State Control

JacknCoke has a long post about State Control in the context of approaches/contextual anxiety over on Badboy Lifestyle. Thanks to Thundercat for originally noticing the post.

However, this only covers a small gamut of state control, and very few techniques around it (basicallly just repeated desensitivisation therapy without the fancy name.)

I find state control highly useful, and I have a few techniques I use for increased state control (if you don't know what an anchor is, reading this exercise should hopefully make you understand and make it easy to start using them more consciously.)

• Maybe my most useful technique: I use focus control to change what state I get into. By changing what aspect of the sitation I get the state from. Good aspects of body feeling can usually be used as a positive influence, the prettiness of a colour or an architectural detail, the amazing physical patterns of a raindrop, the wonderful fractal complexity of a tree, that it's turning into spring, the memory of that amazing feeling of walking on a field of round pebbles, the taste of coffee, the flow of actually writing. All of these are aspects of the situation just now. I can go into an "up" state just by switching my focus around; if you try it, you'll easily learn how, too.
  
• I use my entire body language as a sort of anchor. This is an "anchor" that naturally exists as part of the limbic system. By forcing your body language to match a particular state, you will (to a large degree) force that state. Just do it.
• I have consciously usable anchors for switching into a number of different states. The most important ones are sexual state and a few different relaxed states. NOTE: On my own and in normal state, I find "imagine a resource experience and anchor from that" to be fairly difficult. Instead, I anchor resource experiences when I have them. In trance, I occasionally anchor from memories or imagined experiences, and I find it fairly effective in that context.
  
• On purpose, I anchor negative states when in field. I then override the state to a positive one, and at a later point I use handling techniques to fix the issues that lead to the negative state. To deal with the states, I find the following useful: Swish pattern, dual brain hemisphere stimulation, anchor blending (including EFT/TFT, which are mainly anchor blends with mumbojumbo), submodality changes and/or resource addition on chained memories, various hypnosis/visualisation exercises, and "emotion bleeding" - just going into the state and spending some time there "listening to my feelings". NOTE: Anchoring negatives is an advanced technique. Use only if you are good at self-therapy.