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Summary of Using the Tool

This is a tool for having being able to say what you need to say to another person, alive or deceased, with whom you have unresolved emotional issues.

1. Sit down and close your eyes. If it helps, you can put an empty chair across from you to help you imagine that the other person that you want to talk to is actually there.

2. Imagine the other person sitting across from you.

3. Imagine that they are the ‘Perfect Them’ and no longer defensive and not going to take anything that you say as personally.

4. If you can, find where the feelings you have about the person are located within your body.

5. Move your attention into those feelings and then start to talk to the imagined person about how you feel about them.

6. You can talk about any aspect of your feelings, about your relationship with them or about how their behaviour impacted you.

7. As you talk you do not need to say anything in defence of them, what they did or why they did it.

8. At the end of talking to them, if appropriate, you can imagine them apologising to you for the impact of their behaviour on you. If appropriate imagine them now coming across to you and hugging you and saying sorry for all the pain and difficulties that they have caused you.

Details of the Straight Talk Tool

Most of us have one or more people in our lives with whom we have unresolved emotional issues. These can either be people who are still alive or, in some cases, they will be people who have passed away. For the people who are still alive, we can use the CLEAR Communication Tool in those situations where it is appropriate to clearly communicate to them what we feel. However, there can still be cases where it is not appropriate to communicate with them directly in this way. In these instances, we still need a way of processing how we feel and what would like to say to that person if we had the opportunity. Because we cannot do this in real life with them for whatever reason, we need a way of doing this by ourselves without any involvement from them.

In addition, in the case of people who have passed away, we obviously cannot talk to them any more. So we also need a way of processing our feelings about them and to have the opportunity to say to them what we would like to say to them. However, again we need to do this just on our own.

The Straight Talk Tool is used for this purpose. To use it, we close our eyes and imagine that the other person is present and then we simply say to them whatever we want to say.

We need to feel free to tell them the depth of our pain

For the purposes of using this tool, it is important that we feel free to say whatever we want to say to them. It is often the case that when we are wanting to say something to a loved one, for instance a deceased mother or father, we may not want to be completely frank about how they have hurt us. Nor do we want to be as critical of them as we feel and really let them know how their behaviour negatively impacted on our lives.

So we often end up limiting our criticism of them. This is because we feel it is unfair to criticise them for their behaviour because we now understand that they were just trying to do their best working within the limits of their personality, their situation at the time and their earlier life experiences.

As a result, we hold back from fully expressing our criticism. And we also even find ourselves spending some of the time defending them against our criticism of them. While it is good that we are the type of people that want to do defend them, feeling we need to defend them often means that we are not able to fully explore the depths of our criticism of them, how their behaviour impacted on us and how we feel about all this. As a result we never get to fully process what happened at an emotional level, to get to accept that it did actually happened and to move on.

Imagine the ‘Perfect Them’

A good way to get around this problem is to imagine that the other person, whether they are still alive or deceased, is now in the state of being a ‘Perfect Them’. So the person we are now imagining we are talking to is not quite the original person we interacted with. While it is them, they have now magically moved into a position where they can fully understand everything about themselves and about ourselves and about their relationship with us.

In this state of total understanding, they are no longer hurt by criticism. This is because they can see, and understand, exactly what happened because of the way in which they related to us. As a result, they will not act defensively about anything we say to the no matter how harsh it is. Nor will they take it personally in any way our completely frank criticism of them.

Use the instructions for this tool set out above as many times as you need to help you process your feelings and move on from being emotionally stuck in regard to your relationship with this person. You can use this tool together with the Accept Your Feelings too to better accept your feelings about your relationship with this person.

Please note when you are doing any type of psychological or self-development work, if you find yourself feeling overwhelming emotions, troubling thoughts or actions, you need to talk to a health professional.