Overview: From the time of Aristotle to William James to Freud and Jung to Milton Erickson, M.D., people interested in Psychology have been searching for a way to adequately describe the human experience of time. Time Line Therapy, as a model, has the potential to not only make sense out of our temporal experience, but also to change our understanding of how negative emotions and limiting decisions affect us, as well as describing how to create a meaningful future, because with Time Line Therapy we now understand the human temporal experience= and can change the basic elements that make up someone's history.
Your Time Line: Your Time Line is how your unconscious mind encodes and stores your memories. It's how you know the difference between a past memory, and a future dream? Your Time Line is largely an unconscious process, and like remembering your home phone number, you may be more or less aware of it from time to time.
Releasing Negative Emotions: With the Time Line Therapy= techniques, we now have for the first time, a way to resolve significant events in a person's past. We also gain the ability to release the negative emotions in those memories easily and quickly, in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously, the release of negative emotions in a substantial number of a person's memories will have an impact on their behavior. Stop, and think about it for a moment, what would be the impact on you, if we had released all of the anger in your past memories, while preserving the learnings from those events. Or how about the sadness, fear, guilt or any other negative emotion.
Eliminating Limiting Decisions: Next, what if you could go back and re-do any old decision that you made in the past, and decide in a new way -- a way that supported who you want to be now? Then, what if we could have every event in the past be reevaluated in such a way as to support the way you wanted to be now? With Time Line Therapy, we also have the ability to reevaluate our past, and change any decision which limits us. To a certain extent our behavior is guided by the decisions that we've made in the past. Whether conscious or unconscious, these decisions affect our behavior in the present. Our decisions are stored in the Time Line, and through our Time Line we gain access to them.
Create the Future: Finally, what if you had a reliable way to create your future the way you wanted it, and actually have that thing or event happen? The processes for creating your future are as powerful as the processes for releasing negative emotions, and clearing out limiting decisions.
These three techniques comprise the major techniques of Time Line Therapy as it is taught today, which we present to you for your consideration.
The Time Line Therapy techniques are a relatively recent development. = The idea of an individual having a means of knowing the difference between memories of the past, and the future, or having a "Time Line" is not. Aristotle was one of the first in our culture to mention the idea of a "Time Line" in Physics IV, for the Greeks had a clear idea of temporality. Our having a Time Line may be, at least in part, a result of the structure our= language.
ARISTOTLE: "Western minds represent time as a straight line upon which we stand with our gaze directed forward; before us we have the future and behind us the past. On this line we can unequivocally define all tenses by means of points. The present is the point on which we are standing , the future is found on some point in front of us, and in between lies the exact future; behind us lies the perfect, still farther back the imperfect, and farther yet the pluperfect. ... The Greek language also has corresponding verb-forms which can be delineated in quite similar manner on a straight time-line. ... According to Aristotle, therefore, we must represent time by the image of a line (more accurately: by the image of movement along a line), either a circular line ... or a straight line." [Hebrew, pp 124-6]
WILLIAM JAMES: Time Line Therapy has its roots in traditional psychological thinking, and is based on earlier models, which preceded it. William James, in Principles of Psychology, in 1890 says, "If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of bead-like sensations all separate ... we should be wholly incapable of acquiring experience. ... Whether a highly developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful ..." He described the experience of time, "In short, the practically cognized present is no knife- edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions in time. ... Date in time corresponds to direction in space. ... If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by an horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point." He says, "Some things we date simply by tossing them into a past or future direction." And so, "memory gets strewn with dated things -- dated in the sense of being before or after each other. The date of a thing is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some past or future thing." [Principles, pp 396-413]
MILTON ERICKSON: Time Line Therapy also has its roots in the work of Milton Erickson, who until his death in 1980, was the world's foremost Hypnotherapist. Erickson, almost single-handedly, brought hypnosis out of the closet, and made it possible for the American medical and psychiatric community to accept it as a "legitimate form of treatment." In the early 1960's Erickson was using an hypnotic technique which, remarkably, was quite like Time Line Therapy.
"One hypnotic phenomenon can be used to induce another. The movie screen can be employed as an uncovering technique. The patient looks at it, sees his past ... He can look at the screen, lose his own identity, and observe various traumatic experiences that occurred in his own life experience. ..." The client can look at his past and his future in a non-threatening way: "... the patient saw himself at a later age; on another, at a still later age -- all the way from five years of age on up to thirty-two. ... Then he was allowed to set up another screen where he could see himself as he hoped to appear next year. Thus he was led to recognize what he wanted in his future, what was meaningful for him in that future. ... That technique has been called pseudo- orientation into the future. Just as one can orient a patient back to the past, so one can project himself into the future in accordance with his own motivations and ... desires." [Practical, pp 342- 344]
YOUR MEMORIES: Who are you if not your collection of memories? For almost 100 years, psychologists have agreed that our past experiences do determine who we are, and how we act. In fact, Peter Brown, M.D. (1991) says that "Memory is the matrix of personal identity." Time Line Therapy now gives a reliable way to affect our memories in a way to change our future.
Time Line Therapy was developed by: Tad James, M.S., Ph.D. Tad is= a Master Trainer of NLP, and an acknowledged expert in the field of Hypnosis. He is an active participant on the Internet, and he answers questions and provides support for people interested in NLP, Time Line Therapy, and= Hypnosis.
To Contact Tad James by e-Mail: mind@aloha.com
Last Modified : 17-Jan-94