Associated in NLP terms is when you are really present to a feeling or relationship you have with the memory of an experience. You will be “inside” the experience with all the sensory awareness that go with it, therefore in touch to that memory or event. When your client is associated, you can perform anchoring techniques as they are really feeling the emotion of the event. Any time your client has an associated event, you can skilfully use that in your practise.
One of the critical visual submodalities is Associated / Dissociated. When we are looking through our own eyes in a picture, seeing the elements around us, we are Associated. You can access your clients inner world by looking at their eye patterns and noticing how they are doing the issue. If they are demonstrating the issue with pictures, you can more easily go into that memory and pictures may not have the intense feeling of kinaesthetic. When I am working with pain control, shifting a client from the feeling to a picture (or colour that represents the feeling) often helps alleviate the pain.
Using submodalities can be useful for techniques like anchoring, where we want the client to really feel the senses and be aware of the colourful images so we can reinforce them. Having your client associated, you can access many powerful states and use them to your clients benefit. When you find yourself working with submodalities and you find what we call the drivers, your client will be very associated at that point – and you can also call that an anchor.
