Continued from yesterday’s post:
If you haven’t read yesterday’s post you can find it under “Can Pain be used to stop negative thoughts? part 1”
Continued. . . Here is what happened. First he did a great job explaining how pain and pleasure can be used to break a habit. So of course I was very interested in what he was going to suggest, since learning is one of my values and I wanted to see if I would get something new I could bring back to teach my clients.
To break the habit of negative self-defeating thoughts, he asked his helpers to give out “the snakes.” Well, as you can imagine, he got our attention with that. I’m not sure how many people realized it, but that was step one of the process: creating curiosity and confusion.
I thought to myself, what an interesting way to put people into a state of curiosity. Curiosity and confusion are a great state to be in for learning something new. I’m sure a number of us were thinking “is he really going to give snakes out” as we saw his helpers moving around the room with bags of what seemed to be black squiggly things.
It turned out he was giving out rubber bands, nice thick ones for each member of the audience. So I figured his next step was going to be teaching the “rubber band snap,” which is a powerful behavioral technique, to stop negative thinking. I was impressed at his clever way of getting into this technique. It was a great way to create a state of rapt attention.
But, here is what he told over 1000 people to do with the rubber band. Please if you are reading this, do not use this method. He said to put the rubber band on the wrist and pull it out, and he demonstrated stretching it to its limit, as far as it would go, and then once it was really stretched out he said to let it go, so it would snap painfully on the wrist. He continued saying, “if you want to have change you need to feel pain,” and he told us he wanted to see welts and even blood. After the snap he had people kiss the damaged wrist, (that was the “pleasure part” of this technique). Then everyone practiced using this pain/pleasure technique whenever a negative thought came to mind. We all had written down some of our negative thoughts so there was lots to practice with.
Now remember he had been leading this seminar for a day an a half and people trusted him when he said, if you really want to change negative thinking you need to really feel the pain.
And, you will probably find this hard to believe. But the people in the audience did as he said. People had big red welts on their wrists. Later that day I found a woman crying in the ladies room with her hand under the cold water. Her wrist was so swollen it was frightening. I was horrified to see the damage done to her wrist in her hope to stop negative thinking. Now I must say, these people really wanted to change a negative habit. I brought her some ice, nothing more I could do at that point.
I will finish Part 3 and post it shortly. For now you can get:
Two powerful (non-painful)
stress relief tips we use at the Anxiety Control Center
as part of the Transformation System.
Just go back up to the top right of this page.
Put your name and email in the box on the right,
and click “sign in here”, and they will be sent to you as a pdf.