We were taught how to re-imprint on the last module. I've seen it demonstrated by McDermott, then been through the technique as practitioner and client.
(Aside: the guy who was practitioner for me was a big old foolish hippy nutter, kept talking about my history, then slowly and deliberately repeating the word as His Story, your His Story. It really got under my skin, and I was sorely tempted to tell him when I was his practitioner he had to have knowledge of self, that he had to Know the Ledge, lest he should fall off... into the Devil Civilisation. What, did he think he was a Five-Percenter or something?)
It seemed to be a significant experience for a lot of people, particularly the guy I was working with. It was pretty significant for me, too. They refer to it as a systemic intervention, because it involves giving specific resources to the model of the significant other who was a part of the cause of the imprint experience. There's a superb part of the exercise where you step into being the specific significant other, wear your approximation of their physiology and experience the world as you imagine they do, and ask what the positive intention of their behaviour was which helped cause the imprint (there's an NLP presupposition right there: that all behaviour has a positive intention at its root. I’m not going to argue the truth of that statement, but see what the world is like if you act as if it’s true). I think that’s where the most of the work gets done: you realise that part of you always knew why they acted the way they did. Then it’s just a matter of taking the sting out of the experience for you.
Anyway, that’s a lot of jargon. Bringing things back down to earth, I helped my partner in the exercise come to terms with a specific experience in his childhood which has made it difficult for him to speak his mind and be himself since (you can see it in his physiology, very developed in the upper body and arms, broad shouldered). It had to do with refusing to eat the food that his mother had made, which upset her. He referred to her as having unspecified mental health issues which had been treated by electro-shock therapy, and described his father’s extreme reaction out of being protective, with phrases like, “Even when she’s wrong, act as if she’s right,” or, “Don’t criticise anyone ‘til you’re perfect.” I riffed on the exercise, recognising that both parents were involved in the imprint, and that the whole family could feed each other the resources necessary. That is, the version of the family that existed in my partner’s head. I had him provide the necessary resource to his father, who then resourced the mother, and both parents acted together then resourced the younger version of him back in the experience when he was five or six years old. “Resource” being jargon for “give them what they need to deal with the experience.” The final step is taking that new relationship with the old memories and working it through the clients whole life, and seeing whether anything else crops up that they need to deal with in the process.
(Another aside: this is one of the only places in which NLP borders on changing the content of a past experience, rather than changing its structure and your relationship to the experience. By resourcing the significant other and asking the memory to be replayed as if they had those resources, you’re effectively imagining an alternate past. The only other technique that I’ve been taught that does this is trauma re-coding, which is the closest thing to miraculous that I’ve seen on the course, in which a person who’d been suffering from back trauma for twenty years visibly started to recover in front of us, and was completely fine by the next module. In that instance, the memory was played as if the traumatic experience never occurred, and then worked into the muscle of the person’s body in the act of physically performing the actions that would have prevented them from coming to harm. If this is setting alarm bells ringing, then you’re exactly the kind of person who can be trusted to learn this type of stuff. This is not a game, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. That has to be weighed against the potential benefits of resolving something that the person’s been struggling with for a long time. You really need to have an understanding of ecology and be prepared to deal with ethical grey areas. But then, you need those skills for the rest of life, anyway…)
So, where does the specific interest in re-imprinting come from? Feel free not to answer that question if it’s private (you’ll notice that I haven’t told you about my experience of the exercise). |
