A recovering user found this technique helpful:
If you close your eyes, you can see the image clearly, right? What you may not know is that you can manipulate that image in your mind. Just get in a relaxed space where you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes. Take two or three deep, slow, relaxing breaths to quiet your mind. Then call up the image. Be curious about it. Look at it as though you were seated in a movie theater watching someone else’s film.
Now, push the image far away, then bring it back, then push it to the left and right. Move it around until you’re comfortable manipulating it. It may take a few minutes for your mind to get used to this technique. Be patient with yourself. Have fun with it. You could put a clown nose on the person or draw on a mustache. Let the picture become really silly. The picture is only significant to you because you gave it significance. Now, you have decided that other things are more important in your life. You don’t need this picture any more.
Next comes the really fun part.
Drain all the color out of the image. Make it black and white. Now make it very small. Now push it far, far away. Now throw that silly image off into outer space. The memory will still be there, but it’s power over you won’t.
What if it’s a movie? The above works really well with images, but if it’s a movie, there’s something else you can do. Speed it up and run it backwards! Make it really silly. Add some circus music to it. Now kick it off the planet too!
The psychology behind the above technique
The instructions above are based on the Fast Phobia Cure. We store images in a particular way in memory. The subconscious uses emotion to tag memories for later recall. The more intense the emotion, the closer to the surface the memory. When you remember the image, the body actually relives that moment. If you change the emotion associated with the image by laughing at it, you can change the memory. Once intense emotion is no longer associated with the image, it will no longer have the same intense effect. Note that hypnosis is usually used for curing phobias because of the fear involved. In this case you are just calling up a familiar image and laughing at it. It is helpful if your mind is quiet, but the focus of trance is not necessary.The above is also based on the work of Richard Bandler, who observed that people “see” images in their head differently and the differences can give you clues about the emotional significance of the image. An intense image is big and dramatically colored. If it’s not so intense, then the colors aren’t either. The image is smaller and farther away. Thus draining the color out of an image and pushing it farther away tells the subconscious that the image is not important any more.
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