For twenty years as an Army Medic and over a decade as a Medical Support Clinical Hypnotherapist, I’ve sat across from countless soldiers and clients seeking relief from anxiety. They arrive with vivid stories of worry, dread, and overwhelm. And while their experiences are deeply personal, I’ve noticed a near-universal pattern—not a misconception, but what I’ve come to call a minds eye issue.
People come to me narrating a past difficulty, a past trigger, a past hurt. Yet, when they describe the feeling of anxiety—that looming, impending sense of unease—they are almost always doing something specific with their neurology. They are visually accessing past memories while trying to visually construct a resourceful future. In essence, they are staring into the rearview mirror to navigate the road ahead. This isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a literal, observable process in how our brains map experience.
In the framework of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), we understand that the direction of our eye movements can indicate how we are accessing information. Typically, when people look up and to their left (from their perspective), they are visually recalling a memory. When they look up and to their right, they are visually constructing an idea, a context, a possibility, a story.
Here’s the core of the issue: the clients I see for anxiety are often visually constructing unresourceful futures using the visual recall channel. They are pulling up old, painful images from the past—the memory of a failure, a harsh word, a moment of panic—and projecting them, like a film reel, onto the screen of their future. They are trying to build what’s next with the cracked bricks of yesterday. No wonder the structure feels unstable.
The Moment of the “Click”
The profound shift I’m privileged to witness doesn’t come from me offering or installing a suggestion. It comes from the client’s own nervous system recognizing this mapping error.
I might guide a client to tell me their anxious past story again, but this time, I’ll ask them to consciously move their gaze to the position for visual recall. A remarkable thing happens. When they place that past experience into its correct neurological “location,” a sense of order is restored. The past suddenly feels like… the past. It becomes a stored memory, not a looming prophecy. The emotional charge often dissipates because the memory has been filed correctly. The “click” is the audible sigh of a system coming back into alignment: “Oh, that belongs back there. It’s not in front of me.”
This isn’t about erasing the past or about positive thinking. It’s about correct filing. An anxious mind is a disorganized filing cabinet, with alarming past files stuffed into the “Future – To Deal With” drawer. My work is often about helping the client to consciously assist the unconscious mind reorganize the filing cabinet.
A Quiet Chat with Your Nervous System
So, if I could sit quietly with the anxious, wiser, unconscious part of a client’s mind—bypassing the worried, future-tripping conscious mind—what would happen? I don’t give instructions. My role is to facilitate a space for self-organization.
I would simply invite it to be curious. Curious about the possibility of leaving the heavy, old building materials of the past right where they belong—in the yard of recollection. And then, with a lighter load, to turn its attention gently, to wonder, with no pressure, about the blank canvas of the future. What textures, colors, and shapes could be constructed there? What might it feel like to build with intention, not with dread?
Anxiety, in this light, is often a talented, protective part of you using the wrong blueprint. It’s trying to guard you by showing you the old threats, but it’s showing them on the wrong screen. The calm you seek isn’t about silencing this part; it’s about helping it find the correct projector, so you can both start building a future worth looking toward.
Your mind has a geography. Finding calm can be as simple as helping your experiences find their rightful place on the map.
