The Underlying Structure of Belief: No Matter How Cosmic It Gets, It’s Still All VAKOG

“What is stopping you?” is a question used world-wide in coaching endeavors. It is most often posed in an effort to assist the client to identify the internal and external barriers they are facing as they contemplate making a change in their life. There are several problems with that question when posed in that language and for the purpose of assisting a client to change.

First of all, by adding the “p-ing” to the verb “stop”, the action of “stopping” continues into the present. So that the only answer the client can give you is the present moment, conscious processing of the information that they are aware of. The problem with most beliefs, however, is that we are not conscious of them. We just believe them to be true. So asking someone’s conscious mind to give you an answer about how their other-than-conscious process is structured is essentially asking the least informed piece of their universe for help.  This is not the most useful way to illuminate unconscious process. That is simply the nature of unconscious beliefs – we are not conscious of what they are.  Most of the time, this is actually useful, because having to be consciously aware of the nearly arbitrary nature of the myriad of beliefs that generate our experience would completely overwhelm our limited amount of conscious attention.

Transformational NLP is a methodology for–among other things–assisting the creature self, or our creature wiring, to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals.

In Transformational NLP, we use a working premise that thought has structure. It has a language or, if you would, a code. That code is made up of internal pictures (Visual, or V’s), tonal sounds and digital soundtracks of content (Auditory, or A’s), smells and taste sensation (Olfactory/Gustatory accesses, or O/G’s) and feelings – both physical body and emotional (Kinesthetic accesses or K’s). These internal patterns of VAKOG’s get triggered and go by at hyper speed in patterns which create meaning for humans. An external experience of wet and cold might be attached to the meaning “humiliation” if it is linked to VAKOG’s of the time our older brother and his friends threw a bucket of water on us and laughed, or it might be experienced as meaning “pleasure” if it triggers an internal VAKOG pattern of going skiing (assuming we enjoy that activity).

For example, the purely sensory experience of being “wet and cold” has no meaning by itself. It is just a set of sensations.  It has no meaning until we link it with other internal representations–something remembered or imagined–that can turn “wet and cold” into “fun with snow” or “miserable waiting for a bus in the rain.”

Human beings are meaning making machines. But it is not the external or triggering experience that creates the meaning, it is the internal pattern of VAKOG that creates the meaning. It is the internal pattern of VAKOG that creates belief. In essence, the language – or code – in which our brain has written our beliefs is combinations of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes– VAKOG. It is the neurological links between a stored representation (often a memory) and a feeling (both emotional and body sensation) that give experience meaning. Does the feeling of wet and cold link neurologically to a stored picture of boys throwing a bucket of cold water, the stored memory sound track of being laughed at, and a feeling – muscular and chemical response – that is unpleasant, or does it link to a stored picture of skiing, a shushing sound, and a pleasant feeling?

As Transformational NLP practitioners, when a client describes an experience they are having that they do not want, the question we are asking inside ourselves is: “What are the V’s and A’s that are making those K’s-the unwanted, limiting feelings?” In other words, what internal pictures and auditory tracks is the client running–outside of any conscious awareness–that are triggering the feelings that the client is experiencing? What is the internal code that is giving their external or lived experience this unwanted, un-resourceful meaning? In Transformational NLP, we don’t want generalizations or interpretations from the conscious mind, we are after the literal content of those internal representations that are running out of conscious awareness.

These can be uncovered by tracking how and where the client’s eyes move as the person’s unconscious accesses those representations.

(It is not the purpose of this article to elucidate exactly how to track and unpack eye accessing cues. However, as a note to more experienced practitioners let’s just point out that the question “What stops you?” provides far more useful physiological answers than the question “What is stopping you?”)

The brain stores those internal representations in its impression of the external, 3-D space around our bodies.  The brain literally looks at its recording of apparently invisible internal pictures, or listens to apparently silent internal sound recordings, etc., as it is processing. Some of the patterns that feel most limiting to the human adult were often created by a very young “creature self” in an effort to ensure survival. If a child experienced a traumatic event, and then decided–all at once or over time– “I am worthless,” and then survived the situation, that child’s creature self will code for the successful survival. Consequently, the experiences that were dangerous or threatening become labeled as necessary for continuing survival, “survival” being the creature self’s highest rating for well-being.  As a simple example, if the child learns to survive terribly painful shame, then the experience of shame will become a necessary component of that person’s on-going experience of safety and survival.  Of course, this will be completely contradictory to what the individual consciously wants to experience in life.  This disparity–between the imperative of creature-level survival and the criteria for human happiness and well-being–is what makes us feel most hopeless, as if there were something defective within us at a really, really basic level.  The good and bad news is that there is nothing really wrong with us, it is just the conflicts within our patterning for well-being that create the apparent disconnects and (using the word informally) craziness.

