Transcendence: Healing Our Collective Story

Part Four: You Are The World

© Richard Bolstad with Julia Kurusheva

“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti (1972, p. 158)

In the first section of this book we considered how the human brain has evolved to respond to crises. We saw that the amygdala, an emotional assessment centre, biases us to pay attention to events that have been associated with intense emotions, in order to protect ourselves and ensure survival. Resilience means managing that natural process so we not only survive crises, but grow through them. In the second section, we looked at the dramatic ways that ineffectively processed crises have shaped the history of whole communities. The third section considered several methods of working with these wider social crises, using modern versions of the community rituals that our ancestors developed. In this final section we move back to working inside individual human beings enabling them to “free themselves from social trauma”. The fusion of external discussion/roleplay and internal visualization, we believe, is crucial to the success of this process.

Thomas Hübl (Hübl and Avritt, 2020) runs group experiences to do what he also calls Healing Collective Trauma. These events include large group and small group sharing or “witnessing” with others being “present” and listening, combined with guided meditation processes which visualize connecting with a universal light, for example. In these processes, Hübl draws on his own experience of traditional Western psychotherapy, Chinese chi kung, Polyvagal theory, and Attachment theory. His approach is somewhat more diffusely described than what we are teaching here. His belief is that (and he is here quoting Psychologist and Chi Kung teacher Patrick Dougherty) “Healing comes through a felt experience of relation.” He adds that shared connection creates a holding environment “and is powerful enough to affect our neurobiology.” (in Hübl, 2020, p.109). Hübl says that an effective facilitator of such groups needs to be able to “Connect to future light in order to download its organizing intelligence into the past, so that it may heal, clarify, and release our individual and collective potential.” (Hübl, 2020, p. 126).

To understand how to do this kind of guided visualization and healing process, it helps to understand that not only our emotional response, but also our perception, memory and decision-making systems are created inside our brains and are “biased”.  This isn’t a mistake, and it certainly isn’t something that only happens with “bad people” or “traumatized people”. Our brain is designed to be biased in every experience: it’s bias is to keep us alive and help us have babies. This is no accident: that’s the way biology works. In general, those animals that have these biases are more likely to survive. Those animals that develop an odd fascination with “what is objective reality” are actually more at risk.

Natural Biases of Perception and Memory

In order to identify what we are looking at, or what we are hearing, we need to be good not just at “seeing what is there” but at detecting patterns. And some of the algorithms we use to detect patterns are present from birth. For example, an area of the brain called the Fusiform Gyrus is dedicated to recognising human faces, and even newborns will spend more time looking at a human face than at any other object. So here is a good example of the survival value of a bias. When you were a baby, not every object is equally important to your survival. Finding the other humans is your number one priority. Our tendency to look for faces has a weird side effect though. Face pareidolia is the tendency to see human faces in other objects. Perhaps the most famous examples are foodstuffs that seem to have a burned area in the shape of a face (often interpreted as the face of a spiritual teacher such as Jesus) and the “face on Mars”. When this rock formation in the Cydonia region on the planet Mars was first photographed by Viking 1 in July 1976, the shadows seemed suggestive of a human face. Clearer photos 20 years later showed that the irregular hill is not actually a remnant of an ancient civilization but an accidental result of Martian geology (Carl Sagan, 1995, p. 41).

How does this imposition of a familiar pattern on random shadows occur? Impulses from the retina of the eye go first to the lateral geniculate body in the thalamus (see diagram below), where they interact with data from a number of other brain systems. The results are then sent on to the visual cortex, where “seeing” is organised. Only 20% of the flow of information into the lateral geniculate body comes from the eyes. Most of the data that will be organised as seeing comes from areas such as the hypothalamus, a mid-brain centre which has a key role in the creation of emotion (Maturana and Varela, 1992, p 162). What we “see” is as much a result of the emotional state we are in as of what is in front of our eyes. In NLP terminology, this understanding is encapsulated in Alfred Korzybski’s  statement “The map is not the territory” (Korzybski, 1941, p.750). The map your brain makes of the world is never the same as the real world.

The brain has a very specific way of linking the information about your emotions (stored in places such as the amygdala) into the actual sensory experience you are having or remembering (e.g. into the picture you are seeing). The emotional information is “coded” visually (and in the other senses) as a result of some specific detailed distinctions made within the cortex. Inside the visual cortex, there are several areas which process “qualities” such as colour, brightness and distance (see diagram above). When you are hungry, food often looks bigger and brighter (television advertisers know this — they makes the food on their adverts bigger and brighter too). In NLP these qualities are known as visual “submodalities” (because they are produced in small sub-sections of the visual modality). The first fourteen visual submodalities listed by Richard Bandler (1985, p 24) were colour, distance, depth, duration, clarity, contrast, scope, movement, speed, hue, transparency, aspect ratio, orientation, and foreground/background.

To give a sense of how these submodalities “code” emotional information, consider the following study. In research by Emily Balcetis, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology, and David Dunning, a Cornell professor of psychology, volunteers tossed a beanbag towards a gift card (worth either $25 or $0) on the floor. They were told that if the beanbag landed on the card, they would be given the card. Interestingly, the volunteers threw the beanbag much farther if the gift card was worth $0 than if it was worth $25 — that is, they underthrew the beanbag when attempting to win a $25 gift card, because they viewed that gift card as being closer to them. These findings indicate that when we want something, we actually view it as being physically close to us. Moving an object, in our imagination, closer to us makes us see it as more significant and triggers the neural network with memorised instructions about how to respond to it. (Dunning & Balcetis, 2013). This is then the basis for several NLP processes such as the “visual swish”, in which an image of a desired future self is moved quickly closer and becomes brighter.

Scientists have accumulated hundreds of examples of how the biases coded in “submodalities” alter our experience. Changes in submodalities in one sensory system will affect responses in other sensory systems, as well as affecting our emotions. Office workers in a room repainted blue will complain of the cold, even though the thermostat has not been touched. When the room is repainted yellow, they will believe it has warmed up, and will not complain even when the thermostat is actually set lower! (Podolsky, 1938). A very thorough review of such interrelationships was made by NLP developer David Gordon (1978, p 213-261). These cross-modality responses are neurologically based, and not simply a result of conscious belief patterns. Sounds of about 80 decibels produce a 37% decrease in stomach contractions, without any belief that this will happen – a response similar to the result of “fear”, and likely to be perceived as such, as the writers of scores for thriller movies know (Smith and Laird, 1930). Responses to these changes generally occur out of conscious awareness and control, just as anchoring does.

We are not only biased by the physical closeness of objects like beanbags, though. We are biased by the closeness in time of events. Daniel Kahneman (2011, p. 125), whose book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a text of Cognitive Biases,  showed that people asked the question “Would you pay $400 to help save seabirds injured by a recent oil spill?” would pay an average of $143, while people primed by asking “Would you pay $5 to help save seabirds injured by a recent oil spill?” would pay an average of only $20. Events that have happened recently tip our decisionmaking. Have you ever been on holiday at a beach, and bought yourself a shirt that just looks amazing … until you get back home and realize that you would never wear that shirt – you just had been thinking about how it looked compared to what others on the beach were wearing. This kind of “Cognitive Bias” (in this case technically called Anchoring, or Availability bias) is affecting every decision we make, way below the level of conscious awareness. It’s not a “bad thing” – after all it is part of our evolutionary heritage so it almost certainly helps us stay alive. It is important to be aware of, if you are making decisions that significantly affect your future.

Having just read about a plane crash causes people to be more nervous about flying, and people routinely overestimate what percentage of household tasks they do, as compared to their living partners (Kahneman, 2011, p. 130-131). In both cases the vividness with which they recall the experiences alters their impression of how common the experiences are. Again, this is not a “bad thing” but if you are planning a trip or entering a discussion with your spouse, it may be important to know. Understanding the way our brain works helps us to “hack into” the system and use “submodality shifts” or “anchors” to feel more empowered. Understanding the way our brain works can also ensure that we are more critical (in the sense of assessing our responses more carefully) as we make decisions and formulate beliefs about what is happening.

• Anchoring (being affected by what the event reminds you of from previous experiences)
• Availability (believing what is easiest to believe, using what is easiest to use)
• Confirmation bias (finding evidence for what already makes sense)
• Dunning Kruger effect (not knowing what you don’t know)
• Backfire (seeking even more proof for a belief or action that someone has challenged)
• Barnum effect (thinking you hear real details in vague statements)
• Framing effect (influenced by contexts such as glamour with which an idea is presented)
• Placebo/Nocebo effect (feeling better/worse because you expected to feel that way)

Natural and Optional Biases of Human Interaction

About twenty five years ago, Italian scientists studying the brain made an interesting discovery. They were observing which neurons (nerve cells) fire as a person lifts their arm to pick up a book. They then noticed that some of these neurons also fired when the person watched someone else lift their arm to pick up the book. These neurons are called mirror neurons because they produce a “mirror-like” reflection of what we see, inside our brain. In order to understand what is happening when the other person lifts their arm, the observer’s brain creates the feeling of what is happening, inside the observer’s body. (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1996, 1998) The mirror neurons pay special attention to movements, facial expressions and sounds made by other human beings, because these are extremely important to us as humans. When I see someone else smiling, or hear them laughing, I get the feeling inside me. My mouth automatically smiles.

Our ability to learn complex social skills – everything from smiling at appropriate times to speaking a language – depends on the mirror neurons. The feeling of shared understanding, of “closeness” to another human being, also depends on them. This feeling is called “rapport” in NLP. You have had that experience many times. A time when you feel as if you could complete the sentences that a friend is saying, before they actually say the words. A time when you were enjoying being with someone else and you just knew that they were enjoying that too. When two people have this feeling, they are more open to each other’s ideas and suggestions. They cooperate better.

Seattle’s Washington University researchers John and Julie Gottman have done in depth research on more than a thousand married couples over the last thirty years. This research has shown, for example, that in general the objective amount of similarity between the couples personalities and even the number of arguments between the couple are both irrelevant to marital happiness. The Gottmans’ research (Gottman, 1999) shows that what makes the difference is the level of rapport. Couples who stay together actually feel closer, and feel more alike, because they stay in rapport. When they are videotaped, they actually adjust their bodies to experience what the other person is experiencing. They breathe in time with each other, sit in similar positions, use similar voice tonality, and even their heart rates match. By observing any 5 minutes of conversation between a couple, and watching for these indications of rapport, it is possible to predict which marriages will work and which will not. That means that everything else you learn about communication and about creating resilient relationships depends on this one factor first of all! Synchronizing with others is a natural human bias, and can be observed in newborn babies. It is also true that some people have a protective response to rapport where they almost automatically “mismatch” others.

In separate research, William Condon (1982) has carefully studied videotapes of family conversations, confirming the pattern of rapport. He found that in a conversations in a happy family, movements such as a smile or a head nod are involuntarily matched by the other person within 1/15 of a second. Within minutes of beginning the conversation, the volume, pitch and speech rate (number of sounds per minute) of the peoples voices match each other and they are breathing in time with each other.

Like any hardwired bias, rapport can be a mixed blessing. The “Hawthorn effect” is an example of rapport misleading us. Between 1924 and 1929, a series of research studies at the Hawthorn Works electric plant in Illinois, USA, investigated whether increasing lighting in a factory could increase productivity. It seemed that it did. Then someone decided to test the research by decreasing the lighting in the factory and observing that. Again, the productivity increased. Productivity increased every time people had more attention paid to them, regardless of the change that was being studied. People like attention. (McCarney et alia, 2007)

Another bias resulting from rapport is “groupthink”. In a classic 1951 Psychology experiment, Solomon Asch had 50 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA participate in a ‘vision test.’ Each student was placed alone in a room with 7 other people, whom they believed to be fellow research subjects but who were actually “stooges”. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the “target line”. The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or her answer last. The stooges gave false answers on 12 of 18 trials. While the actual research subjects correctly answered 99% of the time when the stooges had answered correctly, the research subjects conformed to the stooges’ false answers on average 32% of the time. Fully 75% of research subjects conformed to a fake answer at least once (McLeod, 2018).

Examples of Cognitive Biases of Human Interaction:

• Halo effect (agreeing with someone’s ideas just because you like them)
• Hawthorn Effect (improving your behaviour when someone pays attention to you)
• Groupthink/In-group bias (believing that if others think this, it must be correct)
• Curse of knowledge (assuming others know what you mean, and failing to explain it)
• Bystander effect (assuming someone else will fix things, because you imagine you would)
• Spotlight effect (thinking everyone pays attention to you, and notices you, because you do)
• Reluctance/Mismatching (doing the opposite of what is recommended by someone, to avoid rapport)

Optional Biases of Thinking Style

A third set of biases affect our beliefs about how things are happening. This set are far more variable between people, depending on what we learn from experience, and especially from our experience of crises. The more we practice these biases, the more they become what others think of as our “personality” style. Again, these biases are not “bad”: just useful to notice, because they have a significant effect on our emotional state. Psychologist Martin Seligman’s research showed that people who are sustainably happy interpret or explain life’s positive results and life’s challenges in a particular way. They assume that positive results are permanent (this good result will continue), pervasive (this good result will affect many other events) and personal (this good result is evidence that I am good). They assume that negative results are temporary (this challenge will pass), specific (this challenge only affects a small area of my life) and situational (this challenge is a result of something in the particular situation). He called these assumptions an optimistic explanatory style.

People who get depressed in crises, who suffer chronic problems, make the opposite assumptions –for example, that bad things are always happening to them because there’s some fatal flaw in their nature, and those bad events will ruin everything. (Seligman, 1995, p 163). The Pessimistic or Optimistic Explanatory styles are Cognitive Biases. This time, they are not just Cognitive Biases in what we pay attention to or what we remember, but biases in terms of our more basic expectations of the world. Another example of a Cognitive Bias in explanatory style is the belief in a “Just World” – the theory that the world is or ought to be “fair”. Again, evolution has designed us with this belief, perhaps because it motivates us to be nicer to each other. Scientists have found no firm evidence that this idea is in any way true, however. As Psychotherapist Milton Erickson frequently said, and knew from his own life experiences, “Life is not fair …. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people” (Erickson, 2017). 

Seligman’s research showed that the irrational cognitive bias towards the positive, which we see in happy people, can be learned. Adults, Seligman is saying, can teach an optimistic explanatory style to their children by restating challenges as temporary, specific and situational, while affirming their positive qualities as lasting, and generalizable to new situations. Seligman’s research also showed that it is possible to identify people who are depressed, or anxious online, simply by their choice of words in Twitter and other social media posts, expressed in what are called “word clouds” (Weerasinghe et alia, 2019). Depressed people consistently talked about negative emotions (that was expected), but even more consistently, they “chunked up” (used very general and vague language), and they referred to themselves, using words like “Me” and “I” far more, and they used what NLP calls “cause-effect” patterns (I had a difficult childhood SO probably I’ll always be unhappy.”). They spent a lot more time thinking about themselves than happy people, and they thought about what they wanted very generally, rather than planning specific things. This doesn’t mean that these types of sorting are always better. By contrast, people who have a more paranoid personality style may use more attention to others, for example.

