Let me show you something amazing...
Recently I worked 3D Mind with a great guy who’d made a mistake, and it cost him. There was a car accident and he was sober, but someone else died and so he went to prison for over a year. Obviously, it wasn’t a pleasant experience, but his time in prison isn’t the focus today. It’s how it affected him later and what the simple cause of his problem really was.
He came to me because he was afraid to go out on the town. He didn’t want to run into people who he’d worked with before he went to prison and lost his job and have to talk to them about it. He wasn’t comfortable talking to his friends about it either. Also, he was avoiding meeting up with a friend he’d made in prison who’d recently gotten out. My client had gotten a basic counseling certificate while in prison and discovered that he enjoyed helping people, so he wanted to help this friend adjust to life after prison.
But he kept avoiding all this with a desperate need to put it all behind him. Now, many people would say that putting it behind you is a good thing, and I generally agree, but the problem was that it was in front of him constantly. It was getting in the way of simple things he wanted to do, like meet up with old friends and continue on with his life. That’s where it crosses the line past regretting the past and causing a problem.
Again, let me emphasize that. It’s natural for people to assume they should feel bad about something, but when it gets in the way of actually moving on, that’s a genuine problem. This shows you, though, how the brain works. Let me explain.
Often, people assume that a traumatic event causes a negative self-image or belief. The even affects how people feel about themselves. It does, but not directly. Negative beliefs don’t seem to appear until after we rationalize their existence. Let’s take my client, for instance…
Did he believe he was a bad person? Nope. Was he afraid of trusting people ever again? Nope. Was he ashamed of what he did? Nope. I’m sure he doesn’t feel at all good about it, but that wasn’t what was causing the problem.
The problem was caused simply by fear, loneliness, and anxiety. Those three feelings became associated to his stay in prison. If you think about it, that makes perfect sense too. Who wouldn’t feel that way in prison? The thing, though, was that it was novel enough to create a permanent association, kind of a bookmark, in the brain. Everything associated with prison became tainted by those 3 feelings: the people he knew from the job he lost because of prison, the friends who would remind him of it by asking about it, and the friend from it. With those emotions there, every time he’d even think about wanting to talk to his friends or think about going out and possibly running into an old co-worker they would pop up, because the brain is designed to bring together things that are associated, and he’d be reminded of his time in prison like it was right there in front of him again.
He spent a lot of energy avoiding those things because 3 negative feelings were associated to it. That’s it. That’s all it takes. That’s the real cause of problems. No “core” beliefs about himself, no deep insight required. When we found those 3 emotions and balanced them out, his problem disappeared completely. He still didn’t feel good about the past, but it didn’t have the strong emotional association with the things in the present any more that caused the real problem. That is how problems work.
This applies to everything. People spend a lot of time avoiding the things that make them feel bad because of some seemingly random association. Sometimes it’s obvious like a phobia. Other times it’s harder to tell, such as an anxiety disorder or depression.
Regardless, there are 3 things you have to do to fix a problem. You need to find what brings up the association in the present (never the past), find out what the emotional recipe of that association is, and clear it out. That’s what I did with my client, and it took just 45 minutes using 3D Mind. It really is simple.