Moreover, the creature self runs its patterning at light speed, so to speak, the more deliberate and slow-paced human aspects of our systems usually have no idea what is going on.  We will tend to make sense and well-ordered meaning of things by generalizing decisions about ourselves and the world in we which we live and operate.  These decisions that help us make sense of things, some of which are nearly randomly installed, are called beliefs, and these beliefs then function to add whole new layers of mysterious stabilization to our already highly stable, unwanted patterns of behavior and experience.

NLP is a methodology for assisting creature self, or creature wiring to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals. Patterns (“strategies” in NLP-speak) of VAKOG that create beliefs such as “I am worthless” cause immense pain and limitation for adult human, but to truly re-solve those patterns we must hold them as life-giving interventions that contain hidden intended positive outcomes. The art of it is to hold them not as patterns to be defeated, crushed, or forcibly removed, but to understand that we do not have to risk our self-preservation in order to learn or grow.

When representations are unpacked, they most often reveal literal content about important or traumatic events from the person’s factual past. Sometimes, what we learn is revealed more metaphorically, as compilations or even representations from someone else’s past (e.g. their mother, father, or other ancestor with whom they are identified and whose experience they somehow downloaded). These representations can get quite cosmic, but they are still created in  real time, right now, in the VAKOG code of human experience.

Carl Buchheit  NLP Marin 2010

Reconciling an Illusion of Conflict within a Dilemma:  Re-solving the Contest Between Self Preservation and Spiritual Evolution

Human skulls house a brain which has distinctive parts, some dedicated to reptilian survival, and some apparently directed toward spiritual evolution, namely the pre-frontal cortex. These two purposes can appear to be in conflict and that conflict, or rather that illusion of conflict, seems to cause pain and suffering. Transformational NLP is a methodology for assisting creature self, or creature wiring, to more fully serve our human and spiritual goals.

Our creature brain, (the reptilian brain is found in the brain stem and hind brain plus its newer but still ancient cousin, the paleo-mammalian brain) is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze instincts, and is mainly concerned with ensuring our physical survival.  This brain does not know or care about the quality of our experience, only that we survive it, whatever it happens to be.  Although it probably is not conscious in the human sense, and although it has no thoughts and lacks a speech center with which to voice anything, it can be said to be constantly asking one and only one question, “Are we dead yet?” If it finds that we have survived an experience, no matter how difficult, painful, or unrewarding, it will immediately code that experience as survivable, and therefore as part of its overall potential for survival. The critter brain operates to attract and stabilize the presence of that which threatens it, but which it has associated with survival.  It will then attract and re-create these situations for the rest or our lives.

For example, a child growing up in an abusive household might find his survival, his self preservation, dependent on how well he can stay invisible, and he would then create a whole set of beliefs such as “I am worthless” in order to be as invisible as possible. Those beliefs will continue to run out of conscious awareness as that child becomes an adult and the reason for being invisible is long past. Since we are committed to maintaining the coherence and constancy of our beliefs (ordinarily a good thing as it prevents us from feeling and acting crazy), that person will unconsciously recreate conditions of abuse in his adult life to support the belief “I am worthless.” Thus we get the observable phenomenon that people who were physically abused as children often partner with abusive people as adults.

This is a survival pattern – an experience we learn to survive that becomes the condition upon which continued survival depends, for the creature itself. Being invisible and believing “I am worthless” is coded as a “success” for the parts of that person in charge of survival.The parts of ourselves that are in charge of survival do not know – or want to know – any other way. Believing “I am worthless” and remaining not visible worked so well for the child that when the question “Am I dead yet?” gets asked by the creature self, we can unequivocally state “No” and proceed to carry on running the survival pattern.

