ANCESTRAL TIME-LINE THERAPY
In the last few decades, it has become obvious that an individual’s timeline, with all the person’s history — joys and fears, happiness and sorrow, loves and hates, limiting and empowering decisions — is a major part of that person’s personality.
With 30 years of counseling experience I have found that if I were able to intervene in a client’s ancestral timeline, therapeutically, I was able to assist the client to create seemingly miraculous changes in his life — changes that extended even to the deepest level of personality.
How Does Ancestral Time-Line Therapy Work?
In essence, Ancestral Time-LIne Therapy is a blueprint or a map. Like a map, a model is not necessarily “true.” It is just a representation of reality. So, I am not necessarily looking for truth in the time-line, only attempting to offer a description of how a portion of the human personality works. Like a map, it is only a description of the territory; and the value of any map or a blueprint lies in the results that you can produce by using it.
From the time of Aristotle to William James, Freud and Jung to Milton Erickson, M.D., people interested in Psychology have been searching for a way to adequately describe the human experience of time. Ancestral Time-Line Therapy, has the potential to not only make sense out of our temporal experience but also to change our understanding of how negative emotions and limiting decisions affect us, as well as describe how to create a meaningful future for all time to come. We can now understand the human temporal experience and can change the basic elements that makeup someone’s history.
Who are you if not your collection of memories? For almost 100 years, psychologists have agreed that our past experiences do determine who we are, and how we act. (Although the examination of memories has, in the last decade or two, fallen into disfavor among psychologists because they did have a reliable technique to affect the memories.) Memories are recorded and stored as we age and with time they have more and more influence on us. Our Time Line is the index to the memory encoding of the unconscious mind, and it is usually wholly unconscious.
YOUR TIME LINE
In the context of Ancestral Time-Line therapy, the words “unconscious mind” are not intended to signify anything mysterious or unusual, simply the part of your mind of which you are not conscious, right now. Your unconscious mind is a very important part of you. Think about it for just a moment. Here is a part of you that runs your body; it makes your heart beat, causes the lymph system to circulate, your breathing to continue, your eyes to blink, your stomach to digest your food, and many other tasks that perhaps you had never even considered. The first thing to appreciate is that your unconscious mind is the source of all learning, all behavior and all change.
THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
CHANGE: Think of a bad habit you wanted to change in the past. Was it easy? Probably not. Most people find it hard to change a bad habit. For them it’s something that takes time. I remember in the 70’s when I had a nervous habit of playing with my curls, all the time, and one day I said I’m not going to do that anymore! But, you know, five minutes later, there I was again, playing with them.
If change was that easy, you could walk up to a friend who was being a bit of a jerk and say, “Um, excuse me, but you’re being a bit of a jerk! Would you please change?” And they would change. right then — if change was conscious! In the real world, change isn’t always that easy. Many people go on doing the same old things over and over, year after year and they complain about it. If change isn’t that easy for us, it is simply because we aren’t fully in rapport with our unconscious mind. In the real world people are often not in rapport with the unconscious mind, and that is why change isn’t that easy for them.
Your unconscious mind would really like to be in rapport with your conscious mind. Let us look at this idea a little further: Your unconscious mind cannot process a negative in consciousness. It’s true. In fact, it’s also true for the conscious mind as well. Think about this. You cannot think about what you wish to not think about without thinking about it. Think about that. For example, if I said, “Don’t think about a pink elephants,” what are you thinking about. Unless you were semantically trained, you are probably thinking about a pink elephant. Even though I asked you not to!!
Most of us go through our lives telling ourselves, “I don’t want to think about a pink elephant. When you go in to see the boss, do you say, “I hope he doesn’t get angry like the last time.”? Or when starting out in a new relationship, do you say, “Gee, I hope I don’t get hurt.”? Or how about a salesperson going in to make a sale and saying, “I hope I don’t blow this sale.”?
Do you do that? If you do, it may be the wrong signal to be giving to your unconscious mind. If it is the wrong signal, it is because the unconscious mind cannot process a negative in consciousness. So, to facilitate communication between the conscious and the unconscious minds helps create congruence. The feeling of dissonance is the indication that you are at cross purposes with your True Self. Ancestral Time-Line therapy heals the "dissonance" and enables the flow of your Highest Good to move through all conscious and unconscious parts of yourself. All change happens through the unconscious mind. It is the root of all change.