“The somatic strip will now go to the first moment of pain or discomfort which can now be reached,” says the auditor.
The patient drifts around a moment and suddenly feels a pain in his chest. He begins to cough and feels depression all over him. Mama is coughing (often source of chronic coughs).
“Roll the cough,” says the auditor.
The patient finds himself at the beginning of the engram and begins to run it. “Cough, cough, cough,” says the patient. He then yawns. “‘It hurts and I can’t stop,’” he quotes his mother. “Go to the beginning and roll it again,” says the auditor. “Cough, cough, cough,”
begins the patient, but he is not coughing as badly now. He yawns more deeply. “‘Ouch. It hurts, it hurts, and I can’t seem to stop,’” quotes the pre-clear, listening directly if he has sonic, getting impressions of what’s said if he does not have. He has picked up words now that were suppressed in it by “unconsciousness.” “Unconsciousness” is beginning to come off 183
with the yawns. “Roll it again,” says the auditor. “‘I can’t stop,’” says the pre-clear, quoting all that he finds this time. The somatic is gone. He yawns again. The engram is erased.
“The somatic strip will now go to the next moment of pain or discomfort,” says the auditor.
The somatic does not turn on. The patient goes into a strange sleep. He mutters about a dream. Suddenly the somatic gets stronger. The patient begins to shiver. “What occurs?” says the auditor. “I hear water running,” says the pre-clear. “Somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident,” says the auditor. “Roll it.” “I keep on hearing water,” says the pre-clear. (He must be stuck, the somatics did not move. This is a holder.) “Somatic strip will go to whatever it is that is holding,” says the auditor. “‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some good,’” quotes the pre-clear. “Pick up the beginning of the incident now and roll it,” says the auditor. “I feel myself being jostled,” says the pre-clear. “Ouch, something bumped me.” “Pick up the beginning and roll it,” says the auditor. “‘I’m sure I must be pregnant,’” quotes the preclear. “‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some good.’” “Is there anything earlier?”
says the auditor. The pre-clear’s strip goes to the earlier moment where he feels pressure as she tries to get something into the cervix. Then he rolls the engram and it erases.
This is handling of the somatic strip. It can be sent anywhere. It will pick up the somatic first, usually, and then pick up the content. Using repeater technique, the somatic is
“sucked down” to the incident and the somatics turn on. Then the incident is run. If it does not lift, find an earlier incident simply by telling the somatic strip to go to the earlier incident.
If the somatic strip does not move, which is to say, if somatics (physical sensations) do not turn on and off, then the patient is stuck somewhere on the track. He can be stuck in present time, which would mean he has a bouncer thrusting him all the way up the track. Use repeater technique or merely try to send the somatic strip back. If it won’t go, get various bouncer phrases like “Can’t go back,” “Run a mile,” etc. and with them suck the somatic strip down to the incident and run it.
The somatic strip may move through an incident with full sensation and yet, returning over the same ground several times will not bring out data. Time after time this can be done without result in some engrams: the somatics remain almost the same, undulating through the incident each time but with no other content. Then the auditor is “bucking” a denyer, a phrase such as “This is a secret,” “Don’t let him know,” “Forget it,” etc. In such a case he sends the somatic strip to the phrase which denies the data: “Go to the moment a phrase is uttered denying this data,” says the auditor. After a moment, “‘If he found out about this, it would kill him,’” quotes the pre-clear, either from sonic or from impressions. Then the auditor sends the somatic strip back to the start of the incident and it goes on through it, this time with other perceptic content. The somatics, unless the incident is very late prenatal with basic area full of material, undulate (fluctuate according to the action of the engram) and diminish to either reduction or erasure on consecutive recountings.
The auditor tells the somatic strip to go earlier, sometimes it goes later. This is a misdirector. “Can’t tell which way I am going,” “Going backwards,” “Do just the opposite,”
these are the type of phrases of the misdirector. The auditor recognizes that he has one in the pre-clear, guesses it or discovers it from the pre-clear’s wording of the complaint about the action, and by repeater or direct command of the strip, picks up the phrase and the engram, reduces or erases it and continues.
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. The somatic strip will be where the command is which forbids it to function as desired.
There are good and bad conductors of this somatic strip. The good conductor works closely with the file clerk, using such broad orders as “The somatic strip will pick up the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can be reached,” or “The somatic strip will go to 184
the highest intensity of the somatic you now have” (when a somatic is bothering the patient).
The bad conductor picks out specific incidents which he thinks might be aberrative, bullies the somatic strip into them and somehow beats them down. There are moments when it is necessary to be quite persuasive with the strip and moments when it is necessary to pick out incidents of physical pain, but the auditor is the best judge of what should take place. As long as the strip will work smoothly, finding new incidents and running over them, he should not tamper with it beyond making sure that he reduces everything the strip contacts.
