The History Of Events Psychology

The Background Behind Events Psychology

by Silvia Hartmann 2009

• Where has Events Psychology come from?
  
  Where do the core concepts originate?
  
  And which other patterns have played a part in the development of Events Psychology?
  
  At the very heart of all of my designs lies the Harmony Program. This came to me in a true visionary event in 1993, revealed the existence of energy exchanges between people and the Universe around them in a flash, and changed my viewpoint on just about everything in a heartbeat.
  
  One of the core concepts of the Harmony Program involves the understanding that in order to evolve any system, you need to give it what it needs in order to evolve.
  
  This is in stark contrast to the strange human propensity to try and evolve systems through things they don't need, don't want, and particularly by withholding essential nutrients (as would be the case in withholding food and attention from a crying baby so it should grow up “strong in mind and body”).
  
  Since 1993, I have therefore looked at systems and asked myself, what does this system need? What is this system DIRECTLY ASKING FOR? And what happens if you give the system what it needs, instead of giving it something else, or nothing at all?
  
  This led to some true breakthrough patterns and techniques across the board; most notably to the basics of the EmoTrance Client/Practitioner dance, where the helper gets to give the help they want to give, the client gets to receive the help they want to receive, and both try to give the systems what THEY need and are asking for in order to heal, change and evolve them.
  
  The Harmony Program is also responsible for the aspects of Events Psychology that revolve around the concept of there being NO HIERARCHY in natural systems. There can be no proud lion without lowly worms, microbes, and plants; a heart isn't better or higher than a stomach, a brain or a leg and in general, hierarchical thinking makes no sense whatsoever when we are dealing with natural systems such as exist in the human mind, body and spirit (energy system).
  
  The absence of hierarchy in natural systems is also directly responsible for the basic processes of Project Sanctuary (1996), essentially a research device to re-connect the conscious mind with the energy mind (previously known as the subconscious or unconscious mind). When neither “mind” has a hierarchical position of dominance or submission, but both work together on the daily business of information processing, sorting and storing, things actually start to evolve, and people's thinking becomes much clearer and more encompassing.
  
  Project Sanctuary also brought with it the concept of the threshold shifts – change EVENTS that re-organise the entire system to a new level of functioning. At first, these threshold shifts appeared randomly as the original researchers worked with Project Sanctuary; then it became apparent that if one plays the game IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE threshold shifts, a lot more and better threshold shifts were available, and faster, too.
  
  Project Sanctuary deals with all manner of internally stored material (“memories”) in a global and non-hierarchical fashion, using the same approaches and structures regardless of whether one works with a dream, a real memory, a construct, a fantasy, a vision or any of the many other manifestations of data held in the mind of a single person.
  
  As it soon became apparent that there is only one “right” way of dealing with the challenges of all these materials, namely to move an individual into the direction of health, better functioning, problem resolution, it also became apparent that the methods and techniques to achieve these movements towards systemic health were structural and global across the board as well.
  
  It was during these investigations that it became clear that ALL human mind manifestations and memories, actions, thoughts and behaviours were actually extremely logical and always had a cause and effect. That was a significant breakthrough in understanding and opened the door for much further explorations without the fear of insanity or systems breakdown.
  
  In 1993 also, I began the study of NLP and General Semantics, and also hypnosis. Particularly pin point hypnosis, which is designed to go directly to the genesis event of a problem, was fascinating to me and added more data to the theory that people's minds indeed worked in a very predictable, cause and effect fashion.
  
  With the study of General Semantics particularly also came an understanding of the problems of the language of metaphor, and the intrapersonal nature of symbol making and language development in human beings. This was once again addressed through Project Sanctuary, which is a tool for a single person to explore their intrapersonal domains and to begin to understand their own symbology and metaphor, which is highly ideosyncratic and a knowledge of which is if not exactly necessary, then at least extremely helpful in high end personal development endeavours.
  
