NAC MASTER STEP 3

Interrupt the Limiting Pattern.

In order for us to consistently feel a certain way, we develop characteristic patterns of thinking, focusing on the same images and ideas, asking ourselves the same questions. The challenge is that most people want a new result, but continue to act in the same way. I once heard it said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Please don’t misunderstand me. There’s nothing wrong with you; you don’t need to be “fixed.” (And I suggest you avoid anyone who uses these metaphors to describe you!) The resources you need to change anything in your life are within you right now. It’s just that you have a set of neuro-associations that habitually cause you to not fully utilize your capability. What you must do is reorganize your neural pathways so that they consistently guide you in the direction of your desires rather than your frustrations and fears.

To get new results in our lives, we can’t just know what we want and get leverage on ourselves. We can be highly motivated to change, but if we keep doing the same things, running the same inappropriate patterns, our lives are not going to change, and all we’ll experience is more and more pain and frustration.

Have you ever seen a fly that’s trapped in a room? It immediately searches for the light, so it heads for the window, smacking itself against the glass again and again, sometimes for hours. Have you ever noticed people do this? They’re highly motivated to change: they have intense leverage. But all the motivation in the world won’t help if you try to get outside through a closed window. You’ve got to change your approach. The fly stands a chance only if it backs off and looks around for another exit.

If you and I run the same old pattern, we’re going to get the same old results. Record albums create the same sounds consistently because of their pattern, the continuous groove in which the sound is encoded. But what would happen if one day I picked up your record, took a needle, and scratched across it back and forth dozens of times? If I do this enough, there’s a point when the pattern is so deeply interrupted that the record will never play the same way again. Likewise, just interrupting someone’s limiting pattern of behavior or emotion can completely change their life because sometimes it also creates leverage, and with these two steps alone, you can change virtually anything. The additional steps of NAC are just a way to make sure the changes last and that you develop new choices that are enjoyable and empowering.

I created a fun pattern interrupt recently at one of my three-day Unlimited Power™ seminars in Chicago. One man claimed that he really wanted to kick his chocolate habit, yet it was clear to me that he received a great deal of pleasure from his identity as a “chocolate addict.” In fact, he was even wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed “I want the world, but I’ll settle for chocolate.” This provided strong evidence that this man, although he may have desired to stop eating chocolate, also had a great deal of “secondary gain” to maintain this habit.

Sometimes people want to create a change because a behavior or emotional pattern creates pain for them. But they may also derive benefit from the very thing they’re trying to change. If a person becomes injured, for example, and then suddenly everyone waits on them hand and foot, giving them a great deal of attention, they may find that their injuries don’t heal quite as quickly. While they want to be over the pain, unconsciously they want more of the pleaure of knowing that people care.

You can do everything right, but if secondary gain is too strong, you will find yourself going back to the old ways. Someone with secondary gain has mixed emotions about changing. They say they want to change, but often they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn’t get any other way. Thus they’re not willing to give up feeling depressed, even though it’s painful. Why? Because being depressed gets them attention, for example. They don’t want to feel depressed, but they desperately want attention. In the end, the need for attention wins out, and they stay depressed. The need for attention is only one form of secondary gain. In order to resolve this, we have to give the person enough leverage that they must change, but also we must show them a new way to get their needs met.

While on some level, I’m sure this man knew he needed to kick chocolate, I’m also fairly certain that he knew he could use this opportunity to get some serious attention. Any time there is secondary gain involved, you have to step up the leverage, so I decided that a massive pattern interrupt would create the necessary leverage. “Sir!” I exclaimed. “You’re telling me that you’re ready to give up chocolate. That’s great. There’s just one thing I want you to do before we eliminate that old pattern forever.” He asked, “What’s that?” I said, “To get your body in the right condition, for the next nine days you must eat nothing but chocolate. Only chocolate can pass your lips.”

People in the audience started giggling, and the man looked at me uncertainly. “Can I drink anything?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, “you can drink water. Four glasses a day—but that’s all. Everything else must be chocolate.” He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “Okay, Tony, if that’s what you want. I can do this without changing. I hate to make a fool out of you!” I smiled and continued with the seminar.

