Sensational senses

Dear reader,

often we wish negative feelings to be gone. I already described possibilities of pain control in another post. But pain isn't the only perception we can influence in ourselves or others. We could just as well enforce positive feelings.

It's believed in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that we've got a sort of program running for every feeling. Certain programs are running and we are sad. Certain other programs are running and then we're happy. The trigger, of course, isn't always the same. Also the program for a certain feeling isn't the same with every person. For one certain person though, say, the program “laughing” is always the same. Meaning that the processes that are running, until that person laughs, are the same. In many demonstrations, Richard Bandler, one of the founders of NLP, can be seen deliberately making a person laugh. Not with jokes, but by setting what's called an “anchor” in NLP, a trigger. When used again, that person immediately has that feeling again. This may be funny in a demonstration, if you, for example, you just tap someone on the right shoulder and they are rolling with laughter.

It's more interesting though to use that knowledge and this sort of control over feelings and sense of perception deliberately in real life. Some years ago I must have set an anchor for myself to feel warm, without noticing it. Sadly this happens way too often with more negative anchors. Moments of shock lead to phobias or someone touched you in a certain rough way or maybe just tap you on the shoulder in a certain way. When someone else touches youor taps you on the shoulder in a similar way, (often) unconscious memories come up again and you tense up and you feel bad. Even touches that were meant friendly can go down very badly for that other person. I'd suggest for people, especially those working in the social field, to pay attention to those kinds of reactions and avoid the kind of touch in the future, when it's met with tension or something similar. Back to my anchor for warm feeling. I was able to touch my left shoulder with my right hand and I would feel considerably warmer. On a study trip I used that. They had a terrace outside on a floor that was several floors down from our rooms. I didn't want to get up, get a jacket or pullover and leave the interesting discussions. So once in a while I'd touch my left shoulder.

A few years ago I had an infection on my right hand, but for a week it got treated in a wrong way, my left hand got infected, too. Some nights I'd wake up deliberately to scratch. Only when I was awake, was I able to control this unbelievably strong urge to scratch most of the time. Similarily to what I described in my pain control post already, I imagined to be in a forest and my hands would be bathed in cold stream water. The colour blue helped me a lot and also the thought of cool from a flowing river. It would be like a soft massage or something and blue is a contrast to the hands red from the infection. One night I couldn't sleep for some time and my hands were itching a lot. Scratching wouldn't help, of course. So I imagined that my hands would be in a blue cast. Even if I reached over with one hand to the other, I wouldn't be able to scratch. The cast would be there to block the touch. So I just lay there with immobile hands and fell asleep eventually.

One night I came home first with the underground and had to go the rest on my bike, as usual. I only had a thin jacket. On the underground I had listened to music. But for the bike ride I turned the player off. I got on my bike and started riding. I was humming some sort of melody to myself. For no particular reason I stopped at one point and suddenly I felt distinctly cold. Strange, I thought to myself. I started humming again and got warm again. Humming made me warm? Only once I shortly stopped humming, until I decided to hum all the rest of the way home.

On cold winter nights, the yellow street lights help me to feel a bit warmer again. I won't go into detail about it now and write about it in another separate post. But music can change my way of perception of time under certain circumstances, so that it seems to go faster or slower to me than in objective reality.

We all can influence our own perception and those of others. For that we only have to know which way to influence what senses. Spiders aren't scary as such, but are made scary, when we think of them as huge with long, thin legs and probably strangely furry creatures with many eyes, ideally in colour and crawling towards us. I'm usually not afraid of spiders, although I don't necessarily want to touch them. If I imagine a spider in the described way, it does get scary and uncomfortable to me though.

A so called NLP Fast Phobia Cure, a short and fast treatment for phobias, takes an experienced person under some circumstances probably about 5 to 10 minutes only. To describe it short and simple, the representation in the head is checked, mainly the images, visual aspects and sounds. That means more senses can be change, too. The more senses are changed, the more intense the experience gets. A distinct change can also happen when things are changed in just one sense. By changing many aspects to the opposite, the thing that was so scary at first, will turn into the harmless opposite. Cold gets warm and warm gets cold. Fast gets slow and slow gets fast. And many more. I can only welcome you all to experiment with that for yourself, find what factors influence you and change them just for the fun of testing what happens then. In unlucky circumstances, you'll have just a bit of fun, at best, it'll really help. Just like I used that to not scratch or to feel less cold.

Until next blog

sarah