Pass the advocaat

In NLP anchoring is defined as a stimulus which brings about a specific response. It's roots lie in behavioural psychology, building on the conditioned reflex studies of Edwin Twitmyer and Ivan Pavlov. Film makers and advertisers use anchors all the time - in Jaws, we all just KNOW when that pesky shark is going to re-appear when we hear that music. There is probably not a person in the UK over the age of 30 who doesn't know what a Mars a day can help you do.

In just a few moments, we can help people easily access resourceful and empowering states to assist them with future challenges. And how useful it is to help people collapse those negative anchors - that teeth grinding fury we feel when someone looks at us in a certain way for example, or that extreme anxiety we feel in some situations.

Ann-Marie was a young teacher who came for help with performance anxiety.  She was fine when teaching the class by herself, but as soon as she was being assessed in any way, she went to pieces. Ann-Marie had an  unhelpful strategy running, which we helped her change, but she also had a strong anchor negative anchor which fired when she saw someone with a clip board. We agreed that it would be useful to her to collapse this anchor, and I explained that the process was built on the premise that it is impossible for the brain to hold two conflicting thoughts simultaneously, and that this process would give her more choices in the future. There are several ways of doing a collapse anchor, I find this one useful as it involves the client in not only accessing the positive states, but also noticing their submodalities, which appears to make it a more powerful experience. It also avoids them having to engage too much with the negative state.

1. First, I asked Ann-Marie to recall a series of positive experiences: states she chose were feeling supremely confident, feeling invincible, feeling that she really knew her stuff. As she accessed each state, I had her make a fist to anchor each experience. 
2. Each time she added a new state to her fist, I encouraged her to look into her hand and describe what she was seeing in sensory rich details.  I directed her to notice sounds, feelings and visual representations of the state. These are called the submodalities of the state.
3. Ann-Marie was then asked to put the negative state once into the other hand, without paying it too much attention.She was then directed back to the hand with the positive states, and encouraged to review the submodailites again. 
4. Now, holding the “good hand” over the" negative hand", she poured the positive states, including the feelings and the sounds, into the negative hand, making a glugging sound as she did so (Ann-Marie represented her good states as golden, glistening liquid, had she had a different representation, it would have been appropriate to use a different type of sound). The client should continue pouring until the contents of both hands are the same. When both hands look, sound, and feel the same, then they can stop.
5. Once she was sure the two hands were the same, Ann-Maire was encouraged toclap her hands together, and then rub them together briskly.
6. Finally,ask them to think about that experience they used to have a negative response to, and notice what is different now, and then to go into a time in the future, which had it happened in the past would have caused them to have that old response, and notice what is happening. As Ann-Marie did this she  looked puzzled, and said "well, its only a man with a clipboard". She no longer associated any emotion with it - neither postive nor negative.
   

Please do try this at home - a couple of pointers to make it effective for you:

• What you're doing is diluting the negativity with the positivity, so the positve anchors need to be stronger than the negative ones.
• The easiest way of doing this is to use several positive states, and only one negative one, and to ensure that you are fully associated into the positive experiences - really experience them!
• While you need to briefly associated in to the negative state, don't stay there too long, and if the actual experience is negaitve, don't re-live it - you can access the state without re-living the experience.

And where does Advocaat fit in all this?  When I was a little girl, we never really had alcohol in the house, there wasn't really money for it. But every Xmas, a bottle of Advocaat would appear, and over the course of the celebrations, would be drunk by all the women in the family. I remember that magical sip of my first snowball - Advocaat well diluted with lemonade. And so eventually I only need to see that bottle appearing on Xmas Eve, and I felt that anticipation of Christmas. And so every year, though I can't bear the stuff any longer, we simply have to have a bottle in the house (it usually gets used briefly to make pancake sauce in February, and then discarded). Because Advocaat takes me back to being that little girl, sitting in my granny's house, just waiting.....