Imprinting Theory

Imprinting is not just a traumatic event in your biography. It is a belief or a formative experience that shapes your personality. It doesn’t have to be traumatic. It’s something that is reflected in your character.

The term “imprint” goes back to the late Konrad Lorenz, who studied ducklings from the moment they hatched. He found that as soon as they emerged from their eggs, ducklings were searching for a “mother image.” To identify their mother, they looked for just one specific submodality: movement. If an object moved, they would follow it everywhere.

For example, when Lorenz walked around, the ducklings would run after him. After just over a day, the mother imprint in the ducklings was complete. After that, they would completely ignore even their real mother if she was reintroduced, and would instead follow the elderly Austrian everywhere.

For one duckling, the imprint was a balloon, and when the balloon was moved, the duckling followed it. When this duckling grew up, he paid no attention to female ducks, and all his courtship and desire to pair up were directed at any round object. This shows that the mother imprint also transferred to a mate as the duckling matured.

I believe this happens to some extent in humans as well. For example, if a girl was physically punished by her father in childhood, she may develop a curious stereotype as an adult. Regardless of her logical understanding or desires, she may often find herself in relationships where she is mistreated, because this imprint acts as an archetype defining what relationships with men should be like.

If a girl was mistreated by her mother as a child, she may, as an adult, end up treating her own children harshly, hating herself for it and wondering why she acts this way. This means our early experiences not only affect our feelings but also create deep role models for relationships.

There are transitional periods in life when you have to rely on these roles. Whether you like it or not, sometimes it’s the only role you have.

You take on a second position with this role model, almost as if you’re playing someone else’s part. The power of this deep role modeling first became clear to me when I worked with a woman suffering from throat cancer. Her recovery process hit a dead end, and she eventually said, “I feel like my throat has been taken away. My body doesn’t feel like mine.”

I suggested she focus on this feeling and go back in her biography. Suddenly, she recalled a very old memory. She described it: “I’m a little girl, and my mother is holding me and shaking me.” But her facial expression was that of an aggressive mother, not a helpless child. Her voice was full of rage and cruelty. I realized she wasn’t returning to the state of a little girl. Instead, she was reliving the state of the mother shaking the little girl. If you only bring resources to the little girl, you can’t change this experience. Her entire nervous system was organized around the mother; she had become the mother. Ordinary personal history change wouldn’t help here. She had absorbed her mother’s role. Like it or not, you absorb the roles of those you see as significant figures.

Psychoanalysts call this identification with the aggressor. When you create models of the world, you also build models of other significant people. When you build a role model, you may associate with it, especially if it influences your identity. This then shapes your own life. As a child, you identify with a role in the family system. But what happens when you become an adult? Who are you? As one woman who was abused by her mother in childhood told me: “When I was little and remembered those incidents, I always identified with the child: I was scared. Now, as an adult, when I remember, it’s physically easier to identify with my mother. I can’t be the child anymore. So I feel rage and indignation as much as fear. Now I’m the adult: I’m the mother, and I’m the child.”

Steps of the Process

1. Finding the Dead End. First, we identify the symptom in the present. We determine as precisely as possible where the dead end (the symptom) is, and what is preventing change or progress.
2. Creating an Associated Timeline. I like to create a physical timeline, as it helps organize the elements of the system, just as placing feelings by their access keys helps keep them organized and separate. Often, all such incidents, which happened at different times, form a kind of hologram in the mind. This can be overwhelming. It’s much easier to deal with these things separately. Also, a limiting belief formed earlier gives rise to other beliefs, and so on. If we can go back to the first belief and shift it, everything else starts to move and reorganize. This is much easier than trying to work with the belief in the present. It’s like dominoes: each one knocks over the next as you grow.
3. Transderivational Search. You look at the dead end or symptom, associate with the timeline, and allow yourself to move back, leaving the incidents related to the dead end where they happened, until you reach the very first one. This doesn’t have to be conscious. You don’t even need to visualize. Often, as you follow the timeline, you find that something happened at a certain point. You may not know what, but you’ll know it’s important. That’s fine. Just mark the spot and keep going. It doesn’t always have to be conscious, which is why a physical timeline is helpful. Often you’ll know physically, even if not consciously. You keep going back until you reach the earliest event. Maybe it’s just a feeling that it’s the first. How you know doesn’t matter. We’re not talking about objective reality, but about subjective reality, which determines how you act.
4. Clarifying the Perspective Before the Imprint. Next, we need to step back to just before the imprint occurred. Sometimes this is important. I’ve found that with many phobias, people have a “movie” of an event that plays over and over, with no beginning or end. So you say: “Go to a time before this event, when you were safe, and then find a time after it, when you were safe again.” On both sides—before and after—there’s a safe space, and you know the event has a beginning and an end, and you could have made changes to prevent it. I call this creating a safety sandwich.

