Reference: Hubbard 1950: Dianetics TMSMH
These are some comments on Book Three, Chapter 9, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy Part I” from DIANETICS: THE MODERN SCIENCE OF MENTAL HEALTH.
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Comments on
Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy Part I
KEY WORDS: Reduction, Erasure, Somatic strip, Boil-off, Lock
Note: These sections provide quick summaries. If you need details, please consult the section in the book.
THE CASE ENTRANCE
In Dianetics the goal is basic-basic, which is the earliest moment of pain and “unconsciousness.” You right away try for basic-basic and then for prenatal area. Reduce as many prenatal facsimile as you can. Then look for later painful emotion facsimile, instant of loss, failure, and discharge it. Lacking any success, start in repeater technique. Let the somatic strip travel. You may or may not get a discharge, keep searching, keep observing. Try the most likely phrases. Use your knowledge of bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors and denyers. If you get a discharge ask the somatic strip to go back for the prenatal it was sitting on. You alternate between early physical pain and later painful emotion facsimiles. Whenever you encounter a non-optimum thought or feeling, see if it could be traced back to a facsimile.
In the subject clearing approach the goal is to exteriorize the attention from being introverted into the self. You start by clearing the subject of self. Handle facsimiles as they come up. If that gets tiring, alternate the subject of Self with an entirely different subject, such as, sports or literature, that extroverts your attention.
STUCK IN PRESENT TIME
When no repeater phrase works and you seem to be “stuck in present time,” then restudy the mechanism of returning. Practice returning to a moment a few hours ago, then a few days ago, then a few months and finally several years. When you are returned, start using repeater technique with words like “feel” and “forget.” Make a guess what must be troubling you or occluding your recalls and again use these guesses as repeater. Should this still fail, then find some light locks, incidents which contain minimal pain, and run those. There is one motto which applies to all therapy, “If you keep asking for it, you’ll get it.”
In subject clearing start clearing up words and concepts in the subject of self. Study the relationships among these concepts by making examples that are really real to you. As you make examples from your personal experience you might run into facsimiles. You the handle such facsimiles through contemplation under the discipline of subject clearing.
BASIC-BASIC
Basis-basic contains the first moment when the analyzer was turned off. When this moment is gained, subsequent engrams are much more easily reduced. Dianetics assumes such a moment to occur weeks before mother’s first missed period. In practice, try to get the earliest moment of pain or discomfort you can reach every session. If you can reach nothing early, seek to discharge a late emotional facsimile.
In subject clearing try to clear up the earliest concept from available materials on which the whole subject is based.
THE REDUCTION AND THE ERASURE
To reduce means to take all the charge or pain out of an incident. A reduced incident will never be as aberrative as it was before. To “erase” means to recount it until it has vanished entirely. If a facsimile is early enough and no material exists earlier which will suspend it, that the facsimile will “erase.” In other words, it gets assimilated in the mental matrix.
In subject clearing, words and concepts may lead to other words and concepts. Finally a word or concept at the bottom of the chain will fully clear up. Then you come back up the chain clearing rest of the words and concepts.
HANDLING THE SOMATIC STRIP
When the mind is working well, the “somatic strip” can be commanded to go to any part of the time track day by day, hour by hour. It will pick up the somatic first, usually, and then pick up the content. As the somatic strip moves physical sensations turn on and off. If the somatic strip does not respond according to command, then a bouncer, a holder, a misdirector, or a grouper has been restimulated and should be discharged.
“Somatic strip” are attention units that are detached and can look at the experiences objectively.
PRESENT TIME
It happens now and then that after returning, the strip does not get back to present time because it has struck holders en route. Repeater technique with holders will generally free the strip and get it to present time.
In Subject Clearing approach simply contemplate under the discipline of subject clearing. This will help you return to the present time.
THE FLASH ANSWER
The flash answer is the first thing which comes into a person’s head when a question is asked him. Much valuable data can be recovered by clever use of the flash answer. If there is no answer at all, it means that the answer is occluded and there is some kind of a cover-up.
