Location is especially important when it comes to our internal auditory processing. If you have not already seen the two previous tips about submodalities, you may wish to look at “Submodalities and States.”
Whether people are aware of them or not, everyone has internal voices. Everyone talks to him- or herself. Thinking requires it. Some of the voices in your head or the heads of your patients are parental: We continue to repeat to ourselves things we heard our parents (or other adults, especially teachers) say when we were young. We may actually hear the voice of the parent, or we may hear our own voice saying what the parent said.
For many individuals “parental voices” are critical, an internal voice that criticizes them when they have made a mistake (“You never do anything right”) or are about to try something new (“That’s too difficult for you”). For those who have a critical voice, the location from which the voice seems to originate plays an important role in the response to that voice. Helping your patients recognize and change their internal voices is one of the best things you can do for them. The content may be difficult to change, but changing the location is easy.
When you change the location from which the voice seems to originate, you change its impact. What happens, for example, when the critical voice moves down to the big toe? It is likely much more difficult to take the voice seriously when it is coming from the big toe. Changing the tone and rate of speech of a critical voice will also influence emotional response. Imagine making a previously critical voice sound bored, sexy, or Mickey Mouse silly. It is easy to change the reaction to internal voices by changing the submodalites (see Chapter 8, Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication, Bowman and Basham).
Each of the submodalities plays a role in determining the meaning of a representation. For any given representation, however, some submodalities will be more important than others. Often one submodality will be the most important: Change it, and the other submodalities also change automatically. When changing one submodality changes the others and the meaning of a representation, it is usually called the driver submodality.
The submodalities used to determine meaning are typically below the level of conscious awareness. You can, however, help patients learn to recognize them consciously and then to change them in ways that allow them to represent things in more useful ways.
Send your questions about how other-than-conscious communication skills can hurt or help your patients and clients to Joel P. Bowman (Joel@SCS-Matters.com) or Debra Basham (Debra@SCS-Matters.com), co-developers of Subtle Communication Systems. We will provide answers to those for you. For more information about Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), Hypnosis or Hypnotherapy, or about the Imagine Healing Process, visit:http://ImagineHealing.info or http://SurgicalSupport.info.
Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication is available for a limited time for $10 plus $5 shipping within the U.S. For volume orders and overseas shipping, check with Debra. See the Table of Contents and List of Exercises in PDF format for more information about this comprehensive text and training manual.