Ep 165: Oliver's Painful Memory

What if the pain is too intense to ever get over it? Said Oliver. Welcome to the Self Belief Chief podcast. You're here with David Holman. Make sure to subscribe to catch up with the latest episodes. And let's begin. So I was speaking with Oliver, a client of mine, and he said, well, what if the pain I'm going through is just too intense to ever get over it? Now, the pain he was going through was from a past relationship. He was in a new relationship. There was a past relationship where something had happened that he thought and was worried would interfere with his new partner and actually cause that relationship to end as well. So people can go through fairly traumatic things in life, really difficult things that when people, their friends and family just tell them to get over it or just go outside and go for a walk and all of this sort of stuff. There's some things in life where you can't just go and do those things that they completely take over our body, our emotional well being. We can't function. And we're sort of in a headspace where it's like an out of body experience. Maybe you've been there, maybe you are there currently. This is where Oliver was worrying. And there's not just a simple thing. And I don't really believe in positive thinking. I don't. I think it's too casual, it's too fluffy, especially for something big and traumatic. So I had to do something. I had to help him see things differently. When he replays the scene that the sounds change, that the, the feeling is different. And I said to Oliver the following, Oliver, if you saw a lion a hundred yards away, how scared would you be? He said, yeah, I would be scared. I said, okay, if you saw a line 100 yards away and it started running towards you, how would you feel? Oh, I'd feel terrified. Oliver says. I said, okay, if the line was 10 yards away from you and he started running at you, how would you feel? He said, oh, my God, I'd be mortified and my life would be over. I just, I just. And he starts getting more fearful and more worried about it. Now, why is that? I said, oliver, the reason why it's scarier is because it's closer in proximity and it therefore looks bigger and it's therefore bigger in your mind. And that's part of what human emotion is. See, all emotion that you have is contained inside a picture in your mind. Now, there's lots of things that then affect the actual intensity of the pain, you know, that comes with the image, right? So if the image is really big in your mind, and of course it's more overwhelming, it's more intense, it's more traumatic than if it's really far away and it's smaller. There's also things to do with the colours. Some colors are more intense than others for you. You know, certain colours do different things to different people. The sounds are different. Right. An intense sound compared to a completely different sound when the feeling is different. So I did an exercise with Oliver, took about 45 minutes to do in a subconscious state where I started to shift all of this. That this traumatic image that he has in his head, that it gets smaller and further away, that the colors change, that I made the image more cartoonish so it doesn't feel the same, doesn't look the same. I got him to change the sounds to any, you know, silly sounds that he could think of. So instead of the intense sounds that he was fearing, you could just change the sound. So I don't know, let's do the sound of a pigeon. You probably loved hearing that. But that's sort of the point. You change all these things and you keep changing the scene and you keep changing the scene and you keep changing the scene and you make it further and further away and further and further away and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and it starts to feel different. The point isn't about forgetting that it ever happened, because in some ways it's a shame to forget about phases of life. You don't have to be happy that they happened, but we can find a meaning for it in terms of not why did it happen. I don't mean that. Just a meaning in terms of. Right. What can this help me do? Maybe to help other people, that might be a meaning. So it's not about that. He then forgets about it. But the intensity is less. Just like with the lion, the pain is less intense or the fear is less intense. When the lion's a hundred yards away, then 10 yards away, it's different. And that's what we can do with the mental imagery in our mind, so we can start to play with these images and sounds and colors and everything else, so that the intensity drops significantly and therefore gives Oliver that freedom to then operate and enjoy his new relationship. What did he say after we did that exercise? From about 45 minutes, he said, david, it feels different. I can't see it the same way. The tension around my neck and shoulders is looser. It's been there for years. He's got a big smile on his face because yes, maybe he'll never forget that it happened, but it's been changed so much, that memory, that he can't see and feel it the same way anymore. Just to prove why this stuff works, when they do studies on things like eyewitness testimony, they find that our memories of something actually change by a year later after it happens, actually changes by up to 75% from what actually happened. So it's actually not difficult to change these imagery images we have in our head and change the imagery. And I call it scratching. It's imagine if you play a record and you scratch the record, it changes the sound, but if you scratch the picture in your mind, it changes how you feel. I've loved this exercise and it's helped me personally a ton with some really difficult things that I've been through in my life. Hopefully can do the same for you. So I want to invite you if you want to visit the Self Belief Chief website or we'll put it in the in the description. You can schedule a call with me. If you want to be a free call to discuss what this would actually look like for you and how we can try and create that change for you, then it'd be fantastic to hear from you. My name is David Holman. Remember to subscribe to the podcast for more episodes, share your favorite ones and I'll speak to you again very, very soon.