When you recall a past event, usually because of your current circumstances, you also recall the emotions and feelings that went with that event. This then colors your view of your current circumstances, sometimes irrationally.
If you’ve had a significant negative experience that you feel has too much fear associated with it, try disassociation. Disassociation helps you reduce your fear to a more rational level. You may also want to try this technique if you continue to focus on a negative future scenario.
Disassociation is opposite to anchoring. Anchoring ties positive experiences to a trigger. You can use that trigger to improve your current state by recalling a past positive state. Disassociation uses mental imagery to separate the negative emotions associated with an event from the event itself.
Be sure to “learn the lessons” from negative experiences—don’t ignore them. Use disassociation though if you feel you’ve associated too much fear to a negative experience.
Let’s look at a disassociation technique. This is the disassociation movie technique:
1. Recall the experience. Recall the negative experience. Play it through in your mind to give yourself some of the negative feelings and emotions associated with it.
2. Go to the movies. Now go back to the just before the start of the event, before anything happened. Freeze the frame. Now make that picture smaller, and move back from it. Now visualize yourself sitting in a movie theatre or cinema, towards the back. This is a unique cinema that specializes in disassociation. See that frozen frame on the screen.
3. Replay. Now replay the movie in black and white, almost like a Charlie Chaplin movie. There is that piano music playing in the background. Turn down the volume of the voices or other sounds so you can hardly hear them over the music. Try to see the humorous side of the events as they unfold. In fact, smile and laugh at various points, even if you are “faking it.”
4. Rewind. Still in the cinema, imagine the movie running backwards. Do this quickly. The “rewind” should take no longer than two to three seconds, or four to five seconds your movie involves several contributing events. See everything running in reverse, and hear the sounds like they are going backwards. It’s amusing. Repeat this step a few times.
5. Leave and check. Still visualizing, get up and walk out into the cinema lobby. There is a camera crew there with an interviewer. You sometimes see these scenes on TV, with the interviewer asking moviegoers what they thought of the movie they just saw. This interviewer asks you “on a scale of one (low) to five (high), how would you rate your fear now?” Briefly recall the negative experience, and give it the rating. If it is more than three, the interviewer says “looks like you are going to have to see it again!” Turn around and go back into the cinema, and repeat the technique in further detail. If it’s a rating of one to three, the interviewer says “congratulations, now go out and try it”
6. Experience—gradually. If the experience you are disassociating yourself from affects your current behavior, put yourself in some circumstances that used to trigger your fear. See how you feel. Be careful though—start small and build up, and test how you feel as you go.
This process is also good for working with phobias. Replace the movie with the first time you experienced the phobia, or the time when you had a severe reaction from the phobia.