For example, remember how we found the moment before Carla’s imprint? She stepped over it, and we were in a place where nothing had happened yet. This way, we established a point before the period associated with the imprint.

This “safety sandwich” doesn’t always solve the problem. Since we’re interested in beliefs formed by the event, I want the person to stay associated with the imprint. I want them to verbalize the beliefs or generalizations formed by the experience. At this point, we’re not trying to fix anything. We’re just trying to discover the beliefs.

5. Dissociating the Person from the Timeline. When we dissociate, we literally step off the timeline into external space and observe from the outside: here’s the event, here’s what came before, here’s what came after. This creates a meta position. I also want to find out what other beliefs exist from this position, since this perspective is different from the associated one. From inside the experience, the belief might be: “Oh, I’m a good girl, I’m pleasing.” Dissociated, you might think: “This is disgusting and shameful.” The belief on the timeline may differ from the belief in the dissociated position. I can’t always understand the whole problem space from just one perspective; it’s a whole system of beliefs. That’s why you need several beliefs. Sometimes the belief here, in the dissociated position, can also be very resourceful. I might suddenly realize I used the best resources I had at the time, given my limited worldview.
6. Positive Intention of the Dead End. At this stage, you need to identify the positive intention of the dead end.

Remember, when we were off the timeline, I said: “This ‘something’ is part of you and has a positive intention”? From the meta position, I want to find the positive goal of the dead end: maybe it was to protect me, or to keep me from forgetting something important. How to set boundaries was part of the question about beliefs.

Everyone in the imprint relationship needed their own boundaries. A child needs to know if it’s okay to be inventive and explore internal limits. A mother needs to be able to set boundaries for the people she cares about. A man needs to realize his own limits: what are the acceptable boundaries of play? It’s all about where acceptable boundaries are, how a person sets criteria for how far to go within a system while maintaining ecology. Also, by dissociating and moving to the meta position, we can identify any significant person present in the experience and make sure we understand their intentions.

7. Necessary Resources. Now it’s important to find out what resources were needed and at what level for different individuals. These levels matter, because sometimes you ask, “What did you need?” and the answer is, “I needed to not be there, I needed to be somewhere else.” That’s an external environment resource, and it’s important. But it’s not all you need. You might have needed a behavioral resource to make that change in the environment. “What behavioral resource would you have needed to do something that would have allowed you to be somewhere else? What would you have needed to end up in a different environment?” Of course, to perform a behavior, you need internal knowledge and a broader perspective. You need abilities you may not have, or that your parents or anyone involved didn’t have.

Sometimes people say they just needed to run away or kill the person. That’s just a behavior, which isn’t always the most acceptable or ecological choice for the whole system.

When you’re at the behavioral level, it’s important to have several options, a range of possibilities, so you can make an adequate choice. The ability to increase choice is much more important than any particular behavior. I might say, “My mother needed to say something to that person.” “To say something” is a specific behavior. But what ability is needed to know what to say? Here, I’d need some communication skills. I might need good ideas from the NLP toolkit. “It would have been great if my mother had NLP strategies.” To handle the situation and say what’s needed, I might need a resource at the belief level or even at the identity level. Again, at this stage, we discover what resources are needed. You may need resources at all levels. I don’t think you always have to go to every level. It’s clear that Carla’s imprint relates to a very significant situation, more significant than what many people experience. But regardless of the content, she had to face the same questions everyone does at some point—without hiding from herself or reality. If someone says, “I just needed to know this or that,” or “My mother should have known this or that,” that’s an ability. Sometimes people already have the beliefs and self-knowledge, but lack information. Sometimes people have the information but deny it because they lack self-confidence. So, when searching for the necessary resource, ask: “At what level or levels is this resource needed?” And find the required resources for each perceptual position.

The ability to take multiple perceptual positions is important not only in psychotherapy but in many other areas. If you run a company and have no idea what your employees feel, think, or believe, you can’t manage them well, because you have no idea what it’s like to be in their shoes. After we identify the required resource and know what level it’s at, we need to access that resource in the person we’re working with. It doesn’t matter if the mother never had it, or if the child didn’t have it at the time. What matters is that the resource exists, and in the present, our client can access and feel it. Even if it was present for just a moment in your life, you can grab it, and if you combine it with the imprint, it will start to have more and more influence; it will grow like a mustard seed. The key is not to fool participants about what really happened. They can always remember what actually happened. But instead of those memories remaining as scars and throwing you into confusion and hopelessness every time, you bring a solution into the memory. So, you’ll remember not only what actually happened, but also the decision you made. And that decision is real. When it comes to personal history, remember: you are not the content of your past experiences.