According to Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who was interviewed for the article, the goal is not to eliminate a memory completely, but instead to reduce or eliminate “the fear accompanying the memory.” The article reviews research by two groups of scientists:  One group is working to affect memories with the help of drugs, and the other is studying whether behavioral therapy “can one day be used to modify memories of people who react with fear to common anxiety-producing events.” The conclusion is that these tools, including behavioral therapy, may one day be used to help people modify the effects of memories and recover from “phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety-related conditions.”

While this article is interesting, my reaction can be summarized in one word:

DUH.

Of course you can alter the effects of your memories. We have been doing it forever. I do it for myself and clients all the time. You probably even do it without realizing it.

My first formal experience with this phenomenon was many years ago when I purchased a guided meditation CD designed to help lessen the impact of painful memories. I chose a memory that wasn’t necessarily traumatic, but had somehow become uncomfortably lodged in my mind and would occasionally rear its ugly head and make me feel small, unworthy, and stupid.

The audio on the CD walked me through the process of re-accessing the memory as if I were watching it in a movie. Then, I was guided through a process of “rewriting” the movie (i.e. the memory) in a way that was more positive. I was also encouraged to see the people or person involved in the memory in a new, and more forgiving, light.

The process worked. I still remember the event, but my reaction now is one of empathy and wonder – not humiliation and sadness. I’ve moved on to more personalized and effective methods that I use for myself all the time, and it is one of my favorite processes to use with others.

At this point, you might be thinking something like: “Rewriting the past with rose-colored glasses sounds great, Caryn. But how can you just ‘rewrite’ a memory? Isn’t that being dishonest with yourself?”

There are two points that, in my mind, justify the rewriting of memories:

1. Memories are in the past. They have already happened and you can’t change the actual events. What you CAN change is your reaction to them. Ask yourself: What good are you doing yourself to react to a past event in a negative way? What harm can there be in changing your reaction? Remember, the goal isn’t to change the facts, the goal is to change your reaction to the facts.
2. Your view of events, and their implications, is not as universal as you might think. You are exposed to over 2 million bits of information each second, but you can only process or take in up to 2000 of them. Your story is selective, and vast amounts of the information is deleted, distorted, or generalized. Your reality is created by you, not by the event itself. This explains why 10 people can witness an accident, and all 10 will have a different story to tell. The only reality is that there is not just one reality.

So, your memories aren’t really the absolute truth – whatever that is. Changing them is just substituting one version of reality with another – and hopefully it is a version that is more positive and affirming.

Have you tried a similar process, and if so, how did it work for you?

As a trained mediator, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why not use mediation techniques to resolve conflicts between different parts of our mind?

Hence, intramind mediation was born. It uses the power of mediation, hypnosis, and coaching to resolve internal conflicts that keep you from your best life. For example, part of you may want to create a career around something you love. However, another part is concerned about your need for prestige, acceptance, a fancy job title, and/or a lot of money. This conflict can cause a lot of frustration. You may feel like you just don’t have the willpower to make the changes you want to make. In reality, it has nothing to do with willpower; you are failing to make the changes because one part of your mind is sabotaging the other part.

Enter intramind mediation – this is how you get the parts of your mind in sync with each other.

Just like normal mediation, each intramind mediation session is different. But the steps are always the same:

• Determine how you feel when you are happy and when you are not
• Identify, name, and describe the “conflicting parties” (e.g. the part of you that wants a cool career, and the part that wants the prestige of a big title)
• Speak to each part, gathering information about its goals, issues, and interests
• Generate options that incorporate the goals of each part
• Test out the best options to see which ones make you feel happy as a whole person (see step 1)
• Choose the best option (new behavior, goals, thought patterns, etc.)
• Integrate this option into your subconscious via hypnosis, imagery, or meditation.

After I began using this technique with myself and clients, I discovered a similar process called parts therapy. Parts therapy is a therapeutic tool that is used to help people deal with inner conflicts using imagery and therapeutic inquiry. In my experience, intramind mediation seems to more directly identify and “speak to” each part of the mind, then quickly integrates the parts to test out the resolution for the whole person. Intramind mediation also seems to work better for analytical clients because it closely models the structured mediation process rather than a traditional therapeutic inquiry process. Once you get good at this process, you can move through the seven steps in a few minutes for small conflicts, and in a few hours for larger ones.

Give intramind mediation a try and let me know what you think. If you have experienced parts therapy, how do you think it compares to intramind mediation? What other tools do you use to resolve inner conflicts?

Willpower:

“The strength of will to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans.”
(American Heritage Dictionary)

This topic is near and dear to my heart, and it seems particularly appropriate this time of year. When I first started coaching, I focused on productivity. I helped people identify goals, articulate steps to achieve these goals, and then create systems to achieve them. We worked on organizational systems, how to create and work through a task list, and methods for reducing procrastination. Sounds good. Except that people wouldn’t do it. Even though they had defined their goals and created systems to get there, they still didn’t make progress.

Apparently, Ramit Sethi saw the same thing. Ramit is the author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and here is what he has to say about willpower:

We love to believe that willpower determines our actions. “If I just try harder,” we tell ourselves, “I can lose that last 10 pounds.” Or save $200/month. Or improve our time management. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Willpower is important, of course, but there’s more to behavioral change than just trying harder.

