A faulty pattern match is when the brain unconsciously misinterprets a current situation by incorrectly linking it to a past experience, leading to an inappropriate response.
“Don’t hold on to the past; it won’t help in moving forward. Dare to dream big.”
– Rajeev Suri
I’m often asked how I approach painful memories besides using the Rewind Technique. So this time, rather than just explain, I thought I’d show you some video clips from the very case I wrote about in my blog post ‘How to identify and remove unconscious blocks‘.
We created Uncommon Practitioners TV (UPTV) to show real therapy being done with real clients, because nothing replaces the real deal.
We have over 150 hours of footage of me treating clients, and now we’ve made it easier than ever to search for specific therapy clips. So I instantly located Sheila’s case after typing “example of Helping Hand Technique”.
Sheila (not her real name) has been blurred in the clips I’ll include here, but of course you can watch the full unedited version inside UPTV.
The past conditions us and can, if we let it, determine our future. A major part of good psychotherapy entails unhooking the influence of the past from the present so our clients can live more freely.
I think Sheila’s case demonstrates how we can begin to alter the impact of the past so the future can be better.
In essence, hers was a case of ‘faulty pattern matching’. But what does that mean exactly?
The wrong (or exaggerated) response to the stimulus
In Human Givens psychology, a faulty pattern match is when the brain unconsciously misinterprets a current situation by incorrectly linking it to a past experience, leading to an inappropriate emotional or behavioural response.
In short, the brain takes a remembered pattern and matches it to a present stimulus – but that pattern doesn’t actually match. Think of a baby trying to suck milk from a finger placed in its mouth, or a war veteran having a full-blown terror response to harmless fireworks.
The emotion of the faulty pattern match could be excessive and inappropriate anxiety, as with phobia; anger; sexual arousal, as with bizarre sexual fetishes; or indeed any strong impulse.
The most famous example is “Pavlov’s dogs”. Neurologist Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to wrongly pattern match the sound of a bell or the sight of a circle to the response of salivation. Similarly, the word ‘chocolate’ can cause a hungry person to salivate even though the word is not itself a confection.
All emotional problems involve faulty or sloppy pattern matching to some degree.
Above all, when we see an overreaction in a client we are likely dealing with a past emotional conditioning which has produced a life-diminishing faulty pattern match in the present. We need to follow this up – which is, as you’ll see, what I did with Sheila.
Following the clues
When a client reacts strongly to something but we and they are baffled as to why their reaction is so extreme (think phobia, flashback, or over-the-top anger), we can bet that some past conditioning produced a faulty pattern match which now hampers their life.
By ascertaining how and when that conditioning occurred, we can help them escape the faulty pattern match and move on with their lives. This is what happened with Sheila.
So what was her presenting problem?
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Case study: Overcoming unconscious blocks to academic progress
Sheila sought help for repeated difficulty applying for a Masters in social work, a step essential to her career vision. Each attempt triggered unusually strong emotional and physical reactions (injury, sudden sleep, intense emotion) that prevented her from completing the application.
Sheila’s reaction exceeded normal procrastination. It suggested unconscious pattern matching: present-day attempts to apply for the Masters were triggering unresolved emotional associations with past trauma.
Here’s a clip of Sheila describing her unusually strong reaction when attempting to further her career in this way. She says when attempting to apply for the Masters degree she often feels nauseous and incredibly tired and exhausted. After trying to apply for just 5 minutes, she would find she had to take a nap! On two occasions she even fell over and badly hurt her knee. This is a woman who is normally hardworking and focused.
As a rule, when you see a jarring, exaggerated, and otherwise out-of-character response in someone, you should trace its origin to see if you can undo the initial emotional conditioning that produced it. So I asked Sheila a little about her past.
A history of trauma
Sheila had a history of childhood trauma. Her mother, who experienced bipolar, had often frightened her while in psychotic rages. I wondered, not surprisingly, whether there may be a link between the freeze response she may have experienced in the past while terrified and her current panic and ‘paralysis’ when trying to apply for her Masters degree.
I decided to apply an Affect Bridge to see if any particular memory surfaced when she honed in on the feelings of heaviness and hopelessness that arose whenever she attempted to apply for the degree. The Affect Bridge can be a great way to find an instigating memory to work with.
Here’s what happened.
Twisted corridors of the mind
You can see here that as Sheila assesses the feelings of paralysis and panic around applying for her degree – which is really about progressing her career – a haunting memory soon comes to mind.
So we had a pattern match. The Affect Bridge linked her current distress when seeking to do a Masters degree to a time when Sheila was around 12, when her mother was scarily stalking up and down the long corridor at home yelling and screaming.
The fear, paralysis, and helpless reluctance Sheila had been experiencing could be matched to this specific memory. And it’s important to note that generally Sheila was confident and felt she deserved success – so this did seem to be a specific faulty pattern match.
As soon as this memory came up, I suspected that it may well be linked to her current block as far as applying for the Masters degree. So next I worked with that memory. I could have used the Rewind technique, but in this case I decided to use the reparenting technique known as the Helping Hand technique.
Comforting the frightened child she was
You can see me starting to help Sheila build up a strong sense of herself here . First I help her build a sense of her current adult strengths and personal resources, because it’s that part of her we want to amplify as she goes back in time and helps her 12-year-old self. At the same time, I seek a situation in which she feels great and relaxed. These are the elements she will take back with her during the hypnotic technique to come.
But there is one thing I really want to emphasize.
Never a question of ‘no pain, no gain’.
There’s no question of dragging a client back through a painful memory to experience all the fear and distress as it happened. I know some psychotherapists did this traditionally, but it’s cruel and unnecessary. I got a quick sample of the problem state, then stepped back. Once we have identified the problem memory, we need to be careful to use it only in ways that are empowering, not painful.
As you can see here, I begin to help Sheila relax deeply by building up a sense of her resources, as previously discussed. This is to be her protection as she regresses to that painful time in order to process it for good, so that the faulty pattern match stops happening in her current life.
I have her go back in time as her adult self and comfort the child she once was: tell her it’s all going to be okay, and make her feel better in that memory.
I go on to suggest to Sheila that the truth is very important, that she has something very important to teach her 12-year-old self and that the nature of that teaching has to do with “untruthful limitations”. You can watch this part here:
A little later on I frame applying for her Masters degree as a “sacred act” that she will be doing for her 12-year-old self as well as the adult Sheila.
Onwards and upwards
If a child loves a parent even though that parent abuses them in some ways, they can feel disloyal, perhaps unconsciously, to that parent by ‘disobeying’ their negative suggestions about themselves. As perverse as that might sound.
A few days after our session, Sheila emailed to let me know she had finally submitted her Masters degree application. She mentioned that she considered the session “a great success”. The grown-up Sheila had taken control of her life – though it seems her younger self had now made peace with the world too. You can see her describe the change here:
Sheila’s journey is a reminder that even the most deep-seated blocks can be dissolved when compassion, clarity, and courage are brought to bear.
By revisiting the frightened child within her and offering the love and reassurance she once lacked, Sheila rewrote not only an old memory but also the course of her future.
As Viktor Frankl once wrote:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Therapy at its best widens that space, helping us reclaim freedom from the echoes of the past and step forward with renewed strength, purpose, and hope.
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About Mark Tyrrell
Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.
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