You should have seen what happened next! As if by magic, dozens of chocolate bars and candies materialized out of people’s pockets, purses and briefcases and were passed down to him. By the lunch break, he had been inundated with every last morsel of chocolate in that auditorium: Baby Ruths, Butterfingers, Snickers, Milky Ways, M & M’s, Almond Joys, Fanny Farmer fudge.

He caught my eye in the lobby outside. “Thanks, Tony; this is great!” he exclaimed as he unwrapped and popped Hershey’s Kisses into his mouth, determined to show that he could “beat me.” But he failed to realize that he wasn’t competing with me—he was competing with himself! I was merely enlisting his body as an ally in getting leverage and breaking his pattern.

Do you know how thirsty sugar makes you? By the end of the day this guy’s throat was absolutely raw—and he had definitely lost his passion for chocolate as people continued to shovel Krackel bars into his pockets and press his palms with Thin Mints. By the second day he’d definitely lost his sense of humor, but he wasn’t yet ready to cry uncle. “Have some more chocolate!” I insisted. He unwrapped a Three Musketeers bar and glared at me.

By the third morning, as he trailed into the auditorium, he looked like a man who had spent all night praying to the porcelain goddess. “How was breakfast?” I asked as people laughed. “Not so good,” he admitted weakly. “Have some more!” I said. Feebly he accepted another piece of chocolate from someone sitting behind him, but he failed to open it or even look at it. “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Fed up?” He nodded. “Come on, you’re the chocolate champion!” I goaded. “Have some more! Isn’t chocolate the greatest? How about some Mounds bars? And some Peanut M & M’s? And a whole box of Rocky Road fudge? Can’t you just taste it? Doesn’t it make your mouth water?”

The longer I talked, the greener he got. “Have some more!” I said, and finally he exploded: “YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!” The audience laughed uproariously as the man realized what he’d said. “All right, then. Throw the candy away and sit down.”

Later, I came back to him, and assisted him in selecting empowering alternatives to the chocolate, laying down some new pathways to pleasure that were more empowering and didn’t require him to consume something he knew wasn’t good for him. Then I really got to work with him, conditioning the new associations and helping him replace his old addiction with a smorgasbord of healthful behaviors: power breathing, exercise, water-rich foods, proper food combining, and so on.^*

Had I created leverage on this guy? You bet! If you can give someone pain in their body, that’s undeniable leverage. They’ll do anything to get out of pain and into pleasure. Simultaneously, I broke his pattern. Everybody else was trying to get him to stop eating chocolate. I demanded that he eat it! That was something he never expected, and it massively interrupted his pattern. He rapidly linked such painful sensations to the idea of eating chocolate that a new neural pathway was laid down overnight, and his old “Hershey Highway” was bombed beyond recognition.

When I used to conduct private therapies, people would come to see me, sit down in my office and begin to tell me what their problem was. They’d say, “My problem is …” and then they’d burst into tears, out of control. As soon as this happened, I would stand up and shout, “EXCUSE ME!” This would jolt them, and then I’d follow up with, “We haven’t started yet!” Usually they responded, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” And they’d immediately change their emotional states and regain control. It was hysterical to watch! These people who felt they had no control over their lives would immediately prove that they already knew exactly how to change how they felt!

One of the best ways to interrupt someone’s pattern is to do things they don’t expect, things that are radically different from what they’ve experienced before. Think of some of the ways you can interrupt your own patterns. Take a moment to think up some of the most enjoyable and disruptive ways you can interrupt a pattern of being frustrated, worried, or overwhelmed.

Next time you start to feel depressed, jump up, look at the sky, and yell in your most idiotic tone of voice, “H-A-L-L-E-L-U-J-A-H! My feet don’t stink today!” A stupid, silly move like that will definitely shift your attention, change your state, and it will definitely change the states of everyone around you as they begin to realize that you’re no longer depressed—just crazy!

If you overeat on a regular basis and want to stop, I’ll give you a technique that will definitely work, if you’re willing to commit to it. The next time you find yourself in a restaurant overeating, jump up in the middle of the room, point at your own chair and scream at the top of your lungs, “PIG!” I guarantee that if you do this three or four times in a public place, you won’t overeat anymore! You’ll link too much pain to this behavior! Just remember: the more outrageous your approach to breaking a pattern, the more effective it will be.

