"Help with Negative Self–talk Volume I" - читать интересную книгу автора (Andreas Steve)
Changing Volume
When you changed the location of a negative voice so that it was farther away, you often found that the volume decreased, making it much less unpleasant to listen to the voice. Changing the volume was a major factor in making the voice easier to listen to, and changing the location in space was a way to change the volume. But how does this work so easily?
You have had many experiences in the real world in which a sound source moved away from you, or you moved away from a sound, and as it did, the sound became quieter. You have also had many experiences in which a sound moved closer to you, or you moved closer to a sound and it got louder.
When you imagine a sound moving away, or that you are moving away from a sound, that elicits coordinated simultaneous memories in all your senses of that happening. The memories of the sound moving away correspond to a decrease in volume. In other words, remembering this kind of event elicits the precise internal neurology that occurred when that happened in the external world. That same neurology can be used to make a corresponding change in your internal world.
This kind of experience is called a "reference" experience; an experience in the external world that has the characteristics that you need to make a change in your internal world. Whenever you want to make a change, you can search for a memory of something happening in the external world that has the properties that you need in order to make the internal change. When you re–experience it fully, that will elicit the response that you had in the external world. As Richard Bandler has said, "Since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions."
This understanding opens up a world of possibilities, which skilled hypnotists have been using for a century or more. For instance, if you want to lower the temperature in your hands, or to shrink the blood vessels in them, you can vividly imagine putting them in a bucket of ice water; if you want to raise the temperature of your hands, or dilate the blood vessels in them, you can imagine putting them into a bucket of hot water.
If your goal is to decrease the volume of a voice, you can think of many other contexts in which the volume changed as a result of some event, or something that you did. Pause now, to think of several other events in the real world (other than increasing distance) that decreased the volume of a sound or voice… .
Can you think of a time when someone was talking to you and then closed a door between you? Or drew a curtain? Or the person speaking to you turned away from you, or put their head under the covers? Or you covered your ears with your hands? If you were in a bathtub, submerging your ears would muffle the sound. You can use any experience like this to change volume, as long as it is something that you have experienced, preferably repeatedly.
There is a wonderful DVD (21) in which Michael Yapko helps a man with his life–long depression in a single session. The man's depression was caused by his memories of a childhood that was horribly abusive, both physically and verbally, and he had abusive and depressing internal voices as a result. One of Michael's interventions is as follows (verbatim from the transcript):
When I have hundreds of people in a room, and I ask, "Who among you has good self–esteem?" hands go up — not many, but some hands go up. And then I ask them, "Do you have an inner critic? Do you have a voice inside your head that criticizes you and says rotten things to you, and puts you down, and says mean and horrible things to you?" And every single one says, "Yes."
And I say to them, "If you have a voice that says rotten things to you, how can you have good self–esteem?" And the interesting reply — it's always a bit different — but the common bottom line is they don't listen to it. And when I ask them, "How do you not listen to it?" that's when I learn all sorts of different strategies.
One person said, "Well, I picture it as on a volume control knob, and I just turn the volume down.
Somebody else said, "I picture it as a barking dog, tied to a tree, and I just keep walking."
Somebody else says, "You know, I have another voice on my shoulder that says good things to me."
But the interesting thing is that every single person has that inner critic, that critical voice. It's just a question of whether they listen to it or not. (21, p. 17)
Earlier you experimented with changing the location, direction, and distance of a troublesome voice to make it much more comfortable to listen to. When you make these kinds of changes what you are actually doing is changing your relationship to the voice. This is something that you can do voluntarily any time you want, in order to have a more resourceful response to it, giving you some control over your experience. Since a change in location or direction is a pure process change, you can use it with any voice, or any sentence, phrase, or other set of words or sounds that a voice might say.
What you have been experimenting with are changes in aspects of a voice that are usually unconscious, but can become conscious if you ask the right kind of question. Once these choices are conscious, you can experiment with making changes in them. When you find a change that you are pleased with, you can then allow that change to become unconscious and automatic again, freeing your attention for other things. You are taking the first small, yet significant, steps toward having more choice about how you think about and respond to events in your life.