28 May Split Screen
Claire Frederick was part of my Working with Parts Teleseminar series, talking about Ego State Therapy, and she gave us a number of simple, easy to use techniques. The one that I hadn’t used in a while, but have always found helpful was the “Split Screen” from the hypnosis tradition.
Imagine looking at a movie, or your TV with a “picture in a picture” mode. On one side of the screen you see what is annoying you or causing difficulty, next to it, on the split screen you see still images, a different movie, or representations of the positive characteristic.
What happens as you see these two “movies” running at the same time? Often we notice a dissonance in us as we watch these two versions running.
I like to play with the split screen, exploring what happens as the positive side influences the harder, more difficult side. Usually there’s a fear that the negative will overrun and destroy the positive.
That fear speaks to a probable truth from a different time. It’s likely that you had an experience of the negative taking over the positive. And it might be true now that you are in a difficult experience in real time. Often, though, our fears take on a greater felt reality making it impossible to access what Claire reminded us as “Center Core Phenomenon”: Inner Wisdom and Inner Strength.
The compartmentalization that happens with trauma has us separate off different aspects of ourselves (like our Inner Wisdom or Inner Strength). When we’re frightened we don’t feel we have any access to Inner Strength, often feeling that we don’t even have it.
By holding these important qualities in the same “screen” as what is creating difficulty we help make the compartments of our minds more permeable, opening up the possibility for the positive to flow more fluidly and effect compartments that are having a more difficult time.