Please Note: The following article describes a very advanced technique to deal with strong emotions. It is based on Time Line Therapy®, originated and taught exclusively by Dr. Tad James. Feel free to experiment with the technique here, but I must advise you to first go for professional training in Time Line Therapy®. Contact us for a special friend discount.

By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

“The question for each man to settle is not what

he would do if he had means, time, influence

and educational advantages; the question is what he will do

with the things he has. The moment a young man ceases

to dream or to bemoan his lack of opportunities

and resolutely looks his conditions in the face,

and resolves to change them, he lays the

corner-stone of a solid and honorable success”. -Hamilton Wright Mabie

People are strange. I must admit, I was always fascinated by our human tendency to cripple ourselves using excuses from the past. Yes, of course I used to that too; but eventually, I learned to let things go. I don’t think it is a part of being an adult, since there are some very capable adults out there (and I’m certain you know quite a few of them) that just cannot put their past behind them once and for all.

Traumas are tricky. When you think about a traumatic event in your past, it looks like it is a major part of you. No matter what it is, the massive negative feelings that flood your psych every time that memory is triggered, are crippling. They inhibit logic and disorient you.

It feels like it “should” be this way, because after all – you were physically or emo-tionally humiliated or abused. You had something happening to you. People hurt you back then, and whether or not it was your fault, you got to keep the hurt.

I shake my head every time I recall a client called Esther. She was 92 years old. Yes, she made it through the statistics and beat them. However, Esther was not a happy camper. She came to me after a successful work I had with her daughter, Cathy. When she presented what is disturbing her, I was utterly shocked. The only thing I could think about was, “what? You’re holding this hurt for 75 years?!”.

Esther was 17 when the event happened. It was way back in 1918, the world had known its first well documented global war. Esther had to leave school and work in a factory, simply because her school teachers were sent abroad by the army.

That’s where it happened. That’s where Esther earned a handful of hurt. At the ten-der age of 17, at times in which your reputation was a real commodity, Esther was verbally abused. The factory’s shift supervisor did not like her, for various reasons, one of which was that Esther refused his lame courtship attempts time and time again.

His way of handling a rejection was to spread rumors about Esther. Since his posi-tion and title were quite high ranked, people believed him, and in her small town the rumors spread like a plague. Esther was ruined. She begged him to take his words back and help her regain the respect she deserves.

He offered her “redemption” in exchange for physical affection. Being a smart girl, she refused. But she also had to leave town, ashamed and hurt.

And for 75 years she is holding this hurt, reliving this scenario over and over again. She got married twice, has grandchildren and a big house in the village side, but every once in a while she gets these moods and become depressed.

Esther is not alone in this illogical attachment to past hurts. Most of us do the same. Most of us have quite a hard time letting go of what has happened. Oasis wrote “Don’t look back in anger”, but even with this popular song ringing in people’s minds day and night, they still do look back with a lot of anger, shame and regret.

Negative emotions that belong to your past should not resurface in your present. Yes, the misfortunate event did happen; yes, you felt hurt and you had all the right to feel as bad. But you do not have to feel as bad again and again. Once is enough, and sometimes more than that.

There are several critical issues with past events that inspire out of control negative emotions:

First, you are not in control. Anything can be served as a trigger, and often it happens that random stimuli around you get you down, and you are clueless about the rea-sons.

Second, your present and your future become limited. Psychological issues like de-pression (or clinical depression, the biochemical expansion of a minor blues), help-lessness and frequent anxiety attacks could manifest if you don’t handle the past where it belongs.

And thirdly, negative emotions are simply disturbances. How could you concentrate on your studies when your brain keeps bringing up the humiliation you’ve had in 9th grade? How could you really share a moment with your child when your reaction to his crying is anger, simply because that’s how you were treated when you were a boy? How could you truly fall in love when at first sign of argument you become de-pressed and feels alone and helpless?

If there is a memory that brings you down, that gives you the blues or worst – that sends you to a negative emotional roller coaster, it is now the time to handle it.

Time Line Therapy® allows you to disarm the memory’s emotional storm, but keep the learning. So you will gain the essence of the experience, but “forget” the hurt. Yes, you will forget the hurt because remembering to feel bad is useless.

To deal with traumas and negative emotions, we need to learn how to use perceptual positions. A perceptual position is the direction from which you look at X or Y.

For the purpose of this technique, I have chosen a modified version of a very successful technique, named Time Line Therapy®, and we will use 3 perceptual positions:

Position #1 - when you’re in your past, on your timeline, looking at the event in a dissociated way (from the side).

Position #2 - when you’re above your timeline, looking down at the event. The memory here is represented by a slide or a marker and not fully shown.

Position #3 - when you’re above your timeline, but a few minutes before the event. That means, that the event did not happen yet and you cannot see it. You look toward the present moment (on the timeline).

Here is the Time Line Therapy® style solution plan for handling massively negative emotions; you can use the following script for working with yourself or with other people.

“Now let’s take a few deep breaths, lean back and let go of tension. Our goal today is to let go of negative emotions that are associated for now to __________ memory, but still to keep the learning and experience so that you would handle similar situa-tions in the future with greater skill and elegancy.”

“a few more deep breaths and we begin. Allow yourself to float above your timeline, and take a look at it. If it’s left to right or front to back, you can notice where is the place for your future and where is the place for your past. As you’re floating above your timeline, go back in time to Position #1, that’s the exact time when the actual disturbing memory is taking place. Go down and watch that event in your safe disso-ciated position.”

“as you notice the event taking place, note where are the emotions? Can you place them in your spatial space? Where are these emotions, whether within your body or to the left, above, below or to the right? How far or within reach are they?”

“We don’t want you to spend too much time fiddling around with these emotions; we want to let them go, so allow yourself to float above the event, on your timeline, and look down at it from this new perceptual position #2. Now note again, where are the emotions? Surely they’re not within you since you’re too far from the event to note its details and be affected, so where are they? Now it is also the time to preserve the learning and experience. Imagine that you can take the essence of this event, the use-ful conclusions it offered you and keep them with you. You do not need to con-sciously think about the details, your subconscious mind will do the sorting for you”.

“and now it’s time to neutralize the negative emotions. You will do that by allowing yourself to float again above the timeline into position #3, in which you place your-self a few minutes before the event has started and look towards the real present. Now note again – where are the emotions? Are they even there? If the event has not started yet, the emotions are non existent.”

“Don’t look for them too hard, because the harder you try the more impossible and illogical it would be to find them. You cannot track something that simply isn’t there, yet.”

“Alright, now it’s time to return to the present. Allow yourself to float even further above your timeline and run fast through it towards the present. Now open your eyes, stretch your body and smile a bit. You know you want to smile! I know it, and so is that grin on your face… you did some great work today, so you should be proud of your progress, as you are now wide awake and fully alert”.

Now comes the testing part. I usually test the success of the session with clients while they are wide awake and not in the middle of the trance. To test the effective-ness of what you did, simply think about that memory that used to inspire present emotional disturbance. Is there any reaction? If you went through the steps properly, there should not be any.

You can use this technique to recover from childhood trauma of any sort. I used it on rape victims, on teens who were humiliated in school, on a 92 years old grandma’ who felt hurt since world war I, and many other cases. It is a very effective, and yet very rapid technique to disarm an event from its negative emotions.

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From experience, the most effective way to learn to use Time Line Therapy is to pass a qualification seminar. I recommend going for the originator of this field, Dr. Tad James, directly. Contact us here for a special price on Time Line Therapy training.