Transforming Your Self: Appendix: Perspective Patterns pt 2

Appendix: Perspective Patterns Pt 2

Tim: It's farther away now, and not as loud. I feel better; it's easier to listen to it. I can hear some of what it's saying as useful information, while before I was just noticing my bad feelings.

OK. Great. Does anyone have any questions for Tim?

Tess: Were you able to understand what the five voices were saying when they were all talking at once?

Tim: No. I knew they were there, and I could pick out bits and pieces, and the meaning was there, but I couldn't really hear all five voices at once.

That's typical, and it's important to warn people about this, or they may worry that they are doing the process wrong. A woman who was born blind and only got her sight when she was about 30 could keep track of eight different conversations at once, as if she had an eight-track tape recorder. But very few people can do that, and it's not necessary for this pattern to work.

Tim: When I had the four resource voices talking at once, I felt like I was sitting in a big, comfortable overstuffed easy chair, as if the voices were literally supporting me.

That's a nice spontaneous synesthesia. Here's an outline of this process.

Auditory Perspective Pattern Exercise Outline (pairs, 15 minutes total)

1. Think of a troubling voice, and notice your response. Notice the location of the voice, and whether it's your own voice or someone else's. Then set that voice aside.

2. Find four resource voices, one by one, and listen to each one, both the tonality and the words. (If the problem voice is another person's the resource voices should also be someone else's, and if the problem voice is your voice, the resource voices should also be yours.)

3. Arrange these voices around your head so that you can hear all four talking at once. It will be harder to hear the details when they are all talking.

4. Bring the troubling voice in, and listen to all five talking at once.

Notice how your response changes in both intensity and quality.

Sue: Why do you have the voices around the head?

Nearly everyone experiences a troublesome voice somewhere around their head, or inside it. If they have a voice somewhere else, it probably doesn't bother them very much, and you can all try a little experiment to demonstrate this. Think of a troublesome or critical voice, either your own, or someone else's. . . . Is there anyone who has a voice that isn't inside, or near your head? No. Now try listening to that same voice, but coming from your left elbow. . . . Now listen to it coming from your right heel. . . . Location is very important for all our experiences, and particularly so for voices.

Doing this kind of location shift alone can be very useful as a quick demonstration of the importance of location, or as a temporary intervention in a crisis, but usually it won't last unless it is combined with some other process that fully respects the positive function or outcome of the troublesome voice. When Tim heard his troubling voice in combination with the resource voices, it spontaneously moved farther away and became softer. That made it easier for Tim to listen to it and appreciate what it had to tell him. That kind of shift in response to another change is much more likely to last.

Now I want you all to pair up and assist each other in doing this. It will only take you about five minutes to do it each way, and then you can take another five minutes to share what you experienced with your partner.

* * * * *

Kinesthetic Perspective Pattern

Doing McWhirter's perspective pattern in the kinesthetic system is a little trickier, for two quite different reasons. The first reason is that most of us are much more familiar with working in the visual and auditory systems, making changes in our images, voices and sounds.

The second reason is that when we speak of kinesthetic feelings, usually we mean feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness, liking or disliking something, etc. These are the evaluative feelings that are about some other experience. While these feelings are extremely important in deciding what kinds of experiences we want to have more of or less of, they are not appropriate for the perspective pattern.

The feelings that are appropriate for the perspective pattern are the feelings of the experience of doing something. When you are doing any activity you have a great many tactile feelings from the sensory nerves in your skin, which give you a wealth of information about your immediate environment as you contact it. If you are swimming, for instance, you can feel the temperature and movement of the air and water in relation to your body, as well as any objects you may be contacting.

You can also feel many other "proprioceptive" sensations from the nerves in your muscles and joints that tell you how your body is positioned and moving, including muscular tension or relaxation, etc. All these feelings give you specific sensory information about the position and movements of your own body and about the world immediately around you.

You may also have evaluative feelings about your sensory feelings, just as you can have evaluative feelings about something that you see, or hear, or taste, or smell. You may like the temperature of the water, or not like the way your body moves as you swim, etc. These are evaluative feelings about the data feelings. These two different kinds of feelings are easily confused, because they are both felt in our bodies. The evaluative feelings are usually felt mostly along the midline of the front of the chest and abdomen, although very strong evaluative feelings may be felt throughout the body.