• Optimism/Pessimism (expectation of failure or success)
• Just world hypothesis (believing the world must be “fair” and things always work out “for the best”)
• Self-serving bias (assuming you created your successes, not your failures)
• Sunk cost (believing that when you spent so much time/money in an activity, you might as well carry on)
• Declinism (remembering the past, or people in the past, as better than now)
• Figure/Ground bias (paying attention to either one main element or to the context)
• Chunk up/Chunk down bias (paying attention to either the overview or the sensory specific details)
• Associate/Dissociate bias (paying attention to what it feels like inside experiences, or stepping out of them)
• Self/Other Attention bias (paying attention primarily to what you want for yourself, or what others want)

How do we Help People Detect and even Change or Transcend Their Biases?

Several studies show that there is a cultural difference between East Asian born and North American born research subjects in terms of their attention to either context or primary subject. In one study (Masuda and Nizbett, 2001) Japanese and American subjects are shown images of an underwater scene with one fish placed fairly centrally. Asked to describe it, the Americans refer to it most often as a picture of a fish, whereas the Japanese describe it as an underwater scene. Consistent with that, Americans are more able to recognize when they have seen the same central fish before and Japanese are able to recognize when they have seen the same background scene before. A second study (Masuda et alia, 2008) showed subjects images of a group of 5 people. The task was to identify the emotion of the central person, and in some cases the other 4 people were smiling, in some cases they were looking sad. The facial expression of the 4 other people affected Japanese subjects assessment of the state of the central person, but it had no effect on the assessment by Americans.

In another study (Hedden, 2008), the difference was demonstrated inside the brain, where Japanese subjects had to do less brain processing to identify the global images (relative task) and American subjects had to do less work to identify the central image (absolute task). Interestingly, the stronger the students identified verbally with each cultural sorting system, the more stereotyped the results in the brain. Furthermore, “Americans with less activation during the absolute instructions and greater activation during the relative instruction were more likely to express a higher degree of independence. Similarly, East Asians with less activation during the absolute instructions and greater activation during the relative instruction were more likely to express a higher degree of acculturation to American culture.” (Hedden, 2008, p 89) This makes it clear that the sorting was a learnable style, and not some hardwired difference in the brain structure. If this is true for individualism and collectivism, it is also likely to be true for many other perceptual sorting biases that are trained into us by our culture, and by gender expectations. Anecdotally, most people can think of experiences where someone they know has altered their sorting in these kinds of ways as a result of practicing the opposite style (usually by being immersed in a group who use the other style).

Obviously, traumatic events can also shift our sorting styles, just as rehearsing the opposite style does. For example, we know that humans generally identify angry faces in an image faster than neutral faces (a natural protective strategy) but it is also sadly true that in the United States, at least, people identify black faces in an image faster than white faces, and with similar response as they have to dangerous animals such as snakes (Trawalter et alia, 2008). The researchers noted “The stereotype of young Black men as criminal is deeply embedded in the collective American consciousness (and unconscious). Indeed, a recent set of audit studies of racial discrimination in low-wage labor markets (e.g., Pager, 2003) revealed that a Black male applicant without a criminal record fares no better at acquiring a job than a similarly skilled White applicant who was recently released from prison! The present findings offer the sobering suggestion that the association between young Black men and danger has become so robust and ingrained in the minds of social perceivers that it affects early components of attention.”. They emphasize that positively reassessing responses to situations where Black applicants are involved, for example, is needed to retrain people in positions of power to make effective and fair decisions.

There is encouraging evidence that even whole cultures can change their priorities and sorting styles over time, and in fact always do so. The World Values Survey has conducted a questionnaire analysis of the values held by 250,000 people in 70 different nations across the globe every year since 1981. This study identified that within each country, there is a values similarity such that people of different ethnic and religious affiliation will tend to share many characteristics of their home nation. Moslems living in the United States of America tend to share most of their values with other Americans. Christian communities living in Saudi Arabia tend to share many values with other Saudi nationals. Inglehart and Baker noted that there was an increasing trend (they refer to it as a Rising Tide) across the world in two values directions. Firstly, there is a trend towards secular and rational explanations for decisions rather than tradition-based explanations. Secondly, there is a trend towards valuing self-expression higher than group survival and security.

Inglehart (2018, p 1-2) emphasizes, “People’s values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure. For most of the time since humans first appeared, survival has been precarious. This dominated people’s life strategies. Population rose to meet the food supply, and most people lived just above the starvation level. When survival is insecure, people tend to close ranks behind a strong leader, forming a united front against outsiders – a strategy that can be called the Authoritarian Reflex. In the decades following World War II, something unprecedented occurred in economically advanced countries: much of the postwar generation grew up taking survival for granted. …. Unprecedentedly high levels of economic and physical security led to pervasive intergenerational cultural changes that reshaped the values and worldviews of these publics, bringing a shift from Materialist to Postmaterialist values – which was part of an even broader shift from Survival values to Self-expression values. This broad cultural shift moves from giving top priority to economic and physical safety and conformity to group norms, toward increasing emphasis on individual freedom to choose how to live one’s life. Self-expression values emphasize gender equality, tolerance of gays, lesbians, foreigners and other outgroups, freedom of expression and participation in decision-making in economic and political life.”

The former Soviet Union and the Nordic countries are next to each other geographically, and yet are obviously on opposite ends of the Survival – Self-expression continuum in the World Values Survey graph, and this is easily accounted for by their profoundly different experiences over this time. If we really want to help people in Russia to move en-masse towards valuing of democracy and individual expression, then the solution lies in creating the kind of experience of safety and survival certainty that the west has experienced. If we want individuals to change, then one solution suggested by the World Values Survey is to take the risk of inviting them to live amongst us: to see immigration as not so much a danger as a choice for influence.

And that is where anxiety rises again, of course. Inglehart notes with alarm the rise of the new right wing across the globe in the 2020s. He maintains that it expresses something that analysts of 1930s fascism also observed – the fear of freedom, and the fear that change is happening too fast. “Support for these parties is motivated by a backlash against the cultural changes linked with the rise of Postmaterialist and Self-expression values, more than by economic factors. The proximate cause of the populist vote is widespread anxiety that pervasive cultural changes and an influx of foreigners are eroding the way of life one knew since childhood. Though they are often called Radical Right parties, the main common theme of these parties is a reaction against immigration and cultural change.” (Inglehart, 2018, p. 181)

This world-wide cultural swing towards fascism over the last decade has been noted by several historians specializing in tyranny and authoritarianism, such as Timothy Snyder (Snyder, 2017).  Film director and activist Paul Mason explains, (Mason, 2021), like Inglehart, that the rise of fascism this century is unrelated to the economic downturn that seemed to spur it in places like Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s. This time, he says, it is motivated more explicitly what Psychotherapists identified in the 1930s – the “fear of freedom”, especially of sexual freedom and sexual ambiguities. “Long before it had to confront fascism, [Wilhelm] Reich argued, Marxism had ‘failed to understand the character structure of the masses and the social effect of mysticism’. The Nazis’ ability to exploit people’s fear of freedom lay in their willingness to use symbolism, emotion, language and sexual imagery in a way no mainstream party had ever done. This, he said, was the ‘mass psychology of fascism’.” (Mason, 2021, p. 180).

The Biases No-one Wants To Talk About

Fascism taps into powerful unconscious biases. Adolf Hitler notes that the tendency of masses to believe lies and conspiracy theories is unconscious (it is what we might now call a “cognitive bias”). He said (referring ironically to a claimed “Jewish” cultural tendency to lie)  “The broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” (Hitler, 1939, Volume 1, Chapter X).

Sexual repression may indeed feed this unconscious process, adding another layer of cognitive bias. Freudian psychotherapist and Marxist Wilhelm Reich quoted a pamphlet by Joseph Goebbels asking if Jewish men were really “men”: “If someone cracks a whip across your mother’s face, would you say to him, Thank you! Is he a man too? One who does such a thing is not a man – he is a brute! How many worse things has the Jew inflicted upon our mother Germany and still inflicts upon her! He has debauched our race, sapped our energy, undermined our customs and broken our strength.” (Mason, 2021, p. 180). Reich argued that this hints at sexual “perversion”.

Announcing his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin said the West “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes that they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” (Putin, 2022) This statement reveals, in its very avoidance of direct language about issues such as women’s right not to be beaten by men, and about legalization of homosexuality, that the Freudian critique was on track. Putin’s speech reveals, in what it cannot say, a fear of even mentioning the freedoms that must be stopped. In challenging this kind of paranoia, we cannot reply merely with facts about the rate of homosexuality in Ukraine vs Russia etc., or about the divorce rate in Russia compared to the USA. 

Another almost universal unconscious trigger, used by fascists from the beginning, is the idea of eating children and drinking their blood. Allenbach (2020) mentions how Hitler’s magazine Der Stürmer (The Stormer) reported the ancient European claim of “blood libel” (the claim that Jews were committing ritual murder of Christian children, whose blood was then used to make Jewish unleavened bread). This claim is made in books as early as the Σοῦδα (Souda – a Byzantine “encyclopaedia” dated to the tenth century CE). Allebach (2020) mentions the ultimate 21st century version of blood libel, often incorporated into the QAnon Conspiracy Theory belief system: “Frazzledrip, [based on] a video (that does not exist) of Hillary Clinton mutilating a child in a satanic ritual for “adrenalchrome,” [was] spread by a fake news website in 2018. Adrenalchrome is the made-up concept of adrenalized children’s blood.” The substance (also named Adrenochrome) is mentioned in the 1998 movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“. A real substance called adrenochrome exists, is made synthetically by oxidising adrenaline, and has some rather irrelevant medical uses such as helping blood clotting, by the way. There is something powerful for human beings in the idea of people eating their own children – a kind of primeval aversion that makes these conspiracy theories spread especially well. 1000 years ago people were willing to accept that cannibals could gain magic power from the blood of their victims itself. Now, they need to propose another magical substance that could be present in the blood.

These are not random “lies”. They are lies that horrify us because of deep unconscious biases that were designed by evolution to “protect our species”. And that is how they become central to Fascism. They activate traumatic responses in our brain. As listeners repeatedly imagine the story, “as if it was real”, they have a traumatic response to it. The American Psychiatric Association criteria for PTSD allows for the possibility of repeated exposure to descriptions of a traumatic event triggering the same kind of response as the real event “Indirect exposure can also occur through photos, videos, verbal accounts, or written accounts (e.g., police officers reviewing crime reports or conducting interviews with crime victims, drone operators, members of the news media covering traumatic events, and psychotherapists exposed to details of their patients’ traumatic experiences).” (APA, 2013, p. 823) The aim of these lies is to activate people’s amygdalas so that they make decisions based on fear of the illusory conspiracy (decisions that hand power to a powerful warrior-leader), rather than activating their rational decision-making.

Personal Stories are More Powerful than Logical Persuasion

How do we influence people individually to alter their values and sorting processes, their biases of experience? We will look at a few different examples here, some of which are direct cognitive interventions using the submodality systems which (as we saw above) directly code our values and biases (personality sorting strategies), some of which use what we previously called anchoring (accessing times when the person felt safe enough so that their values automatically changed), and some of which are invitations to view experiences from a different perspective or “frame” (reframing). In order to have someone’s permission do this though, we first need to persuade them to experiment. And that is what this next section is about.

VitalSmarts is a business involved in influencing positive change around the world. The VitalSmarts group started their search for influencing skills with the question: “How do people naturally change their values?” Their negative conclusion is very simple: people do not usually change as a result of rational arguments – in fact rational argument usually convinces people that their old view was correct. Their positive conclusion is also simple, and consistent with what we find when we ask people to remember great influencers: values or priorities (and thus values-laden behaviours) change when people have profound experiences where they model the new value from someone they can identify with. When they have that experience they need to believe that the change in behaviour will feel good to them (i.e. it will be valuable), and to believe that it will be possible for them to achieve. That modelling can be done vicariously with stories.

Here’s an example from their book “Influencer” (Grenny et alia, 2013). David Poindexter is the founder of Population Communications International, which focuses on research on the use of entertainment to deliver pro-social messages aimed at improving the quality of life of audiences in the United States and abroad. During the decade of the 1970s, Poindexter was successful in mobilizing the producers and creators of numerous prime-time U.S. television shows, such as Maude, Allin the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others, to incorporate discussions of family planning (birth control) and ending sexual stereotyping into the context of these shows. Starting in 1993, he and Martha Swai ran a radio drama called Twendena Wakati (Change with the Times) in Tanzania. The program dealt with AIDS transmission.

In Africa, AIDS prevention has faced a number of conspiracy theories – that AIDS is not caused by a virus but by western immunizations, that there are magical cures being suppressed by western medical authorities, that AIDS is a western plot to exterminate Africans, that AIDS is biological warfare, and in South Africa that AIDS is an Apartheid plot etc. (Sivelä, 2015). Here is an example, from a High School Student: “‘Some say it came here with Americans. During the apartheid era they injected HIV into black people because they knew that no white person would sleep with a black person. They wanted all blacks to die… During history class, our teacher told us that when there was apartheid here, there was apartheid also in Germany. There in Germany, Hitler was killing people, so the Americans went to him and said that what he was doing was right, and wanted to know how he did it. So, he [Hitler] advised them to infect people with HIV. Hitler was killing all the Jews in Germany so that only the Germans would be left there. And so the Americans decided that if they infect us with HIV, then we will die and they will have our land to themselves’ (Nyaniso, 17, Masiphumelele, February 2011).”

Poindexter and Swai designed their radio drama to explore the AIDS situation in a story about a Tanzanian family.  Polling showed that the main male character in their story, Mkwaju, was initially an attractive macho role model to male listeners. He was abusive to his wife, drank excessively, and had sex with prostitutes regularly. However, opinions shifted over the course of the program. As he died of AIDS, his wife, Tenu, made the decision to leave him, and set up her own successful business. By 1997 listenership of this program increased to an average of 66% country-wide, or almost two thirds of the adult population. 82% of listeners said they adopted a method of HIV/AIDS prevention as a direct result of listening to the programme; 25% of new family planning adopters in Tanzania identified Twende Na Wakati as the reason. The Dodoma area of Tanzania was excluded from radio transmission for this program in the years 1993-1995, as an experimental control. The ongoing tragedy in the Dodoma (where AIDS related behaviour did not change) resulted in this controlled part of the experiment being ended after two years in order to share the benefits the rest of the country received (Singhal and Rogers, 1999, p 131-134, and p 152-171).

How do metaphorical stories create this kind of influence? Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson at Princeton University (2010) first demonstrated that when one person tells a story and another person listens, the two people show synchronised brain activity. This rapport does not occur where mere facts are transmitted, and is probably due to the activation of sensory imagery evoked by the story in both teller and listener. They summarise “Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analysed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.”