  In 1998, I began to experiment with a new modality from the world of Energy Psychology, namely EFT Emotional Freedom Techniques. Over the course of the following five years, and working with literally innumerable people as a practitioner, as a trainer, as a public demonstrator and as an advisor on self help procedures, it became abundantly clear how trauma events work, and how the road into the trauma event (so that its effects may be alleviated) was quite literally blocked by any number of gatekeepers that would derail and side track the attempt to reach the event itself if one didn't pay careful attention and keep the session, the self and the client on track firmly.
  
  In working with EFT, the notion of human beings having an energy body became quite real; and in 2002, I took this model, developed it further and created EmoTrance, essentially a research device to test the assumption that all human emotions originate in the energy body, are feedback devices to the existing conditions in the energy body, and may be changed easily and readily by the application of attention.
  
  As a research device, EmoTrance functioned so well, and produced such surprisingly positive results, that it soon became a therapy form in its own right.
  
  What was particularly interesting about EmoTrance was that when the energy body was being treated directly and this treatment was successful, people would often experience a radical and powerful shift that was way beyond symptom cessation or “finding peace” - we called this phenomena “the energized end state”, where people were literally dancing with joy and had changed their minds about the problem absolutely, and the problem never came back at all after that had happened.
  
  Around the same time, the continuing research and work with EFT produced a very important breakthrough insight – namely that people's problems were not all due to trauma, but that a hugely important driver for behaviour, thought and action lay in POSITIVE events a person had experienced. This was documented in the “Guiding Stars” paper from 2002 and it radically changed the way we began to think about how people work across their life times, how they choose the things they do, as a major missing building block in existing psychology.
  
  Here now were four manifestations that all caused or rather embodied CHANGE in a human system – the trauma from psychology and/or pinpoint hypnotherapy, the Guiding Stars from EFT treatments, the threshold shifts from Project Sanctuary, and the energized end state experiences of the EmoTrance practitioners and clients.
  
  And so there came the day when it became clear that all these change events are just that – EVENTS.
  
  All these change events have the same structure, work in the same way, and thus, Events Psychology was created.
  
  Every component from Events Psychology from start to finish has already been tried and tested through quite literally hundreds of thousands of people who have used the components in Hypnotherapy, EFT, EmoTrance and Project Sanctuary to create change to event memories, and to create new events of change and healing.
  
  In Events Psychology, these components and learnings have been put together to give a theoretical framework to how people work that is sound, sensible, and easy to understand.
  
  Still it took all these many people, and two decades of dedicated research to make this design that we now call Events Psychology, and present it in such a way that it safe to use with clients and in self help.
  
  The “parents” of Events Psychology are still very much in evidence all through the theory and practice of working with events, remedially or otherwise.
  
  General Semantics lives on in the phrasings of the questions, the language of Events Psychology and the true understanding of the INTRAPERSONAL nature of human experience.
  
  Hypnotherapy lives on in the search for the genesis event, and the practice of directing the attitude of consciousness so that new and different learnings and experiences may be had.
  
  EFT lives on in the acknowledgment and detection of the stress blocks that lie on the path the conscious mind has to travel to go any given event; and to make the sessions safe, easy, gentle and without fear.
  
  EmoTrance lives on in Events Psychology through the client practitioner dance, through the structural understanding of emotions, and the highly systemic way the treatment proceeds  from the problem statement, to the change event becoming manifest and REAL.
  
  Project Sanctuary exists in the creation of the Events Models, and in the methods used to make events memories become real, and fully interactive, thus being able to enrich these memories beyond what was possible before.
  
  And most of all, the Harmony Program is alive and carrying all of Events Psychology, in its absolute faith and trust in the natural order of things that is at the heart and core of every system designed by the Creative Order; in the love and admiration that opens the door to experiencing events in the first place; in the rejection of artificial hierarchies and anything else for that matter which may place a barrier between a person and their experience of the real Universe in which they live; and most of all, in that all important message that you can only evolve a system to the next level if you give it what it seeks, what it needs, and what it wants.
  
  Silvia Hartmann
  June 2009

  
   

  • Excerpt from Events Psychology - Understanding Yourself, And Other People by S Hartmann 2009