Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Light switches

Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, got known early in his career as someone who could cure schizophrenics within hours. He started getting called by doctors and patients' families to go to mental institutions, work with the worst cases, the ones everyone had given up on.

One of his favorite stories is about an executive who started hallucinating snakes. No one could convince him otherwise. He was committed, received treatment, no luck. So, he was strapped to his bed - not very empowering when you believe snakes are crawling all over you - in the mental hospital and chalked off as one of the incurable ones.

By the time Bandler met him, he was in bad shape. To figure out what to do, Bandler went for a walk in town. He needed to snap this guy back to reality. He passed a pet store and noticed a barrel full of rubber snakes on the curb. He went inside, asked the man behind the counter if he could rent the entire barrel for a few hours.

"They're for sale," the man said. "I don't rent the whole barrel."

"I need them," Bandler said, "all. But only for a few hours."

"Why?"

"I’m going to cure schizophrenia," Bandler said.

"Cool," the man said.

Bandler chalks it up to the fact that since the store owner wasn't a doctor, his mind was open to cures that were out of the norm. Turns out he also had a few well-trained snakes - two cobras and one giant python that loved wrapping herself around humans. Perfect.

The store owner and Bandler returned to the mental hospital, bags full of rubber snakes and three real ones, went to the shower where the patient bathed, and covered the place with them. The live cobras, he put extra close to where the patient would be. The python, right above where he'd position the wheelchair. Finished, he surveyed his work.

It reminded him of the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones descends into a chamber full of writhing snakes. Enough to scare anyone, let alone a person with heightened snake phobia.

Keep in mind, Bandler once cured a guy who thought he was Jesus by bringing in three muscular football players dressed as Roman Centurions and wood for a life-size cross into his hospital room. Then, he proceeded to nail the cross together, pausing occasionally to measure the guy as the Centurions held him down. By the time they were ready for the crucifixion, the man was convinced he wasn't Jesus. Even after the drama had passed, the cure stuck.

The snake owner and doctor stood behind the one-way glass to the shower. Bandler brought the man in, strapped tight in his wheelchair. The moment the man saw the snakes, he started screaming, "Snakes!" It was a terrible sound, Bandler says, from the very depths of the man, carrying throughout the hospital, "Snaaaaaakes!" But he positioned the man right where he could see the cobras in front and the python dangling above. Then he left and shut the door behind him.

The man screamed and screamed. Bandler waited. Finally, he went in. The man saw him, was about to scream, but Bandler cut him off.

"Snakes snakes, yes I know," Bandler said. "Tell me which ones are real and which ones aren't, and I'll wheel you out. Otherwise, I'm leaving you in here." Then he turned to go.

"Rubber snakes," the man said, motioning to the ground with his head. "Hallucinated snakes," he motioned around. Then, eyes up at the python dangling a few feet above, dropping closer, "real snake!"

This caught Bandler off guard. The man, when put to the test, was not only lucid enough to distinguish real from hallucinated, he could even tell which ones were rubber - something even Bandler had a hard time telling, given how realistic they were.

He wheeled the man out and asked him how he could tell hallucinated versus real.

"Easy," the man said, "hallucinated snakes are see-through."

The man had known all along. Reality was solid, hallucinations were see-through. But his fear was so intense, he'd lost touch with reality. Bandler taught the man to focus on the difference between reality and hallucinated see-through snakes and the man was cured. He still saw hallucinated snakes occasionally, but knew that they were not real. The power they had over him was gone.

Fighting fear doesn't work. It just drags us in closer. One has to focus on what is real. On the truth. When in darkness, don't fight it. You can't win. Just find the nearest switch, turn on the light.

James Altucher, in one of his best blog posts, talks about how he stops negative thoughts in their tracks with a simple mind trick. "Not useful," he tells himself. It's a switch, a breaker of sorts, shifts the pattern of the fear.

In the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy, one of the main characters has been tortured by the Capitol, his memories altered so that he can't distinguish between actual and implanted memories. His friends come up with a simple exercise. They tell him memories they know to be true, then ask, "real or not real?" Slowly, he learns to distinguish real from not-real until his mind adapts and he realizes that not-real memories have a certain shininess to them. And when in doubt, he returns to the practice: real or not-real.

Fear, when used properly, is a useful tool. It serves us well when near a blazing inferno or standing at the edge of a cliff. But outside of this, it's hijacked the mind. To the point where it's difficult to distinguish the mind and our thoughts from fear itself.

So, these tools, like light switches, exist. When fear arises, remember that it is a hallucinated snake or that it's not useful or that it's not real. All three work. There's many more, ones we can come up with ourselves, if we wish. As long as it works, it's valid.

Key is this, when in darkness, have a light switch you've chosen standing by. For example, in writing this book, fear says that I'm risking what people will think of me. Doesn't matter. My role is to recognize it for what it is - hallucinated snake, not useful, not real - and continue on.