In the spirit of "Inside Out, and Bottom Up", I like to have my own NLP experiences to paint a clearer future, as well as clean out some of the the junk in my own trunk. Tonight, I spent an hour practicing Timeline Therapy to unload some of the old gestalts that create drag on my life.
I am amazed at the similarities between the Timeline Therapy and the Sedona Method, though I believe they were developed independently. Timeline Therapy is credited to Tad James, and the Sedona Method to Lester Levinson, made popular by Hale Dwoskin.
Both methods take you back to a time of guilt, embarrassment, or some other emotion of the negative sort (though not a trauma) and associate you with it, allowing all the same feelings of the original event to come to the surface. At this point, the Sedona Method emphasizes welcoming the feeling and releasing it, repeating as required, and Timeline Therapy emphasizes dissociation by floating above the event and gathering up the learnings, then floating to 15 minutes prior to the event to look at it as a future event that has not yet happened, and so the learnings were available, but the negative feelings were absent.
Now, the Sedona Method centers around an invitation to willfully release negative feelings, and I really like the simplicity of the Sedona Method. It hardly requires any set up, and it does work almost anywhere and almost any time (to quote Dr. Seuss: "in a plane and on a train"). But I have to say from my own subjective experience, that the setup of Timeline Therapy, while more intricate and with more steps are involved, results in a stronger release of negative emotion, that seemed far more automatic and cathartic, and likely to generalize and become permanent.
The reason for this, I believe, might have to do with the double-dissociation as one "floats" both above the stressful event, and then before the stressful event, before the memory was even formed. The emotion that surfaced during the associated phase had nowhere else to go but out.
To sum it up, the Sedona Method welcomes and then invites the negative emotion to leave, and Timeline Therapy creates a sort of subjective vacuum that sucks the negative emotion away, clearing the path for more positive and resourceful memories to be installed.
I'd really like to get your thoughts on this.
