What is Emotionology?

Usually when I say the word Emotionology, the person thinks I am just talking about emotions. However, Emotionology, the science of emotions, is much more than emotions by themselves. Emotions are closely tied to our thoughts and how we relate to the world around us. A better understanding of these ties allows us to change our thoughts and subsequently change the behaviors that prevent us from experiencing a vibrant and healthy life. Emotionology draws on four models to understand different aspects of thinking and one’s relationship to the world. I will introduce these models here and then explain them in depth later.

The two of the four models are based on scientific research. The first model, the thinking model, is backed by Bettman’s Information Processing Theory of Consumer Choice and the research that he did at Carnegie Mellon University. The research was done for marketing reasons to understand how to control the consumer’s decision-making powers. It was used to understand decisions a consumer makes when deciding to buy products. The findings can be used to make sense of the thought process in general and how things are recorded in memory. That is really important because, if you know how something works, you can change it. The second model, the Psycho-biochemical model, is based on Candace Pert’s research in how your feelings are your body chemistry. We will go into this more later. The third model is the Systems Model which is about how emotions support a culture or how things are done. And the fourth model is the Generative Model which is how we manifest or generate what we get out of life.

The background of Emotionology.

My background really started with NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). The developers of NLP didn’t have a model for how people think. Instead, they selected people who excelled at certain behaviors (e.g., Virginia Satire and Milton Erickson), carefully observed how those people thought and acted and then essentially taught other people how to mimic the behaviors that brought about successful results. In effect, they modeled genius which is similar to the aims of psychology before World War II. After World War II psychology became a diagnostic approach and focused on looking for what’s wrong with you.

Richard Bandler (one of the founders of NLP) developed a technique to dispel phobias. He interviewed people who had been able to overcome phobias and discovered they followed a particular thought process. When he taught that process to other people, they rapidly overcame their phobia – some cases within 15 minutes.

Although its founders studied successful behaviors in many people, NLP is not what I call research based as the studies were not conducted according to traditionally accepted research protocols nor the findings presented in professional journals or conferences. Yet, NLP has great historical value in the modeling of geniuses and the exploration of learning strategies and, more recently, some NLP people are doing research. It has amassed great information and provides many useful tools, strategies and techniques. Because the approach makes sense and works, the emphasis has been on expanding technique repertoires rather than academic research. Overall, however, NLP doesn’t offer a solidified model that pulls the information all together in an organized form. At least, it didn’t for me. Thus, I was really glad when I found the other models mentioned above that seemed to give a good basis for understanding just about everything mental and how change occurs relative to the bigger picture. The NLP techniques work but having these other models provides the structure to contain them. When I present a synthesis of these models to clients, most people I work with say “Now everything I learned in the past comes together.”

To reiterate, Emotionology is not NLP. We use NLP techniques along with many others from many other sources to bring about change. There are a lot of different methodologies out there that use one technique for everything. Isn’t that like using a hammer for everything? You have more options if you have a toolkit of techniques and use the ones that best fit the situation. Consider, for example, EMDR. This technique is frequently used for removing phobias in Psychology. To me, it isn’t the best technique to use on a phobia. However, it is easy to verify the presence of a phobia and subsequently check if it has been removed so the NLP trainer that wrote that technique used the example of removing a phobia to teach the technique. But, Bandler’s technique is more effective and faster. From an Emotionology perspective, it would be more useful gain a better understanding of the philosophy to use as a guide in selecting an appropriate technique rather than applying a technique indiscriminately. In particular, there are over a hundred techniques to draw upon in Emotionology, but Emotionology is not only a collection of techniques. The techniques are simply the tools that we use. Emotionology is a practical philosophy that can be explicated with the help of the above models and applied with the judicious use of effective techniques.
I will begin with the Thinking Model.

The Thinking Model.

