STANDARD PROCEDURE CHART

A lecture given on 26 September 1950

Step- by- Step Case Handling

In this lecture I will cover the Standard Procedure Chart.

Firstly, we have Step One: Take an inventory. A case was once run for 18 hours and was contacting somatics, but the auditor couldn’t understand why nothing would lift. He finally said, "Did you ever take any drugs?" (Auditing anybody who is under sedation is bad. With phenobarbital or the drugs used in narcohypnosis, the engrams will stay restimulated.) The preclear had not taken drugs, but this case was dragging along.

Then he asked her, "Have you ever spoken any other language but English?" and she finally admitted that she had spoken nothing but Slovakian until the age of 13. Of course no engram would lift. You have to run the engram in Slovakian or whatever language it was put in with. She did a very nice job of getting released in an additional 15 hours once that one point was discovered, because when she got the phrase in Slovakian, the engram could reduce.

So, ask your preclear if anybody in his life ever spoke a foreign language around him. One preclear had Russian, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian— 13 languages in his prenatal bank. He spoke none of them himself and in addition he didn’t have sonic.

Taking the inventory is the beginning. You want to establish affinity with the preclearIt is very bad to get transferences going, but after about 75 hours a preclear comes up to the point where this is no longer the case, so transference is not too much of a problem in Dianetics.

In taking the inventory you seem to him to be interested in him. He starts telling you about himself. You are already starting Straightwire. Ask basic questions. You want to know whether he has ever been treated by any other therapy. You want to know what you are going to come up against, because you may have to cope with a little indoctrination.

For instance, you can upset a psychoanalytical release rather rapidly. If you have somebody who managed to have his ulcers "cured" by psychoanalysis, you can expect a recurrence of ulcers in the case at first. In running the psychoanalysis, back will come the ulcer pains. In the case I have in mind, this took quite a bit out of him because it took five years to "cure" those ulcers! In spite of this, he was able to suffer through it and eventually they left for good.

An old therapy can break up rather quickly because you are going for the cause behind the manifestation. People in Dianetics should understand some of these steps.

Now, concerning dramatizations, you want to know how this man dramatizes. Take him back to a time he was bawling somebody out. This is the way you pick up control circuits in a case. The favorite dramatizations are those of people around him. You can pick up repeater phrasesl from these dramatizations. Find out the dramatizations, run them and use the content of them. Knowing he is dramatizing an engram, you know he will be using the exact words of the engram, whether Mother’s, Father’s or Grandfather’s, and the chances of finding the exact wording in a basic engram this way are very good.

Going on to the next point, you are interested in nitrous oxide because what this does to a man shouldn’t happen to a man! It locks the reactive engram bank. If you touch this nitrous oxide incident and he is not stuck in it, you are liable to freeze him. You want to know where these incidents are so that you can avoid them.

Another thing which does this is an electric shock. This bunches things up. All sorts of things can be in an electric shock. One auditor had a sister in an insane asylum, and when this auditor went into his sister’s case he found that everything in the lower engrams had been pulled into the shock. Childhood shock has the same effect. Run such incidents and you will find data there.

Next, make a list of the people in this person’s life who have died or gone away. Then ask him, "What do you worry about?"

"Oh, I don’t worry."

"Do you like your father?"

"No."

"Do you like your mother?"

"I like her very much."

Look for some allies. A child is going to get love someplace. And allies get old and die, and all kinds of things happen to them. The most vital allies will be so thoroughly occluded that sometimes you might find them unexpectedly. For instance, you can ask the preclear" Who was your favorite aunt?" "I guess Aunt Grace."

"What about Aunt Grace?"

"Well, I haven’t seen her in the last few years."

"No?"

"Well, it was around the time she died, three years ago last June, I think, let’s see. No, that isn’t right." Know you are working with a childhood ally and that there will be charge on this ally.

Sometimes you run a person back to a funeral and it is all blank. That is certainly an ally.

It is very vital that you get a long list of such people. Have a casebook for every preclearIf you change cases, another auditor can find what you did if you have the data in a book. Write down allies particularly, and when you get a grief charge off one, keep tally on the inventory and mark it off; for example, "Grandmother discharged." Allies can get lost, and they can erase. Suppose a case doesn’t seem to be operating right and branches off. You are sitting right on top of a death. This undischarged grief can lie all the way down the bank and cloud up everything.

Step Two: Opening the case and running engrams. If nothing is happening in the case, go to Step Three. You also do that if the case doesn’t open.

