This sound bite was intentionally recorded to demonstrate one of the many NLP techniques I use. I call it the ‘Thumbnail Exercise’.
I'll give you a visual example because you're a visual person. Let's say, have you ever been on YouTube?
Yes
So you go to the home of YouTube, you see all these little clips. Let's say it's all videos that you posted on your page, and each one of them has a thumbnail. You see a bunch of videos with, like, little pictures. And then you can click on it.
Oh, Gotcha
That's the thumbnail of the video.
Okay
So basically you save a thumbnail by saving one frame of the video to be the representative.
Okay
And that's what we do a lot with trauma. We have an experience. We take the frame that was the most painful about the experience, and we turn it into the thumbnail.
Oooohhh
We think about 'Oh, my trip to Spain? I got a stomach flu.' My whole trip to Spain is one frame. I got a stomach flu and I was puking. Sometimes when people do that, everything on their 'feed' is just traumatic. Sometimes what we do is we go back to the experience, let's say in my case, we go back to the trip to Spain and see what happened there.
And a lot of times we leave it in a different frame completely. We leave it at a frame that we can live with. We think about Spain, we think about the park. So then your experience is just much softer and you experience a better, healthier, softer time with yourself because you're not constantly torturing yourself with bad memories and bad triggers.
And then when we reach that point, we create anchors. An anchor is like 'we record a feeling.' Sometimes we add music to it, sometimes we add pictures. and we bake it in in a way that you always have access to it.