How does Time Line Therapy work?

Emotions are part of life and feeling small regular doses of emotion is important for guidance and direction, determining right from wrong and correcting mistakes. Left ignored, those little emotions can build up. Instead of a subtle emotional reminder, you may experience intense knee-jerk reactions.

When your unresolved emotions are left too long they can limit your decisions or cause harm to yourself or people around you. The more you restrict these emotions the more the intensity builds, causing pressure that can erupt at any moment.

I tell people it’s like holding a beach ball under water. It’s easy at first, but after a while, your arms get tired the pressure is relentless and eventually, the ball will burst through the surface and hit you in the nose.

We do all sorts of crap to try and keep those emotions under. Binge on food, alcohol, sex, games, porn, TV, shopping, gambling, whatever it takes to distract us, and then, wham! We burst into tears, slam a fist into a wall, become crippled with guilt or fear. These wild and uncontrolled outbursts only reinforce our need to never let the ball up, and usually come with guilt, fear or sadness at our inability to ‘cope’. At that point, our emotions start running our lives.

That’s just the short term. What about the long-term effects; skin disease, heart disease, digestive problems, respiratory problems, the big C? What kind of internal toll comes from holding all those emotions at bay?

How Experiences Get Stored On Our Time Line

From the moment we are born our brain starts learning, filing, organising and structuring our experiences.

If you feel pain when you touch the stove, you quickly learn not to touch the stove when it’s on. We learn this much faster than someone telling us, “don’t touch the stove, it’s hot”. Each lesson is stored permanently in our unconscious mind. Hot things hurt. The same goes for emotions. If someone pushes you off a swing in the playground you quickly learn that being pushed aside hurts.

The physical and mental pain might also get wrapped together to form a big ball of hurt. If that is the first time we experienced hurt, then the instance of being pushed off the swing will become the root cause for hurt.

Every time we are hurt after this our mind will compare it to being pushed off the swing. If there is a match (your mind will almost always create a match, even if there isn’t one) the new hurt gets stored next to the existing hurt, like some kind of DVD library or photo album. This is how hurt looks/smells/feels/sounds/tastes.

By the time you are in your 20s every new instance of being hurt will be carefully (and really quickly) compared against your listings of hurt all the way back to the incident on the swing. Now, when you are dumped in a relationship it feels like your world is about to break open from so much hurt and rejection, not just from being dumped, from every scrap of hurt you have ever felt amplified like a warning right through your body – just like the swing!

This is what is called your Gestalt of emotion, your record of emotions and how to deal with them. However you dealt with the original swing incident is how you will respond every time you are hurt. If you ran away and cried, if you pushed back, if you covered up your feelings, this will be your programmed response to hurt.

How Does Time Line Therapy Work?

Sound impossible to clear? Not at all. Every record that you have of hurt can be reconsidered using a very quick meditation. Your time line therapist will guide you back to the root cause of your emotion- in this case hurt. Your unconscious mind already knows the first instance, even if you have never been aware of it before. You will be transported back to that memory, the first one, completely bypassing the other instances.

When you get to the root cause of your emotion (or belief system) you can have another look at the situation. What really happened that day on the swing? We are using Hurt as an example here but it could be any individual belief system, “I’m not worthy”, “I’m not good enough”, or any of the negative emotions, Anger, Sadness, Fear, Hurt or Guilt.

From this point, as an adult looking back on the event without any judgement or emotion, you can sort out what emotions in your memory you want to keep and what you can let go of.

Looking again you might realise that the person who pushed you didn’t mean it, maybe you were hogging the swing, maybe it was an accident. Only you will know the resolution and the new understanding of your personal event.

When you realise what really happened the labels you had on the event will simply and naturally fall away. Once the Gestalt is unhooked from the feeling of hurt, all the evidence you had to keep all the other memories stored in hurt vanishes. Without evidence, there is no reason for all these memories to be stored here. Your unconscious mind will re-sort all the memories into new categories, leaving hurt clear and without emotional anchors.

None of your memories will ever be erased, the only thing you let go of is the emotional charge. The memories get reorganised on other gestalts.

If you have reoccurring dreams or flashback memories that keep pestering you, that is your unconscious mind’s way of telling you, “you need to look at this again, it doesn’t make sense, I don’t have the lesson.”

All Time Line Therapy does is open that space and let your unconscious mind do the work it needs to do to understand the event and the lessons attached. Depending on your internal organisation systems, it’s actually possible to get all this completed in as little as ten minutes, although you might like to spend longer gathering new strengthening information which may take 90 minutes or so per emotion. After that your old knee-jerk reactions will be gone, and you can successfully evaluate each situation as it arises without being swamped with an album of old emotions.

Time Line Therapy is so safe it can be used to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression and anxiety.

Because of our unconscious desire to clear and heal we work in harmony with our mind to achieve this result making it smooth, rapid and completely painless.

Once the Gestalt is cleared the emotions you feel in any given moment will only exist in that single moment. The emotion will be felt and then vanish almost immediately, no simmering, no lingering, no haunting. You will no longer skyrocket back to the time when your little brother threw up in your new shoes, then pinball around your childhood rehashing every instance you were grounded, got detention or missed out on dessert then to every break up, every retrenchment, every time someone cut in line. There will just be now.

If you would like to see Time Line Therapy in action and even try it for yourself, join us at our next Live it Now event and reap the benefits in your own life!

Kindest regards,

Matt Catling