It is hard to describe this model without visuals. Let’s say you have a horizontal, imaginary line. The region above the line would be everything that is happening outside of you in the world. Everything below the line is what is happening in your mind or your memory. It is also your feelings. Suppose we could view an external event happening above the line in your world. As that event happens, and you make sense of it, you start to record this in your long-term memory and we would see activity occurring below the line. We can look at this process in more depth by taking an actual event.

Imagine that an external event triggers an emotional response in you. You can experience the event from one or more of your five senses. So think of a time something triggered you. What kind of feeling did you get? If you felt annoyed, the only way you can know that feeling is if you had that feeling before or you wouldn’t have a name for that feeling. So, some time in your past, you were annoyed. That past feeling is stored in the region under the line in a “thought structure”. To better understand thought structures, we will trace through the entire process in detail.

If we take that feeling of being annoyed and follow it back to the first time you were ever annoyed, you would have the first “meaning node” of annoyed. When you think of being annoyed as a kid, what other feelings do you come up with? You might name the feeling something else. It could be distraction or something. So if you take any feeling and took a picture of every time you ever had that feeling, and put that pile of pictures out in front of you, what you are looking at is a thought structure. Actually, it may be difficult to do this with the feeling of “annoyed” because it often masks or overlays other feelings like being bothered, impatience, or some other feeling. It might be easier to continue with a feeling that most people have experienced and that is the feeling of hurt. Let’s say that the first time your feelings were hurt was when you were young, perhaps ten or younger. Notice that I am not talking about physical hurt, but an emotional hurt. What event is associated with that hurt? That association created the first meaning node in your memory.

The above process informally outlines the crux of Bettman’s theory—i.e., you construct a meaning node with the first bit of information that you have of anything that you might be learning of a category. This first meaning node is stored and you keep adding to that pile for the rest of your life. It is like learning chemistry. Maybe the first meaning node was learning about the nucleus. Then you build on that information to gain an understanding of chemistry. It is hard to learn something the first time if you don’t have something to relate to for it to make sense. Once the initial basis is formed, you keep building on previous information. The accumulation of information creates a body of information we call a “thought structure”. Another way to think of it is to imagine that you took a snapshot of every event in your life. Then those pictures are automatically categorized into separate piles. Each picture has a story that goes with it. The stories are generalized into categories of emotions—i.e., hurt, scared, happy, angry, sad, etc. So a new meaning node forms when an emotionally significant event occurs that cannot be related to something else. Once you have an original event and its associated emotion in place, this new meaning node will accumulate pictures of events related by the same emotion.

It turns out that thought structures are grouped into bundles of information that go together for some reason. Your mind is much more complicated than a computer and it knows how to sort and categorize for you so you can retrieve information easily. It also uses the process of generalization to simplify things. So when something happens in the external world and there is another event that connects to hurt or some feeling you have had before, you feel hurt. But you are not feeling just today’s hurt, you are accessing all the hurt you have ever had. That is why a person may react so strongly to a seemingly inconsequential event. Fortunately, thought structures can be changed and the stronghold of old associations broken. We still have memories of previous events, but we no longer experience them in the same vivid way. To change thought structures, we use a variety of techniques. I will demonstrate the use of such a technique next.

Technique Demonstration

Let’s take that feeling of hurt. If you hold that feeling and you could see a picture of every time you ever had that feeling…how big is the pile? Is it bigger than the room? Client nods yes. You being able to see that pile of pictures tells me that you haven’t worked on that feeling. Unless you manually change this thought structure, it won’t just disappear on its own. It will always be there, ready to be triggered by something out in the world. So, to protect ourselves, we want to transform those pictures. We use the natural process of generalization that our mind has to fix this thought structure of hurt. Actually, every thought structure is a pile of pictures of events similar to the hurt thought structure. You can see this because all those pictures and information are generalized into sections or categories like hurt, insecurity and other feelings. Besides feelings, the mind also generalizes into categories of people, places, things, etc. For example, you might have a pile of pictures of everything you know about a city or a person. Many of these categories overlap. The mind generalizes anyway so if you just take one of those pictures to represent all of them and fix it, you can fix them all by generalizing what you did to the one, to all of them. Since some categories overlap into other feelings and events, you may need to also work on them from other angles. We will discuss this more at a later time. Let’s do hurt. Separate physical hurt from emotional hurt. Pick one picture to represent all the emotional hurt. Client says, “I wasn’t supposed to play around my dad’s tractor”. You can find your own first time that you were hurt.

