Talking to your inner teams IS talking to yourself….of course it is! The difference is the quality of the answers! Usually, by ‘talking to myself’, we probably mean a conscious internal dialogue. (Although frequently I have been known to talk out loud!)
But talking to your inner teams is a cross-consciousness process. And you can make it very specific:- you consciously open up a dialogue by requesting a particular part to talk to you….or you can even ask for a group discussion!
Both of these follow an elegant pattern of getting agreement to talk, and then doing so. The difference comes in what I’ve called cross-consciousness; when I’m communicating with the inner teams I CONSCIOUSLY ask a question, then wait for the specific answer to come, UNCONSCIOUSLY-driven, from the inner team member.
It is totally unlike the constant jabbering that ‘talking to myself’ used to mean.
The ‘waiting’ process in inner team communications is, for me, a state change, an internal ‘changing channels’…….a bit like I do to write, what I used to call either ‘switching off’, or ‘opening up’. It is something I do consciously-automatically. Having changed this mental state – ‘electrical’ state is what it feels like I should say – the answers come.
I have often said that though we usually think of the unconscious as an entity, I prefer to call it an energy, through which the inner teams express themselves.
I have established a wonderful rapport and congruence with my inner teams, and most importantly, I trust them. Recently I had been unwell with gastro-enteritis. On the fifth day I suddenly knew that I had become really ill. I asked my inner health team what had changed, and what I should do .
I got immediate feedback……..phone the doctor, you need to be in hospital on a saline drip, an insulin drip, you need oxygen. Reluctant as I was to admit it was that serious, I trusted them, and called the doctor:- she immediately phoned for an ambulance to take me to hospital! When I asked her why, she said –yes, you guessed! – that I needed to be on a saline drip, and insulin. And when I got there and they’d wired me up to various machines, one of the nurses told her colleague that my oxygen levels were low!
It happens all the time now…….my first step, if anything seems amiss, is to ask my relevant inner team member what’s going on and what I should do. The answers are almost always NOT what I’d come up with consciously. For example……..I had a blister on the soul of my foot:- my conscious decision was to bathe it then put a medicated cream on. This made absolutely no difference.
I then asked my inner team and they told me to spray it with Bach flower rescue remedy, something I have only ever used internally. However I trust them, so I did what they suggested……and it really helped!
And the subject of positive intention is of course also involved……….so I always ask the relevant inner team member “What is the positive purpose of this? Can we honour that purpose in other ways, behaviours?” In other words I follow the form of a six-step reframe. However I ‘cut to the chase’ – i.e., I go straight to the crux of the matter - when I sense an urgency or seriousness in the situation.
It’s not only health issues either…….anything which affects you mentally, or emotionally, as well as physically, is something that your inner teams should be consulted about. After all it makes sense………..they are part of you, always have been. They have experienced everything you have ever experienced, thought, or felt. They have complete ‘dossiers’, memories, of all you have consciously forgotten.
So who better to know what’s best for you? It’s like having your own ‘in-house’ team of consultants and experts whose sole specialty is YOU!
So who are your inner team, or teams? And how does this work?
The unconscious provides information it has gathered, through the sensory filters, to the inner teams, internalising it. They process it and supply it to the conscious. The conscious communicates with the outer team and territory, externalising again through the V.A.K.
Congruence is when we pace pace lead the inner team members to establish and maintain rapport; they each have their own maps,V.A.K., meta programs etc., and constant communication between us and them and between the inner team members themselves is of prime importance.
We talk of ‘the map is not the territory’ – in other words, we each filter sensory input uniquely, thereby forming our own unique model, or map, of the world. Well Paul and I would prefer to describe this model not as a map, but as an atlas of maps!
Now suppose each map in our atlas is that of an inner team, and each member of each team is perhaps responsible for their own section of their map.
