Law of Attraction Help: How to Reframe Memories Using NLP

As we’ve discussed in other articles, a major skill for anyone trying to use the law of attraction is the ability to not be affected others. But in the previous discussions, we’ve focused on how to ignore the things others say to you; however, this can be more difficult with the parts of them that reside in your imagination and mind, particularly if you’re bothered by the memory of someone you no longer speak with.

Though it’s a little more negative than the methods people are used to with the law of attraction, a method I’ve used with great success to silence the voices or images or feelings of others in my mind is “smurfing” a method from NLP and related psychotherapy fields. Basically, the idea is to make the image in your mind so ludicrous that you can no longer take it seriously.

So, here’s how it works: you very likely have a crappy image in your mind from something awful someone did or said to you that loops in your mind. Or more than likely, you have a montage of images, sound clips, or videos of things each with their own feeling and meaning, but smashed together with a greater meaning than any of the pieces. For instance, after my last breakup, I had a series of images and videos that’d run on a track that’d go like this: her words, “I’m just not happy”-they infuriate me and remind me how unhappy I’d been, but had been trying to work with her about it; my anger that she broke up with me on the phone; my regret for silently accepting the breakup; my happiness for doing just that; her complaining at me about how my arthritis hurts our relationship; sorrow she’s gone; sorrow I stayed so long… then, it loops. And every time it circles back, it increases in pain and the level of focus it gets.

I point this out as an example to get your thoughts rolling; your thoughts are probably different. The key is to consider something like this or even just a simple memory like yesterday Joe yelled at me and it hurt my feelings. Though, I’d caution you in this case to be aware that the memory is actually larger than the isolated incident of Joe yelling at you, this technique will still be helpful; however, if you can unpack the whole structure of what you’re doing, you can crack it and stop yourself when you run the pattern in the future and you can do more work on your thoughts if you see it as a whole (but this is also why sometimes it’s good to just have a life coach to talk to about these things!).

Anyway, smurfing works like this. You need to “elicit” that state, i.e. think about the crappy memory or montage you don’t want to feel bad about anymore. Run it through in your head at regular speed. Then, pause it at the very last frame and make everyone absurd: people can be anything you want from a smurf to a stapler, the more silly, the better. Next, jump into the memory: it’s important that as much as possible, you’re inside the memory at this point (by which I mean that you’re not watching the memory, but are “in” the memory, almost like you’re reliving it). Now, run the memory or montage backward at half-speed while playing absurd music like circus music or a cartoon theme song or something that just makes you laugh.

If you did this right, you should find that you’re amused and the situation should lessen in intensity. If you really get into it, however, you’ll find it’s almost impossible to get back into the memory and feel how you did about it before.