T2W Trading Community

How to Follow Bob’s Example

You can create your own brief therapy along the lines of Bob’s experience.  The key is forming an image of your problem pattern—the one you identified across the valleys of your sine wave chart—that will energize your attempts to undo the pattern.  Bob created a visual image of a miniature father in his head to help him realize that he was doing to himself what his father had done to him.  Jack’s strategy was different: he equated his pattern with the loss of control he felt as a child and used that feeling to rebel against his pattern.  When alcoholics make life changes in AA, it is because they come to visualize drinking as an obstacle, something that will ruin their lives.  This visualization provides them with powerful images that tap into their motivation to change. 

Your own brief therapy will work if it taps into a similar motivation.  Your image doesn’t have to be negative to be effective.  One client of mine years ago had a tendency to beat up on herself.  She had been sexually abused as a child and blamed herself for what had happened.  Her pattern, not surprisingly, was guilt.  After we talked about how her guilt worked for her as a child—it kept her silent so that she would not face the severe physical abuse that her angry brother experienced—but now was holding her back, she decided to hold a funeral for her guilt.  She literally buried pictures of her childhood and created the image of her pattern as a part of her that had died and now must be left behind.

Many times brief work is effective because it focuses people on the peaks as well as the valleys: their positive patterns and not just their negative ones.  Indeed, figuring out solution patterns often provides insight into what you can try differently when you catch yourself starting to get caught up in an old problem pattern.  One person I worked with described peak experiences of great peacefulness: during vacations, while feeling close to others, etc.  This gave us the idea of using meditation to create moments of peacefulness when the problem patterns were likely to emerge.  By interrupting old patterns and enacting new ones, he eventually made relaxation a positive habit.

Conclusion

All of us have learned to deal with life challenges, and some of the ways of coping that we learned now interfere with our happiness and success.  This doesn't mean that we are mentally ill, and it doesn't mean that we cannot regain control over our lives.  Just as negative patterns can be learned--and overlearned--we can create intensive learning situations to instill new, more positive patterns.  What keeps negative patterns alive is our unwillingness to confront our worst fears.  Bob overcame his pattern because he was willing to face frustration again and again--in imagery and real life--until he had completely silenced his father's critical voice. 

Facing our greatest sources of fear and distress--but with new skills and a new perspective--is the essence of brief therapy.  Typically this is a three-step process:  1) regaining a measure of control; 2) identifying one’s repetitive patterns; and 3) using imagery and learned exercises to disrupt those patterns.  If Lance Armstrong can retain his sense of purpose in the face of late-stage cancer and Viktor Frankl can retain control over his life in a concentration camp, no trading situations need dominate our lives.  We learn problem patterns, we can unlearn them, and we can learn new, positive patterns.  With the help of brief therapy innovations, the unlearning and relearning can happen more quickly than ever.