Time Line Therapy™

Throughout our history, humans have been aware of the passage of time. Even Aristotle mentions the "stream of time" in his writings. Everyone is capable of imagining their "Time Line," a line of time where we store our memories. This linear representation is how we unconsciously know the difference between a memory from the past and an imagining of the future, or an experience of now. Time Line Therapy ™ uses this linear representation of time as the basis for a process, which clears away negative emotions, limiting beliefs and un-useful decisions made in the past.

Have you ever overreacted emotionally to a situation and wondered why?

Has your negative emotion ever seemed out of proportion to the event that caused it?

This is because often something that is bothering us now is reminding us of other similar instances in the past. The Unconscious Mind, where all our memories, learning, beliefs, attitudes, and values are stored, tends to connect similar events into groups called ‘gestalts’. So when you overreact emotionally to a situation, you are really reacting to a collection of similar memories and the emotion becomes distorted by being about many memories or events, and not just about what is taking place in the current moment.

Time Line Therapy ™ traces these memories back to their roots, clears away the negative emotion and any limitations to our magnificence, which have built around the negativity. The process separates the events in the collection of memories to stand alone events and the events become neutral. At the same time, because of the structure of the line of time which we all have, the positive changes we make in the past generate forward into the future, so that any future events which would have been part of the collection of memories with the negative emotions, become separate, stand alone events, with the emotion being appropriate to each event.

There are 6 negative emotions: anger, fear, sadness, hurt, guilt and shame.

Guilt and shame are man-made emotions, and they are after the fact emotions.  They were created to try to get people to do what others want them to do, so we can just clear those up, they are unnecessary, we don’t need them.

The other 4 emotions are pure emotions, and they are only negative when they are stored or stuck.

Anger is how we know our boundaries have been crossed, fear stimulates our fight or flight response, and sadness and hurt are how humans experience loss and grief. So when we clear these 4 emotions, we are only clearing them where they have become disproportionate to events, and where they are stored in the body. By doing this, we also generate proportional emotional responses into the future.  So we still experience pure emotions, we just experience them proportionately and we learn to express them, rather than suppress them.

Along with negative emotions come limiting decisions or beliefs about ourselves which are not very useful, such as, “I’m not good enough” I don’t deserve….” “I’m too fat” “I’m a loser” I’m not very smart” “Rich people are dishonest” and so on.

None of these beliefs is true, we only learn to perceive them as true, and when we believe them, we are creating a self-fulfilling outcome for ourselves.  When we eliminate these beliefs or decisions, we have much more freedom to make positive choices for ourselves.

Time Line Therapy, was created by Tad James, NLP Master and Trainer, based in Hawaii.

It is a very specific process, to use it one must be trained and use it exactly as prescribed.

Submitted by Anne Goodman, MNLP, DH, EFT

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