Here’s a good example of how the forgiveness process works. We were doing training with four people, including the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation. He walked in with his hair sprayed back, wearing a three-piece suit, and his white shirt was a little choking at the collar. At the end of the day, he wanted to go first in his mood scale review. At the top of the list, and denied with ‘five sigmas,’ was the word anger. The big sigma meant anger was highly likely to be an emotion that was really present in him, even though he had completely denied it by giving a ‘0’ response, meaning ‘Not at all.’ He had answered the mood scale question on anger in a way that denied he had any anger, but the computer didn’t buy it. It reported five standard deviations (5 sigmas) of doubt. You only need three sigmas to be statistically significant, and even one sigma can sometimes be very powerful. He had five sigmas, strongly indicating denial of the emotion of anger.
Since he was the first person on the first day in the mood scale interview to go over the mood scale results, he hadn’t seen anybody else work with the Mood Scales. I began gently by explaining that the Mood Scales sometimes indicate an emotion is present that the person is not consciously aware of, but which may be there. I asked him if there was anything he was angry about, and loudly and angrily yelled ‘NO!!!’ Everyone in the room jumped at this outburst.
OK, so now everybody knew he was angry, and still, he denied it. So I tried a different approach. He was married, so I started to praise women’s intuition, saying it was sometimes better than men’s hunches. I intended to lead the conversation around to the point where I could ask: ‘If I were to ask your wife if there is anything you are angry about, what would she say?’ But he was a smart guy, and he was able to figure out where I was going. So I did not even get to ask the question before he again loudly and angrily yelled, ‘NO!!!’ This time, everyone really jumped because his outburst came without me even having had a chance to ask a question.
The Biocybernaut training is gentle and non-confrontational, so I dropped the issue for the moment and went on to ask him about other denied words with sigmas. He was in total denial about anything and everything, and he was totally unwilling to do any inner work or talk about any of his feelings. So we finished his Mood Scales very quickly, making no apparent progress at uncovering the issues we usually uncover by going over the Mood Scales.
But there were three other people in training, and each of them did some serious, deep work with the denied words that received sigmas on their Mood Scales. When they would get in touch with the underlying event, there would be a pronounced emotional release. They were able to sigh and let down an apparently heavyweight they had been carrying, sometimes for a long time. This CEO might have been blocked about his own emotions, but he was a keen observer of people, so he saw what the others had done, and he secretly took it to heart.
Training Center:
When he walked into the Training Center on day two, he still was in the three-piece suit, but sat down and then he opened his jacket and took out a long folded piece of paper, and he unfolded it. It was a long list of everyone with whom he was angry. With traditional psychotherapy, this might have happened in year two or maybe year 20, but in the Biocybernaut training, this was just day two. Now I had an opportunity to coach him on forgiveness work and encouraged him to go into the chamber and get his alpha going as best he could, considering it was only his second day. When he got his alpha going, I told him that he should bring to mind someone from his angry list and then do forgiveness work on that person.
He resolved to do this. While in the chamber, he brought to mind a person from his angry list. Naturally, he got angry, and then he watched his alpha scores plummet. Perplexed, he wondered what had gone wrong with his alpha. Then he remembered that he was supposed to begin now to forgive this person. But he was angry, and his ego was running his mind, so he had a further blow up of Anger. NO WAY WAS HE GOING TO FORGIVE THAT ROTTEN @X%@!&!!!! Of course, this further anger outburst further depressed his alpha. The tones went almost silent, and the scores dropped down into double digits. He was failing big time! Now he was really in a dilemma. He was a performance-oriented competitive guy, running a billion-dollar corporation after all, and here he was failing at alpha feedback. He was getting almost no feedback tones. To him, this was an unacceptable failure. It’s certainly not what a CEO of a billion-dollar corporation expected of himself! So he got angrier but quickly realized that was not the way to go. So he began to think about forgiveness, angrily. But of course, angry thinking about forgiveness doesn’t do it. He discovered that very quickly. So then he tried reluctantly to forgive.
And of course, that did not do it either; the tones stayed very quiet and the low scores seemed mocking as they flashed every two minutes before his eyes. So he was in a muddle, not knowing what to do. As he sat there with his mind spinning, unexpectedly there was a moment where he heard a little bit of increase in the tones. He wondered what had happened and then realized that he must have done something during those few moments that took him in the direction of forgiveness and its higher alpha. So he thought back and recovered the feeling he had had during that brief increase of the tones. And then he generated that feeling all during the next two-minute epoch. The tones were noticeably louder and when the epoch ended, he was rewarded by all the scores setting new highs. He was elated and now he was like Superman. He had his lifetime angry list, and he had a new method, actually a tool crafted out of his existing behavioral repertoire through use of the alpha feedback that told him when he actually authentically forgave someone. So now he was able to go through his entire lifetime of grudges, grievances, withholds, poutings, furies, and rages and simply eliminate them with authentic forgiveness. His rewards were big surges in the feedback tones and ever higher scores and a rapidly spreading sense of peace and wellbeing and wonder. He was opening his heart and forgiving deeply and his alpha soared ever higher.