Our human self is generally out of rapport with this whole process. The human wants to experience love, and joy and belonging, not continue to experience the worst of the experiences it has ever learned to survive.

The parts of us that create experience – even experience which we would think of as “negative” or undesirable –  always, always, always have an intended positive outcome for the experience they are creating. In this case the recreation of a “negative” experience has the intended positive outcome of self preservation. Parts of us may choose to re-experience fear, humiliation, or worthlessness because our creature self knows that this is guaranteed survival.

Our whole beautifully integrated system tends to default to the evolutionary wisdom of the creature self which is based on the question, “Are we dead yet?” If we’re not, then whatever that organism is experiencing is regarded as extremely workable. Again, the human gets very much out of rapport with that. When the human gets out of rapport with that process – what the human experiences as suffering, with a small “s”, and the creature/self experiences as survival, or self preservation, then we have a situation – there is an apparent dilemma or conflict that personal development is at odds with their entire system’s instincts towards self preservation.

This situation begins to explain why people sabotage themselves. When they make wonderful and beautiful changes in their lives, creature consciousness does not yet have this coded as survivable. So it will seek to restore what it knows it can survive, even if other parts of the self are out of rapport with that. The creature does not know that it is safe to endure happiness.

So we’ve got survival/self-preservational patterning that has an intended positive outcome (IPO) and this can feel like it’s in conflict with other parts of us who want to experience joy and harmony and growth. The first task of Transformational NLP is then to understand that this is not actually a dilemma; we do not have to risk our self preservation in order to learn or grow. And we do not have to defeat our self preservation in order to learn or grow.

Many disciplines would ask us to overcome, to overpower the creature self, in service of the human, in service of the learning and growing. If we could only defeat our instincts towards self preservation we could be more alive and well. Unfortunately for us, or fortunately for us, the self-preservational patterning has millions of years of perfection in it and it basically says to us, “Just try it.” And when we try it, we generally fail or we create a mess, because the so called “problem” (which is actually a successful survival strategy) ceases to operate in context A where we’ve been working on overpowering it, and it moves over to context W and re-erupts over there.

Alas, self preservation seems to be directly opposed to personal growth or development or learning – bummer!

The operation of self-preservational instinct has a small scale daily, weekly, monthly, yearly expression of the patterns of behavior and meaning that continue even when they’re not wanted at all, by the human part of us. The underlying question of all successful changework then has to be: “What is the intended positive outcome of all that unwanted patterning?” At the creature level, it’s self preservation, but there can also be other layers, for example involving love and belonging in family systems.

By including the self-preservational instinct, by explicitly including the intended positive outcome of survival while separating out the method by which that is being achieved, we can begin to work with (not “work through”) that patterning and we can begin to create congruence between the different aspects of ourselves.

For lasting change to happen, our creature-self must be explicitly valued; it must not only be  respected but that respect must be so palpable that this creature mind can register that it is safe, undamaged, and whole. (We should note that this is very far from the usual, basically pointless, “peak performance coach” chatter about “destroying your lizard brain” and “murdering our monkey mind.”) We must allow our creature-self to make its contributions according to its programming, rather than our trying to fight that programming, or rather than trying to make it do something else–trying to force it to be a different operating system that produces different outcomes (aka experience) for us.  When we communicate respectfully with both our future-self and our more ancient self, allowing each to contribute on its own terms, we learn to adapt through choice to effectively produce more of the experience we would like. We begin to teach the creature brain how to survive in conditions that also and perfectly support those more “advanced” or “spiritual” aspects of our complex humanity.

To not get caught up in the illusions of conflict of this apparent dilemma, where self-preservation seems to conflict with personal and spiritual evolution, we humans must learn to not distort or improperly generalize our creature-level feeling signals. We all have some learning to do, so that our feelings are signals and communications, rather than indications of low-ranking cosmic status, or of the snares and traps set for us by a corrupt, functionally evil ego.  To me, most all of this other stuff seems to be basically an entertainment device.  We actually do know what we’re doing, and part of what we are all refining is that art of avoiding inappropriate self-preservation reactions. We really can learn to respectfully, and nearly, instinctively, re-coordinate and choose the most useful combination of physically safe and spiritually beneficial choices.  We are all getting the hang of this. It is actually the most natural thing in the world!

Carl Buchheit