One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring. Pattern interrupts happen to us every day. When you say, “I just lost my train of thought,” you’re indicating that something or someone interrupted your pattern of concentration. Have you ever been deeply involved in a conversation with a friend, had someone interrupt you for a moment, then come back wondering, “Where were we?” Of course you have, and it’s a classic example of a pattern interrupt.

Just remember, if we want to create change and we’ve learned in the past to get pleasure by taking a circuitous route that includes a series of negative consequences, we need to break that old pattern. We need to scramble it beyond recognition, find a new pattern (that’s the next step), and condition it again and again until it becomes our consistent approach.

HOW TO BREAK LIMITING PATTERNS OF FEELING AND ACTING

Again, often it’s true that interrupting a pattern enough times can change almost anyone. A simple way of breaking a pattern is by scrambling the sensations we link to our memories. The only reason we’re upset is that we’re representing things in a certain way in our minds. For example, if your boss yells at you, and you mentally rerun that experience the rest of the day, picturing him or her yelling at you over and over again, then you’ll feel progressively worse. Why let the experience continue to affect you? Why not just take this record in your mind and scratch it so many times that you can’t experience those feelings anymore? Maybe you can even make it funny!

Try this right now by doing the following: Think of a situation that makes you feel sad, frustrated, or angry. Now do the first two steps of NAC, which we’ve already covered. If you feel bad now about the situation, how do you want to be able to feel? Why do you want to feel that way? What’s been preventing you from feeling that way is the sensations you’ve linked to this situation. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could feel good about it? Now get some leverage on yourself. If you don’t change how you feel about this situation, how will you continue to feel? Pretty lousy, I’ll bet! Do you want to pay that price and continually carry around these negative sensations or upsets you have toward this person or situation? If you were to change now, wouldn’t you feel better?

THE SCRAMBLE PATTERN

You’ve got enough leverage; now scramble the disempowering feelings until they no longer come up. After reading this, take the following steps.

1) See the situation in your mind that was bothering you so much. Picture it as a movie. Don’t feel upset about it; just watch it one time, seeing everything that happened.

2) Take that same experience and turn it into a cartoon. Sit up in your chair with a big, silly grin on your face, breathing fully, and run the image backward as fast as you can so that you can see everything happening in reverse. If somebody said something, watch them swallow their words! Let the movie run backward in very fast motion, then run it forward again in even faster motion. Now change the colors of the images so that everybody’s faces are rainbow-colored. If there’s someone in particular who upsets you, cause their ears to grow very large like Mickey Mouse’s, and their nose to grow like Pinocchio’s.

Do this at least a dozen times, back and forth, sideways, scratching the record of your imagery with tremendous speed and humor. Create some music in your mind as you do this. Maybe it’s your favorite song, or maybe some type of cartoon music. Link these weird sounds to the old image that used to upset you. This will definitely change the sensations. Key to this whole process is the speed at which you play back the imagery and the level of humor and exaggeration you can link to it.

3) Now think about the situation that was bothering you, and notice how you feel now. If done effectively, you’ll easily have broken the pattern so many times you’ll find it difficult or impossible to get back into those negative feelings. This can be done with things that have been bothering you for years. It’s often a much more effective approach than trying to analyze the why’s and wherefore’s of a situation, which doesn’t change the sensations you link to the situation.

As simplistic as it seems, effectively scrambling a situation will work in most cases, even where trauma has been involved. Why does it work? Because all of our feelings are based on the images we focus on in our minds and the sounds and sensations we link to those specific images. As we change the images and sounds, we change how we feel. Conditioning this again and again makes it difficult to get back into the old pattern.

One way of breaking the pattern is to just stop doing something, go “cold turkey.” If you stop running a pattern again and again, the neural pathway will gradually dissipate. Once a neural connection is made, the brain will always have a pathway, but unless the path is used, it becomes overgrown. Like anything else, if you don’t use it, you begin to lose it.

Now that you’ve broken the pattern that has been holding you back, you now have the open space to …