I get two types of response from my clients and program participants when I start talking about working on past events that shaped their body image, relationship with food, cravings and other weight-related issues:
The first category of response is from those who have already done a fair bit of personal growth work. They really ‘get’ that their current thoughts, feelings and behaviour are shaped by beliefs, and those beliefs were formed in the crucible of important life events. It logically follows for them that gaining insight and new perspectives on those life events, and resolving any traumas that occurred, will help them achieve their current goals.
Then there’s the second category. These people look at me as if I’ve suddenly grown two heads when I suggest that what their big brother said when they were six years old has an impact on them now. After all, they say, that’s in the past, and I’m an adult now and I can put it into context. Surely weight loss is all about getting on the right diet and exercise plan, not this airy-fairy woo-woo rubbish? How could something that happened back then still be affecting me now?
Now, I don’t want to have to waste my precious time persuading someone that yes, all that childhood stuff really does make a difference. So it helps me no end when I come across scientific studies I can share, that show how our brains actually store and work with memories, and how we can leverage this process to our advantage.
The first thing you need to grasp is that your brain operates by forming an unimaginably complex network of associations between neurons (‘brain cells’). In fact, a single neuron in your brain is believed to be connected to 10 000 other neurons, and each of these is connected in turn to 10 000 others, which is connected to 10 000 others… Now bearing in mind that the average human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, that’s an awful lot of connections!
The result of this interconnectedness is that everything you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel and think about, is compared with everything else you’ve ever encountered that’s along similar lines to (‘resonates with’) the current experience, so your brain can figure out what to get you to do about it. Its first priority is to protect you from any kind of danger, so if anything that it’s currently encountering ‘reminds’ it of a previous experience that was physically, emotionally or socially hazardous, it will activate avoidance mechanisms to keep you away from that danger.
So if your older brother mortified you in front of his friends by calling you ‘Thunder Thighs’ when you were 7, any situation you get yourself into now where there’s even a slight chance that someone will make negative remarks about your body, will make you feel acutely anxious and drive you to find excuses to avoid that situation. You may find yourself putting off going to the gym because you don’t want anyone to see you in shorts, or avoid making love with the lights on :).
Unfortunately, even apparently minor distressing incidents – especially when repeated on multiple occasions throughout childhood – tend to create ‘resonance patterns’ that cause people to recreate the traumatic situation in various ways, over and over again throughout their lives. So, following our hypothetical example, the girl who was taunted by her big brother keeps ending up with friends, boyfriends and even bosses who criticise the way she looks.
And that’s where Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) – and especially Matrix Reimprinting – literally come into the picture. You see, your brain holds a ‘picture’ of incidents that have a strong emotional charge that it keeps ‘referring to’ when current events resonate with the past event in any way. But, as recent research vividly demonstrates, that picture of the original incident can change over time as we have different life experiences. Furthermore, we can deliberately modify it so that it’s a positive, rather than negative picture.
In a fascinating study, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, 17 men and women were firstly shown varied backgrounds on a computer screen – such as an underwater ocean scene or an aerial view of farmland – with a random object superimposed on the background. They were then shown a different scene, and asked to place the same object in the exact location it had been in on the previous scene. Interestingly, participants always placed the objects in an incorrect location.
Finally, participants were shown the object on the same background scene as they’d first seen it, in three different locations – the one they originally saw, the one they placed it in the second part of the study, or a completely new location – and asked which showed the exact location they’d first seen it in.
According to lead author Donna Jo Bridge,
“People always chose the location they picked in part 2… This shows their original memory of the location has changed to reflect the location they recalled on the new background screen. Their memory has updated the information by inserting the new information into the old memory.”
This ‘updating’ of memory is the principle we harness when using the advanced EFT technique Matrix Reimprinting. When working on a memory with Matrix Reimprinting (MR), we ask the younger version of us that we meet in the memory (known in MR as the ‘ECHO’ or Energy Consciousness HOlogram) what changes they would like to make in the memory – either in their own behaviour, or other people’s, or in the environment itself – in order to help them feel more empowered and to resolve the situation to their satisfaction.
After completing the reimprinting process, I always ask my client to go back to the original, traumatic scene from the memory in their imagination, and describe what they ‘see’. Invariably, the memory has changed – and for the better. In most cases, the client now sees the positive scene that they reimprinted. Occasionally, the client sees the original scene, but as if from a great distance, so the details are fuzzy and there’s no emotional ‘sting’ to it.
What this means is that when the client next encounters a situation that resonates with the original traumatic memory, the ‘picture’ that the brain consults for reference will be the altered one, in which they feel empowered and resourceful. The real-life effects of this are profound: clients report to me that they after working on key memories, they are facing work, study and relationship challenges – not to mention challenges relating to their eating behaviour – with a level of calm, inner peace and clarity they never knew they could muster.
A great example is a client whom I’ll call ‘Julie’. A breast cancer survivor, Julie knew she needed to kick her sugar habit to help prevent a recurrence of her disease. But her cravings for lollies and chocolate kept bringing her unstuck. We used MR on a key memory involving her older brother, who had been her rock after her father died in tragic circumstances, and who subsequently suffered an untimely death himself. After resolving Julie’s ECHO’s feelings within the memory and reimprinting an altered picture, Julie reported to me that her sugar cravings had vanished – lollies simply had no appeal for her anymore!
Think of how different your life would be if you were no longer driven by the fear wired into your brain by past events, and instead could freely and consciously choose the actions that are in your best interest. That’s the promise that Matrix Reimprinting holds for you!
As Joel Voss, co-author of the memory study commented,
“…memory is designed to help us make good decisions in the moment and, therefore, memory has to stay up-to-date. The information that is relevant right now can overwrite what was there to begin with.”
With MR, we make this natural process conscious and harness it to create the future we desire.
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