How do you change stressful memories to avoid limiting your future experiences?

The other day, a friend and I were talking about how our memory of unpleasant experiences becomes more vivid and larger than life each time we think back on the experience, and how this can sometimes limit us in the future. This is how phobias develop. We can’t change these experiences, but we can all change how we remember and feel about them.

I asked my friend if there was any experience she had had in life which she felt limited her now. Her response was a memory of being at the top of a tall building. She felt (and a sideways glance at her confirmed) quite anxious about ever repeating the experience. At the time her fear was probably her instinctive self-preservation reflex kicking in and absolutely appropriate. The trouble is, after the event, we go back over it and run a movie of what happened in our minds.

Each time we play the movie we start and stop at the same scene. With each replay our senses enhance the images, so the pictures get bigger and brighter, the sounds clearer and the smells sharper. I asked her to imagine she was watching a movie of her experience, but instead of starting at the same place, to rewind to 15 minutes earlier and finish 10 minutes later. Then I asked her to imagine herself in the movie and running it backwards from the later finish to the earlier start.

When she found herself back at the beginning I asked her to re-run the movie backwards and 10 times faster than before, and then 100 times faster. I then asked her to repeat the backwards movie with some silly music to accompany it. (My suggestion was Benny Hill singing ‘The fastest milkman in the west’.) I could see from her relaxed features and broad smile that the way she remembered the original experience was now different. Finally I asked her to run the movie forwards again, from the early start time to the later finish time and see how different it felt right now. My friend admitted she couldn’t feel the same about future trips up tall buildings.

If anyone wants me to check it out with her, maybe you could send me two tickets to the Eiffel Tower (purely for research purposes of course!). Maybe you can make different movies of your frightening or stressful past experiences and see how differently you feel. A good one for those afraid of spiders is to put clogs on their feet and get them line-dancing to a merry tune in your favourite coloured clothes!

Horses are powerful healers of such experiences. These animals are alive today because they have such an instinctive ability to survive. They do not have memory like us and live entirely in the present moment. They do not imagine what may never happen in the future or distort their present with unpleasant memories. Spending time with the horses teaches us how to be present and look only at what is happening NOW!

One well-known advocate of using horses as healers is Monty Roberts, and this link is to a recent article about his work with soldiers with emotional issues.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2608674/Queens-horse-whisperer-uses-gift-help-heal-broken-heroes-Afghan-war.html

If you’d like to know more or come and try this out, let me know!