EMOTIONAL INTERRUPTIONS

5) Interrupting Emotions as Necessary. Because emotions involve motions, movement, energy going out—emotions will sometimes seem to have “a life of their own.” That is, once initiated they move us as they do, and if strong enough, will move us even when we do not want to experience them. So sometimes, just sometimes, you will want to not let an emotion play out. You will want to interrupt it and stop it dead in its tracks.

A state interrupt or an emotion interrupt then becomes a tool or skill in your repertoire for managing your emotions. This is not to be confused with rejecting an emotion. In this instance, you are accepting the emotion, you are simply putting a time or place limit on it. Just not now, later. You may be suppressing the emotion, fully conscious of what you are feeling and simultaneously feeling that right now in this place and time, it is best to not feel it or express it. In NLP we call this a state or a pattern interrupt and it’s an extremely valuable tool when helping yourself or someone else maintain control of one’s responses.

In human experience, the psychological phenomena of an interruption is a common and regular everyday occurrence. From morning to night, all of us experience all sorts of interruptions. Usually they are momentary and we quickly handle the interruption and then get back to what we were doing. Sometimes the interruptions are more problematic. If sometime dramatic occurs, something really out of the ordinary, something threatening or upsetting—then the interruption may be such that we are completely set off our course. If intense enough, we may later suffer amnesia. “Where was I?” “What were we talking about?”

Talking about interruptions, some people are especially skilled in constantly interrupting themselves. Because they are highly distractable, a stray thought can pop into their mind and take them complete off course. In stress it is common to experience thought intrusions to such an extent that a person cannot stay on the same subject to hardly complete a sentence.

While I first learned about therapeutic interruptions when I was studying clinical psychotherapy, it wasn’t until I learned NLP that I really understood the concept and learned to use it effectively. That’s when I learned that to protect a client from himself, there are times when it is not only useful, but necessary, to interrupt his line of thinking and emoting. This is especially true for someone “caught up in a strong emotion.” It could be anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, shame, guilt, despair, etc.

Now typically it occurs for the person who tends to always associate into whatever they are talking about. When the conversation turns to a subject that triggers them, they go into the experiences that they have had as if they are there again. They see what they saw then, they hear what they heard then, they feel what they feel then. And because they are completely associated into the movie that’s playing in their mind, they are not present. They are not in the here-and- now with your in your office. They are back in the war zone. They are being raped. They are being beaten by a drunken parent.

Time for an interruption! “Hey! Is that a snake climbing up on your leg??” “Opps ... I didn’/t mean to spill water all over you!” Anything outrageous will do. Slam a book down on the floor; stand up quickly, “I can’t wait; I have got to pee!” “Is that a burger in your nose?”

In RET (Rational Emotive Therapy) which I learned in the 1970s, someone wanting to break a habit (smoking, over-eating, intrusion of suicide thoughts, etc.) would wear a rubber-band on the wrest and every time the intruding thought or feeling occurred, they were to snap the rubber-band so it would hurt. It was a self-interruption—a way of shifting state.

In the Meta-Therapy training that I do, we typically use more gentle interruptions. “Oh by the way, did you eat breakfast this morning? What did you have?” “Did you notice anything different about the office when you came in?” It’s a small interruption. Then, “Now you were talking about being scared ... what was the last thing you said?” You then let the person talk a little bit more and as soon as they seem to go deeply into the state, you pull them out with another distraction, “Is purple your favorite color?” In this way, they go in and then you bring them out, and you do this going in and coming out until they can do it themselves.

The significance of this is that a person can then have his emotions rather than his emotions having him. She is in control rather than the associating process of going into an emotional experience and getting lost in it. Now the person has two ways of processing an experience. She can step in and experience it from the inside and she can step out and experience it as an observer on the outside (this is meta-program #20, associated and un-associated).