This confirms that in order to understand the story, the person imagines it in sensory detail, and thus synchronises with the story-teller, experiencing the emotional responses that the teller evokes as well. This is a very old understanding of course. When asked “Why do you speak to them in parables?” Jesus of Nazareth is said to have answered by quoting the Jewish prophet Isaiah, saying that his aim was that people needed to be led through stories so “they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.” (Christian Bible, Mathew, 13.15  More literally put in older translations, “so that those with eyes should see, those with ears should hear, and those with a heart turn to me and be healed.”)

This research and the examples above emphasise that to be successful storytelling needs to meet the following criteria:

• Establish rapport first (e.g. note the way people identified with Mkwaju in Tanzania).
• Tell stories with engaging sensory details, including emotion.
• Tell stories which reach a positive conclusion (e.g. the success of Tenu in Tanzania).
• Tell stories which make it clear what specific behaviour needs to happen and shows how it is possible.

In summary then, to really influence someone, use stories, attention to their emotional needs and respect for their own value of scepticism. However, in the end, like someone working with an addict, you need to be willing to let go and accept that they need to find their own time to get out. That’s hard, but there is no simpler way. To remember the key points here, Think of your conversation as creating a RAMP back to sanity.

• R – Rapport: Restate their feelings and values, Ratify areas of agreement, Reinforce scepticism.
• A – Assess: Assess their beliefs, and identify what biases they operate with.
• M – Metaphorical stories and, with their permission,  correcting of Main mistaken facts.
• P – Patience, Politeness, and be Prepared for the possibility that change may not happen.

Doing a Cognitive-Bias Self-Assessment

What is going on for the person who not only responds with biases, but even seems to lie compulsively? Are they also traumatized? Much has been written about Donald Trump’s compulsive lying, for example. Dr Bandy X. Lee collected 27 concerned Medical commentaries on his psychiatric status. For example, Trump famously lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the US Presidency due to the peculiarities of the USA Presidential Electoral College system. He claimed, however, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” (Twitter, November 27, 2016, quoted in Lee, 2017, p.34). Dr Lance Dodes (in Lee, 2017. P. 87) says “Children must develop ways to manage emotional distress: anxiety, confusion, disappointment, loss, fear, all while they are growing in their capacity to think, and sorting out what is real and what is their imagination. We all develop systems to do this, to tolerate and control our emotions, understand and empathize with the people around us, and tell the difference between reality and wishes or fears. But not people with the early, primitive emotional problems seen in sociopathy. They do not tolerate disappointments; instead, they fly into rages and claim that the upsetting reality isn’t real. They make up an alternative reality and insist that it is true. This is the definition of a delusion. When it is told to others, it is basically a lie.”

If this is the explanation, then with fascism we face a flood of full grown people who have not learned to manage their emotional distress. In positions of power they may feed into a collective problem. Gail Sheehy adds “Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent former professor of psychiatry at Yale University and today at Columbia University, elaborated in a follow-up interview, “Trump creates his own extreme manipulation of reality. He insists that his spokesmen defend his false reality as normal. He then expects the rest of society to accept it—despite the lack of any evidence.” This leads to what Lifton calls “malignant normality”—in other words, the gradual acceptance by a public inundated with toxic untruths of those untruths until they pass for normal.” (Lee, 2017, p. 79). 

If you’re reading this, then you have a considerable advantage, obviously, because you are at least considering the reality that all human beings are inevitably responding with unconscious biases (and can hear that without thinking it’s somehow a “bad” thing). To take action to further free yourself from the less useful effects of some of these biases, it may help to engage in some self-assessment. Richard Byyny, Emergency Medical Physician at Denver Health and University of Colorado (2017) recommends the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as an online survey of your biases in response to a number of social issues. He sums up, for Medical Practitioners, the process of discovering their own biases: “Skills to abate unconscious bias include: • Perspective taking which is the cognitive component of empathy; • Emotional regulation to use more inclusive social categories; and • Partnership-building for clinicians to create partnerships with patients working as a team toward common goals.” My intention is that the last of these three points is covered in section Three of this book, and the first two are covered both there and in this section.

Here, I invite you to relax and calmly review the following questions, taking time to identify the answer without any sense of blame or justification, just being curious. Note that you may agree that you have the response asked about, AND believe that it is entirely rational to keep using that response. This questionnaire is not a “test of sanity”. It is an invitation to check whether any of these responses is happening in a way that you would like to change.

Anchoring (being affected by what the event reminds you of from previous experiences)

• Are you often uncontrollably reminded of emotionally significant events that happened a long time ago?

Availability (believing what is easiest to believe, using what is easiest to use)

• If you search for an opinion online, is the best answer always in the first few items?

Confirmation bias (finding evidence for what already makes sense)

• Do you frequently do something that you’re not sure is right to do and then discover that it works out perfectly?
• Do you notice that the evidence usually agrees with what you thought intuitively already?
• Do you often find yourself thinking about how other people are conspiring to make things more difficult for you?
• Do you believe that history is largely the result of what secret groups do to manipulate events?
• Do the world’s governments all seem to deliberately hide the truth about significant historical events?
• Is there a secret world-wide plot to kill people like you?

Dunning Kruger effect (not knowing what you don’t know)

• Do you often decide to do something and then discover that it’s a lot harder than you expected?
• Can you fairly easily detect who’s view is correct and who’s view is not, even in a professional area you’ve never trained in?
• Do you often wish that people would notice how exceptional you are?

Backfire (seeking even more proof for a belief or action that someone has challenged)

• When someone disagrees with you, do you find yourself compulsively searching for the proof that they are wrong?

Barnum effect (thinking you hear real details in vague statements)

• Do astrology predictions in magazines seem to describe real specific events that happen to you?

Framing effect (influenced by contexts such as glamour with which an idea is presented)

• Do you often buy things that looked really impressive and then find yourself disappointed with what you get?

Placebo/Nocebo effect (feeling better/worse because you expected to feel that way)

• Are you especially sensitive to side effects of medical treatments, even when official information says those side effects are unusual?
• Do you notice that when someone you trust tells you a treatment will be good for you, it always works?
• Do you notice that when someone you trust tells you a treatment will be good for you, it never works?

Halo effect (agreeing with someone’s ideas just because you like them)

• Does a best friend suggesting something cause you to immediately think that it must be a good idea?

Hawthorn Effect (improving your behaviour when someone pays attention to you)

• Do you compulsively think about how your actions must look to others, and change to look better?

Groupthink/In-group bias (believing that if others think this, it must be correct)

• Do you find yourself almost compulsively agreeing with what others say?
• Do you often go along with what others suggest and then wish you didn’t?

Curse of knowledge (assuming others know what you mean, and failing to explain it)

• Do you often talk to people about something interesting and then discover that they don’t really understand what you were talking about?

Bystander effect (assuming someone else will fix things, because you imagine you would)

• Do you think you’d like the world to be different but it’s not really something you should or could get involved in changing?

Spotlight effect (thinking everyone pays attention to you, and notices you, because you do)

• Do you get the feeling that other people are always looking at you or assessing you?

Reluctance/Mismatching (doing the opposite of what is recommended by someone, to avoid rapport)

• Do you find yourself almost compulsively disagreeing with what others say?
• Does someone else suggesting something cause you to immediately think that it might not be a good idea?

Optimism/Pessimism (expectation of failure or success)

• Do you always expect that things will work out well in the end?
• Do you always expect that things are going to be difficult and that you won’t be able to get the things you need in life?

Just world hypothesis (believing the world must be “fair” and all things should work out “for the best”)

• Do you spend more time than you enjoy thinking about how unfair life has been to you?
• Do you get the sense you are usually treated unfairly by other people?
• Do you have a sense that a particular group of people are getting an unfair advantage and deserve to be punished?

• Do you believe that you are basically broken or evil and that is why things don’t work out for you?

Self-serving bias (assuming you created your successes, not your failures)

• Think of a time in your life when things went well for you. Can you explain how you contributed to that?
• Think of a time that didn’t go well. Can you explain how you contributed to that?

Sunk cost (believing that when you spent so much time/money in an activity, you might as well carry on)

• Do you find yourself compulsively putting more and more energy into actions or decisions that you wish you could just let go of?

Declinism (remembering the past, or people in the past, as better than now)

• Does it seem like everything, almost without exception, was better when you were younger?
• Do you often wish people could behave as well as people used to when you were much younger?

Figure/Ground bias (paying attention to either one main element or to the context)

• If you think about an earlier time in your life, is it easy for you to focus on a specific person in that event, ignoring the other people and things?
• If you think about an earlier time in your life, is it easy for you to remember the general experience, the and the various people and things that were happening around you?

Chunk up/Chunk down bias (paying attention to either the overview or the sensory specific details)

• If you think about something you hope to do in the future, is it easy for you to focus on the exact details of what you will see through your eyes and hear people saying in the situation, on the future day when you have reached you goal, and the precise steps you need to take to get there?
• If you think about something you hope to do in the future, is it easy for you to think about the general idea of how this will affect your life and how happy you will be?

Associate/Dissociate bias (paying attention to what it feels like inside experiences, or stepping out of them)

• Can you think of something mildly unpleasant that happened to you, but stay so fully outside as an observer that you don’t respond emotionally to it?
• Can you think of something really enjoyable that happened to you, and step inside the experience so fully that you start to feel excited right now?

Self/Other Attention bias (paying attention primarily to what you want for yourself, or what others want)

• Do you know specifically what you want to do in your life?
• Do you know specifically what your partner or best friend wants to do in their life?

Checking relevance: Are any of your answers (above) things that you would really like to change?

There are of course many different ways to “hack into” the system and adjust such biases. That’s what we’ll look at next.

Lucas Derks: Changing Social Biases in the Social Panorama

In the last section of this book, we considered social biases as something that could be explored and in many ways healed in a group setting, and offered a range of exercises for doing that. Of course, in this section, we can see already that the social interactions we have are always mediated by the learned biases and choices made in our heads. The social world we experience is actually the world inside us, and can be resolved there as much as in its “playground” of external relationships. This is what Lucas Derks has been working with.

Lucas Derks’ Social Panorama model was a bold move to transfer much of his experience as a Social Psychologist into NLP terms. His original work (Derks, 2000) mirrors a lot of what we are attempting to do here. Since that time, he has expanded his model to deal with the entire field of “Mental Space” (Derks, 2018), presenting it as a new Psychotherapeutic paradigm (“Space is the primary organizing principle in the mind”). I am not aiming to teach his material fully here of course, and I recommend contacting the Society for Mental Space Psychology to study with the experts.

What I do want to do is to focus in on the individual social biases that Derks has been studying, and explain his methodology for changing these experimentally, should you choose to (Derks, 2000, p. 159-200).

Derks’ basic ideas are also explored in the social psychology field called “Social Representations Theory” (Sammut et alia, 2015). What is missing from that field in general is the concretization that Lucas has been able to do, using the NLP framework. He says (Derks, 2000, p. xiii) “To begin with, think of humanity, the greatest social whole that exists. Think of it in your own usual way. How do you perceive it? Do you see the whole of humanity at a distance, or do you experience all the other human beings as surrounding you? About one third of my subjects spontaneously take the distant view. Are you one of them? If you are, try to put yourself in amongst the rest of mankind and then step into your ‘self’. I want you to imagine that you are in the middle, amongst everyone else in the world. Experience yourself as a person surrounded by all the others. Once you have that, then let your thoughts turn to a person you really love and care for. We will call this person your ‘loved one’….Please return to that feeling of love for a moment and think about where in your mental space your loved one is located. How far away and in what direction do you experience the sense of him or her? Let the answer seep quietly into your consciousness. And if you’re not sure, make a guess – which spot did you think of first when you heard or read the question ‘where’.”

Moving this representation in various ways is likely to change the feeling response you have as you think about them, and hence the way you would interact with the real person that this is just a representation of. Courtney and Meyer (2020) studied peoples subjective experience of feeling lonely, and correlated it to two other variables. Where do they imagine other people around them, and what happens in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the brain when they think of those people and when they think of themselves. These three elements are closely linked, it turns out. When you feel close to someone emotionally, you imagine them visually closer as you think about them, and in your brain an area of neurons is activated that is closer to the area activated when you think of your own self. “mPFC responses reflect others’ objective social network positions (Parkinson et al., 2017). For example, multivariate mPFC responses to viewing people from one’s own social network mirror their eigenvector centrality (i.e., the extent to which they are connected to well-connected others in a social network, a metric of objective popularity). By extension, the mPFC may also cluster representation of others based on how subjectively close we feel to them (i.e., as “cliques” varied by closeness). Another possibility is that interpersonal closeness impinges on our own self-representations, with closer individuals more similarly represented to ourselves. Indeed, social psychology suggests that self-representations include representations of close others (i.e., “self-other overlap”) to foster social connection (Aron et al., 1991). …  Specifically, our results suggest that the subjective experience of loneliness can be traced to a lonelier “neural self,” with lonelier individuals distancing themselves from their social connections, even at the level of neural representation.” Furthermore, lonely people had less clear representations of specific others (they blurred people together) as shown also by the lack of clarity in their brain activation. The researchers conclude “Our results suggest that the social brain may help us navigate our social connections by mapping people based on whether or not they are in our social network, with our closest social ties represented most closely to ourselves. Moreover, loneliness is associated with distortions in this mapping, particularly skewed neural similarity between the self and others and blurred representations of weak ties. The paths we take in social life may depend, in part, on the interpersonal maps we carry in our social brains.”

Of course, in NLP, what we do is take this to its logical conclusion: if we help people clarify their internal social representations, and then have them intentionally move those representations closer to them, they will feel significantly less lonely. In an experiment with 51 subjects (Derks, 2018, p. 223-239, Derks et alia, 2019), pre and post interviews demonstrated that “the intensity of a social emotion can be influenced by suggesting that subjects move the relevant images to more distant locations in mental space. Our results show that the social emotion may change not only in intensity but also in quality, and may shift to another type.” In one of the more dramatic uses of this understanding, Derks shows that by placing someone else in the same imaginary position as someone one loves, the feeling begins to generalize to the other person as well – a sensation which is often described as surprising and intense, and an experiment that should be done only after reassuring people that they can immediately reverse the positioning afterwards (Derks, 2018, p. 108).

 Closeness and distance is only one of the variables that has social effect of course. “A review of results from various studies, including our own, supports various predictions from the hypothesis: (a) high status dominant and prestigious individuals are estimated taller, and (b) taller individuals are estimated higher in prestige and dominance-based status.” (Blaker and Vugt, 2014). That is to say, when we think of someone as more “important” we actually imagine them taller or higher, and we frequently confuse this social panorama representation with their actual scale. Derks (2000, p. 169-176) notes that the same dimensions are significant in thinking of social groups, and that sometimes people have groups whom they feel positive above on one side or the other (left or right), or coded as darker or lighter, or moving in a particular way. In studying people who were very peace-loving people often have merged all of humanity into a surrounding group, and levelled out the inequalities in their images, often suffusing them all with a golden glow or some other symbolic indication of their unity.