When you look more closely at a picture, you will recall a memory linked with it. A memory is usually only a few frames long and involves a limited time period. These frames may be quite vivid and involve more than one modality—e.g., pictures, sounds, tastes, etc. You will have also generalized some of the information related to the period before and after the actual memory. In viewing the memory you chose to represent your feeling of hurt, you are looking at a specific instance of yourself feeling hurt. You minimally have a frame of before, during, and after. In this case of a child playing around his dad’s tractor, there is a picture of the child playing around, then getting caught, and then being punished and one more frame feeling the after effects.

Find your own picture of hurt. We can change any part of that picture to change the feeling. In NLP this is called the “sub-modalities” of a picture. It can be what you hear, the color of the picture, or anything and changing that will change the overall meaning for you. When we say a picture is a “meaning node”, we mean that you created some meaning for that event. A meaning has a feeling associated with it. The feeling is the glue that stores it in your memory. Let’s play with this to see what happens.

When you look back at that memory, what is the sound you hear going on with that picture? Client: “I hear my father scolding me”. Now change the voice to a Donald Duck voice. When you play it like that, does it change the meaning and also the feeling? Client nods. Now change it back to what it was and make it a black and white picture. What happens to the feeling now? Client: “I can’t relate to it”. So once again, we changed the meaning another way. So now change it back to color so it has the original feel and play it like it is some cartoon. Put the content of the event into a cartoon movie. What happens then? Client: “It doesn’t have any meaning at all”. So now, change it back and let’s put a different sound in it. Put the roar of an engine in it. What happens then?

Now we have done quite a few things to that picture and it gets harder to bring it back to the original for every time. But let’s do one more thing to the picture. To Client: “What did your father need”? Client: “Understanding and patience.” To Client: “Now think of the understanding and patience your father needed and feeling love in his heart and understanding that life is a learning journey and put that all in him and replay the movie of the past that way.” Now we are putting information in it. That is different than just changing the picture you are looking at. That information changes the picture too. To Client: “Now take all the maturity you have now and understanding you have now, and see yourself having that before you were playing around the tractor. If you have all the maturity and understanding now what happens?” Client, “I would still play around but I wouldn’t get hurt.” So now, everything that you did to that picture, bring the picture back and look at it since we did so many things to it? What does it feel like? Client: “It feels harmless.”

Now take that picture and put it into all the other pictures. See everybody in all of the other pictures with the patience, understanding, love in their heart and everything there that we did to the one picture. We generalize all that through all those pictures, and then push those pictures out until they look like black and white snapshots far away. Pretend you have a paper shredder and shred them all up and let the wind blow them behind you so they compost in the past… Now pull up the feeling of hurt – what happens to it. Client: “it is not quite as available.” To Client: your language tells me you still have some pictures of hurt. There was something needed that was more than what we put into those other pictures. So pull up what is left in hurt. It might be an older or more recent picture of feeling hurt because your mind won’t let go of something that hasn’t been completed yet. Every picture that has a negative feeling, has a negative feeling because it is missing some information. When you change a picture in any way, you change the associated feeling but when you put information into the picture, the picture is transformed and heals that lack. This transformation results in a different energy or chemistry in your body which then creates a different feeling in your body. This takes us to the bio-chemistry of your feelings.

The Psycho-biochemical Model

This model is supported by the research of Candace Pert. There is a process in your brain primarily concerned with your hypothalamus that decides the meaning of your mental images of events and what chemistry should go with each meaning. To simplify it, your hypothalamus, your body’s chemistry factory, makes a decision about the meaning and chemistry of each event. Everything in your system is transmitted through chemistry and electrical impulses and is all somehow decided through this brain you don’t have a manual for. Think of the brain as a mechanical device you have to live your life through. By having a manual for how it works, life is easier because you can manage to get what you want from it. Otherwise, you are a victim to it. Thus, we could become more self-empowered if we could develop a manual and we do so using the four models. First we need to know a little more about how the hypothalamus works.

