What Is a Time Line?

If you are new to Time Line Therapy®, you might wonder, what is a time line? The simplest way I can explain it is that your time line is the way your mind organizes your memories of the past and your ideas about the future. It is something you create in your imagination.

Your time line can be different from someone else's. Some people imagine their past as being behind them, while others imagine it being to their left. Some people picture a line, a road, a series of pictures, or something completely different. You may see it, hear it, feel it, or simply have a sense of knowing where your past and future are. There is no right or wrong way to experience it.

During Time Line Therapy®, I guide you to find your own personal time line, and notice where you experience your past, present, and future. We then use that representation as part of the healing process.

One of the things I find most important is that you get to experience your past from a different perspective. Instead of being right inside a painful memory, it is like you are floating above your time line, and looking down at it. You can observe, or become aware of what happened, without having to become trapped in the trauma all over again.

This was one of the things that made Time Line Therapy® so appealing to me. I had been looking for a way to help people release emotional pain without making them suffer through the pain again. With this process, I can guide someone while they remain safely separated from the uncomfortable feelings.

You also do not have to remember every detail of your life for this process to work. Heck, you don't even have to believe it works for it to work. Many people have no idea when they first experienced a particular emotion. They may know they have struggled with anger, anxiety, sadness, grief, guilt, or hurt for years, but have no idea when it began.

This is where the unconscious mind comes in. While our conscious mind may have forgotten many things from childhood, our unconscious mind can still hold the experiences and emotions connected to them. Many of our strongest emotional patterns began when we were very young, often before the age of seven.

The time line gives us a way to work with these emotions and experiences without having to sit and search through every memory we have ever had, or forgotten. Instead, I guide the person through the process, and let the unconscious mind help find and address the root of the problem.

That is what makes the idea of a time line so useful. We are using something the mind already does naturally, and turning it into a tool for emotional healing. I have guided people through Time Line Therapy® for the past 11 years, and it continues to amaze me how well it works.