Have you ever looked at a visual puzzle? You see a picture, but that picture was actually designed from two pictures, each of which is revealed dependent on your perspective, or how you look at it. The most well-known are the two faces looking at each other, but the space between them also looks like a candle stick, and the picture of the young woman, but if you look at it differently, you see an old woman. What these pictures show us is the importance of “attractors,” that is, the things that help us organize the information that surrounds us into something we can make sense of. What these pictures also show us is that which attractors we pay attention to determines how we understand something. Even if we understand it, it can be quite different depending on which attractors we focus on.

Of course, these attractors do not only affect how we look at pictures, but how we understand and react to all different kinds of phenomena. For example, people who are afraid of dogs are almost always afraid of all dogs, so a negative experience with a big dog can result in the person being afraid of even small dogs. This is why immersion therapy is successful in overcoming phobias. If a person sees that not all dogs are aggressive, then the attractor between dogs and fear is diminished and later destroyed. Attractors do not only help us understand and react to the world, but they also build upon themselves to create new attractors. Let’s say your favorite Aunt Mary lives in California, and when you visit Aunt Mary in California for the first time, everything is great because you love being with Aunt Mary. The attractors will build upon the “California” category in your mind in positive ways, so suddenly things “California” for you are much more interesting and positive. The things themselves have not changed, but they are now attracted to California, which is attracted to Aunt Mary, and therefore, they are now more positive for you.

The force of an attractor is usually determined by its depth or width, or in other words, how strong it is and how many situations it can be applied. Back to the example of the fear of dogs, the fear is very strong (deep) and it applies to all dogs (wide), so we can say that this is a strong attractor. But maybe the person just doesn’t like dogs, so while this is applied to all dogs (wide), the feeling is not very strong (shallow), or maybe the opposite, the person is afraid of only German Shepherds (narrow) but very much so (deep).

The stronger the phobia, the wider and deeper it is. Obviously, this depends quite a bit on personal history. NLP examines attractor primarily in terms of sub-modalities, or how the specifics of the attractor affect how a person reacts to it.For example, you might have a picture of a beautiful, relaxing landscape, but if you are blasting heavy metal music in the background, the situation will probably not be too comforting. Now, let’s look at a specific exercise we can do that will help us understand attractors better.

First, think of a resource state you have that you would like to transfer to other contexts, like being relaxed.

Next, identify which specific context you would like to transfer that state to, say being at work. Now, establish a meta position and also the locations of the two experiences: “being relaxed” and “being at work.” After that, associate the two experiences, paying close attention to the different parameters you see them through, such as sub-modalities, representational systems, and physiology. Now associate into the resource state as deeply as possible by using the parameters you found in the last step to intensify the experience. Now you want to widen this attractor to involve the desired context (being at work) by stepping into the location of the desired context, shifting the physiological and cognitive patterns, and transferring the attractors to the desired context. Now you will find yourself more relaxed at work.