Once you have the four needed skills in place and they work, we can start to move toward working on an individual memory. I’d select one to start with that is not one of the worst things that has ever happened to you. Working on memories in this way is a skill that will be better and easier the more you do it. Save the big ones until after you can successfully process smaller ones.
Before starting any memory, I’d encourage you to check your current level of stress or distress. If you are going into this work already overly stressed, it will be much harder for you to have a positive experience. If you estimate your current level of distress above a 5/10 (before even thinking about the memory), your baseline distress is probably too high. I’d encourage you to do something that gets some of that stress out of your body so you have plenty of emotional “cushion” to manage the distress that may come. Go for a walk, pet an animal, listen to your favorite song, do some deep breathing if that works for you, do the grounding skill I just taught you, or simply watch your selected YouTube video for several minutes until you notice a relaxation response.
Before selecting the memory to work on, we will spend at least two 30-second rounds in the calm scene. You can play the YouTube video and leave it playing while I guide with audio you through the process. Every five seconds, you will hear me say the word “blink.” When I say “blink,” you will blink your eyes once for about one second, like this. Or, you can blink your eyes twice in one second, like this. If you have eye irritation, you do not have to blink at all. Just look away from the video when you hear me say “blink” for at least a half second and return to the video to have another pleasant experience with it. It is the large number of going into and out of the calm scene that helps process the microslice of the memory that we just put into the container. It is important that you be engaged in that video, because what is shifting the memory is the positive response of your nervous system to the video over and over (I’ll have more to say later about the possible working mechanism).
Once we have done several rounds in the calm scene and you are noticing a positive response, I’ll encourage you to select the memory that you want to work on and immediately push it out of your awareness. Identifying it and pushing it out of awareness are part of the same motion/act. Like an icon on a computer desktop, we only want to click on the memory once to select it. Don’t double-click it and start playing it in detail.
After identifying and pushing the memory away, I will guide you to go into the calm scene with blinks and we will do two rounds there. If anything difficult shows up in the calm scene, we will catch, container, and push that content thousands of miles away. Once it’s gone, we will return to the calm scene with blinks. If you were able to repeatedly find your way back into the calm scene, we will quickly glance at the memory and get a tiny piece of distress. We will container that distress and push it out of awareness. Then, I will direct you to return to your calm scene and will guide you to do more blinks.
We will be in this lightly activate and container / calm scene with blinks loop until you cannot find distress when glancing at the memory.
Then, I’ll guide you to walk through the memory one frame at a time like it’s a piece of videotape. We will catch, container, and push out of awareness each piece of the memory that contains distress, then keep returning to the calm scene with blinks. We do this until you can play the memory from beginning to end and there is no distress in any part of the memory.
I’ll then invite you to do the same thing again with a future scenario instead of a memory to help neutralize future distress. Future targets should focus on things connected to the past memory that are likely to happen. Future targets should not be catastrophic. I’ll guide you to find and container distress when glancing at the future scene, then we will do calm scene with blinks until the distress of the future scene is neutralized using a process very similar to the one we used with the memory.
If you are able to do this and follow this all the way through, the memory should lose its reactivity. You should be able to play it without any distress on any channel. You should believe something more positive about yourself and the world. And, every part of you should know for absolute certain that the memory is over and cannot currently hurt you.
If you have a good experience with this tool, feel free to come back often. However, be careful not to shift too many memories in too short of a span of time. I wouldn’t work on more than several memories in a 24-hour period.
Resolve Memories 