The hypothalamus will make a decision on whatever you are running through your head. It doesn’t matter whether the thoughts have to do with imagined or real situations, i.e., whether they are happening in your head or out in the world. The hypothalamus decides the meaning, and the decision is based partly on past experience. If the meaning ascribed is one of anger, hurt or frustration or whatever, then that meaning is already set up to be a certain chemistry. Anything that has similar meaning to a pre-existing meaning-node goes to the relevant thought structure and will produce the same body chemistry as the original. It would be handy if there was a way to directly educate and control this part of the brain, especially as it sometimes it comes up with stuff we haven’t consciously decided about. Apart from our thoughts, we change our body chemistry by the things we eat, how much exercise we get, the pills we take. So we already try to control our body chemistry in other ways that are conscious. However, it is not a simple process to manage our body’s chemistry.

Now let’s go back to understanding the thought structures. You feel hurt and the hypothalamus decides the recipe for the corresponding chemical reaction and then floods your body with that chemistry. When the chemistry goes through your body, it is so fast that you immediately feel a feeling. It is almost instant. The other day while I was driving, someone pulled out in front of me and it scared me. I felt the shock go right through my arms and down to my hands in a fraction of a second. These rapid changes can have different results. For example, some body chemistry supports the immune system and some suppresses it. Sometimes a person is too open; they accept everything, including diseases like cancer because they have no defenses.

Part of Emotionology philosophy is to question everything (including everything I say). Question so you can learn and evolve further. Having some defenses gives you a center from where you are questioning and allows you to base your understanding on a solid foundation of principles. One of the strong points of Emotionology is that it is based on a working philosophy. If you have a useful philosophy, it protects you from the effects of negative feelings. A key tenet of Emotionology is 1: Life is a learning journey. If you recognize that life is a learning journey, you are willing to learn. This guiding philosophy doesn’t mean you are gullible because you question everything. Nor is it about rules. What’s right is what works for the highest good of everyone. If you just live your life by rules, you don’t have to think. Rules are for people who don’t want to have to think. If you were to make a rule, make one that gives you that ability to think, “What is right is for the highest and best of everyone, including yourself”, then you have to consider how best to take care of yourself. When facing a choice you ask, “Is this in my highest and best interest and is it in the highest and best interest of everyone else?” Asking this question is how you can know what “right” is. This point takes us to the third model.

The Systems Model

The systems model has to do with the uneducated ego model vs. the wisdom model, or the negative model vs. the positive model, or the autocratic model vs. the synergistic model. The name that is used depends on the group you are relating it to. To illustrate, I’ll put the negative model on my left here and the positive model on my right. On the left is how you know your uneducated ego is involved. It is a limited way of thinking. The ego doesn’t have any way of knowing what is right or wrong except by having rules.

We can also look at a company to see how this works. Suppose Company A is on the left and Company B is on the right. Company A operates from a rule dominated model. Company B does what works for everybody. Just picturing that much you can see how different these two companies would be to work in. Company A is a hierarchy. As such, information is on a need to know basis; you have to be careful if you say too much because it may be used against you; you must follow the rules and don’t think and then when something goes wrong, they ask you “What were you thinking?” In Company A, what is right is what works for winning or competition, or what authority decides is right. It is not about morals; it is about what others think and not getting caught. If you don’t get caught and you are not in trouble or you have more power than others, then you are the person that is OK in this model. Yet, success is fleeting. Nothing is lasting. Power is temporary. Looks are temporary. Being on top is temporary. So the negative model places value on moving targets that few achieve and fewer can keep for any amount of time.

