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The NLP Whiteout Technique
Chris Harrison - July 2007
©2007 PlanetNLP Ltd
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The purpose of this NLP exercise is to enable you to stop thinking about a memory that keeps forcing itself into your consciousness, and that makes you feel uncomfortable.
It is important to understand the steps so that you can perform this exercise without any doubt or confusion as to what you are doing and why.
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It is important to read the Content and Submodality Primers before attempting this exercise.
So here goes:
If, like most people, you discovered during the Submodality Primer that increasing the brightness of an image increased the intensity, then this exercise may seem at odds with what you've learnt so far, but it works very well.
Think of something that, when you think of it, makes you feel uncomfortable.
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Maybe there is something that you can't get out of your mind at the moment, that produces a negative feeling.
If so, then use that.
How, rather than turn the brightness down, which is the usual NLP approach to lower the intensity, this time you're going to do the opposite, but there are a couple of important points:
Firstly, the brightness must be increased very quickly.
And secondly, the brightness should be increased until the image goes completely white.
So remember that uncomfortable memory.
Turn the brightness up very quickly all the way to white.
Pause for a moment and think of something completely different (break your state).
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Repeat the brightening and breaking state 5 times.
Once you have done this 5 times, think of the memory again and see what happens.
Hopefully it does one of two things, either it whites out all by itself (spooky), or you can’t visualize the image clearly at all.
By repeating this process over and over you are telling your brain what you want it to do, and by finishing each attempt with a completely white image, you are making it very difficult from your brain to reverse the process.
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The pause between each attempt is important to ensure that you’re not creating a loop where your brain just keeps creating the image and brightening it, over and over.
So what do you do if you can still feel bad about the image?
Well, firstly try repeating the process a few more times.
Try performing the whiteout quicker.
Try adding a sound effect - watching your image whoosh into white can help enormously.
You may be tempted to try a different submodality, but that isn't really likely to work because we’re increasing the submodality effect, not diminishing it, and we’re taking advantage of the fact that changing brightness in either extreme makes the image impossible to see.
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