This helps us understand the meaning of what Thomas Hübl says about his Healing Collective Trauma events. “During a light meditation—a form of individual or group meditation in which we focus on inner spaciousness and opening ourselves to receive light (see the guided practice provided in the appendix)—space is the container for light, for inspiration and insight. In a group meditation, it is the intersubjective space, the space between us, into which light is received and across which it may be passed. We deepen and expand intersubjective space through mutual presence and witness. Our life’s most inspirational conversations and healing interactions share some quality of deep presence, which makes it possible for subtle light to flow within and between us.” (Hübl and Avritt, 2020, p. 124). The Social Panorama gives us concrete ways to help others do this.

Working with Group Relationships in the Social Panorama: Derks (2000, p. 199-200) also suggests deliberately supporting people who have been socially oppressed by clarifying their representations when we are talking to others (humanizing them, instead of allowing them to remain blurred non-humans) and by equalizing them (seeing them at the same level around us). He suggests several options for working with people who are actually open to change, such as:

• Creating a better position for the representation of a group: Find another group who they feel about in the way they would like to feel about the group that has seemed a challenge. Move the challenging group into that location and imagine they “click” into place.  Check that the old location feels clean, and check for any objections to the move. Talk with the “part of the group” that has any objection, and ask what its positive intention is for resisting change (e.g. to keep safe; to maintain closeness with their own group, who don’t like those people). Find better ways of meeting that intention. (this applies to objections to any of the following processes).
• Integrating a group you’ve had difficulty with A): Recall a really relaxed and enjoyable party you have been to. Once you feel the fun of that party, invite the challenging group into the party, seeing them closer and enjoying dancing with you.
• Integrating a group you’ve had difficulty with B): Find a group you feel good about, and adjust the challenging group so that they have the same size and colour as the people you feel good about. Take all the time you need to merge the two groups until you can’t tell the difference.
• Dealing with strong negative feelings to a group: Deal first with your own reluctance to harmonize, by finding its positive intention and identifying better way to meet that intention. Ask “What ability is this group lacking that makes it so unpleasant?” Identify a time in your life when you had that ability in abundance – step into that time and feel the ability. Choose a colour that represents that ability and imagine you are surrounded by a cloud of that colour. Flow the colour to that group until you see it fill them up. Repeat for any other needed abilities and check for any objections in you, resolving them by identifying their positive intention.
• When your feelings are too strong to do the other processes: Use some version of the NLP eye movement process (described in the first section of this book) and check that you feel more able to repeat the process above, or use the self-havening process described below first.
• Resolving a negative belief about another group: This is a kind of “limiting belief” or “limiting decision”. We will discuss the Time Line Therapy® technique for dealing with this, below, AND here is Lucas Derks’ version: Go back to a time before the problem with this group existed and before you had formulated that belief. Find out what advantages the belief has had for the person up until now (the positive intention of the belief). Imagine you are a wise aunt or uncle, and travel back in time to before this belief was installed, and teach the younger you how to create an alternative belief that will generate a better future. Step into the younger self and experience the new belief. Grow up to the present time with this belief and notice how that delivers much more choice, and notice how that new belief can change things. Test the new belief by thinking about the group now.

A Note on Working with the Spiritual Panorama: Another aspect of Lucas Derks’ model is the study of people’s internal experience of “nature”, “spirituality” and “religion”. He says (Derks, 2000, p. 285) “The spiritual panorama is a pantheon that comes into being when the universe, nature or natural forces are personified.” In his studies with religious teachers and shamans, including in places such as Bali, Ecuador, and Suriname, he noticed that people frequently find it an advantage to visualize a wise guiding “spirit”. When they do so, they often place it up above their head and in front, either directly or to a side, about 1½ metres from them. He proposes a secular version of the same process, by visualizing some guiding personality in that position and negotiating with them to offer wise advice and protection when needed (Derks, 2000, p. 285). Anthropologist Michael Winkelman (2010, p. 205) explains “Understanding spirits as representations of social groups and internal forces illustrates how ritual healing involves a restructuring of individual psychodynamics and collective psychology. These psychodynamic implications of spirits derive from their roles as social actors. Spirit beliefs constitute a symbolic system representing norms, values, and ideal behaviours, directing people towards proper social behaviour. Spirits and supernatural beings consequently communicate about social traditions, valued attitudes, morals, ideal patterns of behaviour, and preferred psychocultural dynamics.” Western religious traditions often assign patron “saints” to people, either by the correlation of the saint’s name and the person’s name, or by the field of work that the saint is involved in, and believers may wear symbolic tokens of these guides. In many indigenous cultures, ancestors perform a similar function. When someone shares such a belief system, it makes sense to remind people to communicate with and align with their “guides” at the beginning of any healing process – the “shamanic” equivalent of asking a person to “anchor themselves into a resourceful state” at the start of an NLP process.

Tad James: Healing the Past with Time Line Therapy™

In that last section, we are thinking about Time as a spatial structure we can travel in and make adjustments to, also. Let’s explore that a little more. How can we encourage our brain to let go of unconscious biases such as sorting for context vs sorting for central focus only? These are not exactly social panorama issues, but they certainly seem to be learned responses that people adjust to suit their social surroundings, and at their extremes they may limit our social ability because they focus us so completely on one aspect of life. One way is to hack into the memory of when they were prioritized, and Time Line Therapy™ offers one more choice for doing that.

The Hippocampus stores an earlier record of new experiences, before they are reconsolidated to the cortex in the brain, and it continues to keep records of both time and place, kind of like how a modern camera notes where and when you were for each photo you took. A Time Line is a spatial metaphor in which events are thought of as occurring along a line which stretches out in one direction to the past, and in another direction to the future. Examples of this way of mentally organising events are found in everyday speech; for example when we say “I’m going to put that whole experience behind me now.” Or “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

In psychology research, the sense of past and future is strongly related to body movement and spatial ordering, similar to the Social Panorama discussed above. “One influential hypothesis (e.g. Bender & Beller, 2014; Boroditsky, 2000) suggests that the abstract concept of time is grasped and operationalized in terms of a more experientially available concept of space. A substantial body of research has shown that the direction of spatial movement influences the temporal location of individuals’ thoughts in that forward motion encourages future thinking and backward motion facilitates thoughts about the past (Boroditsky & Ramscar, 2002), that thinking about the future or past tends to affect postural sway (Miles, Nind & Macrae, 2010) and that backward vection (stimulus-induced sense of motion; Ash et al., 2011, Dichgans and Brandt, 1978, Palmisano et al., 2015) can elicit past thinking while forward vection facilitates future thinking (Miles, Karpinska, Lumsden & McRae, 2010). Closely related to this is the concept of the subjective time line (e.g. Hartmann and Mast, 2012, Rinaldi et al., 2016)—an imaginary line which orders our experience by passing through our body centrally in both directions with the future portion extending in front of the body and the past portion extending to the back.” (Aksentijevic et alia, 2019, p 242)

Where each particular person stores their time line depends on individual experiences, and even on language. In New Zealand Māori: “The phrase embracing the notion of the ‘past’ is ‘i nga ra i mua’ (in the days ahead).  The future by contrast was unknown, and uncertain.  The phrase which refers to the notion of future is ‘i nga ra i muri’ (the days behind).  In Māori orientation the future is behind, and an individual ‘backs into the future'”  (Jones et al. 1990). This is a significant source of intercultural conflict. “While there has been little exploration in the intercultural conflict caused by divergent time perspectives in this regard, Nairn and McCreanor’s (1991) study (which examined 220 written contributions from individual Pākehā to the Human Rights Commission in 1979 regarding their view of Māori protest) supports the view that many Pākehā believe that Māori need to move on from the past and that Māori are too backward thinking (Nairn & McCreanor, 1990, 1991, 1997).” (Lo and Haukamau, 2012, p. 117). Lo and Haukamau also note that Pākehā (non-Maori) New Zealanders often feel separate from the flow of time, whereas Māori often feel immersed in the flow. This is also identified by NLP studies as a result of different Time Line location, as it metaphorically suggests. People who see their Time Line in front of them, like a kind of planner diary, feel “dissociated” from time (the experience is called “Through Time, in NLP). People who have their Time Line running through their body feel more associated into each event in their life (the experience is called “In Time” in NLP).

In the NLP literature, this set of submodality distinctions for time was first described by Connirae and Steve Andreas (1987, p 1-24). Since then, a number of other NLP Practitioners have developed ways to work with the brain’s coding of memory. These include “Re-imprinting” and “Change Personal History on the Time Line” (Dilts, Hallbom and Smith, 1990) and “Time Line Therapy™” (James and Woodsmall, 1988). They tend to involve viewing the original traumatic events from a new time perspective, and while connecting to emotional resources from other areas of the person’s life. Dr Tad James’ Time Line Therapy® techniques are a specific set of these processes.

A one year research study (May 1993-May 1994) into the treatment of asthmatics, using Time Line Therapy™, was done in Denmark.  Results were presented at a number of European conferences, including the Danish Society of Allergology Conference (August 1994), and the European Respiratory Society Conference (Nice, France, October 1994). The study was run by General Medical Practitioner Jorgen Lund and NLP Master Practitioner Hanne Lund, from Herning, Denmark. Patients were selected from 8 general practices. 30 were included in the NLP Intervention group, and 16 in the control group. All received basic medical care including being supplied with medication. Most had never heard of NLP before, and many were completely unbelieving in it, or terrified of it. Their motivation to do NLP was generally low. The intervention group had an initial day introduction to NLP and Time Line Therapy™, and then 3-36 hours (average 13) of NLP intervention. The NLP focus was not mainly on the asthma; it was on how the people lived their daily lives. The results affected both the peoples general lives, and their asthma. Patients tended to describe their change subjectively as enabling them to be “more open”, get “colossal strength and self-confidence” “a new life” etc.

The lung capacity of adult asthmatics tends to decrease by 50ml a year average. This occurred in the control group. Meanwhile the NLP group increased their lung capacity by an average of 200ml (like reversing four years of damage in a year!). Daily variations in peak flow (an indicator of unstable lung function) began at 30%-40%. In the control group they reduced to 25% but in the NLP group they fell to below 10% . Sleep disorders in the control group began at 70% and dropped to 30%. In the NLP group they began at 50% and dropped to zero. Use of asthma inhalers and acute medication in the NLP group fell to near zero. Hanne Lund points out that the implications of this project reach far beyond asthma management. The patients who used NLP did not consciously do something different in order to cure their asthma. They had the unconscious areas of the brain respond differently to solve their problems. Lund says “We consider the principles of this integrated work valuable in treatment of patients with any disease, and the next step will be to train medical staff in this model.” (Lund, 1995).

A study at the University of Malaysia by Senior lecturer Dr Kamarul Zaman Ahmad showed that two twenty minute sessions of Time Line Therapy® reduced stressful emotional responses far more than controls and even more than standard NLP submodality-based techniques (Ahmad, 2011). Dr Ahmad conducted his study with IT personnel, and found that after a single intervention, using a Time Line Therapy® process for unpleasant emotions, the effect was dramatic. For example with anger, average subjective assessment (1-10 where 10 is the worst it could be) of the emotion, as the person thought about target memories, dropped from 6.15 to 1.15 in the Time Line Therapy™ group, and remained the same in the control group. With sadness, average subjective assessment dropped from 6.85 to 1.80.

Tad James, who developed his methodology while studying traditional Hawaiian healing, is clear that often people will experience the source of a limiting belief or emotional trauma as being not merely earlier in this lifetime, but even in an ancestor’s lifetime, or in a “past life” when they lived as someone else. Rather than get into hypothesising about whether this is in some way “real” he is interested in checking if it actually helps. By connecting with ancestral trauma, and with future healing, Time Line Therapy™ enables us to concretize some of the work that Thomas Hübl does in his “Healing Collective Trauma”. As he says, the facilitator needs to have an internal access to the past and the future: “Our ancestors are not gone; they live on with us and in us. This truth comes as a clarion call from future generations, who require that their ancestors be healed so that they may live in a better world—or that they may live at all. As we heal and integrate the traumas of our time, we assist in the integration and healing of theirs.” (Hübl and Avritt, 2020, p. 226) He urges that in a group “facilitators serve as a grounding or mediating influence, so that higher light, or the light of the future, can more easily enter the space.” (Hübl and Avritt, 2020, p. 156)

Abbreviated Time Line Therapy® Script

I’m not aiming to teach Time Line Therapy® in this context, but rather to give you an example of how Tad James used it. Following is an abbreviated script from 1989 (James, 1989, p. 78-84). It takes a full weekend training to appropriately explain and experience the presuppositions and skills needed to guide someone through this process, and to find a certified trainer, it is best to contact the Time Line Therapy® Association. In the complex preparation for this process, one of the most significant things we do is help the person identify which direction their brain thinks of as the future and which direction it thinks of as the past. These two directions imply a kind of “Time Line” in the hippocampus. Before even guiding the person through the following process, it helps for me to find out where they unconsciously imagine time. Tad James tends to ask: “If I were to ask your conscious mind, where your past is, and where your future is, I have an idea that you might say, “It’s right to left, or front to back or up to down, or in some direction from you in relation to your body.  And it’s not your conscious concept that I’m interested in, it’s your unconscious.  So if I were to ask your unconscious mind where’s your past, to what direction would you point …  And your future, what direction would you point if I asked your unconscious mind, where’s your future?”  (James 1992). Then, we suggest to the person that they identify a “limiting decision” that they might have at some time made unconsciously – for example that people can never be trusted, or that life will always be a struggle.

Identify and pre-test a limiting choice in your past

“Have you found a limiting decision in your past which might limit you? … if your unconscious mind knew and if you could trust your unconscious mind, and I know you can, to let you know the exact moment to disconnect, which if disconnected would allow you to be at choice regarding this particular goal that you want, to be able to choose to have it. If your unconscious mind knew, could it transport you back to the moment when you made this particular limiting decision, could you go back into the past, and just have your unconscious mind transport you instantly back to that moment…. Glide down into your body at the time you made this limiting decision and I’d like you to notice what emotions are present at that particular time…. Come up out of that memory: It’s okay.”

Preserve Positive Learnings

“I also want you to know that there were certain positive things that you learned from this particular event, and so before we actually delete this limiting decision and the emotions that go with it, I would like to suggest that you preserve all those positive things that you learned from this event in that special place you reserve for all such learnings. And store them in there in a way that they totally support your achievement of this goal or this outcome that you have…. Having done that at the unconscious level, get up above your Time Line again, if you would, and go fifteen minutes before any of the events that led to this particular event. Now there may be a part of you that thinks it is important that you learned something from this event and I agree…. So can you store the learnings sufficiently so that you will be able to let go of those emotions? You can, can you not? And is that part willing to allow you to let go of those emotions now? It is, isn’t it?”