When I demonstrated this perspective pattern in the visual and auditory systems, I asked for an image or voice that the person was troubled by. The troubled feelings are always evaluative feelings of not liking the image or voice. Similarly, when we use the perspective pattern in the kinesthetic system, what we want is a set of kinesthetic tactile and proprioceptive feelings that the person also has a troubling evaluative feeling about. So for instance perhaps someone isn't satisfied with how they feel as they swim, or play golf, or play a piano, or any other physical activity. The perspective pattern in the kinesthetic system is particularly useful in improving any sport, motor skill, or other kinesthetic performance. Is there someone who would like to experience this?

Bill: I'm not satisfied with the way I play basketball.

Great. First I want you to reexperience what it's like to play basketball, and it can be very useful to chunk it down to one specific element of the game, such as free throws, or dribbling. After you have done the pattern with one element it will be easy to go on to do the same with other elements of the game. You don't have to actually dribble or shoot baskets, but I suggest that you stand up, so that your whole body is free to move slightly as you review what you feel as you play basketball. I also want you to check to be sure that you still feel some dissatisfaction with it. . . .

Bill: Overall I enjoy playing basketball, or I wouldn't do it. But there are also a lot of little places where it's not smooth, where I feel kind of kinked up and everything momentarily slows down. I don't like those, and I usually mess up right then, or soon afterward.

OK. Now set aside that experience of playing basketball for a moment, and think of four physical activities that could serve as resources, one at a time. Since you described the problem as a kinkiness or lack of smoothness, I suggest that you pick four activities that you can do particularly smoothly. And since basketball is a whole-body activity, be sure that each resource is also something that your whole body is involved in. As you select each resource activity, take a little time to reexperience how it feels to do it. Let me know when you have four. . . . (Bill nods.)

OK, now I want you to do something that will probably feel a bit strange. Imagine that you divide your body into four quadrants with a horizontal line at about your waist and another vertical line down your middle. Then access the four resources one by one, and feel each resource in one of those four quadrants of your body. Just as with the visual and auditory patterns, it will be a little difficult to feel the details of each when you are feeling all four at once. Let me know when you have all four. . . . (Bill nods.)

Now, keeping the feelings of those four different resources, imagine that you are playing basketball, using your whole body. After a little while, allow those resources to move into other parts of your body and blend together. Take a little time to experience what that is like. . . .

Bill: That's really interesting, and very nice, but I think it's going to be a little hard to describe. When you first told me to have all four resources in different parts of my body, I felt really strange and disjointed. But when I imagined playing basketball, the different resource feelings sort of flowed into each other, and into playing basketball. It gave me a real muscle sense of playing much more fluidly, and smoothing out those kinky places.

Sue: I was wondering if you'd be willing to tell us what the four resource activities were?

Bill: Sure. Skiing, giving a massage, driving a car on a winding road, and swimming in the ocean.

Ann: Steve, in the visual pattern you had the problem experience overlap only part of the resources. In this kinesthetic one, all the resources were in different parts of the body, while the problem activity was whole-body, which means that the resources were completely overlapped by the problem activity.

That's a great question, and the simplest answer is that I can't think of a better way to do it when the problem activity is a whole-body one. If it were part-body, you could do it in a way that is more similar to how we did it in the visual system. It's particularly important to have only a partial overlap in the visual system, because if it overlaps completely, you can't see the resources at all, so it's impossible to integrate them with the problem. In the auditory system, when you have all the voices going at once, they actually overlap completely, but you can still hear them all; the overlapping doesn't make the resource voices disappear, unless the problem voice were so loud that it drowned out the resources.

It's very useful to take some time to practice taking an event or pattern in one modality and then transform it into an analogous experience in another modality. How could we do a visual perspective pattern that was analogous to the situation in the auditory or kinesthetic system? . . .

Bill: Well, I'm thinking about my experience with the kinesthetic pattern. It was sort of as if I could feel one set of feelings through the other. If I take that into the visual system, it would be like seeing one picture through another, as if they were both partly transparent.

Exactly. If we did the visual pattern with transparent pictures we could cover the resources with the problem image completely, and they would still show through. However, many people associate transparency with unreality, and if so, that would weaken the resources. Partial overlapping works fine in the visual system, so I suggest that you simply do it that way.