You may be trying to improve your life and career by focusing on things that matter, things that you love. But this requires changing your habits. And changing habits is not about willpower alone. It is about changing the way you think. And that can often mean working with a part of your brain that you aren’t consciously aware of and which doesn’t respond to logic.

In a fascinating U.S. News & World Report article, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak explores how your unconscious is making your everyday decisions:

According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.

Szegedy-Maszak goes on to tell us about Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor of marketing from the Harvard Business School. Zaltman was interested in determining “what made people buy one thing and not the other. In the world of neuroscience, this goes to the heart of the profound questions of motivation.” Zaltman ended up creating tools that allow companies to figure out how to access the 95 percent of the brain that motivates choices. He did this by “accessing the deep [unconscious] metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.”

Another example provided by Szegedy-Maszak comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s awesome book Blink:

In Blink, Gladwell describes how the Coca-Cola Co. made a costly mistake in using data from blind taste tests between Coke and Pepsi–in which Pepsi was emphatically preferred by most cola drinkers–to change the recipe and create the marketing debacle that was New Coke. Still, even with a less preferred taste, Coke remains No. 1 in the soft-drink world. More recent research that was published after Gladwell’s book was finished may explain why.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine offered 67 committed Coke and Pepsi drinkers a choice, and in blind testing, they preferred Pepsi. When they were shown the company logos before they drank, however, 3 out of 4 preferred Coke. The researchers scanned the brains of the participants during the test and discovered that the Coke label created wild activity in the part of the brain associated with memories and self-image, while Pepsi, though tasting better to most, did little to these feel-good centers in the brain. P. Reed Montague, director of the Brown Foundation Human Neuroimaging laboratory at Baylor, explained…: “There’s a huge effect of the Coke label on brain activity related to the control of actions, the dredging up of memories and self-image.” The point, says Montague, is that “there is a response in the brain which leads to a behavioral effect.” And curiously, it has nothing to do with conscious preference.

So, the bottom line is that we often do things (or don’t do things) because of hidden stuff that is stuck in our brain. Nice.

The good news is that there are things you can do about it, and it doesn’t necessarily require that you go through the time consuming process of figuring out why the hidden stuff is there, or even that you know exactly what the hidden stuff is.

There are many tools you can use to access your subconscious mind, including meditation, hypnosis, dream analysis, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), directed visualization, and stream of consciousness writing. Personally, I experienced amazing results using hypnosis to get past some of my hidden blocks. During hypnosis, you are able to access your subconscious mind and “install” new scripts or metaphors to replace those that are blocking your progress or making it harder to break bad habits. This still means that you have to do the hard work of making changes, but at least you aren’t working against hidden ick buried in your brain. I was so happy with my results that I decided to become a certified hypnotist myself.

If you find that you are not doing things you really want to do, or you do things you really don’t want to do, the path to changing your behavior is to change your subconscious scripts. Regardless of how you choose to do it, the goal is to get the conscious (read: logical) part of your mind out of the way so you can access the scripts that are sabotaging your good intentions. This is the key to making willpower work.

Do you have other ideas about how we can access our subconscious mind? I’d love to hear about them, and I’m sure others would too. Please leave us a comment…

Of course, all his friends were happy to see Jim making all these positive changes, right? Um.. wrong.

When we go through positive changes – when we start to follow a path that makes us happier – sometimes the people closest to us don’t react the way we expect. This can be a bit of a surprise, and if you aren’t prepared for it, these reactions can sabotage your progress.

According to Martha Beck, best-selling author and life coach, “if someone seems strangely opposed to your actions, even though you’re motivated purely by good intentions and are doing nothing that could possibly injure him, rest assured that person is afraid.” When someone is afraid, the reptilian part of their brain starts to generate all kinds of fear responses. In Jim’s case, his friends liked things the way they were. His changes were threatening their status quo, and they didn’t like it. It’s not that they were bad people – in fact, they really wanted what was best for Jim – but the reptilian parts of their brains just weren’t ready for Jim’s changes. Jim’s friends were executing a changeback attack.

Here are some signs that you might be the victim of a changeback attack:

• Your family or friends start to say things that don’t make any logical sense. In Jim’s case, his friends began to insult him and his new choice in friends. These comments confused Jim because the insults just weren’t supported by facts – as is typically the case during a changeback attack.
• People who are normally fun and easygoing become withdrawn for no apparent reason. You may notice that some people start to ignore you or purposely avoid including you in conversations. This may be their way of trying to guilt you back into the status quo, or it may be an attempt to exclude you so they can continue with their normal social patterns.
• Those very close to you might start reversing their complaints about you. Previously, you were “the loner who never got out and met new people”. Now, you are “making a fool of yourself by hanging out with all these people who are just not right for you”. Whenever you just can’t win no matter what you do, you are probably experiencing a changeback attack.

Here’s the good news. According to Beck, changeback attacks are “actually a good sign because they show that you’re beginning to behave in ways that are genuinely new. And, if you can keep your own fear response from ruling you and act as a leader instead of a reptile, they don’t need to cause much trouble.”

Just recognize that your attackers are temporarily allowing their reptilian brain to run loose, and continue to create the life you want.