rapport, and by using language that constantly makes the distinction between the person now, and the person who’s having the experience then. So the simplest and most useful technique is to always speak to the person (who is the client) as “you”, and speak about the previous self as “she” or “he.” “So, what is ‘he’ experiencing?” “What is ‘she’ experiencing?” “If you step in there for a moment and come on back out (just a quick little recognizance), what’s it like? What is he or she experiencing? What is he or she deciding? What’s it like? Come on back.”

And so, through the direction of association and dissociation, the use of the correct kinds of pronouns, and waving your hand around (pointing to the past and pointing to the present, and sometimes, even using your hand or your body as a barrier between the past and the present), you can actually kind of push that past pain back up on a past timeline – an imaginary past line of time – and it becomes fairly straightforward for the person to be able to stay there with you.

It’s also a question of the client being willing to participate with you in this revision of a really important meaning in their world. They’re usually really enthusiastic to do it. They’re experiencing the edge of a lot of fear, but where they are – on the edge – is quite bearable (if it’s properly done) and there’s general enthusiasm for the mission, because they have a sense of the good things that will come out of it.

Practice, practice, practice. Rapport, rapport, rapport… and proper waving.

Best, Carl

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (3 min)

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded and first published in 2008

Ready to take on the New Year? Looking for some inspiration? Or are you reluctant to consider New Year’s resolutions? Carl responds to questions about resolutions, and how they can be seen and used in a new way for effective personal change and growth.

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (4 min)

Note: The following transcript is edited for clarity.

Question:
Why don’t New Year’s Resolutions work? And what’s the difference between a “resolution” and a “Re-Solution”?

Carl:
First I think we need to notice that sometimes New Year’s resolutions do work. They work just often enough to give us the idea that this year they might work, too. If they never worked for us or anybody else we probably wouldn’t bother with them—except that we probably would because they’re mainly designed to produce good feelings about the future and take pressure off of the present. That is, they’re not actually intended to change behavior or revise capability in any way. So New Year’s resolutions do work if what we want is a better feeling about a possibility in the future. They rarely work if what we want is different behavior in the future.

The main reason they don’t work for most of us most of the time is because the New Year’s resolution operates by imagining a different future and then putting that future into conflict with the version of us who is doing the imagining in the present. In other words, as soon as we make a New Year’s resolution we have at least two of us there: the one in the future behaving differently and theoretically behaving better, behaving more responsibly, whatever it might be; and we have the present person who is imagining that better future. We have a problem; we have a conflict. We have attempted to ally ourselves with the future self against the present self. Or, perhaps we’ve tried to take our present self and get sneaky in some way and imagine that we will overcome that present self and thus produce a different future self.

In either case, this generally doesn’t work. With any luck we’ll forget the New Year’s resolution as soon as possible, or at least arrange to forget it as soon as we can after the new year so that we get away from the conflict, because the conflict is quite painful and that experience of internal conflict—of actually being at war with ourselves—is also kind of damaging. It reduces our morale by making the future a less positive place as a result of past failures to make that future better. It’s kind of a complicated business.

The difference between a resolution and a re-solution is the difference between doing something that actually works for New Year’s and doing something that seems like it’s supposed to work, but is not actually intended to work.

A re-solution is something that does not set a future plan against a present reality. It doesn’t create a conflict. The word solution comes from a Latin word which just means to loosen. So let’s think about solutions as activities and choices that loosen things up. A solution loosens up our reality, loosens up the steadiness or the predictability of our present experience to some extent. And then if we can find a re-solution, we can create a new solution—a different solution. If you pronounce re-solution properly you get the word resolution, but I think it’s much more useful to put a hyphen between the “re” and the “solution” and make the word re-solution.

A re-solution presupposes that the old solution was in fact a solution, that it was the very, very, very best solving of a past difficulty or a past situation that our system could find. A re-solution respects the past solution. A re-solution includes the past solution as the pathway, as the vehicle that gets us to someplace new and different. With a re-solution we’re not asking ourselves to overcome or defeat or declare victory over the past. We actually allow the past to be that which gets us to the present, which gets us to the future, which allows that unwanted present to become a past that changed. I know that gets kind of complicated, but it’s actually much simpler than it sounds.

If we make a resolution, we’re saying “I will defeat myself after January 1st,” I promise. If we create a re-solution, we’re arranging to use our experience now as the basis for something different in the future without creating internal conflict, without having to ask ourselves to defeat some part of us so that the rest of us can win. And when we defeat some part of us, who is it exactly that wins, anyway?

Best, Carl

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin