Thresholds of Thresholds
By Chris Cathey
Copyright 2010
When is ‘enough’ enough? Everything in NLP really in a lot of ways has to do with taking people over thresholds of experience. In order to elicit a state a person needs to take a person into an experience just enough so that the entire gestalt that is the state emerges. Same thing occurs with the process of mapping across. You’re taking submodality distinctions from one experience and you transferring them to another experience to the point where the person then crosses a threshold from one to the other. How do you know when you’re done brushing your teeth? How do you know what constitutes a brushing of one’s teeth? It’s the criteria that determines whether you have in fact brushed your teeth or even if you have brushed your teeth enough.
What happen with people that are obsessive compulsive? They never reach threshold, they don’t get to the point where they brains says enough is enough. We’ve all had time where check and re-checked something because the first time we crossed threshold so that we knew to stop for whatever reason it didn’t stick so we had to go back and try to take ourselves over threshold once again in order to move on. NLP has a pattern called the, ‘Compulsion Blow Out’ this pattern is actually designed to utilize submodality distinctions in order to take a person over threshold so that the person goes over the threshold the compulsion is no longer there. If you want to see a demonstration of this Steve Andreas a well known figure in the field has a DVD where he is working with a person that has a compulsion that he quite elegantly blows out using this pattern.
When you’re eliciting states you can anchor them one of many ways. One way a person can anchor astate is to make it a sliding anchor. A sliding anchor is much like those analog light switches that allows a person dim or brighten a rooms light to their liking as opposed to a light switch that operates in a more digital way of either the light is on or it is off. Now with a sliding anchor you can actually play with the variability of a person’s feeling in order to do any number of things. A useful thing to do for those who are in the therapy game is to turn way up or way down a feeling in order to take it through a certain threshold so that it is no longer the feeling that it once was. For example you can heighten the feeling of anxiety into some other type of feeling that would be more useful. I do want to draw the distinction between just amping a state during a state elicitation and leaving it there as opposed to amping it and taking a person past a threshold.
If you merely amp up a state and anchor it there and you leave it like that typically the state will lose its intensity much like a tire to a bicycle losing air if it has a hole in it. When you amp up a state and take it past threshold whatever that might be typically the crossing of that threshold will act as a floor that will serve as a backstop that will prevent the state from collapsing back into the previous state. That’s what I’ve used it for in the past.
I was once working with a person and I could find the necessary resource that would allow us to complete the piece of work. So what we did was take a resource that was close enough and we spatially marked out a time line and had the person walk into the future feeling it grow and enrich up and until the point where the feeling passed threshold and transformed into a different feeling that would be much more conducive to completing the piece of work. The fact that we passed threshold was enough for the feeling operate within that person’s normal range of emotional state intensity.
Tony Robbins once spoke of doing a seminar in which he was talking about people passing thresholds and in the example he gave he spoke of a lady that one day raised her hand and said that she loved chocolate so much that she could eat it without stopping. I would love to see some eat without stopping but theoretically this is just not possible. Anyhow, what Tony did was have everyone in the training pass their chocolate that they might have had in their purses or pockets up to this lady so that they could watch her eat it. After a short while they had accumulated so much chocolate that as the lady was eating it she finally got to a point where she said enough was enough. She passed threshold.
Everyone has a convincer strategy, a sequence of steps that a person has to go through for them to be convinced of something. Some people have to see something to be convinced, others have to hear about it or hear it, others have to do it. Going further some people have see, hear, feel it just once other have to do it a certain number of times and other have to have it occur or a period of time while still others just have to be convinced every time. Well how is this useful? It’s useful because if we know what it takes to get ourselves to pass threshold then we can use this information to take ourselves in to experience that we would like to have.
What is something that you believe about yourself that in some way limits you? How do you know that it’s true? Your probably gonna arrive at some sort of evidence procedure for how you know it’s true, conditions that must be met in order for the generalization that is that belief to fire off. If you tinker a bit with the evidence procedure you can cause the generalization to collapse from something you believe to disbelieve. At some point if condition A is met then B is met and condition C is met then the beliefs will fire off as true. Sometimes it’s easy as counter exampling the conditions present in the criteria in a belief in order to make the generalization collapse. Sometimes you only need to counter example one condition, sometimes you need to do two or even all of them. At some point mentally you cross the threshold from belief to disbelief because the information inside the box so to speak no longer fits into that category of experience.
