A New Straightwire Technique (501129)
Date: 29 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
We have as a major interest, I am sure, the regaining of attention units and the general rehabilitation of a case by the “auditor imagination saver.” This is nothing terrifically new. I’ve been talking to you about this material here for some days. But I’m going to show you a codification of the material and a method of using it.
The first thing that you would be interested in in terms of this is of course our triangle: reality, affinity, communication. The auditor uses this in this fashion. In straight memory he starts in with anything which would break down reality. Now, you have a codification of those things—the types of incidents which would go about to make up a break of reality. So the auditor hammers around for a while with straight memory, picking up these things about reality and just to vary the monotony he goes and starts picking up some things that has to do with affinity; and then he comes around and he picks up some things that has to do with communication; and then he picks up some things that has to do with reality; and then he picks up some affinity breaks; and he picks up some communication.
Now, the best way to remember this, I think, would be if we changed these corners—it doesn’t matter which one’s uppermost, of course—and we call it “arc.” He keeps swinging in an arc: affinity, communication, reality; affinity, communication, reality. Of course he isn’t drawing any pictures for his preclear but he knows what composes, then, breaks in communication or over-communication (over or under, you know). Breaks in affinity or enforced affinity—you see, a break-off of or an enforcement on, compulsion or inhibition—works for each one of these. And he goes around the thing in this fashion. He doesn’t run out of ideas. And he keeps the memory of the preclear playing on new subjects and new people. And if he asks for something on communication—for instance, if he asks for “Who used to tell you you had to talk?” That would be too much communication. “Who used to tell you you had to talk?” and so forth. And he’ll think for a moment and, “Tell me I had to talk? It’s my father. He used to tell me to speak up. Yeah, ‘Speak up.’” And so you say, “That’s fine” and you explore this a little bit more. So there’s probably a “speak up” chain of some sort or other if this was Papa’s dramatization straight down the boards. And you’ve gained a little point there on communication, so we swing over to reality, “Who used to tell you that they hated you?” “Oh, nobody—oh! My sister.” And believe me, if his sister ever went around with this computation. “I hate you” and so on, you can be sure that it’s strung down the bank. Particularly if his sister is older. You see, that’s a little bit complex, but you look at a family pattern and you find that the first child is not quite the same aberration pattern as the next child, as the next child, but by the time they get down to about the third or fourth child these things are compounding because there’s more and more personnel around Mama and therefore there are more and more commands; and in addition to that, Mama by this time has probably had a lot more keyed in. God help the third child! I knew a seventh child once who was a junior.
Now, it’s fairly certain if we have the third child—if the second child has a dramatization and our preclear is the third child, he’s going to have everything the second child had, plus. I mean, that’s just a safe bet; I mean, it’s something there that you can use. So we can follow this material down and we keep putting this down, if we’re keeping accurate notes on our preclear, we’re putting this stuff down as potential circuits. A circuit that said, “Speak up. I tell you you’ve got to speak up” — that sort of thing—“I can’t hear you, you know. You’ve got to speak up.” And it’s this insistence and so forth. Well, if Papa said this continually, it was a communication break. So we just go around the thing and we’ve picked up something; we won a little bit now on communication, so we try to win something on reality and then we try to win something on affinity, on reality, communication, on affinity, reality, communication, on affinity, reality, communication. In other words, round and round on this case. [gap] Now, we can divide our session up, actually, if you want to get real mechanical about it, to all those things which enforced. So we get two grades on this. [drawing on blackboard] We would go on the basis of enforced—compulsive, you might say—and we swing this thing many times on compulsive. And then we start swinging it on inhibitive: compulsive, inhibitive. I should say, actually, that this is “denied.” So we start going around here first on enforced. “You’ve got to love me. You must love me,” and so forth. That makes for somebody trying to force affinity through. Which will, by the way, have a tendency to charge up the bank.Now we swing into this and somebody has continually said to this person, “You must understand. You’ve got to understand. It is true, you must know that it’s true,” something like that. That’s an enforced reality.
Now we come over here and, “You’ve got to see it,” “You know that this is very plain,” “You’ve got to see this,” “You’ve got to look at it,” “You’ve got to listen to it,” “You’ve got to feel it,” “You’ve got to smell it.” You know, any of these things. Enforced communication, in other words. Or “You’ve got to talk” or “You’ve got to write.” Any one of these things. And we just keep swinging it around .
Now we select members of the family, if we want to break this thing down further. We know that there are four members of this family: Papa, Mama and two brothers—basically four members. But we know probably that there were some grandparents or relatives and that there were some nurses on this case, so after we’ve written down a list of dramatic personnel of the case—we know how many people there are on this case, we’ve got a list of the dramatic personnel.
You could even inventory the dramatic personnel via your preclear, and you’d do it with this circular system here by saying—all right, we’re talking about his elder brother. Now let’s just get this elder brother very thoroughly into view “When did your elder brother used to say that you had to like him?” So forth. “Well, he never said anything like that. He wouldn’t say that.” And by actually forcing this a little bit on your preclear, he turns around and he objects to this thing and he says, “Why, he used to—he didn’t say things like that. He used to say things like that, well, ‘Nobody likes me, absolutely nobody likes me.’ As a matter of fact, you know, he committed suicide when he was eighteen.” All of a sudden you realize this man hasn’t thought about this or compared this; this is new data, actually, which was just sort of lurking back in his mind: committed suicide; his elder brother—somebody in that family had a suicide engram. You mark that down. There’s a suicide engram in here someplace. All right, let’s find out what its ramifications are. But here is the trick in all straight memory: don’t superconcentrate on any one subject very long. Memory is something which can be darted at a subject, but a continual pressure toward the subject will have a tendency to blunt it a little bit and it will disperse. In other words, the thing that you’re targeting at seems to become alert and start bouncing it off and you won’t get anything out of it. Do you follow me? In other words, if you can make him remember something quickly. You don’t ever insist that he remember this quickly, but you say, “Let’s remember this,” so on. If we keep him on the same subject it sort of restimulates the subject a little bit and the subject will begin to turn against the “I” slightly. So you change the subject on the person and you make him remember something else now. And you direct the memory stream at something else, and then you direct it at something else. And after you’ve done this you finally come around back to this same subject again, you’ll find out that a little more of it is in view and that a sudden dart at it again—”Now, about your brother’s suicide, how did he do it?” And the fellow says, “Why, it was with a razor blade.” “Ah.” You add it over here in your column. All right. In other words—”And now, what else did your brother used to say about liking people?” “Oh, he—nobody liked him; nobody liked him. He used to say that all the time. He used to say, ‘Everybody’s against me’ and so . . . oooo!” Now you get around here and you get some reality and you get a little communication and so on and you just keep going around. And then let’s come back and find out, “Well, did your brother say this just before he committed suicide?” “Oh, no, I don’t remember that. No, I don’t remember that.” “Well, let’s take your younger brother now; did he used to try to make you understand things? Did he have any trouble trying to get people to understand things and so forth?” “Oh yes. As a matter of fact, he used to go into tantrums. He’d lie on the floor and he’d say, ‘Nobody understands me. I just can’t do it to anybody. I can’t tell anybody about it. Just nobody does,’ and so on.” And you get this going and you come back to the thing; “Now, what did your brother say just before he committed suicide?” “He was pretty blue. This girl had just left him,” and so on.
Aha! We have a dramatization in the bank about Papa leaving Mama and somebody committing suicide because of. Threatened suicide because of separation between the two. So we know that Papa and Mama used to fight one way or the other and they used to come hammer and tongs at each other on this subject but this whole thing may be completely occluded from the preclear.
He may be telling you all this time, “Well, you know, my father and my mother, they never fought, they were absolutely model parents in front of children and they never fought in front of children and they never said anything about it and they were always nice to each other and they got along so well.” Here’s this fellow, by the way, with no reality and with just that much communication and so forth, and he’s telling you that his family life was all a gay song. Oh, yeah? This means that you’ve got a tremendous amount of occlusion on this case. But you don’t tell him he’s occluded; you just come around again and you just keep working at it, chewing away at it, and the first thing you know, you have Papa and Mama into view with this very same dramatization. They probably dramatized it later if they dramatized it earlier. That sort of a computation.
Now, it so happens that if Papa and Mama died very early, that you get a break in the dramatization pattern. So the dramatizations in late life don’t compare to the prenatals. This means your prenatal bank may be relatively undisturbed because it’s never been repeated. But it means that there is a tremendous affinity break on this, grief and so forth, or apathy, because of the death or loss of Papa and Mama. It doesn’t mean this case is in any better shape just because he lost his parents. But it does mean that you’re not going to pick up the clues on the prenatal bank that you would pick up ordinarily. But there is broken affinity.
The parents may not have died; they might have just left the child. Or Mama left the child with a foster home and then went off and left the child. Now, this will definitely alter a pattern, definitely alter the background. If this happened immediately after birth, the chances of it having any enormous effect on him are very slight. But the aberrative pattern which would be ahead of a child being abandoned immediately after birth is probably awful.
Anybody who gets an adopted child gets a terrific pig in the poke, you might say, because the child was unwanted all during the prenatal period, so you know what sort of a thing to scout for. Unless the parents died by illness or violence. If this child was just pushed out and given away shortly after birth, you can expect all sorts of things. AAs and everything else are on this case.
Well, it would be a little bit tough one to locate until we start to find out what points and periods in the preclear’s life that he was very unhappy. What sort of thing made him unhappy? That sort of thing. And we still work at it on this triangle here—we get people who have broken affinity with him and people who have invalidated his reality or enforced realities upon him, people who have communicated with him too hard, people who haven’t communicated enough. And we go on this enforced—I was giving you both that time—but we go on remembering all his family members, all the persons in his vicinity, and trying to touch on each one of them with these various things.
Let’s deal with Mama for a short time. Let’s go over Mama or the foster mother, whatever it is, and let’s find out, enforced basis. “When did she insist on being loved?” or “When was she very sad?” Remember that affinity doesn’t mean just love. “When was she very sad? When did she used to be afraid? What did she used to say about these things?” and “You’ve got to watch out” and “You’ve just got to be afraid,” that sort of thing, “because if you aren’t afraid then you wouldn’t learn, you wouldn’t stay away from these things.” I ran that one out of a guy once. He’s had to be afraid. It made an anxiety case.
You got, up here on the reality line, “This is true,” “You’ve got to believe it.” “This is the way the world is.” “You’ve got to mind your grown-ups, they know best. Elders know best.” Yap, yap, yap, up here. And believe me, that is really the toughest one in the whole doggone system. That’s the toughest of tough social aberrations because it enforces upon an individual the fact that his elders know best and so on. And by golly, I have given a great deal of thought and inspection to this subject and I haven’t found it to be true!
Now, enforced communication. We’re just taking Mama on this one. See, we’ve gone around the thing here with Mama and we vary this enough so that the preclear doesn’t see a mechanical pattern in this. But we inventory Mama, you might say, and what she used to do and so on, with this. And then let’s take up the foster father or the grandparents or somebody—another person in the child’s life. Then let’s take up his teachers, let’s take up the children, his playmates, let’s take up all this vast horde of humanity that surrounds every human being during his childhood, one by one. Let’s take the chauffeur.
By one time suddenly assuming the possibility that the family might have been in better circumstances, I suddenly found out that the family had gone broke when the child was two years of age. The child had no recollection of it whatsoever. They had lived in this enormous, beautiful house and they had had servants and everything else. And the ally on the case that was burying everything was the chauffeur. Something like a murder mystery, you know? The murder was done by the butler.
All right, now let’s take denied on this same personnel. Try to follow it out with some degree of pattern so you get full coverage. Denied: denied tears, denied apathy, denied shame, denied fear, denied love, denied unity with the rest of the human race and so forth— affinity. All right, reality: “It isn’t true,” “It isn’t real,” “You don’t know what’s true,” “You don’t understand,” “You don’t know the facts,” all of that sort of thing. Disagreement: who used to disagree in this family and say that the other person didn’t know? And we get over here in communication, “You can’t hear anything,” “You don’t know,” so on, “Oh, you can’t feel anything like that; it’s all in your imagination,” which is a cross-up between this one and this one. [taps blackboard] All right. Denied, all the way around.
Now you see a mechanical method by which you can use straight memory. You can regain lots of attention units without straining your own imagination. [gap] . . . this is so bad off that you have to do an awful lot of Straight-wire in order to get attention units, don’t dive into this case. Let me give you that as a caution. Don’t dive into this case. This person, his sense of reality isn’t too good and so forth, the second that you get something that looks hot, make a note of it. Be orderly about this; don’t be eager, just be orderly. Put the person’s dramatization that you’ve just discovered—one of his parents’ dramatization, put this down over on the side as something you’re going to scout for. Now shift him from straight memory into reverie. And this is the sort of thing you would then go after in reverie.
You don’t dive on this case. After all, all you’re trying to do here— you’re getting data, but that isn’t the main thing you’re trying to do—what you’re trying to do is pull attention units up to “I” and restore “I” and get the charge off the valences.
Now, you will find somebody in the family who had trouble with identity—personal identity So we start covering this subject and the people in the family in terms of whose valences were they in. If any of these people were out of valence or if they did a lot of dramatizing or anything according to that, they were out of valence themselves; therefore, there existed valence shifters. Now let’s see if we can find out what these valence shifters are. So we go into the various lineups and so forth. “Did anybody try to make you a better boy?” “Ah, yes.” “Weil, who did they set up as a model for you?” “Oh, that was Herman, down the block. I hated him!” “Yeah, well, what did they used to tell you about Herman?” “Oh, he was a little gentleman and had nice manners and—my mother used to tell me this all the time.” You follow this track right on down to Mama had identity trouble. She had identity trouble in herself and she’s got a dramatization there that tries to make her change the identity of other people around her. You’ve spotted, then, a shifted-valence personality in the vicinity of your preclear—Mama. Okay? So we look at Mama and we find out when Mama said to Papa, who she wanted Papa to be like and who she wanted Grandpa to be like and who she wanted the other children to be like. And finally we’ll pick up enough data on this and stimulate the memory of a person to a point where you will actually have valence shifter dramatizations coming into view with whole word content. See how that would be? Now you’ve got the valence shifter dramatization. “You’ve got to be like other people. You can’t go on thinking you really amount to something in the world. You’ve got to buckle down, do your job and you’ve got to be like other people. You’ve got to live like other people,” and so on. Well, that would be a valence shifter into all sorts of valences, and you finally spot this.
Now, mind you that each one of these locks is a lock because it’s buried into the overall charge which has come up from the engram and the secondary engrams. But just by springing off a lock off the top of this chain, one to some degree deintensifies the charge on that thing, so he can go round and round.
Now, the second part of the mechanical operation here has to do with the [drawing on blackboard] first, second, third and fourth.
All right. For each one, all the way, let’s just cover these subjects. “Who used to talk about not liking yourself?” First dynamic. “Who used to say that you were nobody?” That would be a valence shifter in it. A nullification. “Who used to tell you you shouldn’t listen to your own advice?” or “You should listen to your own advice?” and so forth. In other words, these cockeyed little split-offs. They’re all inhibitive on the first dynamic.
We get the second dynamic. Let’s start being interested now in the second dynamic and we’re interested in that in two divisions, remember. There are divisions on the second dynamic. One is sex as an act and the other is children. So we can handle sex. The reason sex gets so mixed up is it gets mixed up with the family, which is actually over here, but it’s partly in the second. And it has two divisions which has to do with the sex act and children, and it’s the family, and it’s this whole dynamic of the future. And the reason why people sometimes go hog wild and think sex is the super-super-superaberrative something-or-other in the society is just because it’s apparently a little bit stronger than some of these other combinations. But I’ve seen whole societies that never worried that long about sex. So you want to cover this.
Now, it’s interesting, for instance, that the recovery of data on the second dynamic is actually no more significant than the others if you’re treating just sex. You’ll find all sorts of locks and secondary engrams on the subject of sex on a case and you start asking about it. Now, you’re not so fascinated with this person’s own sexual behavior or aberrations but you’re interested in the sexual aberrations or behavior of the people around this person. The only time you get interested in a person’s own dramatization is when all else fails. What does he say? What does he do? Because if it’s an aberrated conduct or in aberrated statements, he got them from somebody else, and it will clue you in to somebody else’s actions in the bank. All right?
An interesting clue on this is getting the dictated affinity, communication and reality on children. How do they feel about children? How should you treat a child? So on. Now, you go on the basis of this, you just follow it around. “Should children be seen and not heard?” [gap] . . .to an English private school or an American private school system or something of the sort, why, you’ll find a lot of sex louse-up on the case. And you just play one of these things against the other, back and forth, rolling the three around until finally you’ve gotten a lot into view on the thing.
You’re unburdening a case. You’re taking charge off a case. You’re looking for secondary engrams, you’re looking for dramatizations, you’re looking for circuits, you’re looking for data, you’re trying to get everybody in this case into view. You’re trying to knock out all the occlusions. And if you keep it up in this fashion, I would safely say that without ever putting anybody into reverie you would finally knock most of the occlusion off of a case. You’ll probably knock it all off Just by going through this routine.
Now, on to the third dynamic: “How do you feel about people?” “How do you feel about the Elks Club?” “How do you feel about the government?” How do you feel about this, that and so on. But affinity, communication and reality on these things. “Do you think government is good for people?” “Who in your family used to think that government was awfully bad for people?” And so forth. Highly generalized statement: “Do you think a government really exists to help the people?” and so on. “Who used to be very hot on this subject, around you?” and so on.
This is an odd tack. It would certainly sound, offhand, as though this couldn’t possibly contain very much in the way of charge. But you’d be amazed. The group is terrifically important, and these so-called governments that are in the world today have affinity with, or a broken affinity with their own people and with individuals so often, and it actually exists on cases in the form of charge.
One single point that’s terribly important but this point resolved a young vet’s case. He was in an apathy and he couldn’t get up the scale at all. I got him up to grief. I pulled him up by his bootstraps and got him up to a point where he could get rid of this. He had been hammered into an apathy.
He had lost both legs in the war. He was an officer and the government had said that he should go over to the Veterans Administration and there’s where he should collect his compensation. And his family was so alarmed at taking care of a cripple that everything hit him simultaneously. But the family didn’t have an awful effect upon him because they’d always been ornery to him and he’d never been close to any of these people; he was quite a stranger to them all his life. But he had always believed thoroughly and patriotically in the government and here he had given his very best and the government had told him, “Well, we’re not going to retire you as an officer so that you can get three-quarters of your base pay and live like a gentleman the rest of your life. No, we’re not going to retire you as an officer, we’re not going to fix you up. We’re going to push you over here and just let you starve. We’re going to give you something like 30 percent disability. And maybe in a couple of years if you pass all of the examinations and everything else, you’re going to get something like that.” And this case had just gone boom! right at that moment.
I tried to unburden it from the family. No. Didn’t have an awful big bearing on it. Person had been raised in another environment than his own family. But when it came to the government and the Veterans Administration and everything else—this thing had laid a secondary engram on the case, complicated by such things as the government wouldn’t answer his mail, wouldn’t answer his letters. They would force him to go through channels someplace else, you see; that’s a compulsion of communication. He had to communicate with somebody else and he had to do this over here with somebody else and he had to do this and he had to do that; and he had to see this person and he had to see that person. And they’d kept him going around in circles for weeks and then, all of a sudden, he just had collected enough material, so the final blunt statement, “No, we’re not going to retire you,” was enough to send him completely into an apathy. Boom! Laid in a secondary engram.
Well, I got some of the attention units out of the earlier part of this fight and then all of a sudden ran into his receipt of a letter on the thing and ran that out. It was a secondary engram. Actually, got the apathy off, but discharged some grief off the thing and we came up to a point where he could pick up his fear of facing his environment. Picked up a lot of these points out of people who had surrounded him all of his life: fear of the society, fear of self, fear of sex, fear of children, fear of this, fear of that. Picked these things up, but particularly over here on the third dynamic—and we were actually, practically, in this case, selectively rehabilitating one dynamic— picked up fear of not being able to measure up in the society anymore and that sort of thing. And his case came up to a point where it darn near ran pianola. It was very easy.
Now, if you can pick up one of these dynamics, you have picked up to some degree the possibilities on the others.
If you could rehabilitate one of these dynamics—if you could rehabilitate mankind—certain religions lie squarely across the fourth dynamic— “Man is evil, therefore we have to make him good.” It’s a computation. Various religions lie across this line. Oh, there’s enormous amounts of things lie across it. If you’ve ever run into anybody, for instance—I’ve seen some women at one time or another who did this: “If human beings only acted so nice as cats, if they only acted like these dear little animals . . .” Evidently they’d never seen kitty out there knocking off a bluebird! [gap] . . . and making this up, that man is no good—now, the odd part of it is, “Men are no good,” “Women are no good,” “Women are all alike,” “Men are all alike,” so forth—that’s a block up here on this dynamic. So we have to start picking up affinity, communication and reality enforcements: “You’ve got to like . . . [gap] . . . you’ve got to agree with people,” that sort of thing, you see, or “You shouldn’t pay any attention to people, you should never listen to them” and so on, this sort of material will form locks on this one. So let’s go, then, on the basis of you’ve got a number of tools now that you can use. You’ve got affinity, reality, communication for the family, for any one of the dynamics. Not only for any member of the family, but for any of the dramatic personnel in a person’s life. Don’t overlook the marital partner as a source, for instance, of aberration or restimulation. So we’ve got affinity, reality, communication on any of the personnel in a person’s life for any one of the dynamics. And you follow it out.
Let’s take them selectively, person by person, and by keeping notes on these various people we will really get to know their aberrative pattern. There are two motives to this: one is to get back attention units, locate secondary engrams—discharge, in other words, some of the charge on this case—and the other is to get data to use in locating some of the engrams which must be run in order to resolve the case. By removing the charge and by removing some of the circuits and by removing some of the valence shifters, we will finally get the case in a state that it can run engrams with conviction, and we can then resolve the case along a pianola line.
Now, you understand this system that you can run affinity, communication and reality locks and engrams out of the person by Straightwire . . . [gap] . . . and when you put him in reverie, you can run these things out—secondary engrams and the locks. You can run the lock out in reverie just as though it’s an engram. And you can run the secondary engram out in reverie. Or you can knock them out by Straightwire. That does not mean that you are going to discharge all the grief off a grief engram or a bad secondary engram. You’re never going to be able to discharge one of those things by Straightwire. It’s got to be in reverie, you understand. But just by springing these things into view, there’s a little material that springs into sight. There’s some attention units start coming back to “I,” the case starts to discharge, reality will pick up. That’s how you get a tough case into shape.
There is a spectrum of charge on locks: Light Locks _____________________________From the middle of the spectrum on up, _____________________________it is not necessary to run locks in reverie, ______________________________but from that point down they have to be ______________________________run as engrams.
Supercharged Secondary Engrams Loss of an ally or close friend would be at the bottom of the scale; a broken appointment would be at the top.
A secondary engram is a highly charged lock which must be reduced as an engram. The degree of the intensity of charge and the amount of pain in the physical pain engram on which this engram is sitting determine the intensity of the lock.
If you could knock out all these secondary engrams, you would have a release automatically.
You use the factors on the Straightwire chart (plus any others that apply to the case) to give you all the questions you have to ask the preclear. You use these questions to break enough locks to build his “I” up to the point where’ he can run secondary engrams and reduce them, or to the point where you can go after circuitry if the secondaries won’t reduce.
A final analysis: you are trying to return all these attention units that have been lost to “I.” To get a person up to a point where nothing can happen, it is necessary to run physical pain engrams. They are the cause, but there may be two thousand locks attached to a physical pain engram. These locks will start to disappear. When finally you take the physical pain out from underneath, they have nothing on which to live. Sometimes the deepest charges will wait until last, such as Mamas death.
You can expect such occluded material as deaths to hang on. One day the file clerk will hand out something and the next thing, you will be into this engram that produced it. You cause this to happen by unburdening the case. The file clerk is the safety valve. He knows how much this case can take. He is not likely to hand up what it can’t take.
Auditing skill is required. The case is hardest at the beginning and immediately after the beginning. It softens up as it goes along.