A very fine way to thoroughly wreck a case is to put the somatic strip into an incident, decide something else is more important and go rushing off to it, get that half lifted and go off to something else. By the time three or four incidents have been so touched but not reduced, the strip stalls down, the track starts to bunch up and the auditor has a snarl which may take him many hours of therapy or a week or two of rebalancing (letting the case settle) to bring back to a workable state.
The patient will sometimes want a somatic turned off. It has been bothering him. That means that the strip is somehow hung up in some incident which therapy or the patient’s environment has restimulated. Ordinarily it is not worth the time and trouble to locate the incident. It will settle out of its own accord in a day or two and it may be an incident which cannot be reduced because of the earlier engrams.
The somatic strip is handled in a late incident just as it is sent to an earlier one. Despair charges are contacted in the same way.
If you want a test to see if the strip is moving, or to test recall, send it back a few hours and find out what you get. While the prenatal area is easier to reach than yesterday in many cases, some idea will be gained of how the patient is working.
PRESENT TIME
The beginning is conception. Your patients sometimes have a feeling that they are sperms or ovums at the beginning of the track: in dianetics this is called the sperm dream. It is not of any great value so far as we know at this time. But it is very interesting. It does not have to be suggested to the pre-clear. All one has to do is send him to the beginning of the track and hear what he has to say. Sometimes he has an early engram mixed up with conception.
At the late end of the track is, of course, now. This is present time. It happens now and then that patients are not getting back to present time because they have struck holders en route.
Repeater technique with holders will generally free the strip and get it to present time.
A patient may get a trifle groggy with all the things which have been happening to him in the course of a therapy session. And he may have reduced resistance to engrams as he comes back up the track and may thus trip a holder
. The auditor should be very sure the patient is up in present time. Occasionally the patient will be so thoroughly stuck and the hour so advanced that the effort to bring him all the way up is not feasible at the time. A period of sleep will generally accomplish it.
There is a test whereby the auditor can tell if the pre-clear is up to present time. He snaps a question at the pre-clear, “How old are you?” The pre-clear gives him a “flash answer.” If it is the pre-clear’s right age, the pre-clear is in present time. If it is an earlier age, there is a holder there, and the patient is not in present time. There are other methods of determining this but it is not very important, by and large, if the patient does fail to make it.
Snapping questions at people, asking how old they are, elicits some surprising answers. Being stuck on the track is so common in “normal” people that a day or two or a week or two of failure to reach present time in a pre-clear is far from alarming.
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Anyone who has a chronic psycho-somatic illness is definitely stuck somewhere on the time track. Snap questions about it get, “Three,” or “Ten years,” or some such answer quite ordinarily even when asked of people who suppose they are in good health. Reverie reveals to them where they are on the track. Sometimes, in the first session, a pre-clear shuts his eyes in reverie to find himself in a dentist’s chair at the age of three. He has been there for the last thirty years or so because the dentist and his mother both told him to “stay there” while he was shocky with pain and gas -- so he did, and the chronic tooth trouble he had all his life is that somatic.
This doesn’t happen very often, but you can find someone you know, it is certain, who would flash answer “Ten years” and, being put in reverie, would find himself, as soon as the engram came to view, lying flat on his back in a ball park or some such situation, with somebody telling him not to move until the ambulance came: that’s his arthritis!
Try it on somebody.
THE FLASH ANSWER
A device in common use in therapy is the flash answer. This is done in two ways. The first mentioned here is the least used. “When I count to five,” says the auditor, “a phrase will flash into your mind to describe where you are on the track. One, two, three, four, five!” “Late prenatal,” says the pre-clear, or “yesterday” or whatever occurs to him.
The flash answer is the first thing which comes into a person’s head when a question is asked him. It will come from the engram bank, usually, and will be useful. It may be “demon talk” but it is generally right. The auditor merely asks a question, such as what is holding the patient, what denies him knowledge, etc., prefacing the question with the remark, “I want a flash answer to this.”
“I want a flash answer to this,” says the auditor. “What would happen if you became sane?” “Die,” says the patient. “What would happen if you die,” says the auditor. “I’d get well,” says the patient. And with this data they then make an estimate of the current computation on allies or some such thing. In this case, the ally said to the pre-clear when he was ill, “I’d die, just die if you didn’t get well. If you’re sick much longer I’ll go insane.” And a former engram said the pre-clear had to be sick. And this is, after all, just an engram. So repeater technique is used on the word “die” and an ally is uncovered that the pre-clear never knew existed and a charge is blown.
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 that is almost as good a reply as actual data since it means some kind of a cover-up.
DREAMS
Dreams have been used considerably by various schools of mental healing. Their
“symbology” is a mystic foible forwarded to explain something which the mystics did not know anything about. Dreams are crazy house mirrors by which the analyzer looks down into the engram bank.