Thresholds are everywhere as you learn to detect and play with them you’ll learn how to manipulate them to your advantage. ‘Six Blind Elephants’ Volume 1 by Steve Andreas is a good reference for experimenting with thresholds. Also I would recommend looking into Jonathan Altfeld and Doug O’brien’s work entitled, ‘Belief Craft’.
What happen with people that are obsessive compulsive? They never reach threshold, they don’t get to the point where they brains says enough is enough. We’ve all had time where check and re-checked something because the first time we crossed threshold so that we knew to stop for whatever reason it didn’t stick so we had to go back and try to take ourselves over threshold once again in order to move on. NLP has a pattern called the, ‘Compulsion Blow Out’ this pattern is actually designed to utilize submodality distinctions in order to take a person over threshold so that the person goes over the threshold the compulsion is no longer there. If you want to see a demonstration of this Steve Andreas a well known figure in the field has a DVD where he is working with a person that has a compulsion that he quite elegantly blows out using this pattern.
When you’re eliciting states you can anchor them one of many ways. One way a person can anchor astate is to make it a sliding anchor. A sliding anchor is much like those analog light switches that allows a person dim or brighten a rooms light to their liking as opposed to a light switch that operates in a more digital way of either the light is on or it is off. Now with a sliding anchor you can actually play with the variability of a person’s feeling in order to do any number of things. A useful thing to do for those who are in the therapy game is to turn way up or way down a feeling in order to take it through a certain threshold so that it is no longer the feeling that it once was. For example you can heighten the feeling of anxiety into some other type of feeling that would be more useful. I do want to draw the distinction between just amping a state during a state elicitation and leaving it there as opposed to amping it and taking a person past a threshold.
If you merely amp up a state and anchor it there and you leave it like that typically the state will lose its intensity much like a tire to a bicycle losing air if it has a hole in it. When you amp up a state and take it past threshold whatever that might be typically the crossing of that threshold will act as a floor that will serve as a backstop that will prevent the state from collapsing back into the previous state. That’s what I’ve used it for in the past.
I was once working with a person and I could find the necessary resource that would allow us to complete the piece of work. So what we did was take a resource that was close enough and we spatially marked out a time line and had the person walk into the future feeling it grow and enrich up and until the point where the feeling passed threshold and transformed into a different feeling that would be much more conducive to completing the piece of work. The fact that we passed threshold was enough for the feeling operate within that person’s normal range of emotional state intensity.
Tony Robbins once spoke of doing a seminar in which he was talking about people passing thresholds and in the example he gave he spoke of a lady that one day raised her hand and said that she loved chocolate so much that she could eat it without stopping. I would love to see some eat without stopping but theoretically this is just not possible. Anyhow, what Tony did was have everyone in the training pass their chocolate that they might have had in their purses or pockets up to this lady so that they could watch her eat it. After a short while they had accumulated so much chocolate that as the lady was eating it she finally got to a point where she said enough was enough. She passed threshold.
Everyone has a convincer strategy, a sequence of steps that a person has to go through for them to be convinced of something. Some people have to see something to be convinced, others have to hear about it or hear it, others have to do it. Going further some people have see, hear, feel it just once other have to do it a certain number of times and other have to have it occur or a period of time while still others just have to be convinced every time. Well how is this useful? It’s useful because if we know what it takes to get ourselves to pass threshold then we can use this information to take ourselves in to experience that we would like to have.
What is something that you believe about yourself that in some way limits you? How do you know that it’s true? Your probably gonna arrive at some sort of evidence procedure for how you know it’s true, conditions that must be met in order for the generalization that is that belief to fire off. If you tinker a bit with the evidence procedure you can cause the generalization to collapse from something you believe to disbelieve. At some point if condition A is met then B is met and condition C is met then the beliefs will fire off as true. Sometimes it’s easy as counter exampling the conditions present in the criteria in a belief in order to make the generalization collapse. Sometimes you only need to counter example one condition, sometimes you need to do two or even all of them. At some point mentally you cross the threshold from belief to disbelief because the information inside the box so to speak no longer fits into that category of experience.
Thresholds are everywhere as you learn to detect and play with them you’ll learn how to manipulate them to your advantage. ‘Six Blind Elephants’ Volume 1 by Steve Andreas is a good reference for experimenting with thresholds. Also I would recommend looking into Jonathan Altfeld and Doug O’brien’s work entitled, ‘Belief Craft’.