Close your eyes and point to where your past is. Where’s your future? Most people have an instinctive answer, usually a line in front, behind or across them. Time Line Therapy builds on that.
Where it came from
Time Line Therapy™ was developed by Tad James, an early NLP trainer, with Wyatt Woodsmall, from the 1980s. James founded his company in 1982 and published Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality in 1988. It’s a trademarked name, and it is taught in its own certification courses alongside NLP.
The core idea
NLP proposes that people store memories as an internal “timeline”, an imagined line running from past to future. The therapy claims that by working with that line you can:
- Release negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, guilt and anxiety;
- Drop limiting decisions made earlier in life; and
- Change how you relate to past events.
How a session goes
Practitioners vary, but the outline is:
- Find the timeline. You show where your past and future sit in your mind’s eye.
- Float above it. You imagine rising above the line so you can look at it from a distance.
- Go back to the root event. You travel back, still floating above, to the first time you felt the emotion.
- Learn from it. You imagine what you learned, then let the feeling go.
- Return to the present, and check how you feel.
- Future-pace. You imagine a future in which the issue has gone.
What the evidence says
- I found no peer-reviewed trials of Time Line Therapy. Promotional material describes use with survivors of trauma in conflict zones, but I could not find published studies behind that.
- It is not a recognised treatment in clinical guidelines for PTSD, anxiety or depression.
- The theory is a model, not a finding. There is research on how people spatially represent time, and on “time perspective” in psychology, but that doesn’t show that “releasing” emotions along a line works. (General knowledge; not checked here.)
Why it may help some people
- Distance. Imagining a painful event from above can work like other dissociation and imagery methods, loosening the feeling a little.
- Meaning-making. Asking “what did I learn?” invites reflection, which is part of many therapies.
- Expectation and attention. A structured, caring process helps people feel heard.
Risks and cautions
- Memory. Going back to find a “root cause” can produce vivid but inaccurate memories (see hypnosis series, part 32).
- Trauma. Revisiting traumatic events without a trained trauma therapist can make symptoms worse.
- Cost and claims. Be wary of promises to remove emotions quickly or permanently.
- Not an alternative to treatment. For PTSD, depression or anxiety disorders, use evidence-based care.
The bottom line
Time Line Therapy is a creative imagery technique, popular among NLP practitioners and without published trial evidence that I could find. Use caution, especially around trauma.
Next in the series: Parts Work in NLP: The Six-Step Reframe and Core Transformation
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.