Steve Andreas - Help with Negative Self–talk Volume I

My favorite example of this is that a phobia has the exact opposite structure from grief. In a phobia someone fully steps into and re–experiences a very unpleasant memory, while in grief, someone steps outof a very pleasant memory. If someone were to try to use the phobia cure on grief (or the grief process on a phobia) it would make the problem worse, not better. That is why my preference is to use very specific and detailed interventions that are precisely designed to do exactly what the client wants — or needs, which is not always the same! As NLP develops more and more detailed specific patterns for specific problems or outcomes, this becomes even more true.

However, any process that works is worth learning, and the instruction above is a wonderful example. One of its great advantages is that the instruction is complete in itself, and does not require any special skills on the part of the person using it. The process can even be given in written form, as I have done here, so that someone can try it on their own.

In this chapter we have reviewed some additional ways to add a voice to your experience in order to make a useful change. Next I want to explore a number of very important aspects of the words that we use to describe our experience.

Troublesome voices have many different aspects. Usually they describe events or ourselves in ways that make us feel bad. However they can do this in a variety of ways, with varying impact. Among them are generalizations, evaluations, and presuppositions.

Words are one of the primary ways that we generalize about our experience, a very useful skill. When someone uses the word "chair" we know immediately that is something that we can sit on.

However, this skill also has some very serious drawbacks. For instance, notice what specific image comes to your mind when you read the word "chair" in the previous sentence. What kind of chair is it? What does it look like? What shape is it, what color is it, what is it made of, etc… .

Do you suppose that your chair looks the same as the one that I had in mind when I wrote the previous paragraph? Mine was a hotel meeting room chair, with shiny chromium metal legs and frame, and some gray–blue coarse cloth upholstery.

Yours was probably different from mine in a number of ways. Often we think of a somewhat "generic" chair, perhaps a wooden dinner chair, or some other common type of chair that you might find in a home. Or you might have thought of a

particular chair that is special to you in some way, perhaps a favorite chair. You probably didn't think of a lawn chair, a throne, or an antique chair.

When we use a single word like "chair" to describe a wide range of things that we can sit on, that is a very useful way to organize our experience, and communicate at least a semblance of our experience to someone else. We know that something described with that word "chair" can be used in a certain way, roughly what size it is, and something about what it is made of, how long it is likely to last, etc. For contrast, compare your image of the word "chair" with your image of the word "cloud," or "mountain," and you can begin to notice how much information a single image can contain.

When we identify several different objects as a "chair" we tend to think of what a chair can be used for, and ignore all the differences between individual chairs. And we also do something else; we tend to forget that a chair can be used for many other purposes than sitting — to block a door, to impress the neighbors, to fend off a snarling dog, feed a fire in an emergency, etc. In many areas of our lives this only occasionally causes some misunderstanding. You may offer to give me a chair, and I accept, thinking of an ordinary chair. But when you arrive with your museum piece chair, I realize that it wouldn't fit in with any of the other furniture that I have.

The image that comes to your mind when you understand a word is called a prototype by cognitive linguists. (17) When we read or hear or see a word like "chair," we use our prototype to represent all the objects that could be described as a "chair," and then respond to this prototype image. This usually is not a significant problem when we are thinking of a chair, or some other physical object, though it can be. For instance, if someone offers me a "drink," I may accept, thinking of water, while my host may have alcohol, strong coffee, or something else very different "in mind."

This kind of misunderstanding is often much more problematic when we describe events that are judgments about each other or ourselves. For instance, when we describe what someone just said about us as a "criticism" that word — just like the word "chair" — can describe and evoke a multitude of experiences that we have had throughout a long period of time, and in a wide range of situations. What image will we use as a prototype to represent the meaning of that word?

Often we will use an emotionally charged memory of what someone said when they criticized us in the past. If we do, then we will respond to that image, rather than to the present event. Another way of responding to someone's else's "criticism" is to internally hear a loud chorus of many "criticisms" that we have experienced over a period of years. The present event might be a very small criticism about how we did the dishes. But our emotional response may seem "all out of proportion" to others unless they realize that we are responding to internal images from our past.

This process often occurs below the level of our conscious awareness, so we don't even realize that we are responding to these past events, not the present. We only notice the horrible feelings that we have as a result.

As soon as we have labeled what someone said as a "criticism," we are likely to forget that the same set of words could be labeled as a "comment," "feedback," "honesty," "good information," "caring concern," or some other description that would evoke a very different prototype image, and a very different feeling response. This is one of the many ways that words can trap us in unpleasantness. Using a different word to describe the same set of experiences creates a new meaning that can release us from that trap.

Quite often we have the experience of receiving appreciation or caring from many people in a row, followed by one person who says something critical or rejecting. What do we typically do? Most of us ignore the many appreciations and caring that we received, and feel bad about the one rejection! We may even dismiss all the positive comments with a wave of the hand that shoves those images aside, often actually saying something like, "That's irrelevant" or "Those don't count." This is using our ability to generalize in a way that is not useful, and all of us find ourselves doing this at times.

It is common for someone to say, "I had a bad day," which can be very discouraging — especially if we have several in a row. But what does "having a bad day" really mean? Occasionally we may have a day in which it seems as if everything goes badly all through the day, from dawn to dusk. But usually it actually means something very different — that we had one, two, or possibly even several, things go badly, and we generalized from those to the entire day, when actually the rest of the day went rather well. Saying that we had a "bad day" ignores all the things that went well, distorting and contaminating our experience, and making us feel much worse than we really need to. John McWhirter has developed a very simple process for reevaluating this kind of destructive overgeneralization.