Now, when she came back in two weeks, we couldn't resist. We induced a somnambulistic trance, and established an anchor for amnesia so that we could erase anything we did during that session— because she was doing fine and we didn't want to interfere. We just wanted to check and find out what had happened. We asked her unconscious mind if in fact the experience described by the therapist during the session—or anything approximating it—had ever occurred. The answer was unequivocally "No." However, that is no different than what just happened here. If the experience that Tammy generated has all the elements of whatever the original experience or set of experiences was, it will serve as a metaphor which will be as effective as an actual, factual, historical representation. And from my sensory experience I can guarantee that it was effective.

Woman: What I still don't understand is what you do if the client is stuck because she has an expectation of getting a picture of a childhood incident, and now she's sitting there doing this and she can't get a picture.

OK, that's the same choice point as the congruent "I don't know" that we talked about earlier. Ask her to guess, make it up, lie, fantasize; it doesn't matter.

Actually, age regression is a very easy phenomenon. We said "Go back through time." She had very little conscious idea what we meant by that, but she responded quite easily to it.

Man: What specifically were you seeing on her face?

The same response that she originally demonstrated when we asked her about the feelings of the phobia. I watched her age regress until I saw a very intense example of it. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. There was whiteness around the eyes and the side of the face. There was some kind of scrunching of her chin. There was an increase in moisture on her skin, especially on the bridge of her nose. When that became intensified, I said "Now look at an image, that image there."

If you tell people to go back through time and they frown, that's also a cue. And you might try something tricky like saying "Well, go forward in time." "Go through time, jump back in time." "Go around time." Anything. It doesn't matter. The specific words you use are wholly irrelevant as long as you get the response you want.

Another way to think about it is that everybody with a phobia knows the feelings of the phobia. They have a fragment of the experience, so they can get the rest by overlap. How do you find your car keys when you want to go to the store and you don't know where they are?

Woman: I start feeling around through my pockets.

Man: I go through the house and look.

Man: I search my mind, going back to try to visualize where they are.

Woman: I shake my purse so I can hear them.

OK. If all else fails, you can go back to the front door and walk in again. Now, if you think about the responses we just got, those include the three main representational systems. If you have any fragment of any experience, you can have it all by overlap. She had the feelings here. The feelings, once anchored, stabilized her state of consciousness. Everything that she accessed as she closed her eyes and went back in her personal history had that set of feelings in common, guaranteeing that whatever picture she selected would be in the class called phobic experiences.

I used the same principle to help her have a complete focused visual

image of herself at a younger age. At first she had only a picture of herself, but no context. I ask her what color shoes she is Wearing. I presuppose that she can see her feet and her shoes, and that she can see

colors. She accepts the presupposition; she says "Black." Since she can see the shoes, then obviously "logically," she can see what they are on top of, the surface she's standing on. I request that. When she gets the surface, it blends into walls and into trees, or whatever the rest of the image was. It's a very easy overlap, or intersection, technique that allows me to assist her in recovering the image by constructing portions of it, a little at a time.

Man: What’s the difference between this techniques and systematic desensitization?

About six months. That's the major difference, which is a very expensive difference. My understanding is that it's straight conditioning. We have simply associated a new set of feelings, namely competence and strength, with the auditory and visual stimuli.

There is another very important difference. We are picking a specific set of feelings and assorting it, instead of just trying to wipe out the set that is there. The people that I've observed desensitization are usually trying to eliminate a certain kind of behavior rather than replacing it with something which is a positive response. They are the kind of people who answer "Not bad" when you ask "How are you feeling?"

We claim that every piece of behavior has a positive function. It's the

best choice a person has in context. It was far better for Tammy to be

phobic about bridges than it was to have no program at all. If you do systematic desensitization, and you don't replace the "negative" behavioral pattern with something positive, it takes a long time because the person will fight. It's their only defense. That's why it takes six months, because a person has to randomly put something else in its place.