Here’s a great example: Let’s say someone is a bit self-centered or narcissistic. They have trouble tolerating it when someone else has more expensive clothes than they do, or is more important than they are in some way. When they work with perceptual positions, they may find that when they try position number two, which is looking at themselves through the other person’s eyes, they discover that what they are hearing is not really the other person’s voice. Instead, they hear what seems to be their own voice, telling them that they are inferior and that someone else is better than they are. But they go on to another discovery. Those thoughts add an emotional energy to that judgement. Those thoughts are loaded with the feeling that it is not acceptable, that it is horrible that this other person has a better car, or whatever. This person has been so busy trying to push away those feelings that they have been preoccupied with gaining status in any way they can. This means they have not realized how they are being driven by a voice that they have lost in the second perceptual position and that they are being attacked with feelings lost in the second perceptual position.

It gets a little farther out than even that. They realize, doing this work, that the thoughts are not really their own. Those thoughts about inferiority and superiority were the best thing they could come up with when they were children with a parent who humiliated them and who was very harsh. You could say then that they kind of inherited the voice from the parent; the voice was primarily coming from the second position. That judgmental voice had gotten assigned to random people, but it was not from them; it was from the parent, who was very judgmental. And the feelings? Those are first position feelings, and that’s good because we are imagining from the first position, from inside our own skin. But these intolerable feelings aren’t really a reaction to other people’s having nice things. Those are the terrors of a child who fears his or her big, harsh parent.It’s just that those thoughts and feelings were a defensive or protective posture. Defenses tend to stick around, because they are there to protect us.  Unfortunately for this fellow, though, they went out of date long ago. However, they didn’t know who they were, so they became lost in a struggle with what they had become. For the client, it had become a drama of who is best, who has the nicest things, and who is superior and inferior. The fear of the parents became the fear of anyone being superior. This, in turn, became a struggle for prestige, a struggle that seems like an adult struggle, but is actually a holdover from the past. It’s very difficult for someone to untangle themselves from a drama that masquerades as a grown-up pursuit. Aligning perceptual positions can rescue people from such suffering, and it can unlock maturation that has been frozen, maybe for decades. The beauty of aligning your perceptual positions is that it makes it much easier to let go of feelings and thoughts that don’t belong to you. When you are aligned, the misaligned parts feel out of place. You want to put them where they belong: in the past, or give them back to the person who started them in the first place. Many NLP practitioners work without talking about the past. That can work, because alignment happens in the present, and you can let go of thoughts and feelings without knowing where they came from. Most are practical and work with or assess past experience as necessary. They don’t, however, get lost in the past; the focus is on outcomes.