Decision Making Strategies
Time lines and decision making
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In 1993, with my wife Elisabeth, we had designed a 5 days seminar for alcoholics
(a lot of alcoholics in France !) using NLP and our background in Gestalt as
kinesthetic submodalities were almost absent of the NLP trainings we had.
We started using the parts model described in Reframing (Chapter 6). We used
to follow the process described in this book :
1. Eliciting the 2 dissociated parts : the alcoholic part (AP) and the
Sober part (SP).
2. Making them collapsing using anchoring or anything else that works
3. Reframing the New part (AP+SP) using 6 steps reframing.
Most of the time, we had good results. But a few month later, it seems that
some patients get back to their habit. So getting them back for follow up
session we discovered that the point was their decison making strategies.
In other words "What do they do in their mind to make the decision of
having a drink ?".
The strategy was quite simple :
1. Seeing a picture of themselves having a drink or being drunk
2. Associating themselves in the picture
3. Triggering a compulsion process.
Remarks
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If we assume that addicted people got two very very dissociated parts
(ie the addictive part (AP) and the sober part (SP)) we could say :
1. They are seeing a picture of their addictive part (AP)
2. When they are associating themselves in the picture, they are jumping
into their AP.
3. The compulsion process is initiated into their AP.
4. The addiction in itself would be a way to stay as long as possible in
this other part of themselves we call the addictive part. As alcoholics
used to switch back and forth beetwin these two parts (depending what
time it is or which day it is), heroin addicted people generally used
to stay in their addictive part making their sober part to disappear.
5. Generally this decision strategy is not only used to decide to have
a drink (or whatever they need) or not but it is also used in a wide
range of decisions, involving different areas of their lives.
What we did
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At a seminar, as we were eliciting decision strategies, we had the idea to
train the participants in using different timelines configurations
when they are making decision.
We chunked the decision process into three steps :
1. considering the decision,
2. judging the decision,
3. making it and acting to get the outcome.
For each step we taught them to use a different timeline:
1. Being dissociated from time and looking at their full time line just
in front of them and being able to see all the future consequences of
their decision.
2. Being associated in their present and looking at their time line set
as a V past on their left side and future on their right side,
being able to see the consequences more precisely and being able
to judge the value of their future comparing with similar past events.
3. Moving their timeline past behind future ahead and now being able to
GO FOR IT !
Conclusion
==========
This decision making installation has worked pretty well with several
patients. Some of them got back to their habit for some time then
stopped again as if they had *the choice* and are staying away from
their habit until now.
Richard Bandler teaches now that you have to litteraly destroy their
old way of making decisions and he taught us how to. I will explain
how in a future posting.
Please, all your comments about this article are requested and welcomed.
-Bernard FRIT