As a matter of fact, it's not even that they are. Pick any experience that you believe happened to you, and I will guarantee you that on close examination it didn't. The original personal history that Linda relived, re-experienced today as she went through the experience, is as much a myth as the new experience she went through with the resource. The one we made up is as real as the one she "actually had." Neither one of them actually occurred. If you want a demonstration of this, wait two or three months, remember about having been here for three days and then look at that videotape that they are making now. You will discover there is very little relationship between it and your memories of "what happened here." Since your personal history is a myth anyway, use it as a resource instead of a set of limitations. One way to do that is with anchoring.

Those of you who have done TA "redecision" work as a client: remember all those vivid scenes and experiences that you so well recollected from when you were two years and eight months old?

Woman: Well, mine really happened.

Nothing ever really happened. The only thing that happened is that you made a set of perceptions about events. The relationship between your experience and what actually occurred is tenuous at best. But they really are your perceptions. Doing a redecision about an experience that never occurred is just as valuable as—perhaps more valuable than—doing a redecision about one that did occur, especially if it's less painful, and especially if it opens more choices. I could very easily install memories in you that related to real world experiences that never occurred and could not be documented in any way—that were just bizarre hallucinations out of my fantasy. Made-up memories can change you just as well as the arbitrary perceptions that you made up at the time about "real world events." That happens a lot in therapy.

You can also convince your parents. You can go back and check up with your parents and convince them of things that never actually occurred. I tried that, and it worked. My mother now believes she did things to me when I was a child that never happened. And I know they never happened. But I convinced her of it. I told her I went to a therapy group and I made these changes which were really important to me, and it was all based on this experience when I was little. As I named the experience, she had to search through her history and find something that approximated it. And of course we had enough experience together that she could find something that was close enough that it fit that category.

It's the same as if I sit here and say "Right now, as you sit there, you may not be fully aware of it, but soon you will become aware of a sensation in one of your hands." Now, if you don't, you are probably dead. You are bound to have some sensation in one of your hands, and since I called your attention to it, you'll have to become aware of any sensation. Most of the things that people do as therapies are so general that people can go through their history and find the appropriate experiences.

You can do marvelous "psychic" reading that way. You take an object that belongs to someone and hold it in your hand. That allows you to see them really well with your peripheral vision. You speak in the first person so that they will identify directly and respond more, and say something like "Well, I'm a person who... who is having some kind of trouble that has to do with an inheritance." And then you watch the person whose object it is and that person goes "An inheritance!" Right? And then he goes "Ummmmmmmm" through all his memories, right? And somewhere in his life there was something that had to do with some inheritance and he goes "You're right! Uncle George! I remember now!"

Peripheral vision is the source of most of the visual information I find useful. The periphery of your eye is physiologically built to detect movement far better than the foveal portion of your eye. It's just the way it's constructed. Right now I'm looking in your direction: if there were a trajectory, my eyes would be on you. That just happens to put everyone else in my peripheral vision, which is a situation that is effective for me. As I'm talking, I'm watching the people in the room with my peripheral vision to detect large responses, sudden movements, changes in breathing, etc.

For those of you who would like to learn to do this, there is a little exercise that is quite easy. If I were helping Jane here to learn to have confidence in her peripheral vision, the first thing I would have her do is to walk up to me and stand looking away from me at about a forty-five degree angle. Now without changing the focus of your eyes, Jane, either form a mental image of where you think my hands are, or put your hands in a position that closely corresponds. Now look to verify whether you are correct or not. And now look back over there again, and do it again. Once she can do this at forty-five degrees, then I'll move to ninety. You are already getting all the information you need in your peripheral vision. But nobody has ever told you to trust that information and use it as a basis for your responses. Essentially what you are doing with this exercise is teaching yourself to have confidence in the judgements that you're probably already making by getting information through your peripheral vision. This exercise is a stabilized situation. That's the most difficult. Movements are much easier to detect. If you can get position information, the movement stuff will be easy.

This is particularly important in conference work, or in family therapy. I don't pay attention to the person who is actively communicating verbally; I'll watch anyone else. Anyone else will give me more information than that person, because I'm interested in what responses s/he is eliciting from other members of the family or the conference. That gives me lots of choices, for instance, about knowing when they are about to be interrupted. I can either reinforce the interruption, make it myself, or interrupt the interruptor to allow the person to finish. Peripheral vision gives you much more information, and that's a basis for choices.

Your personal history serves as a foundation for all your capabilities and all your limitations. Since you only have one personal history, you have only one set of possibilities and one set of limitations. And we really believe that each of you deserves more than one personal history to draw upon. The more personal histories you have, the more choices you'll have available to you.

A long time ago we had been trying to find expedient ways of helping people to lose weight. Most of the vehicles that were available at that time didn't seem to work, and we discovered that there were some real differences between the way people have weight problems. One of the major things we discovered is there were a lot of people who had always been fat. There were other people who had gotten fat, but there were a lot of them who had always been fat. When they got skinny, they freaked out because they didn't know how to interact with the world as a skinny person. If you've always been fat, you were never chosen first to be on a sports team. You were never asked to dance in high school. You never ran fast. You have no experience of certain kinds of athletic and physical movements.

So instead of trying to get people to adjust, we would simply go back and create a whole new childhood and have them grow up being a skinny person. We learned this from Milton Erickson. Erickson had a client whose mother had died when she was twelve years old, and who had been raised by a series of governesses. She wanted to get married and have children, but she knew herself well enough to know that she did not have the requisite background to respond to children in the ways that she wanted to be able to respond to them. Erickson hypnotized her and age-regressed her into her past and appeared periodically as the "February Man." The February Man appeared repeatedly throughout her personal history, and presented her with all the experiences that she needed. We simply extended this further. We decided that there was no need to just appear as the February Man, Why not March, April and May? We started creating entire personal histories for people, in which they would have experiences which would serve as the resources for the kinds of behaviors that they wanted to have. And then we extended it from weight problems to all kinds of other behaviors.