When I headed off to my NLP training last week, I was so excited because I knew that I was ready to let go of all the pain and hurt associated with that day in April. But I had been to many a training before and I knew what to expect …
Although you’re probably not as blunt as I am, you will know what I mean when I say that in any training session there are people who never seem to get it. Somehow, the concepts just don’t sink in and they spend their time asking what might be unkindly described as stupid questions. And as luck would have it, whenever there is an exercise, I always end up partnered with the ones who are struggling.
So my excitement was tinged with anxiety. What if, when it came time to work on letting go of anger, sadness, fear, guilt and hurt, I was working with someone who didn’t do it properly? What if they said the wrong words, couldn’t read the script or had an accent so thick I couldn’t understand them? What if my one shot at healing was unwittingly sabotaged by a below average student?
So finally, the long-awaited day arrived when we would be letting go of our negative emotions with Time Line Therapy™. The first emotion we dealt with was anger, and because I thought anger had never been an issue in my life I wasn’t too worried about making sure I had the right “therapist” for the first exercise. I ended up with a bright young man full of enthusiasm and a very thick accent.
With nothing to lose, I surrendered to the process knowing that it worked having seen the demonstration earlier. In the moments before I closed my eyes and imagined my time line, I made the decision that if anyone was going to change me, it would be me and not my partner.
I don’t know if he read the right words, I don’t know if he did it properly, and I don’t know why every word he spoke was crystal clear, but what I do know is that I had been very very angry for a very long time and it was somehow OK to let it go. The relief was transformational and instantaneous. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulder and I was lighter than I’d ever been in my entire life.
It has been a week since then and my life feels totally different. I don’t get cranky, pissed off, irritated, frustrated or get the shits like I used to. It is like drinking from a clear stream that was once muddy and dirty.
[It is also interesting to note that the best way to ‘deal’ with anger is exercise, and I had needed to exercise to exhaustion to lose weight in the past. Maybe anger made it hard for me to lose weight? Interestingly, even though I don’t have a scale, I have lost a significant amount of weight in the past week without changing anything consciously… spooky…]
Now when I think of that significant emotional event, I can no longer feel any emotional content. It is like watching it happen to someone else a long time ago. And if you’ve experienced how trauma and grief blind-side you almost daily, you will understand how much of a miracle that is.
The point of this post is to celebrate the discovery that no-one else can change me except me. I have to make the choice to be responsible for my own journey. There is nothing and no-one outside of myself that can make me do anything that I don’t choose to do or stop me having the changes that I desire. And when I go after what I want, I can get results even though the odds might appear to be stacked against me.