Development of Time Line Therapy

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The Development of Time Line Therapy®

Since the introduction of the Time Line Therapy® techniques in 1988 in the book Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality by James & Woodsmall, there has been, not only excitement about the techniques themselves, but also major interest by the psychotherapeutic community and a rather rapid adoption of the process by people actively involved in seeing clients daily for various reasons. In the last few years, it has become obvious that an individual's Time Line with all the person's history - his joys and fears, his happiness and sorrow, his loves and hates, his limiting and empowering decisions - is a major part of that person's personality. Over the last few years, we found that, if we were able to intervene in a client's Time Line therapeutically, we were able to assist the client to create seemingly miraculous changes in his life - changes that extend even to the deepest level of personality.

Models, such as Time Line Therapy®, are interesting devices. A model is a description or simulation of how something works. In essence a model is a blueprint or a map. Like a map, a model is not necessarily "true". It is just a representation of reality. So, we are not necessarily looking for truth in our model, we are only attempting to offer a description of how a portion of the human personality works. Like a map, it is only a description of the territory; and the value of any map or a blueprint lies in the results that you can produce by using it. In retrospect, even after several years, this model still seems to be a major discovery.

From the time of Aristotle to William James to Freud and Jung to Milton Erickson, MD, people interested in psychology have been searching for a way to adequately describe the human experience of time. Time Line Therapy®, as a model, has the potential not only to make sense out of our temporal experience, but also to change our understanding of how negative emotions and limiting decisions affect us, as well as describing how to create a meaningful future for all time to come, because with Time Line Therapy® we now understand the human temporal experience and can change the basic elements that make up someone's history.

Since 1988, thousands of people have been affected by the techniques of Time Line Therapy®. Hundreds of people have been trained in the techniques and use them daily. Thousands of others have attended seminars given all over the world, and have seen dramatic changes in their lives. Today, there are institutes around the world authorised to teach the techniques of Time Line Therapy®.

The Time Line Therapy® techniques are a relatively recent development. The idea of an individual having a means of knowing the difference between memories of the past, and the future, or having a "Time Line" is not. Aristotle was one of the first in our culture to mention the idea of a "Time Line" in Physics IV, for the Greeks had a clear idea of temporality. Our having a Time Line may be, at least in part, a result of the structure our language.

Aristotle
"Western minds represent time as a straight line upon which we stand with our gaze directed forward; before us we have the future and behind us the past. On this line we can unequivocally define all tenses by means of points. The present is the point on which we are standing, the future is found on some point in front of us, and in between lies the exact future; behind us lies the perfect, still farther back the imperfect, and farther yet the pluperfect. The Greek language also has corresponding verb-forms which can be delineated in quite similar manner on a straight time-line. According to Aristotle, therefore, we must represent time by the image of a line (more accurately: by the image of movement along a line), either a circular line or a straight line." [Hebrew, pp 124-6]

William James
Time Line Therapy® has its roots in traditional psychological thinking, and is based on earlier models, which preceded it. William James, in Principles of Psychology, in 1890 says, "If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of bead-like sensations all separate ... we should be wholly incapable of acquiring experience. ... Whether a highly developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful ..." He described the experience of time, "In short, the practically cognised present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions in time. ... Date in time corresponds to direction in space. ... If we represent the actual time-stream of our thinking by an horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a certain point." He says, "Some things we date simply by tossing them into a past or future direction." And so, "memory gets strewn with dated things - dated in the sense of being before or after each other. The date of a thing is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some past or future thing." [Principles, pp 396-413]

Milton Erickson
Time Line Therapy® also has its roots in the work of Milton Erickson, who until his death in 1980, was the world's foremost hypnotherapist. Erickson, almost single-handedly, brought hypnosis out of the closet, and made it possible for the American medical and psychiatric community to accept it as a "legitimate form of treatment". In the early 1960s Erickson was using a hypnotic technique which, remarkably, was quite like Time Line Therapy®.

"One hypnotic phenomenon can be used to induce another. The movie screen can be employed as an uncovering technique. The patient looks at it, sees his past ... He can look at the screen, lose his own identity, and observe various traumatic experiences that occurred in his own life experience. ..." The client can look at his past and his future in a non-threatening way: "... the patient saw himself at a later age; on another, at a still later age -- all the way from five years of age on up to thirty-two. ... Then he was allowed to set up another screen where he could see himself as he hoped to appear next year. Thus he was led to recognise what he wanted in his future, what was meaningful for him in that future. ... That technique has been called pseudo-orientation into the future. Just as one can orient a patient back to the past, so one can project himself into the future in accordance with his own motivations and ... desires." [Practical, pp 342- 344]

Time Line Therapy® is a registered trade mark of Dr Tad James, licensed exclusively
to the Time Line Therapy™ Association. Members may use this trademark.