People are either aggressive or passive in the negative model and if you make a mistake it is a big deal. Now if you look at Company A and you have an aggressive boss, there may be other aggressive people in the company but there are no two people who are aggressive at the same time – that would be war. People avoid conflict or choose conflict if they are good at it. So usually we have one aggressive person and all the others have to follow or shut up. If you work for Company A, you are also not supposed make anyone else uncomfortable by being up front and you are not supposed to rock the boat. Company A always likes those who go along with everyone and don’t make any trouble. No one has to change then.

Now over on the right in Company B, it is not a hierarchy because everybody there knows that they all have a learning journey and all journeys are equal in value. It doesn’t mean the journeys are the same. Each person is perfect for the journey they are on. They are all there to learn, they are all there to do the highest good for everybody including themselves. They all take care of themselves first but with the consideration of others. They respect the choices of others. In Company B everyone knows how to “live and let live”.

In Company A, you expect the company to take care of you. They promise you that level of care but never follow through. The Company A expects you to sacrifice for them and who gets left holding the bag? You do because in the negative model of Company A authority can always change the rules. They have the authority over you. They don’t have to follow the rules. They make the rules for you, not for them. Company A consistently operates this way and the end result is always the same. The negative model always fails. In fact, it is about failure, sacrifice, pity, obligation, and guilt; not happiness.

If you have a family operating out of the negative model, you have mother or dad that is aggressive; you have to follow their rules; it is a hierarchy; you are taught not to question authority or the rules; you are not taught to think. You are taught to follow the rules, obey authority and feel guilty when you think for yourself or do for yourself. Happiness is not honored. From the negative model, if you look too happy, you must be doing something wrong. Instead, you are supposed to be sacrificing for the good of others. You are supposed to be giving to be a good person because you don’t deserve a thing over here in Company A or family A. Nobody deserves anything and everything is limited. This model comes from the notion that the world is a world of lack. So we can also call this the scarcity model. If you believe that everything is in scarce supply, you will end up with less. You might have more money but you will have less of something else – perhaps less health and less happiness.

In Company B, or the positive model, everybody thinks life is a learning journey; everyone here has the willingness to learn with a positive attitude; doing what they can and looking for the best in others (not like the negative model where they are looking for something wrong, where they are looking for blame all the time). Here in the positive model they are looking for what works so the whole focus is positive and everybody can work together as a positive team. Information is open and upfront. More information is better than less information in the positive model. There isn’t the same risk as in the negative model as people need to share so they can get other viewpoints and they are looking for what works instead of looking for something wrong. Everybody is equal. The equality comes from the idea that life is a learning journey and all journeys are equal. We all know in this world that none of us are born equal if you are going to measure us by looks, or weight, or what we have or whatever. All that is equal is that we all have a learning journey and each journey is an equal opportunity to learn and experience. In Company B you have happiness. Can you see that? Wouldn’t you have peace of mind here, everyone can live and let live…Motivation is different too. Here it is through inspiration and the desire to create, and because you really want to share working together and do good things together and create a better world.

What is the bottom line in Company A? Survival. You only work there as long as you have to. The pay in Company A could never be enough because there is always some dissatisfaction. In contrast, think of times when you may have worked for someone for less money just because you liked them or wanted to help them. You took less money because you were appreciated. This intangible, appreciation, makes a difference. What is the feeling of being in Company A vs. what it would feel like to work in Company B where you are appreciated? Put yourself in Company A for a minute….isn’t it a feeling of fear? Don’t you feel threatened? OK, now put yourself in Company B, the positive model. When you are there, you are free. This is about freedom and about happiness.

Now, if you took a person from Company A and put them in Company B – what happens? They are waiting for the shoe to fall. They say, this is good now but what happens when I do something wrong? They don’t know how to act; they may try to re-create a Company A atmosphere or otherwise sabotage themselves and others. They don’t know how to be happy because in order to be happy in the negative model you are used to looking for something outside yourself to give you enough to be happy. If you don’t have the right to happiness how do you learn to be happy? You would be used to trying to get enough money or other stuff to make you happy. People get that stuff and then are still not happy. Because happiness is not available in the negative model. You have to survive this world to go beyond it. In the negative model you have to make others happy first before you can consider happiness for yourself. You only deserve the pursuit of happiness. However, if you decide life is a learning journey you can be happy right now – it is a choice.