The reason the chart is organized this way is so as never to leave you with nothing to do. With anything you run into along the line, you have something you can do about it.

Now, we come to a very serious question: "How do you put the preclear in reverie?" I have even received telephone calls from faraway Florida—" I am not having any success in putting my wife into reverie."

When we used numbers and counted, somebody could say, "Reverie is like hypnosis." But you don’t want your subject in a trance. An investigation was done to find out if running under hypnosis was easier and better than running by reverie. Running on the time track in deep or light or medium trance was far more difficult in each case and far less effective than when the person was wide awake. Hypnosis is less efficacious than reverie. If the preclear won’t run on the time track when wide awake, the reason is right there ready to be picked up.

You need the attention units to get down the time track. Benzedrine, caffeine, anything to wake him up, will help him go down the time track. You are trying to wake a person up every place he has ever been asleep in his whole life.

If you closely approximate sleep in a preclear, you may apparently release an engram, but when he wakes up, the engram will be in full restimulation.

The words "Close your eyes. Open your eyes" constitute reverie. That is all. Sometimes you will notice a tremble on the eyelids. This means the preclear has deepened his sense of sleep and has left some of his attention units somewhere. That is a very early stage of hypnosis. Be careful of such a patient.

Next, you are going to install a canceler. l Don’t read it out of the book. Give a canceler with the sense of it, but not with the exact words in the book. The exact words are not important. People sometimes have very unique cancelers, but the word canceled is enough: "Anything I say to you while you are lying on the couch will be canceled when I say canceled."

Toward the end of the session, bring the person up to present time and then give him the canceler.

I once heard of this canceler being put in: "Any time that you hear the word abracadabra, everything that I have said to you will disappear." Of course, it all disappeared!

Next, find out if he is moving on the track. Repeater technique has a use, but that is not it. See if he can eat that very good dinner he had last week. Send him back to when he was singing or riding a bicycle. Sometimes he won’t be able to pick the incident up, but if you run it four or five times it will become more available. The somatic strip goes there; the file clerk has accurately selected the incident. People fail to get good results sometimes because they don’t believe this phenomenon. The preclear may be hung on the time track for a moment. If an auditor doesn’t count on the file clerk and doubts it, the first thing he knows, his preclear will have engrams restimulated.

If an auditor doesn’t make it easy for the person to go to the instant, it is because he himself doesn’t have faith in this thing. And that is where faith enters into Dianetics. You can disbelieve almost anything else, but don’t distrust the file clerk. This is a form of Auditor Code break.

One day a medical doctor said to me, "I never had a somatic." So with the file clerk in present time I sent the somatic strip to the beginning of his tonsillectomy and had him run it at standard time speed. The somatic turned on, and the doctor held his stopwatch and checked each somatic. The tonsillectomy went on for 18, 19, 20, 25, 30, 40 minutes, and he said, "Nineteen minutes before he got the adenoids! He was slow!"

You command the somatic strip; you ask for the cooperation of the file clerk. Give only one order. When it is carried out, go to something else. Ask the file clerk to give the incident. For instance, "Give us a pleasure incident at 5 years of age. The somatic strip will go to the beginning and run it."

Running these pleasure moments is a necessary step and you can actually tone up the perceptics this way. You want the case to play itself and you want to get control circuits out.

You can say to a person, "The file clerk will give the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase in the engram will flash into your mind. One- two- three- four- five (snapl)." You go over the first phrase three or four times. This helps it settle there. Now he is at the beginning of the engram and you send him on through, reducing all bouncersl and so forth.

The only time the file clerk doesn’t work is when you start dictating to it; but run as above, it works very smoothly and very easily. The file clerk is a very savvy fellow.

Sometimes, very early in the case, he may hand up birth. If he does, it can be erased. You work with the file clerk; you command the somatic strip, and you know the somatic strip goes where you tell it when you tell it to go.

Straightwire, actual memory, is the process used when the preclear is wide awake. Inventory is taken in the same way. Straightwire is used at the beginning of a case, but after you have entered it there is no reason to use it if the preclear is in good running order.

Straightwire is actually a technique which lay unused until we had to have some method of reaching control circuits.

So, our target is (1) to discharge painful emotion, and (2) to reach the basic area engrams.

We want to get unconsciousness off the beginning of a case in order to begin erasure, but it is very important that the case be moving with as many attention units in full play as possible.

So, get painful emotion off first. Sometimes by tacit consent one can avoid painful emotion, but it is very important that painful emotion be picked up. Just start talking and ordinarily, before the preclear realizes it, he is moving down the track.