Free association

Hello! Welcome to my page on free association.

Firstly, what is free association?

It is the spontaneous, free-flowing process of linking and connecting thoughts, feelings and experiences. You speak out loud giving me a running commentary of whatever’s going through your head. Following these subconscious links helps you to briefly connect with a surprising and enlightening network of experiences, ideas, thoughts and feelings. Enabling you to review aspects of your life and gain new understanding to support confidence and personal transformation. 

 

How does free association work?

The process of free association allows any experiences, thoughts or feelings to come into your conscious mind. These things are stored in your subconscious mind as memories, perhaps half forgotten memories. The way we think about those memories, the lessons we learnt from those experiences causes you anxiety and symptoms or behaviour you want to change. When the conscious mind is a little more relaxed than usual (deep relaxation or ‘hypnosis’ is NOT necessary) they will readily flow into your mind.

With Cognitive Processing and Integration, as long as you are properly free associating, you will finish therapy within 6 sessions.*

As much as I want you to get through therapy as quickly and as smoothly as possible, the only person who can really get you to finish therapy is YOU. Therefore it is crucial that you understand how to free associate properly.

Free associating is easy, as long as you are doing it correctly. Here is how to….

The Golden Rules of Free Association

• Say absolutely, completely, totally EVERYTHING**!! Therapy only begins when you are saying everything – 99% is not enough! If there is something on your mind that you are not saying, you will not move on in therapy until you do. The hardest things to say (ie, most embarrassing, most guilt inducing, most emotional) are often the most important and significant. This therapy is not about just recalling memories – is it about ALL the things that go through your mind in the session. I don’t just want to know what you see, I want to know what goes through your mind when you see it.

• **Everything includes

memories
dreams / nightmares
fantasies
thoughts
feelings / bodily sensations
colours / patterns
sounds / smells
worries
what you think I’m thinking
things you’re wondering
present day thoughts
‘insignificant’ thoughts (nothing is insignificant)
something you read / watched on TV
photographs
glimpses of people / places / objects.

• Be specific- Say exactly what you see, not your interpretation of what you see. For example, If you get a memory of the school bully approaching you in the playground and asking you for your lunch money and you feeling afraid, say exactly that. Don’t say “I had a hard time at school because I was shy” – that’s your interpretation.For each recollection, I want to know:

WHERE you are
WHAT is happening
WHAT is it like….what’s the gist of the experience

• Don’t ‘go looking’ for things you think are significant.- As soon as you start looking, you stop free associating. Therapy stops as soon as you try to direct or control the recollections.

• Say it as soon as you see it. Don’t wait, don’t try to figure it out, hand it straight on to me.

• Only say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don’t story-tell, don’t waffle, don’t fill me in on facts and figures.

• Tell me what it’s like. Be specific and let yourself be there and be a part of it again because that connects you to your emotions again.

• DO repeat yourself. It doesn’t matter how many times the same recollection comes up, keep saying it every time you think of it.

• You will never have a completely blank mind for more than a couple of seconds.- There will ALWAYS be something on your mind – it may not be an actual memory or an image, but you will always be thinking something, even if it’s “shit, I can’t think of anything”!

• Thoughts may come into your mind from all times in your life … say each and every one. Your mind will mostly naturally want to go back to your childhood because that is when the we learn the most. If your mind keeps drifting back to the present day, you are probably just thinking and brooding about current issues and not free associating.

If you follow these rules, you’ll sail through therapy!

 

*Very occassionally, some people do require a couple more sessions if they are very dissociative, ie, they are very disconnected from the experiences and emotions and it’s less easy for them to get in touch with things that are coming up for them. However, even for these people, as long as they are free associating correctly, they will finish therapy.