Suppose I’m get a job in a company and know that I am here to learn positive and negative – I’m going to learn from this experience and it is going to be my learning journey. From this perspective, I can choose to be happy no matter what the external circumstances are. So, happiness is a choice. It doesn’t come from anybody outside you. It comes from inside. In particular, I might experience a workplace to be operating from a mostly positive model while another person claims it is operating from the negative model. Anytime you have a negative feeling or a negative feeling is triggered you are operating out of a negative model. As soon as you feel that negative feeling you are not yourself. If you are under pressure it is very hard to be your real self as your skills are less available. Sometimes you have to leave a situation because it is impossible to be yourself. However, often there is a way to do it, because there is a way to be in the world without being of the world. That is a big lesson for all of us. All the experiences we have in the negative model are our learning journey to change our thought structures so we can face any situation and still be ourselves. We can’t be ourselves when we are threatened or under stress unless we have fixed the thought structures that limit our ability to respond. Sometimes our feelings get in our way or cloud our thinking so we can’t get to who we are. We then have to step away from the situation to get our bearings again – to get back to the real me.

When you are in your negative world you are not really you – you are reacting to what is until you evolve enough to stay you. You can use some of the thoughts that come out of the positive model to pull yourself back such as “Everything always works out for the best.” “There is something good about this, what is it?” “It’s only temporary.” These are some of the things that you can say to yourself to bring yourself back out of the insanity of the world. How you fix an experience that feels negative is to use it as a learning experience. Take whatever has happened and replay that experience from the positive model. It fixes the experience so different body chemistry happens. Things can change from positive to negative and back to positive very quickly if you fix the negative feelings.

If you don’t fix things, experiences pile up like unfinished business and a person gets overwhelmed or depressed. If you have most of it fixed, you can go back and forth without too much trouble. When you realize after the fact that something needs to change, you can do a technique on it. You can say, I see myself over there doing these things, I can access the peace and harmony that I needed knowing everything is always OK, everything has a purpose, everything is something to learn from. Then you take those thoughts and put them in the picture of what happened. This process transforms that picture so that you then don’t have the same response the next time. If something is very traumatic, you will want to do more to it than that, something along the lines of what we did earlier with the example of feeling hurt.

I want to go back to one of those hurt memories now that we are know about the systems model because we can see how the negative model played a role in creating the memory. Pick another time you felt hurt that had to do with an emotional hurt. If it is a physical hurt usually you don’t have to put information into the picture, you just change the picture. You could probably put maturity or awareness into it and you probably wouldn’t hurt yourself. Right? But usually with an emotional hurt you want to change the picture to black and white and shred it up or play it like a cartoon. You want to do at least three things to a picture so it won’t change back. Let’s take one where you were emotionally hurt. Look at that picture, change it to a cartoon, now change it to black and white, now bring it out to a dot on the horizon, now stick it in the sun and let it burn up in the sun. Now we just did four or five things to the picture but three is usually enough to lock in the changes so it won’t come back.

Remember your hypothalamus is constantly sending messages through certain chemicals and that you also have an electrical system sending information. Now if you have a big, bright color picture of yourself tripping and falling and you see that image at the same time you are walking down the stairs, you might just trip and fall. If someone says “Don’t trip and fall”, your mind may not process the don’t so you might fall because your brain interprets the statement as a direct command. More precisely, you create a picture of tripping to understand what was said, but not a picture of not tripping so you might trip and fall in much the same way you think of a pink elephant when someone says don’t think of a pink elephant. Making pictures is how we communicate. You say something to me. I make sense of it by creating my own picture to represent what you said. If I can’t make a picture of it, I can’t understand you.