Release the decision, from earlier and higher perspective, and heal

“Now go back before any event that led to this particular event, any event, and turn and look towards now. And as you consider those emotions, now where are those emotions…. So just let go of those emotions. And as you consider those emotions, now where are those emotions?…. Gone…. So just let go of those emotions. And I would like you to also notice the decision, has the decision disappeared also?…. Good.”… “And floating up above your Time Line, I’d like you to imagine over your head now a source of infinite love and healing, and I would like you to imagine that infinite source of love and healing flowing down through the top of your head and out your heart. Allow that energy, remaining infinite, to flow down through the top of your head and out through your heart and allow it to flow into your Time Line, healing the you at all the successive points in your Time Line.”

Return to now

“Come forward to now only as quickly as you allow all of the events between then and now to re-evaluate themselves in the light of your choices of having whatever it is that you want, your choice to have this particular event, this outcome that you have chosen to have. Notice that there were times in the past that you could have been at choice… and this time choose to be at choice…. And when you get to now, come back down into now, organizing your Time Line in the way that is most comfortable for you. And when you are there open your eyes.”

Havening

As you do any of these processes, it also helps to have a “first aid” technique that you can use to calm down your amygdala so that you can make changes comfortably. Havening is an innovative, gentle, and highly effective approach to working with intense emotions and traumatic memories as well as cultivating life-empowering states. We have guided hundreds of psychotherapists actually at online training from the war zones in Ukraine, to use these simple techniques to calm down, most commonly estimating that their subjective units of distress (1-10) drop from around 8-10 down to 0-3, in just ten minutes. The Havening Techniques® engage your biological system to permanently heal, restore and empower your mind and body, and can be used for: Trauma reprocessing, State and stress management, and Wellbeing and resilience enhancement. Medical Doctor Ronald Ruden and Dentist/Hypnotherapist Steven Ruden, who developed the model, have worked to ground the techniques in neuroscience. 

In Havening, the conscious mind is given other tasks while the body is experiencing calming touch (stroking the arms, shoulders and face), which “depotentiates” the brain’s panic centre (Amygdala), making this a “psycho-sensory technique”. 2015 research in Health Science Journal showed  “The single-session of the Havening intervention resulted in improved scores on the PHQ-9 (depression), GAD-7 (anxiety) and the WSAS (social stress) scales, and improvements were sustained over time.” (Thandi et alia, 2015). In 2022, in research at Nottingham Trent University, a single Havening session reduced higher frequency gamma brainwave activity and clients reported lasting stress reduction (Sumich et alia, 2022).

While a skilled Havening Practitioner is recommended for guiding someone through the processes for healing traumatic events using more advanced Havening Techniques®, self-havening is a safe, easy to learn set of first aid techniques for emotions brought on by specific events. The basic Self Havening touches have the person move their hands at 3-5 cms per second, and involve strokes of the cheeks, shoulders, and hands, which research had showed were the most effective skin areas to access this calming response from (Harper, 2012). “Sensory input creates a remarkable increase in the power of the low-frequency portion of the electroencephalogram (EEG) spectrum. Glutamate receptors on synapses that mediate a fear memory in attention during exposure therapy are depotentiated by these powerful waves of neuronal firings, resulting in disruption of the [traumatic] memory network.” The Havening Practitioner can do these touches for the client or have them do the strokes themselves.

The Practitioner may also ask the person to do various distracting cognitive tasks at the same time, so their conscious mind allows the amygdala to calm down. Aside from distractions the client may also use affirmations, roleplay, or future focusing questions (“iffirmations” – developed from Burgess, 2012). Lycia de Voogd and Erno Hermans show that such tasks distract the “executive control network” from reactivating the amygdala, and allow the amygdala to calm down. “It has been noted that any cognitively demanding task that activates executive control network may downregulate the amygdala, including a standard working memory task. … This finding may have consequences for the interpretation of the underlying mechanism of cognitive reappraisal: amygdala downregulation may be related to the cognitively demanding nature of reappraisal and not per se by the act of the reappraisal itself. Moreover, it raises the possibility of applying working memory tasks in clinical settings as an alternative emotion regulation strategy…. When participants perform a standard n-back working memory paradigm while simultaneously undergoing a threat conditioning paradigm, conditioned responses have been shown to be reduced” (de Voogd and Hermans, 2022). These simple tasks reviewed in their studies included things such as identifying letters, and counting in unusual sequences.

Kate Truitt (2022, p. 17-18) guides readers through the self-havening process itself: “Let’s go through the mechanics of how the practice works:

1. The first touch involves the simple motion of gently rubbing the palms of your hands together as if you are washing them.
2. The second touch involves giving yourself a nice, soothing hug. To do so, start with your arms crossed, with your hands at your shoulders, and then move them down slowly and repeatedly over your upper arms to your elbows.
3. The third touch is a motion similar to what you might do when you are wiping away a tear or receiving a facial massage. Start with your hands together over your nose and glide them over your cheeks from the middle outward with your fingers, always smoothly and gently.
4. The fourth touch is similar to the third, but it involves moving your hands over your forehead, just above your eyebrows, with that same inward-to-outward motion.

If your motions seem a little disjointed, try doing it backward from the order I explained with five repetitions of each touch—first with the forehead five times, then move down to your cheeks, then go to your shoulders, and then end with your hands. Then go back to the top and start again. Sometimes people will notice they have a “sweet spot”—a type of self-havening touch that feels best for their mind and body. For others, their preferred type of touch may vary across situations. For example, after a particularly long day, I find that the forehead touch brings the greatest calm, but when I’m having fitful sleep, arm havening is my natural go-to.

As you’re practicing these motions, this is a wonderful opportunity to once again engage your insula [an area of the brain that cross-references body and mind] and practice interoception—deepening your relationship with your body. Turn your attention inward and notice what forms of touch you like. You can even let your natural responses to stress or anxiety guide you. For example, if you have a tendency to wring your hands or pick your nails, you might find that palm havening is a delightful alternative. Or if you tend to experience forehead or jaw tension, you might find that face havening is just what you need to soothe away the tension. The most important part of the self-havening touch experience is to lovingly connect and attend to you. After all, this whole journey is about you.”

Family therapist Virginia Satir famously used Havening-style touch continuously as she worked with clients, and taught them to do the same. On her videos, her stroking clients’ hands as they dealt with challenging emotional issues comes as a shock to many modern therapists. Steve Andreas refers to this in his study of her work “Virginia insisted on using touch to amplify any important positive communication or new learning and thus to consolidate change….In her videotape “Of Rocks and Flowers” (1983), Virginia works with a blended family with a history of severe physical abuse on both sides. In a moving segment in which she interacts only with the two young children, she has them touch her face gently, reciprocates, and then asks them if they would like to do the same with their parents. Then she brings the parents back in and patiently coaches both the children and the parents, suggesting that the children initiate this kind of contact several times a day.” (Andreas, 1991, p 37)

Transcendence

The Presuppositions Behind Transcendence

In this book we have already explored many therapeutic metaphors for healing our responses to social situations. This last section presents what we believe is the most important process of all these. It uses an individual challenge as a doorway to heal society, space and time in one vast process. The understanding of mental space implicit in Social Panorama and Time Line is taken here to its logical conclusion. Like many of the processes that Lucas Derks, Tad James and others in the NLP field developed, it is based on the two fundamental idea of NLP:

• The map of the world you have inside is not the same as the world. The map you have can be expanded to create a map which more usefully helps you find what you want, showing hidden connections and fresh paths. Inside you is the whole world, and the map is the key that unlocks it.
• Life is systemic, meaning that events are not separate things, but understandable in relation to the social, temporal and spatial systems that they occur in. When you understand the whole system in which something happens, you have many more choices which you could not have had when you didn’t know the whole system. Blame makes no sense inside a system, because blame is pretending that a part of the system is autonomous and entirely independent, and it is not.

We are going to introduce you to this new process, which “came to” Julia at the time we were thinking about this whole process of changing the world and healing collective trauma. In this process we will begin with a specific challenge that you have, in a specific situation, perhaps the way you respond emotionally, or perhaps the way you almost compulsively act and think in that situation. To heal that, we will expand the sphere within which we examine that event in nine waves of change. At each step, there are some fundamentals of our approach that we need to remember. They are beautifully described by our friend Steve Andreas (1935-2018), who studied and “modelled” them in the work of family therapist Virginia Satir. Steve especially emphasises the way that “Virginia never blamed anyone. She presupposed that hurtful or destructive behaviour was simply a result of limited opportunities to learn how to respond more positively.” (Andreas, 1991, p. 5).

A Note About Internal Guides: In the Social Panorama model, above, we discussed the idea that in many cultures people embody their resourceful feelings, values and guidelines for action in one or more spiritual guides, who occupy a position in their “spiritual panorama”. At the beginning of this process we ask people to relax and enter a state where they can be aware without needing to blame or justify. To do this it may be useful in many cultural contexts for people to feel that their Spirit guide, their Animal Spirit Guide, their Ancestor, the Holy Spirit, the light of God or Allah, or some other guide is with them.

Main Stages: The process is based on accessing a series of expanding perspectives which reveal the systems in which a problem behaviour is embedded and thus more fully understandable and changeable, then bringing the sense of expanded awareness through each of these spheres:

• The current behaviour is understandable within an amygdala response set for an interaction early in life.
• The original interaction is understandable within the relationship with a significant authority figure.
• The authority figure’s response is understandable within their family of origin.
• The family of origin’s constraints are understandable within their community or cultural history.
• The community/cultural history is understandable within the countries or civilizations that shaped it.
• The behaviour of those countries or civilizations is understandable within that time in history.
• The time in history is understandable within the context of humanity and its longer history.
• Humanity is understandable within the biosphere of earth.
• The earth is understandable within the cosmos itself.

Earliest time: The first thing to understand about context is that most of our behaviours (emotional reactions, self-talk, knee-jerk or compulsive behaviours) which we disapprove of, come from an earlier context, where they had an entirely different meaning. Obviously, this includes phobias that emerged after being bitten by a dog at an early age, for example. But even social behaviours that don’t seem harmful at the time may later seem “regrettable”. When I was a child, I often bought a kind of ice-cream bar called an “Eskimo pie”. I repeatedly referred to the indigenous people of Northern Canada by this name. The Canadian Encyclopaedia explains, “The word Eskimo is an offensive term that has been used historically to describe the Inuit.” It apparently meant either “eaters of raw meat” or “one who laces snowshoes”. “Inuit is the standard endonym (a name a group uses to describe itself) for Inuit…. The “Eskimo Pie,” an ice cream bar dipped in chocolate, exploded in popularity in the United States in 1922, the same year the groundbreaking documentary “Nanook of the North” was released. The frozen treat is still sold in the United States. Amid backlash, it was announced in 2020 that the product’s name would be changed.” So now you know, and that changes the meaning of the word. And you can forgive that part of your brain if it automatically was triggered to say the old term, because it was a habit created at an earlier time (Historica Canada, 2023)

A Note About Parts: In this process we begin with a situation where the person feels “not at peace with themselves”. This is an experience of internal conflict, where perhaps one “part” of you has a certain emotional or behavioural response and another part of you doesn’t approve or enjoy that. It is our experience that such internal conflicts parallel actual conflicts that happened at earlier times. The template may come from a conflict where someone else disagreed with your behaviour, or from observing a conflict between other people. Often, but not always, the others involved are parental authority figures from early in life.

NLP uses the word “part” referring to any neural network in the brain with enough functional autonomy to run its strategies without control by the rest of the brain. In that sense there is a “part” of your brain that knows how to walk, or to ride a bicycle, or to play a piano, or to tie a necktie. You have a network of nerve cells that run the activity and, once you practice enough, can do it without you having to “supervise”. If you can perform these tasks efficiently, and you try to think consciously about the strategies you use, you may realise you no longer do them consciously. That works fine. However, if you have had a “traumatic experience” you may find that other strategies also run unconsciously when you are reminded of that original experience: biting your nails, drinking alcohol, comfort eating, running away from a scary situation, experiencing “panic” … these are also indications of a neural network running on its own (Van der Kolk, 1994). In this process we are starting with something that a “part” of the person does, and that they want to change.

Parent or other significant figure: In one of the most powerful processes Steve Andreas developed (a process which we studied with him at a conference in Guadalajara, Mexico in October 2008) Steve explains how it was possible for Virginia Satir to respond to clients’ stories without blame. Virginia understood, he said, that behaviours always can be better understood by expanding the scope out to see the system to which the behaviour is a response. Similarly, when Steve was dealing with a client’s internal conflict, where a person has a blaming internal voice, he would ask them to pay attention to the voice, firstly to find out who taught the person to speak to themselves like that, where and when that voice was developed, and what was happening before and after. “Knowing who is speaking provides a wealth of background information about the underlying attitudes and perceptions, biases, and limitations. Where this occurred provides additional context, an important factor in creating meaning. When this occurred, and what happened before and after that, expands what you are able to notice. What else was happening at the time the words were said provides a fuller understanding, and the question how reveals the actions that were going on at the time between all the who’s and the what’s. All of this provides more of the big picture in both time and space.” (Andreas, 2014, p. 4) We start from the presupposition that your brain had to have some reason for creating a response that you now disapprove of, and that involved some interaction with someone outside you. It didn’t just happen inside.

Extended Family: In Virginia Satir’s psychodramatic family therapy work, she then expanded the frame even further to show how, for example, a parent’s actions and words early in life were a reflection of their own experience in the larger extended family. Speaking to her client Linda, in a training group session that Virginia titled “Forgiving parents”, Virginia says “You knew about your mother’s heart…. She couldn’t express what was in her heart because, you said, of her upbringing…. Her upbringing is composed of all of these people.” Satir then has Linda place group members who are present in a kind of family sculpture representing the family that Linda’s mother grew up in, confirming that her grandfather “was the big ‘pasha’ in this group” ruling her mother with violence. When Linda looks at this she says “Well, I felt really sad, and a lot of sympathy for my mother.” (Andreas, 1991, p. 112, 114). In fact, Satir expands the frame even further by discussing how each person in that extended family was just trying to be “a good Catholic” and was responding to Italian American cultural rules. This is what changes Linda’s understanding of how to effectively relate to her own mother (both inside when she feels her mother’s critical voice, and even in the real world). This wider frame that we do things because of the family, the extended family, and the culture that we were brought up in was not just some throw-away positive idea, for Satir. “On at least one occasion she facilitated a group that included both a Nazi death-camp survivor and an ex-guard from the same camp.” (Andreas, 1991, p. 4). In Aotearoa / New Zealand Māori, the closest term to extended family is Whānau.