Transparency is a very useful submodality that most people don't use. It's particularly useful for imagining the insides of things in three dimensions, like a CAT Scan. A geologist can use transparency to look at a hillside, and imagine how all the rock and soil layers probably look, and a good surgeon can visualize the organs inside someone's body.

Transparency can also be used to integrate visual images by superimposing them and then allowing them to gradually blend into one image. For instance, you can make a transparent image of a problem, and then set it aside temporarily while you make a much larger transparency that represents your entire life. Then superimpose the smaller problem transparency over the transparency that represents your whole life and allow them to blend together into a single image. That uses transparency, together with a much larger scope of your whole life to give a different kind of new perspective. It can be very useful to take a single submodality shift like this--opaque to transparent--and play with it to find out how you could use it with patterns that you already know.

I have presented this pattern in each of the three major modalities. Do you think that you could do the same pattern while mixing modalities? For instance could you use visual resources for a problem voice? Or kinesthetic resources for a problem image? . . .

Tom: When I'm balancing my checkbook, I hear the sounds of the wind in the pines, or the sound of a stream to motivate me to do it, because it reminds me of how I eventually get to enjoy some of the money.

That's a great way to motivate you, and it does utilize perspective, in one of the ways that I mentioned earlier. But if those sounds are motivating, I predict that they are in a different location, and don't actually integrate into the task of doing your checkbook. For motivation, you want the two experiences to be related, yet separated in space and time, as if saying, "Do this, and you get to do that."

For the integration that occurs with McWhirter's pattern, both representations need to be in the same modality. If you want to add or subtract decimals and fractions, you have to change one of them into the other in order to do it. Sometimes the person will spontaneously be able to make the necessary adjustments, but it's not wise to count on it, and more often you will get something other than what you intend. However, you can integrate one image with sound with another image with sound, because then the two images can integrate and the two sounds can also integrate.

McWhirter's perspective pattern joins a group of different events together into a collection of experience that results in a broader understanding or generalization. When I asked for four resource experiences, the word "resource" is already a generalization about a group of specific events that are similar in some way. When they are combined with the problem experience they both enrich each other to form a new generalization.

Beliefs

One particularly interesting place to use the understandings provided by this perspective pattern is with the generalizations that are usually called "limiting beliefs," particularly when these beliefs are about yourself. When you have a limiting belief, there are several possibilities:

1. The belief may be based on only one unresourceful experience, with no positive experiences joined with it to provide a useful perspective. This is what many people assume when they do "Reimprinting" or "Change Personal History," or some other remedial change work on a single traumatic past experience.

2. There is a group of unresourceful experiences. While it is possible to have a single difficult experience, most difficulties repeat, and usually the most intense one becomes a sort of "magnet" that gathers other similar experiences to form a group that is the basis for a very unuseful perspective, and this is what is often called a "negative" or limiting belief. Doing change work on a single experience will work well only if it is done on the most intense example of a group of experiences, because then the change will usually generalize to the rest of the group automatically.

3. The belief may be based on a group of unresourceful experiences, combined with only one or a few resourceful ones. The positive ones are just not powerful enough or numerous enough to provide a balanced perspective. In this case it can be useful to transform unresourceful ones, and also to remember, elicit, or create additional positive examples, so that the overall meaning of the generalization becomes more positive and useful.

4. The belief may have a mix of unresourceful and resourceful experiences that provide an ambiguous perspective. This is very similar to the previous situation, so again it is useful to transform unresourceful examples and generate additional positive ones so that the generalization becomes unambiguously positive.

For simplicity, I have presented McWhirter's perspective pattern in the context of a single problem experience, accessing a number of resources that provide a wider scope, and more information. This establishes a new context for the problem experience, creating a useful new perspective that provides a new meaning. However, usually a problem experience is part of a group of experiences that is the basis for a limiting belief, and then you need to work with the whole group in order to change it.

This kind of perspective pattern underlies all the generalizations you make, both about the world and about yourself, so this pattern presents some of the fundamental properties of how we form all beliefs. Now that you have been sensitized to this process, you will probably find it (or the need for it) almost everywhere you look.

(This Appendix to the book Transforming Your Self: becoming who you want to be, was originally published as an article in *Anchor Point, Vol. 15, No. 4 May, pp. 5-18).