Let’s look at an old hurt picture, one that didn’t change after the generalization process we did earlier. We want to look at it from a systems standpoint. Client: “I was having lots of fun skiing and I said to my dad, ‘Wasn’t I doing great?’ and he said, ‘You shouldn’t tell people that…you shouldn’t show off how well you feel.’” To Client: Because he wanted you to be humble, your dad said you shouldn’t show off how well you feel. He gave you a mixed message. Looking at what is going on from the negative model, we don’t deserve happiness. There are lots of conflicts in the negative model. On one hand, you are not supposed to be selfish but you are not respected if you are self-less and give everything away. Because, if you have nothing, in the negative model poverty isn’t grounds for respect either. You are not supposed to be proud of yourself and yet you are supposed to do good and be successful. Nothing makes sense in the negative model. Your dad was afraid you were going to be proud and since you don’t deserve anything in the negative world, you are not supposed to be proud either. Also, if you are acting happy you are doing something wrong. And, your father would be looking for something to be wrong too. So you were having too much fun, you were not doing your duty or sacrificing for others so you are not acceptable.

Looking at your father, if he knew happiness was the highest goal, how much would it change that? All of a sudden he could let you have some fun, right? He could have enjoyed it too. If he wanted you to have self-worth and you knew you were valuable and he knew you were valuable as a person too, just to be here…would he have said that? He wouldn’t have been getting you to put yourself down then, would he? In the positive model, you are valuable just for being here. You don’t have to do anything to have value – you are valuable. You are perfect just the way you are. And it is important to have fun, to enjoy life and to be happy. So in the positive model, if you see someone happy they must be doing something right. So if your father thought that way, he wouldn’t have said all that negative stuff. And you would have felt different.

What is the message you got by him saying what he did? Client: “Don’t show your happiness.” Yes, because in that world that he was looking from the position that happiness equals irresponsibility. If happiness means you are not sacrificing, you are doing something wrong. You have to look pitiful. In the negative model if someone can feel sorry for you then they can do something honorable by rescuing you. In the negative model it makes you a good person to rescue someone but it also makes you more important because you are better than them to begin with or you wouldn’t have to rescue them. So, since nobody has any value, the only way you create value is by doing things and sacrificing….Or not sacrificing and making tons of money. You can be envied by having more. Or looking really good, or being skinnier than everyone else. All the ways someone can be jealous of you gives you importance. Being important is valued in the negative model. Actually it matters more what others think than who is really important. Such values create dysfunctional and co-dependent behaviors.

None of the values held in the negative model create true happiness or abundance. If your father was thinking from the positive model that life is a learning journey, and it is all about happiness, he wouldn’t have said what he did. Take the understanding of your father’s world and pretend he came from another country like Russia. Now suppose when he spoke from the negative model, as a kid, you just knew it was his Russian thinking. You could forgive him, right? Because he didn’t grow up free and he didn’t know happiness was the highest goal. So if you could take that mature perception here and put it in that little boy back there, would he be hurt then? Client: “No he wouldn’t be hurt.”

Alright so now, if we took what we put into this event that life is about fun and happiness, that life is a learning journey, and that you are valuable and all of that is in there in that memory and you could see what a happy family you would be... Take that picture and put it into the rest of the pictures and generalize that into everyone in every place, if everyone in every place thought that way, would there be any hurt anywhere? NO. So push those pictures out until they are black and white snap shots and pull out your imaginary paper shredder and let the wind blow them behind you. Now let’s look for the feeling of hurt. What do you get now? Client: “I can’t find the feeling.”

Now let’s see a time in the future you might be in a situation where someone might not be kind or you usually would feel hurt. But see yourself feeling understanding knowing they are just thinking from their Russian past – they are stuck in the negative…It is them and not you…and they just forgot who they are…then you don’t have to be hurt, right? So what we do is we fix the past, we fix the now or whatever is going on now, and then we future pace it by seeing yourself in the future with the same thinking we fixed the original picture with.

