Now compare hearing the voice above you and below you, and notice any differences… .

I have asked you to experiment with hearing the voice in the six main spatial dimensions, but of course there are an infinite number of other possible directions. If you experiment with some other direction in relation to your body, you may find a way to change the impact of the voice even more… .

Why does location matter so much, and why does moving a voice farther away from your head usually make it less disturbing and easier to listen to? When something threatens us in the real world, if it is closer to us, we need to respond more quickly and intensely to protect ourselves. If a threat is farther away, we have more time to prepare a response, so it isn't as urgent. When a threat is very close to you, you had better attend to it, but if it is behind you it is much less urgent, even when the content — what the voice says — is the same.

Changing the location in space also works with internal images. Recently Lewis Walker, an NLP–trained MD in Scotland, author of a book about medical applications of NLP, (20) saw a young woman who had witnessed two of her friends killed in a motorcycle accident the day before:

When she came into my office she had already dissolved into tears before she sat down. Through the sobs she told me about the smash. One friend was decapitated, the other with a bit of leg thrown across the carriageway. As she described how "The pictures are all in front of my face," both hands were gesturing about 2 inches from her eyes.

I said something like, "Let me take these for you," as I reached over with my right hand and grabbed her pictures, while simultaneously making a "ripping" noise as I stood up and hauled them off to her left side, and then diagonally behind her. I asked her to "Look at all these pictures in my hand as they shrink way down in size and all the color drains away," cupping and closing my right hand as I did so.