Dreams are puns on words and situations in the engram bank.
Dreams are not much help, being puns.
Dreams are not much used in dianetics.
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You will hear dreams from patients. Patients are hard to shut off when they start telling dreams. If you want to waste your time, you will listen.
VALENCE SHIFT
A mechanism used in dianetics is the valence shift.
We know the way a patient gets into valences when he dramatizes his engrams in life.
He becomes a winning valence and he says and does rather much what the person in the winning valence did in that engram.
The theory behind it is this: returned to a time the patient may consider too painful to enter, he can be shifted into a valence which felt no pain. A dull way to persuade him is to tell him he does not have to feel the pain or the emotion and let him go through it. This is very bad dianetics because it is a positive suggestion and every safeguard must be taken to keep from giving suggestions to the patient, for he may be very suggestible even when he pretends not to be. But there is the valence shift and this permits the patient to escape the pain and still remain in the engram until he can recount it.
Example, father beating mother, unborn child knocked “unconscious.” The data is available in the father valence with no pain, in the mother valence with her pain, in the child’s valence with his pain.
The way to handle this, if the patient positively refuses to enter it although he has somatics, is to shift him in valence. The auditor says, “Go into your father’s valence and be your father for the moment.” After some persuasion the patient does so. “Bawl your mother out,” says the auditor. “Give her a fine talking to.” The patient is now on that circuit which contains no “unconsciousness” and approximates the emotion and the words his father used to his mother. The auditor lets him do this a couple or three times until the charge is somewhat off the engram. Then he turns the patient’s valence into the mother: “Be your mother for the moment now and talk back to your father,” says the auditor. The patient shifts valence and is his mother and repeats his mother’s phrases. “Now be yourself,” says the auditor, “and recount the entire incident with all somatics and emotion please.” The patient is able to reexperience the incident as himself.
This works very well when one is trying to get at an ally. “Shift valence,” says the auditor to the returned patient, “and plead with your mother not to kill the baby.” “Now be a nurse,” says the auditor, with the pre-clear returned to some incident he seems very fearful about entering, “and plead with a little boy to get well.” The patient will correct the auditor’s concept of the script and usually will proceed.
The patient will often refuse to go into a valence because he hates it. This means there must be considerable charge in the person he refuses to be.
This mechanism is rarely used but is handy when a case is stalling. The father did not obey the holders or commands, he uttered them. The nurse would not obey her own commands. And so forth. Thus many holders and denyers can be flushed to view. It is useful in the beginning of a case.
Valence shift is seldom used except where an engram is suspected which will not otherwise be approached by the patient. He will often approach the engram with valence shift when he will not approach it as himself. Valence shift is somewhat undesirable when employed on a suggestible subject since it violates the dianetic rule that no positive suggestion be used beyond those absolutely necessary in returning and recounting and uncovering data. Therefore valence shift is seldom employed and rarely on a suggestible person.
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TYPE OF CHAINS
Engrams, particularly in the prenatal area, are in chains. That is to say there is a series of incidents of similar types. This is useful classification because it leads to some solutions.
The chains one can most easily contact in a pre-clear are the least charged. The most aberrative chains will usually be the hardest to reach because they contain the most active data. Remember the rule that what the auditor finds hard to reach, the analyzer of the patient found hard to reach.
> Here is a list of chains -- not all the possible chains by any means -- found in one case which had passed for “normal” for thirty-six years of his life.
COITUS CHAIN, FATHER. 1st incident zygote. 56 succeeding incidents. Two branches, father drunk and father sober.
COITUS CHAIN, LOVER. 1st incident embryo. 18 succeeding incidents. All painful because of enthusiasm of lover.
CONSTIPATION CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 51 succeeding incidents. Each incident building high pressure on child.
DOUCHE CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents. One each day to missed period, all into cervix.
SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 5 succeeding incidents. 3 colds. 1 case grippe.
One vomiting spell -- hangover.
MORNING SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 32 succeeding incidents.
CONTRACEPTIVE CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 1 incident. Some paste substance into cervix. entirely and completely unable to confront and attack an engram which the auditor is certain is present: and this is rare.
FIGHT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 38 succeeding incidents. Three falls, loud voices, no beating.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, SURGICAL. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, DOUCHE. 1st incident foetus. 2 incidents. 1 using paste, 1
using lysol, very strong.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, PRESSURE. 1st incident foetus. 3 incidents. 1 father sitting on mother. Two mother jumping off boxes.
HICCOUGH CHAIN. 1st incident foetus. 5 incidents.
ACCIDENT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 18 incidents. Various falls and collisions.
MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm.
DOCTOR CHAIN. 1st incident, 1st missed period. 18 visits. Doctor examination painful but doctor an ally, discovering mother attempting an abortion and scolding her thoroughly.
PREMATURE LABOR PAINS. 3 days before actual birth.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health Page 37