Now we have gone through three models, the thinking model, the psycho-biochemical model, and the systems model. With those three models you can pretty much take care of anything that happens to you. You have some techniques to transform your thinking. These models help you understand what’s going on in the world and your role in it. The last model is how you generate your life. Because whatever is in your thinking already, is what you see out there.

The Generative Model

Let’s pretend in front of your face there is a sieve or screen and that screen only has 3-5 holes in it. Moreover, that screen constantly shifts so that whatever you are feeling inside, those holes match that same feeling so you can only see that outside. Your perception is limited to your filter of the world. Your inner world with all your thought structures creates this filter of your world. As an example, if a girl has always had abusive relationships, the filter she would have would only allow her to meet men that would be abusive or she would make them abusive to match her filter. Her filter would keep her from generating in her world a kind and loving man that she would appreciate. Even if she did meet one that was kind and loving she wouldn’t appreciate him because he wouldn’t match her model of men. So whatever filter you have is what you get to see. As you transform your thought structures so that everyone is kind and loving, you automatically change your filters.

It is as if the filters are little doors that you open for experience. You can’t easily have an experience that you can’t make sense of. So, you have to be open to new experience. You do that with your beliefs which are giant generalizations of everything that you have experienced in the past, all the thoughts and ideas that you have ever heard about. So if you took all the information you ever got and generalized it, you have your beliefs. Beliefs are the filtering system that only opens doors for certain things. So if you want money in your life but all the doors to money are shut, you can’t generate money in your life. This is a simplified way of looking at the generative model. If you change your beliefs, you change what you generate in your life. This automatically happens as you change your thinking and it happens much faster if you change your beliefs.

If you decide you want money then you need to look at how you have shut doors to that in the past. You can take those experiences and transform them and by transforming them you create a new reality that will open all the doors to money in the future. Your values also work with your beliefs so that is another area to look at. Whatever you don’t have is usually a high value so values shift. If you grew up in the negative model and you were taught to sacrifice and only give and not receive, then what you do in the future is that you only open to experiences and you will continually generate experiences where you are the giver and your value is tied to how much you give and take care of others. Change your values, beliefs, emotions, and you change your life. It is not a simple process but you will naturally see your life change as you change your thinking.

What this all comes down to is going back to those original pictures of memories and using ways to edit them. One of the first things you can do is, in your memory, change your parents. For fun, pretend you had different parents. It might be a good thing to pick a new set of parents. Perhaps you had a friend that had wonderful parents you would have liked to have had. Pretend they were your parents. Pretend they were back there with that younger you. See how different your life looks with those parents. See how different you would think now. What would they have taught you differently?

When you put those parents in your past, your mind doesn’t know the difference of what is real or imagined. For a few days pretend these wonderful people were your parents and notice how you feel and how different your life is. All their ideas and how they look at life would be part of you now. And if you could see yourself with those parents how would you have looked like as a kid? Client: “Full of joy.” Ok, they would have honored happiness then. And as a teenager, what would your life look like as a teenager? Client: “A lot more full”. Ok, and if you started relationships, what would your relationships have looked like? Client: “More open.” OK, and if you had those kinds of parents supporting you in your work, what would your work look like? Client: “Very productive. More creative and more successful”.

OK, now let’s take one experience of your work and pretend you had those parents….how would you have done this differently? Client: “I wouldn’t have worked for those people.” Now let’s look at those employers, if they were coming from the positive model and they saw life as a learning journey, what would be different there with them? What else would we need to give them so they were totally be coming from the positive model? Client: “There wouldn’t be the I’m better than you.” So they would have seen you as equal, they wouldn’t have talked to you the same way because your journey is as important as theirs, they would have respect for what you do, and you would have had respect for yourself…now see how that would look, and they would want to give value for value. They would have wanted to pay you what you were worth, you would have wanted to do the best job you could do for them…see how that all would look? That would be a much different story.

Now we have millions of memories to edit and the only way we get through this very fast is by generalizing. By getting them in categories and generalizing. Some of the processes help you do that.