DREAMS
Dreams are puns on words and situations in the facsimiles. They are not much used in dianetics.
VALENCE SHIFT
A person assumes a valence when he dramatizes a personality (from a facsimile) that is not himself. He says and does rather much what the person in the winning valence did in that facsimile. When running a trauma, the person may first run it in valences that did not suffer pain as it makes it easier to go through the trauma. This can flush out phrases that can then be used to run out the trauma in his own valence.
TYPE OF CHAINS
A chain means a series of incidents of similar types. The chains one can most easily contact are the least charged. The most aberrative chains will usually be the hardest to reach because they contain the most active data.
DIANETIC DON’TS
Many of these don’ts are common sense and doesn’t explicitly apply when you are using the subject clearing approach. Just don’t get angry or upset with yourself. Don’t get frightened when there are reactions. They will soon run out. Don’t expect anything; let things happen as they may. Stick to the procedure. Handle any anomaly as far as you can, don’t leave it in the middle.
TYPES OF SOMATICS
There are two kinds of somatics, those which properly belong to the person and those which belong to some other person in the facsimile.
“UNCONSCIOUSNESS”
“Unconsciousness” has two special manifestations: the yawn and the “boil-off.” Yawns are an indicator of approaching awareness. “Boil off” is a condition of being groggy and floundering around. One appears as if drugged. Five or ten minutes of “boil-off” are not uncommon. A period when the person was almost dead is coming up to the surface.
LOCKS
A lock is a moment of mental discomfort containing no physical pain and no great loss. It can be recalled easily and reduced. But there are just too many of them. The key-in of a painful facsimile is the primary lock. All locks discharge automatically the moment the painful facsimile holding them is erased.
THE JUNIOR CASE
If father was named George and the patient is called George, beware of trouble. A Junior case is seldom easy.
RESTIMULATING THE ENGRAM
“Ask often enough and you will receive,” is always true when working the facsimiles. Simply by returning into an area enough times facsimiles will appear. If it is not there today, it will be there tomorrow. But if it is not there tomorrow, it will be there the day after and so forth. Emotional discharges are most certainly located by asking for them time after time, returning over the part of the track where the charge is expected to lie. What repeater technique will fail to do can be done by returning, session after session, to a portion of your life. Sooner or later it will come into view.
OCCLUDED LIFE PERIODS AND PEOPLE
Whole areas of the time track and persons will be found occluded. They come to view after a few facsimiles have been lifted in basic or the area has been developed as above.
ANIMOSITY TOWARD PARENTS
As a person gets better he will go through a phase of anger. It is a natural by-product of therapy and it cannot be avoided. When he is released or cleared, he feels no animosity whatever toward his parents or others who had caused his aberrations.
PROPITIATION
Propitiation is a state wherein the person, in deep fear of another, offers expensive presents and soft words, turns the other cheek, offers himself as a doormat and generally makes a fool out of himself. It is an apathy effort to hold away a dangerous “source” of pain. This is an indicator of sympathy facsimile not yet suspected or tapped.
LOVE
Love can be compulsive, dictated by nothing more reasonable than aberration. Here is a meeting of minds — but the minds are on the lowest computational level possessed by man. Driven together by compulsion, men and women mate who will find in that mating nothing but sorrow and reduction of their hopes. Where there are children, divorce does not answer, clearing does. And with clearing comes a fresh new page of life on which happiness can be written.
THE ERASURE
Once you get the basic-basic things start to erase rather than reduce. You erase all the early painful facsimiles, always the earliest you can find, and you keep discharging painful emotion facsimiles in the later periods after birth and later in life. You erase as much as you can find in the early part of the case, then you release all the emotion you can find later in the case and then you come back and find early material. Not until you have worked out every moment of physical pain and discharged all the moments of painful emotion will the case be cleared. A cleared person is no longer interested in facsimiles.
THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CASE
The best remedy for such a case is to get help from somebody who knows both the language used in the prenatal area and the present tongue. Another remedy is to take a dictionary and figure out the bouncers et al. from the dictionary.
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