Community / Culture: In doing this work, Satir offers us a bridge to the kind of understanding that indigenous people have about the origins of their individual trauma. Tom Ball and Theresa O’Nell say “An indigenist model, the authors argue, not only shifts the focus away from the isolated individual with symptoms to the historical individual whose problems arise out of the stresses of colonization but also to an embedding of the person within the coping resources of family, community, and spirituality.” In their work with Native Americans, they came up with the idea of “creating tribal-specific historical trauma genograms that could be used as counseling tools by tribal mental health and alcohol and drug counselors.” They say that the challenges that initiate historical trauma are not merely that an extended family was damaged, but that the entire society which would usually enable healing from that, was destroyed too. “For the Umatilla tribal consultants, the story was told around two central concepts in their culture: tamanwit, the natural law that orders all of life, and tichum, the knowledge that all of life is intertwined.” (Ball and O’Nell, 2016, p. 337, 339, 348).

Country / Civilization: When we attempt to understand how individual communities and “cultures” become the way they are, then the larger notion of “countries” and even “civilizations” are the system in which these are embedded. For example, when the European colonists arrived in North America, they were shocked by the exposure to a vast network of new cultures. Equally, the North Americans were shocked when they discovered what European civilization was like. Universally, when they were able to visit France, England etc., they would report their amazement at the state of things there. David Graeber and David Wengrow collate a number of the resulting written discussions. For example, Kandiaronk (the name means “Muskrat”) was a politician from the Wendat Confederacy, one of the representative governments of indigenous nations in the North East of the continent of North America. He says “I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’…. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money.” He similarly found European religion incomprehensible. “What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021, p. 54-55). We don’t have to agree with Kandiaronk, who clearly saw the Europeans as victims of the most enormous historical trauma, but we can see that from his point of view, having seen this civilization as a system, helped him make sense of (not forgive, perhaps, but understand) the brutal colonization of his people’s lands.

Time In History / Chronotope: We mentioned in the second section of this book that Russian writers sometimes refer to the Stalinist era as a “chronotope” – “a specific and inextricable bundle of time and space whose defining features are despotic arbitrariness, suddenness, shock, attack out of nowhere, disappearance and the blurring of the line between reality and phantasm.” (Hinton and Good, 2016, p. 98). How does the chronotype affect our understanding of traumatic events? The time outframe is summed up in the common French expression “autres temps, autres moeurs” (other times, other customs).  Here’s an example. “In 1958, a student wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., with this question: I am a boy, but I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls. I don’t want my parents to know about me. What can I do? Is there any place where I can go for help? To which King responded: Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. Your reasons for adopting this habit have now been consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed. Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. In order to do this I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you in bringing to the forefront of conscience all of those experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit.”  (Urban, 2023, p. 327-328; Duffy, 2015).

Here, the famous social activist Martin Luther King is recommending that a gay teenager see a psychiatrist to “fix” his homosexuality. How can we “forgive” this cruelty. The LGBTQ website PinkNews does not so much “forgive” as simply point out that we are all enmeshed in our chronotype. It says “ Though Dr King’s response may seem ill-informed by modern standards, his advice to the boy is remarkably calm and polite, given the fears and active scaremongering about gay people at the time.” (Duffy, 2015). Once again, PinkNews is saying it is unhelpful to “blame” a person or a group, and more empowering to understand the system that they are responding to. The very failure of Martin Luther King’s advice also emphasises why we are best not to stop at the first or second level in this Transcendence process. King understands that it will help to outframe the boy’s responses by identifying what experiences in his life story those responses come from, and the circumstances around them. He does not have the awareness to outframe even this and note that the meaning of these experiences and circumstances is dependent on the society and the chronotype they emerge within.

Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” is about a sexual relationship between a 13 year old girl and a 16 year old boy. Such a relationship would be considered abusive today, and the agreement by a church official to marry the two people would be seen as sanctioning child brides. In the England of 1597, this idea of a 13 year old marrying was still surprising (it came from an Italian story from perhaps 100 years earlier, and 16 was actually considered the earliest a girl should give birth), but it was more scandalous rather than proof of a crime. In fact in the play, Juliet’s father says “Younger than she are happy mothers made”, and her mother argues against it “…and too soon marred are those so early made.” (Povey, 2021) That doesn’t mean we need to accept child marriages, or that we are wise to promote the story to modern 13 year olds; but nor does it make sense that the book should be banned. Shakespeares other stories contain other such anachronisms, including the presence of “witches”, who, if convicted, would have been burned at the stake in his time. We can no more expect Shakespeare to stand up against burnings of heretics than we can expect Russians under Stalin to have opposed the show trials. We are all trying to survive given the constraints of our time.

As we mentioned above when looking at the shift in world values over the last 50 years, we can see that civilizations shift their priorities, depending, for example, on how safe life seems. (Ingelhart, 2018). What was acceptable 50 years ago is different now in every country.

Humanity: How long has this been going on? Well, the story of humanity is the story of multiple related species of hominid. There are very few in our lineage left – none who were related to us more closely than bonobos. When we consider the whole history of humanity, observed through genetics, we see that our species nearly died out at least twice. We can detect this in modern genetics by identifying “founder events” (Tournebize and Moorjani, 2022). “A founder event occurs when small numbers of ancestral individuals give rise to a large fraction of the population. Founder events reduce genetic variation and increase the risk of recessive diseases.” They can be caused by famine, war, plague and climate change. Similar events also occur in other species, and dogs, for example, have had a rough history due to our forced breeding of them. “Most dogs these days have so many more problems than village dogs. Their rates of cancers and congenital diseases are pretty high. And that’s largely because of these very severe founder events in their history during breed formation.” Explains Priya Moorjani (Sanders, 2022). Sadly, this is true of our species also. Most of the bones of our ancestors just a few million years ago show signs of predation, which is to say that our early ancestors very often ended their life by being eaten by predators (Hart and Sussman, 2005). For the last 70,000 years or so, a remarkably short period of time, our species has produced beautiful art and, according to anthropologist and neuroscientist Brian Hare and science writer Vanessa Woods (mentioned in the first section of this book: Hare and Woods, 2021) we domesticated ourselves by focusing on our emerging superpower – cooperation. Hare and Woods maintain that this is the deeper story behind our species spread, a story which is far from complete.

The Biosphere: By the time we are thinking of our species, most people being guided through this process will be beginning to accept the frame of blameless shifting to wider systems. Certainly, life, which spans this planet and, as we noted at the start of the book, has been here for perhaps a billion years, is a fragile and beautiful experience to be part of. Knowing that life has survived all the challenges of the mass extinctions (such as the last one which exterminated the large dinosaurs), to continuously blossom back, is in itself a moving experience. More and more, as we study biology, we discover that humanity cannot be understood alone. The attempt to do so, Lynn Margulis suggests, is due merely to our “linguistic, national, regional and generational impediments to perception. Like those of everyone else, the scientist’s hidden assumptions affect his or her behaviour, unwittingly directing thought.” (Margulis, 1999, p. 3)  Most of the living cells in our body are not human, but bacterial, and the microbiome contributes significantly to the production of essential chemistry in our body, such as neurotransmitters (Sender et alia, 2016). Margulis is the microbiologist who first realized that inside every cell in our body, the mitochondria are separate bacteria-like organisms which symbiotically give us energy. She follows a long tradition of scientists stretching from Piotr Kropotkin in 19^th century Russia (“Mutual Aid”), through James Lovelock in 20^th century America (“Gaia Hypothesis”); scientists who have been trying to shift our view of nature from the idea of a war of all against all, to a new model of vast cooperative symbiosis. There is not so much a tree of life, or a “great chain of being”, she explains, as a web, a network, where animals and plants share their genes with each other in an intricate co-evolution. So much DNA is shared amongst bacteria, for example, she says that it is actually incorrect to say that bacteria have separate species. All trees are linked together in a vast planet-wide web of over 300 different fungal symbionts, which transfer information and nourishment from tree to tree. This network of lifeforms makes an absurdity of the idea that there could be “higher life forms” and “lower life forms”. In this network, “We Homo sapiens sapiens and our primate relations are not special, just recent: we are newcomers on the evolutionary stage. Human similarities to other life forms are far more striking than the differences. Our  deep connections, over vast geological periods, should inspire awe.” (Margulis, 1999, p 3-4)

The Cosmos: And, beyond even “Gaia”, beyond the one life that lives on and interpenetrates earth, as we mentioned at the start, the universe itself forms a vast unity, which created even the earth and the stars. Our tiny galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least 100 trillion stars, and there are billions of such galaxies extending across the known universe in huge superclusters – our local one is known as Laniakea and holds over 100,000 galaxies in a vast silk-like structure whose size defies imagination (Plumer, 2015). We are only now understanding that the universe is not a random explosion of material, but a greater system itself, organized in multiple layers of beauty. Whether this system is conscious as a whole (as Quantum Physics developer Erwin Schrödinger thought), certainly it creates, again and again, the opportunities for consciousness, and in that sense we are the universe looking out at itself in wonder. For Schrödinger, this truth was expressed in terms of the Indian philosophy of Vedanta.  “This is what Brahman expresses with the holy, mystical, and yet actually so clear and simple formula “Tat Twam Asi -This Thou Art” or also with such words as “I am in the East and in the West, I am below and I am above, I am this entire world”.’ This is not meant in Spinoza’s pantheistic sense, that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal infinite being, since then the old question would arise, what piece are you? ‘No, as inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason: you – and every other conscious being taken in itself – you are all in all … it is a vision of this truth that forms the basis of every morally valuable activity.’” (Quoted in Moore, p. 172).

Another way of discussing the same idea is Gareth Cook’s panpsychism, mentioned at the start of this book. “Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside,” in terms of its behavior. But matter “from the inside”—i.e., in terms of its intrinsic nature—is constituted of forms of consciousness.” (Cook, 2020). Of course a more traditional way is to say “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Christian Bible, New International Version, John 1: 1-5). Is it such heresy to say that this quote and Gareth Cook’s quote are using different metaphors for the same idea?

Even putting aside the mystery of Tat tvam asi, of consciousness, of “the word”, the comment of the more sceptical cosmologist Carl Sagan remain true. In his 1980 television series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”, he famously summarised much of his previous writing by saying “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” In his beautiful Science Fiction story of first contact with alien life (“Contact”) he sums up his final learning as an astrophysicist even clearer: “She had been fierce in debunking the creation myths of others, and oblivious to the lie at the core of her own. She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” (Sagan, 1997, p 371). In the end of our journey, climbing beyond system after system, this is our message as well. For creatures like us, there can be no blaming; because blaming stops this other thing emerging, and that other is the meaning of it all: love.

Having given you some of the theoretical background of the new process, in the next section Julia will tell you her experience of how this process emerged.

How the Process “Emerged”? (from Julia)

On the day when this process emerged, I (Julia) got distressed thinking that I accidentally smudged Lily plant substance over our cat Shaman. Followed by a Google search for “Cats and lilies”, the distress turned into an intense sense of guilt and devastation. After taking a shower with the cat, to clean it (if you can avoid this experience – do!), I noticed that the adrenaline left my body.  Still distressed, I decided to guide myself through a process to get into a more resourceful state. I have an extensive range of self-help tools to choose from. Shamanic Journey is one of them. I lay down, connected with my Shamanic guides, and asked them for help and guidance.

I had a sense of firstly being cleared of “sticky energies” and standing like a vulnerable featherless just born bird-ling. Intriguingly, there was a strong smell of blood present, which pointed my mind to the time of my birth.

I know from my mum that at my birth the medical personnel got me out, ensured I was breathing, put me in the cot, and attended to my mum. For a few hours I was by myself, adding to my mum’s dismay with non-stop crying, while her physical body was being mended. In my life I often felt guilt about “hurting others” (as in “hurting my mum at birth”). But the intensity of this feeling never quite made sense to me. It was visceral and stubborn to process. It was the same sense of guilt of hurting someone inadvertently – especially inadvertently – as I felt about “hurting” our cat.

Leading up to this day, Richard and I had talked about collective trauma and cultural experience of guilt as he had been studying this topic. It made sense to me that this guilt could be cultural and epigenetic even, which could explain its tenacity.

So, in my mind I was at my birth. No one was attending to the new-born me, who seemed abandoned and exiled.

Shamanic Guides: “Connect with her”.

Me: “No. I have no connection with her. She smells, there is blood and stuff all over. I don’t like it. I do not feel any closeness whatsoever to this new-born person. No.” Prominent smell of blood endures.

After years of self-development work I would expect myself to feel unconditional love to the new-born me. Instead I felt revolted; with the sense of separation, devastation, loneliness, i.e. ultimately “abandoned” using a modern-day term.

She (me) was disconnected. Mother was disconnected from her. Then a thought occurred “My mother is distressed on her own accord because of her relationship with my father”.

“Wait, what if there is an even larger context here? Family”.

We all lived together (my parents and grandparents, brother and I, cat and a tortoise). At the family level – things were not perfect either. Everyone had some distress – mum and dad, mum and her mum, dad and mum’s mum, mum and dad’s mum, and so on.

“What is an even larger context? Community.

Larger? Culture.

Larger? Country (former Soviet Union).

Larger? Period of time in history.

Larger? Humanity.

Larger? The planet.

Larger? The Cosmos.”

I was going through each level, observing how each might have been affecting and contributing to the level before, with curiosity of a neutral observer.

At the Cosmos level everything became expansive and meaningless as in “free-of-meaning”, free of a particular frame or understanding. It felt open, vast, free, neutral, calm, light, energy, awareness, presence, being, spirit. The vastness washed through any emotional and somatic unease, the boundaries of me melted away, and I felt one with Spirit, Cosmos.

I started the Journey back with Spirit going through all layers.

Planet – it is OK.

Humanity – seeing humanity at peace; being inside the circle of humanity but observing it as if from the centre of a centrifuge. I am calm, at peace, and humanity is at peace, distanced.

Period of time in history – this is just a part of a larger scope.

Country – looking at the country, I am centred and at peace.

Culture – I am at peace, part of the Cosmos, Spirit, looking at culture.

Community – I am inside the community but bigger than it somehow, looking from the centre of it (like from inside a donut). 

My larger family – recognising the individual hardships but not being engulfed, affected by them; still looking from inside at the family circle that is around me and outside of me.

My immediate family – mum and dad – are being together, OK with each other, dad is supporting mum while she is giving birth, waiting in the hospital (I re-wrote this part of the story in my mind because “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood”). 

Me and mum – mum is no longer distressed, whole. There is enough of mum for me because she is enough, whole in herself.

In reality my birth was fast and hard; and – my Mum healed, I was OK, there has been ongoing connection, closeness, and warmth.

Now in my mind I could take the new-born me into my arms and hold her to my body so that she felt my body warmth and contact right after her birth. She needed warmth and contact; contact is connection, the opposite of abandonment.

Checking on that initial vulnerable feeling, I now felt like an intricate energetic matrix was going through my body, creating an electro-magnetic structure of inner strength. I am my own being connected with the energy of Cosmos, maintaining my energetic integrity. Everyone – even our cat – is their own being connected with the Cosmos, maintaining their own energetic structural integrity.

My distress about what happened that morning changed into a calm sense of “Yeah, it’s possible that I accidentally contaminated his fur. If I did, I truly did not know. It was an accident, if it even happened at all.”

I completed the Journey with gratitude and gifts to my Shamanic Guides.

