THE QUALITIES OF YOUR THOUGHTS Submodalities
Back in the 1970s, John Grinder and myself originated the idea that people build mental representations. It wasn’t a new idea really. Gentlemen like Gregory Bateson and Marshall McLuhan had been talking about such things for years, but we formalized the idea.
We defined thinking as thinking in pictures, thinking in words, and thinking in feelings, tastes, and smells. Since then, I’ve taken it a step further. I’ve broken each of those systems down into their various components. The qualities of the images, sounds, and feelings are known as submodalities.
We have five senses that we use to take in information from the outside world. Then we represent the world to ourselves using five internal senses. When we think, one way is that we think in pictures or movies.
Whenever you get directions from someone, or you give directions to someone, it relies on your own ability to go inside and mentally represent through a movie how to get to wherever it is that you need to go. When people create anything, they must create it first in their mind by imagining what it is going to look like.
There are also certain qualities to these images. For example, think about what you did yesterday. As you think about it in your mind, you might see yourself yesterday doing something or you might see what you saw through your own eyes yesterday. You might see still images of your activities or you might remember them like a movie continuously running. Regardless, this is one way that we process our experiences from the world.
We also hear internal sounds. Whenever you remember what someone said to you or their voice or whenever you remember what a song sounds like or whenever you talk to yourself…all of these are examples of internal sounds. Again, these sounds have various qualities, such as loudness and resonance when we pay attention to them.
Internal feelings are no different. Whenever we have a feeling, we can feel it in our body in particular locations. We can feel it starting somewhere and then moving somewhere else in our body when we pay attention to it. People even describe it when they talk about fear. They will say things like I felt butterflies in the pit of my stomach, and then my mouth went dry and I felt lightheaded. People are constantly revealing what is going on inside their mental reality.
When we think of something, the picture of it is in a particular place. It’s a particular size. It’s a particular distance from us. When we look at mental images, they don’t look like the same as the outside world. We do, however, seem to represent them somewhere in front of us and they are a certain size. You either see yourself in the image, which means that you are disassociated, or you don’t see yourself in the image because you are looking through your own eyes. This means you are associated.
When listening to a mental voice inside your head, it’s either your voice or somebody else’s voice. It’s either on the right or on the left. It’s either going in or going out. Some of them are very loud and some of them are very quiet. Sometimes, there is just silence. It doesn’t matter where it is coming from and it doesn’t really matter which it is but it does matter that you notice the differences that exist in the voices between different states.
People have been talking about feelings in the field of psychology for a long time. When I started, I saw all kinds of counsellors, all kinds of therapists, and all kinds of psychiatrists working with patients. What always amazed me was the number of times somebody would be asked, Well, how do you feel about that? and somebody would say, I feel frustrated. They would ask the same question again instead of finding out what that meant. They failed to stop and see that word which has been turned into an event was actually something the person was doing.
When people say they’re frustrated, it’s actually a verb. When people say, I have doubts, they’ve turned the verb into a noun and made it so that it becomes an event or a thing. When people say, I have frustration, they don’t actually have a bucket of frustration. They’re in the process of frustrating. That is an activity. When you turn it back into an activity, you can find out so much more about it.
So when therapists and psychiatrists say to somebody, How do you feel about feeling frustrated? or How do you feel about feeling disappointed?, they miss the most important information. We know that there’s another way that we process the world. Our understanding of the endemic brain tells us that the connection between all the organs is as sophisticated as the synapses inside the brain and actually allows us to think with feelings.
What this means is that our bodies are not disconnected from our brain. They are an extended part of the brain. The important question to ask people when they say, I feel frustrated, is, Where? Where does the feeling start? Where do you feel it first in your body? Where does it move to? Feelings can’t stay still. They are always moving somewhere, in some direction.
I know people sometimes feel as if they have a knot in their gut when they’re frightened but in fact that knot either rotates forward or rotates backwards. Every single time somebody has told me they feel stuck and I ask where, they have told me the feeling was in their stomach or in their chest. However, it doesn’t really matter where it is. It matters what you do with it.
Sometimes, I ask, Which way is it moving? and they say, It’s not. It is only by having them take their hand and having them rotate it forward and backwards, to the right and to the left that we can find out which way their feelings are moving in their body. These are the only dimensions really available.
One of these directions will feel right when they think about their feeling. From this, people typically get the idea that it is moving ever so minimally. The fact that it’s moving means that you can move it faster, you can move it slower, you can move it forwards and you can move it backwards. Our feelings are not outside of our control. In fact, this is the very thing most of us need to gain control of because, when you do, you can alter it.
The qualities of your thoughts, these submodalities, determine how your thoughts affect you. When you make big movies of things that you are associated with, generally, the feeling will be more intense. When you make the movie smaller and move it, disassociated, into the distance, the feeling will be smaller. We can also learn how to use our control over submodalities to manifest the kinds of feelings we need when we need them. I like to call this running your own brain.
RUNNING YOUR OWN BRAIN Changing Neurochemistry
One of my main focuses in the work that I’ve done has been discovering ways to help people achieve what I call Personal Freedom. Personal Freedom means having the freedom to be able to control your thoughts and to manifest the kinds of feelings you want in your life.
We are often imprisoned by the chains of our thoughts and we allow ourselves to think ourselves into problems. However, since most problems are created by our imagination and are thus imaginary, all we need are imaginary solutions. So, here are some effective ways of controlling your thinking for a change.
Think of a time when you felt really good and then start playing around with the qualities of the images, sounds and feelings. By changing these submodalities, you get to intensify the feelings.
For example, think of a time when you felt really, really good. Now, step inside that time and see through your eyes, hear through your ears, and feel the really good feeling all the way through your body. Make the images bigger, brighter, more colorful and you’ll probably find yourself feeling even better. Make the sounds louder and crisper and if there are no sounds, add sounds. Start to intensify the good feeling.
Next, find out where in your body the feeling starts and where it goes. Discover the direction it spins inside your body and spin it faster and faster and, again, notice your feelings intensify. There lies the control you have over your brain to create powerful feelings inside of you.
You can then attach these feelings to