By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

Here’s a great example. Let’s say someone is a bit self-centered or narcissistic. They have trouble tolerating it when someone else has more expensive clothes than they do, or is more important than they are in some way.

When they work with perceptual positions, they may find that when they try position number two, which is looking at themselves through the other person’s eyes, they discover that what they are hearing is not really the other person’s voice. Instead, they hear what seems to be their own voice telling them that they are infe-rior, that someone else is better than they are.

But they go on to another discovery. Those thoughts add an emotional energy to that judgement. Those thought are loaded with the feeling that it is not acceptable, that it is horrible that this other person has a bet-ter car or whatever.

This person has been so busy trying to push away those feelings that they have been preoccupied with gain-ing status in any way they can. This mean they have not realized how they are being driven by a voice that they have lost in the second perceptual position, and that they are being attacked with feelings lost in the second perceptual position.

It gets a little farther out than even that. They realize, doing this work, that the thoughts are not really ex-actly their own. Those thoughts about inferiority and superiority were the best thing they could come up with when they were a child with a parent who humiliated them and who was very harsh. You could say then, that they kind of inherited the voice from the parent; the voice was primarily coming out of second po-sition. That judgmental voice had gotten assigned to random people, but is was not from them, it was from the parent, who was very judgmental.

And the feelings? Those are first position feelings, and that’s good, because we are imagining from first po-sition, from inside our own skin. But these intolerable feelings aren’t really a reaction to other people having nicer things. Those feelings are the terror of a child who fears the big harsh parent.

It’s just that those thoughts and feelings were a defensive or protective posture. Defenses tend to stick around, because they are there to protect us. Unfortunately for this fellow, though, they went out of date long ago. However, he didn’t know what they were, so he became lost in a struggle with what they had be-come. For him, they had become a drama of who is best, who has the nicest things, who is superior and infe-rior. The fear of the parent became the fear of anyone being superior. This, in turn, became a struggle for prestige; a struggle that seems like an adult struggle, but is actually a holdover from the past.

It’s very difficult for someone to untangle themselves from a drama that masquerades as a grown-up pursuit. Aligning perceptual positions can rescue people from such suffering, and it can unlock maturation that has been frozen, maybe for decades.

The beauty of aligning your perceptual positions is that it makes it much easier to let go of feelings and thoughts that don’t belong to you. When you are aligned, the misaligned aspects feel out of place. You want to put them where they belong: in the past, or given back to the person who started them in the first place.

Many NLP practitioners work without talking about the past. That can work, because alignment happens in the present, and you can let go of thoughts and feelings without knowing where they came from. Most are practical and work with or assess past experience as necessary. They don’t, however, get lost in the past; the focus is on outcomes.