Returning back to being awake, I thought “Huh, this is new. What is this process? I don’t know it. I’ve not experienced it before. I wonder if anyone has it. Need to talk with Richard, he will know for sure.”

Curiously, I discovered that during the entire time I was Journeying, Richard was thinking about writing his new book about collective trauma. He was very excited to tell me about it. I interrupted “Before you say anything, let me tell you what just happened.” Richard listened and said “This is it! This is The Process! I’ve been thinking for a while about what new process could combine various elements in my new book, that I could then run as a training. This is IT!” 

I did not know that Richard was looking for a new process and the he wanted to write a book to convert into a new training. I knew that he was reading about collective trauma and guilt. 

Trying to explain how this synchronicity occurred, I might think that I tapped into Richard’s thinking. I often joke “You are thinking too loud! I can hear you thoughts.”

Logically, this process is an amalgamation of elements from several techniques: Shamanic work (working with guides and Journeying), Aligning Neurological Levels the way Richard teaches it (connecting with the Energy of the Universe), The Double Handshake process as Richard guides people through it (“we are all made of star dust, cosmos”), Havening (the first time the pattern/feeling occurred), Core Transformation (parts), Transforming Troublesome Voices (scope). In reality this Journey experience happened effortlessly, without preconceived agenda or plan, or brainstorming, or trying to organise the steps. It came out of asking my Shamanic guides to help and guide me. In that sense I consider it to be a gift. 

The Transcendence Process: An Example

How do we use these nine layers of system in helping a person heal? Before we list the steps as instructions for you to use, here is the transcript of the first time Julia guided me through the process. My thoughts are [italicized in square brackets].

Julia: You can relax and you can close your eyes if you like. And think of a situation you want to change, where you are not quite at peace with yourself, it might be an emotional feeling you have, overwhelmed by a certain emotional experience. Let me know once you have something.

Richard: OK [I thought of an uncertainty I had about whether a particular training was going ahead and the frustration of not being able to plan for the next two weeks]

Julia: Just notice for yourself how you experience it inside, notice your internal experience, and give it an intensity from 0 to 10, 10 being the most intense,

Richard: Maybe 4 or 5.

Julia: And also if you are working with any guides, like shamanic guides, you might invite them to be with you as well. And now again thinking about this experience, notice how this aspect of you or a “part” might have been created, because you didn’t generate it consciously, how it came into being. Notice what emotional feeling you experience towards it. And check how old it is, which means maybe how old you would have been when it first appeared.

Richard: Four, four years old. [I remembered a time my parents were arguing about whether my father’s business was going to succeed, whether he was making the right decisions]

Julia: Mmm. Thank you. And now have a check internally how this inner part might in some way parallel a conflict you might have had earlier in your life, with a parent or a caregiver, or you might have observed them having a conflict between themselves. And notice these others in the situation: other or others, and have a sense of how they might have brought their own internal limitations into this situation, and therefore contributed to your experience of this situation.

Richard: Yep. [I noticed how my parents had different values and different experiences with money, and how they were each trying to live up to such different ideals]

Julia: And now expand the scope to include the larger, extended family. Notice the unease that might have come with it in interactions between the family members, just at the level of noticing.

Richard: Yep. [I was thinking about how my mother’s family had been employed and my father’s family had been business managers; about how my grandparents had different ideas about what my parents were doing; how my parents both felt under pressure to obey their own parents]

Julia: And now expand the scope to include the community around all of you at that time, and just notice  what you notice. Have a sense of how that community might have been at that time contributing to certain aspects of the unease.

Richard: Yep [I thought about the suburb where my family lived, and how everyone was just starting out raising families, but with so little support, and with mortgages and other stresses]

Julia: Now expand the scope to include the culture, noticing how the culture might have been at that time, and how in some ways the culture might have been also linked , affecting that situation. There is a larger story.

Richard: Yep. [I thought about the two different cultures my parents had come from, one valuing working class solidarity and physical labour, and one, including Roma/Gypsy experience, valuing creativity and flexibility]

Julia: And now expand the scope to include the country and in the same way observe what you observe, notice what you notice.

Richard: Yep. [I was thinking about colonial New Zealand: about the do-it-yourself ethic of colonial society and the sense of the “British Empire” in the background]

Julia: And now notice what time in history it is, and understand that it is part of this larger story, and how that might be playing a certain role. What is happening at the time.

Richard: Yep, yep. [The 1950s boom time with the peak of the “Pleasantville” home-maker fantasy]

Julia: And now expand the scope to humanity itself.

Richard: Hmm-hmm. [such a long story of migrations and conflicts and struggles to create “a living”. I felt a kind of collective compassion]

Julia: And now expand the scope to include the entire planet.

Richard: (Nods) [I felt a sense of the beauty of it]

Julia: And now expand to the cosmos itself, so that your awareness expands completely. And at this level, using whatever words feel right for you – and you can choose the word – allow spirit, cosmic expansiveness, energy, awareness to be fully present, almost expanding your awareness to the cosmic limitlessness, and allow yourself to relax into the existence itself, melting almost, going beyond the bounds of your physical body, to experience yourself as one with all.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [everything became very still, and silent, and peaceful]

Julia: And as you experience this fully, bring this larger awareness back into the planet itself, and notice how it transforms your understanding or perception of the planet.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [I saw the planet as part of that great vastness]

Julia: And experiencing this at every level of your being, bring it, allow it to go through humanity, noticing how it transforms your understanding or perception of humanity’s place there.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [I had a sense of life eventually finding its way, of humanity like the other life forms before and after it]

Julia: And bring this expansive awareness into the level of the time in history and notice how it transforms your understanding or perception of that time.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [The time in history felt small, almost as if people were just learning basic things and didn’t know what would be possible yet]

Julia: And bring this expansive awareness to the level of the country and notice how it transforms your understanding or perception of that.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [It felt unimportant]

Julia: And bring this expansive awareness into the culture, again noticing how it transforms your understanding or perception of hat culture.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [The separate cultures I grew up in felt like different flowers in a garden]

Julia: And allow this expansive awareness to come with you to the level of the larger family or whanau, and notice how it transforms your understanding or perception of that extended family.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [Again I felt compassion]

Julia: And now allow this expansive awareness come into the interaction itself, where we started from. And now allow this expansive awareness to be with you and that other person or those other people, noticing how it might transform your understanding or perception of that situation, when you have this expansive awareness.

Richard: [And more compassion]

Julia: And now allow it to be in that original situation where you started, noticing how it might transform your experience of yourself in it, your experience of that aspect of that experience.

Richard: Mmm-hmm. [The situation felt more clearly “back there”, a small part of a much bigger story]

Julia: And then just noticing what you notice at the time, just bringing yourself back, and checking how it might have changed things for you from what was originally there when we began. How was that. Tell me what was like.

Richard: Well I was using the situation of worrying about whether these courses will run, and feeling uncertain about what things will happen this year and what won’t, and remembering how my mother and father would argue about whether my father’s business would succeed when he was, you know when I was very young.

Julia: Mmm-hmm, four.

Richard: Yeah, but it felt so relaxed that I found myself just kind of drifting into… you know, like almost asleep, relaxed kind of, and at several times coming back, but it was really good.

Julia: Mmmm, and when you’re more consciously checking on what it is like right now, how does it feel different?

Richard: Oh, it feels completely relaxed and like almost it has no sense of …

Julia: Meaning?

Richard: …being related to that other situation, and it also feel like I can just be curious about what is happening, rather than have some backlog of worry about it

Julia: Oh, Wow. Great.

The Transcendence Process: Steps

• Preparation

For the person guiding this process, it is important to be in a calm and compassionate state. Your own attitude is easily picked up by the experiencer. Remember that you and this person are part of one system, you share the same ancestry in deep history, and the future of humanity is in the guardianship of both of you together. Notice their breathing and body position, and synchronize with them. Imagine your own connection to cosmic awareness and gently put aside any other thoughts.

• Find a Starting Place

 You can relax and take a breath in, and enjoy a long exhale, and you can close your eyes if you like…. And think of a situation you want to change your response to, where you are not quite at peace with yourself, it might be an emotional feeling you have, a situation where you are overwhelmed by a certain emotional experience. Let me know once you have something.

• Scaling Question: 1-10

Notice for yourself how you experience it inside, notice the internal experience of it, and give it an intensity from 0 to 10, 10 being the most intense.

• Identify Original Earlier Situation

And also if you are working with any guides, like shamanic guides, you might invite them to be with you as well. And now again thinking about this experience, notice how this aspect of you or a “part” might have been created, because you didn’t generate it consciously, how it came into being. Notice what emotional feeling you experience towards it. And check how old it is, which means maybe how old you would have been when it first appeared.

• Others in the Original Situation

And now have a check internally how this inner part might in some way parallel a conflict you might have had earlier in your life, with a parent or a caregiver, or you might have observed them having a conflict between themselves. And notice these others in the situation: other or others, and have a sense of how they might have brought their own internal limitations into this situation, and therefore contributed to your experience of this situation. You are not blaming or justifying, just noticing with understanding of yourself and others.

•  Expanded Family / Whānau

And now expand the scope to include the larger, extended family. Who else was around or was influencing the people in that original experience? Who had influenced them previously? What values, beliefs, and challenges did those people focus on? Notice the unease that might have come with it in interactions between the family members, just at the level of noticing. Be aware of how this wider family affects the others in the original situation.

• Community

And now expand the scope to include the community around all of you at that time, and just notice  what you notice. Have a sense of how that local community might have been at that time contributing to certain aspects of the unease. How do people in that community go about their daily life, and what other challenges, conflicts, values and beliefs may influence things at this level. Notice how the community around them influences your extended family.

• Culture

Now expand the scope to include the culture, noticing how any culture or cultures that these people are immersed in might have been at that time, and how in some ways the culture might have been also linked, affecting that situation. Again, without criticising or justifying, just notice any challenges, conflicts, beliefs, values and traumatic experiences that may have happened at this level. Notice how different cultural values shape life in each community. There is a larger story.

(For some people, either community or culture may not make sense as a category, and for some people these will be the same. For some people their faith may also be their culture).

• Country

And now expand the scope to include the country and in the same way, notice what you notice. Continue to be careful neither to blame or to justify, and just observe in what way this larger system may influence or shape the experiences you were thinking about. How decisions at the national level may shape the choices of cultures and communities.

• Time in History

And now notice what time in history it is, and understand that it is part of this larger story, and how that might be playing a certain role. What is happening at the time, what values and beliefs are common, what choices are not there or are there, what technology is emerging, what world events are significant in people’s minds, that are unique to that time. Notice how those larger world-wide events shape the country and its communities.

• Humanity

And now expand the scope to humanity itself. Realise that this time in history is part of the greater story of humanity appearing and spreading across the planet, of civilization emerging, of the whole story of history. That greater story shapes the particular time.

• The Planet

And now expand the scope to include the entire planet. Be aware that this story of humanity is part of the larger story of the planet forming, and of life spreading across it, interconnected and ever changing.

• The Cosmos

And now expand to the cosmos itself, so that your awareness expands completely to cover all of existence. And at this level, find whatever words feel right for you – and you can choose the word – allow spirit, cosmic expansiveness, energy, light, awareness, to be fully present, almost expanding your awareness to the cosmic limitlessness, and allow yourself to relax into existence yourself, melting almost, going beyond the bounds of your physical body, to experience yourself as one with all. You are the cosmos experiencing itself.

• Returning With That Awareness

And as you experience this fully, allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of the planet.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of humanity.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of that time in history.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of the country.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of the culture or cultures.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of that extended family or whanau.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of the interaction itself, where we started from.
And allow this expansive awareness to transform your understanding or perception of the interaction earlier in your life itself. Allow this expansive awareness to be with you and that other person or those other people, noticing how it might transform your understanding or perception of that situation.
And now allow this expansive awareness to be in that original situation  in your current life, where you started, noticing how it might transform your understanding or perception of your experience in it.

• Checking What Has Changed

And then just noticing what you notice at the time, bringing yourself back, and checking how it might have changed things for you from what was originally there when you started. How was that? And when you’re more consciously checking on what it is like right now, how does it feel different? On that intensity scale of 1-10, how does this feel now? And if you imagine a time in the future, when in the past that would have been a challenge, what is it like to think of that now?

The Transcendence Process: Summary

1. Preparation: Calm, Compassion and Presence
2. Identify the issue in current life.
3. Scaling Question: 1-10
4. Identify Original Earlier Situation. Emotion? How old?
5. Expand Scope to Others in the Original Situation and notice how that affects the earlier situation.
6. Expand Scope to Extended Family / Whānau…
7. Expand Scope to Community…
8. Expand Scope to Culture … 
9. Expand Scope to Country…
10. Expand Scope to Time in History…
11. Expand Scope to Humanity …
12. Expand Scope to The Planet…
13. Expand Scope to The Cosmos, allow expansive awareness to be present.
14. Returning Allowing That Expansive Awareness to transform your understanding or perception of: planet, humanity, time in history, country, culture, community, extended family, others in earlier situation, you there and in current situation.
15. Checking What Has Changed

Key Points

• Human beings are naturally programmed with perceptual biases such as confirmation bias and the framing effect, coded in submodality distinctions in each sensory area in the brain.
• Humans are also programmed with interactional biases such as groupthink and the Hawthorn effect,  coded as rapport and synchronization processes using the mirror neurons in the brain.
• Humans have many optional biases which often vary from culture to culture, such as individualism vs collectivism.
• Over times of global safety. collective values have been shifting towards a bias for self-expression, and secular beliefs; though as social stress builds, they shift back towards traditional beliefs and security, and primal conspiracy theories such as blood libel and fear of sexual differences drive the shift towards totalitarianism.
• When attempting to influence someone away from unhelpful beliefs, rather than using facts, it is more successful to use metaphorical stories which establish rapport, have engaging sensory detail, teach specific behaviours and reach a positive conclusion.
• It is useful to asses ones use of biases to check what you want to change.
• One of the key ways to assist change in social attitudes is to access the social and time codings in the hippocampus. The Social panorama shows us that changing the place, size and other submodalities of social representations, for example merging conflicting groups, in your mind may assist in creating resolution externally.
• By identifying a person’s coding for past and future, and the connection via their “Time Line” it is also possible to find root cause events for unhelpful decisions, preserve positive learnings and from before and up above the event let go of the negative emotions and limiting decisions.
• Change processes can be enhanced by the use of self-havening, which involves rhythmic stroking of hands, shoulders and face while applying cognitive distraction techniques, allowing the depotentiation of the amygdala.
• Transcendence. In this process, you identify a cause event in the early life, where a traumatic conflict was either observed or experienced. You then identify that the inner conflict is understandable only by increasing the scope to understand the dilemma of the other person or people in the original event, of the extended family, of the community, of the culture, of the country, of the time in history, of humanity, of the biosphere, and then of the cosmos itself. You then return with that expansive cosmos-wide awareness through each level and notice how that changes even the original situation.

Bibliography

• Ahmad, K.Z. 2011, “The New Age Complimenting the Digital Age: Using Hypnosis, NLP and Time Line Therapy™ Techniques to Reduce Negative Emotions among People Involved with Information Technology” Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 200974, Journal of Organizational Knowledge Management, 8 pages, DOI: 10.5171/2011.200974
• Aksentijevic, A., Brandt, K.R. Tsakanikos, E. and Thorpe, M.J.A., 2019,  “It takes me back: The mnemonic time-travel effect” Cognition, Volume 182, January 2019, Pages 242-250
• Allebach, N. (2020) “How America Became the Land of Conspiracy Theories” September 19, 2020 https://medium.com/discourse/how-america-became-the-land-of-conspiracy-theories-7c8b0353c667
• American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2022, “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Text Revision DSM-5-TR™” American Psychiatric Association Publishing, Washington DC
• Andreas, C. and Andreas, T. 1994, “Core Transformation” Real People Press, Moab
• Andreas, S. 1991, “Virginia Satir: The Patterns of Her Magic” Science and Behaviour books, Cupertino
• Andreas, S. 2014, “More Transforming Negative Self Talk: Practical Effective Exercises” W.W. Norton and Company, New York
• Andreas, S. and Andreas, C. 1987, “Change Your Mind And Keep The Change” Real People Press, Moab, Utah
• Ash, A., Palmisano, S., & Kim, J. (2011). “Vection in depth during consistent and inconsistent multisensory stimulation”. Perception, 40, 155–174.
• Augoustinos, M. and Innes, J.M. (1990). “Towards an integration of social representations and social schema theory.” British Journal of Social Psychology 29: 213-231.
• Ball, T. and O’Nell, T.D. “Square Pegs and Round Holes: Understanding Historical Trauma in Two Native American Communities” p. 334-358 in Hinton, D.E. and Good, B.J. eds 2016 “Culture and PTSD (The Ethnography of Political Violence)” . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 
• Bandler, R. 1985, “Using Your Brain For A Change” Real People Press, Moab, Utah, 1985
• Bender, A., & Beller, S. (2014). “Mapping spatial reference frames onto time: A review of theoretical accounts and empirical findings”. Cognition, 132, 342–382.
• Blaker, N. & Vugt, M. (2014). The Status-Size Hypothesis: How Cues of Physical Size and Social Status Influence Each Other. 10.1007/978-1-4939-0867-7_6. In Cheng, J.T., Tracy, J.L. and Anderson, C. eds.: “The Psychology of Social Status” (pp.119-137) Edition: 1st, Chapter: 6, Springer
• Bolstad, R. 2002, “RESOLVE: A New Model Of Therapy” Crown House, Bancyfelin, Wales
• Bolstad, R. and Kurusheva, J. 2013 “Outframes” Transformations, Auckland
• Boroditsky, L., & Ramscar, M. (2002). “The roles of body and mind in abstract thought”. Psychological Science, 13, 185–188
• Burgess, T., 2012 “Beliefs and How to Change Them… for Good” SRA Books, Alcester
• Byyny, R.L. 2017 “Cognitive Bias: recognizing and managing our unconscious biases” in Pharos, Winter 2017, online at https://www.med.upenn.edu/inclusion-and-diversity/assets/user-content/cognitive-bias.pdf accessed 08/03/2023
• Condon, W. S. (1982) “Cultural Microrhythms” p 53-76 in Davis, M. (ed) Interactional Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behaviour Human Sciences Press, New York
• Cook, G., 2020 “Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?” Scientific American, January 14, 2020 online at www.livescience.com/does-consciousness-pervade-the-universe.html accessed 07/03/2023
• Courtney, A. L. & Meyer, M. L. 2020 “Self-other representation in the social brain reflects social connection”. J. Neurosci. 40, 5616–5627 (2020).
• de Voogd, L. D., & Hermans, E. J. (2022). “Meta-analytic evidence for downregulation of the amygdala during working memory maintenance. Human Brain Mapping”. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25828
• Derks, L. 2000, “Social Panoramas: Changing the unconscious landscape with NLP and psychotherapy” Crown Publishing, Bancyfelin, Wales
• Derks, L. 2018, “Mental Space Psychology: Psychotherapeutic Evidence for a New Paradigm”, Coppelear BV, Nijmegen
• Derks, L.A.C., Oetsch, W.O. and Walker, W. 2016, “Relationships are Constructed from Generalized Unconscious Social Images Kept in Steady Locations in Mental Space” Journal of Experiential Psychotherapy, vol. 19, no 1 (73) March 2016
• Dichgans, J., & Brandt, T. (1978). “Visual-vestibular interaction: Effects on self-motion perception and postural control”. In R. Held, L. W. Leibowitz, & H.-L. Teuber (Eds.). A. Aksentijevic et al. Cognition 182 (2019) 242–250 249 Perception (pp. 755–804). Berlin: Springer.
• Dilts, R., Hallbom, T. and Smith, S. 1990, “Beliefs: Pathways To Health And Wellbeing” Metamorphous, Portland, Oregon
• Dunning D, Balcetis E. 2013, “Wishful Seeing: How Preferences Shape Visual Perception.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2013;22(1):33-37. doi:10.1177/0963721412463693
• Erickson, B.A. (2017) “Milton Erickson’s Rules of Life” Ericksonian Info (https://ericksonian.info/articles/milton-ericksons-rules-of-life/)
• Erickson, M.H. (1980) The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson Vol I (ed Rossi, E.L.) Irvington, New York
• Gottman, J.M. (1999) The Marriage Clinic W.W. Norton and Co., New York,
• Gottman, J.M. and Silver, N. (1999) The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999
• Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. 2021, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Grenny, J. Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., and Switzler, A. 2013. Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, McGraw-Hill, New York
• Hare, B. and Woods, V., 2021  “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity” Random House, New York
• Harper, M. 2012, “Taming the Amygdala: An EEG Analysis of Exposure Therapy for the Traumatized” June 2012, Traumatology 18(2):61 DOI:10.1177/1534765611429082
• Hart, D. and Sussman, R.W. (2005) “Man The Hunted: Primates, Predators,and Human Evolution”. Boulder: Westview Press
• Hartmann, M., & Mast, F. W. (2012). “Moving along the mental time line influences the processing of future related words”. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 1558–1562.
• Hedden, T., Ketay, S., Aron, A., Markus, H.R., Gabrieli, J.D. 2008 “Cultural influences on neural substrates of attentional control”. Psychol Sci. 2008 Jan;19(1):12-7. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02038.x. PMID: 18181784.
• Hinton, D.E. and Good, B.J. eds 2016 “Culture and PTSD (The Ethnography of Political Violence)” . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia .
• Hinton, D.E. and Good, B.J. eds 2016 “Culture and PTSD (The Ethnography of Political Violence)” . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 
• Historica Canada, 2023 “Eskimo” in “The Canadian Encyclopaedia” www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/eskimo accessed 09/03/2023
• Hitler, A. 1939. “Mein Kampf.” Translated by Murphy, J. Archived from the original on 24 July 2008. Retrieved 23 August 2008 – via Project Gutenberg
• Hübl, T. and Avritt, J.J. 2020, “Healing Collective Trauma: a process for integrating our intergenerational and cultural wounds” Sounds True, New York
• Inglehart, R. 2018 “Cultural Evolution: People’s Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World” Cambridge University, Cambridge
• Inglehart, R. and Baker, W.E. 2000 “Modernisation, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values” p 19-51 in American Sociological Review, Volume 65, No 1, February 2000
• James, T.  1992 “Master Practitioner Manual”,  Advanced Neuro Dynamics, Hawaii
• James, T. and Woodsmall, W. 1988 “Time Line Therapy and The Basis Of Personality”, Meta Publications, Cupertino, California
• James, T., 1989, “The Secret of Creating Your Future” Advanced Neuro Dynamics, Honolulu
• Jones, A., McCulloch, G., Marshall, J., Tuhiwai-Smith, L., Hingangaroa-Smith, G.  1990, “Myths and Realities: Schooling in New Zealand”, Dumore Press, Palmerston North
• Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York
• Korzybski, A. (1941, 1994). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (5th ed.). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics.
• Krishnamurti, J., 1972, “You Are The World” Harper & Row, New York
• Lee, B. X. ed. 2017 “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” St Martin’s Press, New York
• Lo, K.D. and Haukamau, C. 2012 “Exploring the Cultural Origins of Differences in Time Orientation between European New Zealanders and Māori” NZJHRM. 2012 Spring. 12(3),105-123.
• Lund, H.1995,  “Asthma Management” p 4-6 in The Time Line Therapy Association Journal, Vol 5, Summer 1995
• Margulis, L. 1999 “The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution” Basic Books, New York
• Mason, P. 2021 “How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance” Penguin books, Harmonsworth
• Masuda, T., and Nisbett, R.E. 2001 “Attending holistically versus analytically: comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans”. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2001 Nov;81(5):922-34. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.81.5.922. PMID: 11708567.
• Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P. C., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & Van de Veerdonk, E. (2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 94(3), 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.3.365
• Maturana, H.R. and Varela, (1992) F.J. The Tree Of Knowledge Shambhala, Boston
• McCarney, R., Warner, J., Iliffe, S., van Haselen, R., Griffin, M., Fisher, P. 2007, “The Hawthorne Effect: a randomised, controlled trial.” BMC Med Res Methodol. 2007 Jul 3;7:30. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-7-30. PMID: 17608932; PMCID: PMC1936999.
• McLeod, S. 2018 ”Solomon Asch – Conformity Experiment” https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html, accessed 5 February 2023
• Miles, L. K., Karpinska, K., Lumsden, J., & Macrae, C. N. (2010). “The meandering mind: Vection and mental time travel.” PLoS One, 5, e10825.
• Miles, L. K., Nind, L. K., & Macrae, C. N. (2010). “Moving through time”. Psychological Science, 21, 222–223
• Moore, W. 2015 “Schrödinger: Life and Thought” Cambridge University Press. Cambridge
• Nick Duffy, “Here Is What Martin Luther King Told a Teen Struggling with His Sexuality,” PinkNews (blog), July 13, 2015, https://www.thepinknews.com/2015/07/13/here-is-what-martin-luther-king-told-a-teen-struggling-with-his-sexuality/ accessed 09/03/2023
• Palmisano, S., Allison, R. S., Schira, M. M., & Barry, R. J. (2015). “Future challenges for vection research: Definitions, functional significance, measures, and neural bases”. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 193.Plumer, B. 2015, “This is the most detailed map yet of our place in the universe” Vox, online at https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6105631/map-galaxy-supercluster-laniakea-milky-way accessed 09/03/2023
• Podolsky, E. The Doctor Prescribes Colours National Library Press, New York, 1938
• Povey, J., 2021, “Romeo & Juliet and the Reality of Elizabethan Marriage” June 12, 2021, Medium,  online at https://jenniferrpovey.medium.com/romeo-juliet-and-the-reality-of-elizabethan-marriage-f29d3aec3893
• Project Implicit 2011 “Implicit Association Test (IAT)” online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ accessed 08/03/2023
• Putin, V. 2022, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation” Kremlin, online http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843, accessed 5 February 2023
• Rankin, L. 2022 “Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing” Sounds True, Boulder
• Rinaldi, L., Locati, F., Parolin, L., Bernardi, N. F., & Girelli, L. (2016). “Walking on a mental time line: Temporal processing affects step movements along the sagittal space”. Cortex, 78, 170–173
• Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V. and Fogassi, L. (1996) “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions” p 131-141 in Cognitive Brain Research, No. 3, 1996
• Sagan, C. (1995) The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, New York
• Sagan, C. (1997). “Contact”, Simon and Schuster, New York
• Sammut, G., Andreouli, E., Gaskell, G. & Valsiner, J. (Eds.), 2015 “The Cambridge Handbook of Social Representations” (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107323650.033
• Sanders, R. 2022, “Bottlenecks that reduced genetic diversity were common throughout human history” June 23, 2022, Berkeley News online at https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/06/23/bottlenecks-that-reduced-genetic-diversity-were-common-throughout-human-history/ accessed 09/03/2023
• Seligman, M. (2018), The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism, Nicholas Brealey, London
• Seligman, M.E.P. (1995) The Optimistic Child Random House, Sydney
• Sender, R., Fuchs, S., Milo, R., “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body”. PLoS Biol. 2016 Aug 19;14(8):e1002533. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533. PMID: 27541692; PMCID: PMC4991899.
• Singhal, A. & Rogers, E. (1999). Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change. 10.4324/9781410607119.
• Sky News, 2020, “Who is David Icke? The conspiracy theorist who claims he is the son of God” https://news.sky.com/story/who-is-david-icke-the-conspiracy-theorist-who-claims-he-is-the-son-of-god-11982406 3 May 2020 accessed 08/03/2023
• Smith, E.L. and Laird, D.A., “The Loudness of Auditory Stimuli Which Affect Stomach Contractions In Healthy Human Beings” in Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 2, p94-98, 1930
• Snyder, T. 2017 “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” Penguin Random House, New York
• Stephens, G.J., Silbert, L.J. and Hasson, U. 2010. “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 18, 2010
• Sumich, A., Heym, N., Sarkar, M., Burgess, T., French, J., Hatch, L. and Hunter, K. 2022. “The power of touch: the effects of havening touch on subjective distress, mood, brain function and psychological health”. Psychology and Neuroscience, 15 (4), pp. 332-346. ISSN 1984-3054
• Thandi, G., Tom, D., Gould, M. Greenberg, N. and McKenna, P. 2015, “Impact of a Single-Session of Havening” January 2015, Health Science Journal 9(5):1
• Tournebize, R., Chu, G., Moorjani, P. (2022) “Reconstructing the history of founder events using genome-wide patterns of allele sharing across individuals.” PLoS Genet 18(6): e1010243. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1010243
• Trawalter, S., Todd, A. R., Baird, A. A., & Richeson, J. A. (2008). Attending to threat: Race-based patterns of selective attention. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5), 1322-1327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.03.006
• Truitt, K. 2022, “Healing in Your Hands: Self-Havening Practices to Harness Neuroplasticity, Heal Traumatic Stress, and Build Resilience” PESI Publishing, Eau Claire
• Truitt, Kate. Healing in Your Hands: Self-Havening Practices to Harness Neuroplasticity, Heal Traumatic Stress, and Build Resilience (p. 216). PESI Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
• Urban, T. 2023, “What’s Our Problem?: A Self Help Book For Societies” Legible Publishing Services / Amazon Kindle
• Van der Kolk, B.A. 1994 “The body keeps the score: Memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress” p 253-265 in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol 1 (5), 1994
•  Weerasinghe, J., Morales, K., & Greenstadt, R. (2019) ““Because… I was told… so much”: Linguistic Indicators of Mental Health Status on Twitter”. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. 2019. 152-171. 10.2478/popets-2019-0063.
• Winkelman, M. 2010 “Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing” Praeger, Santa Barbara