The procedure for decontaminating your Adult Ego State is simple and straightforward, although not easy. In fact, it is so challenging that even though no one can do it for you, you cannot do it alone. You need a Team of two or three allies who are also Decontaminating their Adult Ego State, who will stand at your side and back you up during the process.
STEP 1: For this Experiment, title a new page in your Beep! Book: DECONTAMINATING MY ADULT EGO STATE. Make important notes to yourself from reading through the website http://decontaminations.mystrikingly.com.
STEP 2: Then write the word SYMPTOMS on your Beep! Book page. List as clearly and thoroughly as you can your personal symptoms of Parent Contamination, Child Contamination, Child Contamination, and Demon Contamination, if any.
STEP 3: Once you have listed your first appraisal of your contamination symptoms, take this question to your Possibility Team: “In what ways is my Adult Ego State contaminated by my Parent, Child, Gremlin, and Demon Ego States?” First read the symptoms you have observed in yourself. Then ask for 20 minutes of their time and attention to share what subtle behaviors they can perceive in you about each of the four possible contaminations. Write down exactly what they say.
STEP 4: After that, ask, “Based on your observations of me, which contamination is biggest?” Decide that whichever they say is the biggest, is actually the biggest. Commit yourself out loud to start with decontaminating that first. Say, “I will begin my Decontamination with the (Child, Parent, Gremlin, Demon).”
STEP 5: A person can only proceed with one decontamination at a time. Trying more than one does not work. We have tried it. The process becomes immediately too confusing while one Ego State tries to defend the others through creating confusion and sneaky sabotage. Usually the biggest contamination is from Child or Gremlin, sometimes Parent, rarely Demon. If the biggest is Demon, you should immediately skip this Experiment and implement the procedure described in S.P.A.R.K. 135 which is given on the website http://triggerhunter.mystrikingly.com. For Child, Parent, or Gremlin Decontamination, proceed as follows.
STEP 6: Create a Decontamination 3Cell for yourself. A ‘3Cell’ is a temporary Team of 3 allies with a shared purpose, usually to support one or all 3 members to make a leap to expanded potentials of adulthood.
STEP 7: Contamination shows up as enacting a behavior from one Ego State within a different Ego State. The toxic effects of contamination occur from enacting Child, Parent, or Gremlin behaviors when in the Adult Ego State. At your first online or offline 3Cell meeting, ask your Team which of your contamination behaviors to begin with. It should be one of the most apparent behaviors and yet one of the simplest. For example, let us suppose that your Child Ego State is your biggest contaminator. A first behavior to work with might be your little girl/boy nice-person smile, or that you do not look directly in people’s eyes, or that you rock up onto your toes when you speak, or that you leave little messes around for others to clean up, or that you do not keep your promises on time, etc. rather than a bigger Child Ego State behavior such as being adaptive, giving your center away, not taking a risk to contribute new ideas for fear of looking stupid, or not asking critical questions in the group and then powerlessly complaining afterwards. These are contamination behaviors that can only be decontaminated after you have built up some decontamination legitimacy through separating out smaller behaviors first. STEP 7 is to choose your first behavior to Decontaminate.
STEP 8: Begin Decontamination. Decontamination means to focus your attention on noticing each time you are about to enact the chosen behavior, and instead, use your intention to move that behavior back into its appropriate Ego State and hold it there. This does not mean to shift out of the Adult Ego State and enact the Child, Parent, or Gremlin behavior. This means to stay in the Adult Ego State, move the impulse for the behavior back to the Child, Parent, or Gremlin Ego State where it came from, and deposit the impulse there without enacting the behavior. Relocating the impulse will at first occupy almost all of your available attention, intention, and will. And, at the beginning, as soon as you release the hold on your impulse, it will sneakily slide back into your Adult Ego State as a contamination again as if it were pulled there by an elastic band. But it is not. The contamination returns to your Adult Ego State through fear and habit, mostly habit. No matter. The Decontamination Practice is to focus entirely on this one tiny impulse to behave a particular way (for example, the urge to make a pointless good boy/girl smile, the urge to make an evil little Gremlin comment or joke…) and EVERY TIME THE IMPULSE APPEARS, move it back to its rightful home before it shows up on your face or comes out your mouth. This is simple. This is clearly measurable. This is possible. You are not fighting against nature. Gremlin behaviors belong in the Gremlin Ego State. Child behaviors belong in the Child Ego State. Parent behaviors belong in the Parent Ego State. Simply put things back where they belong. STEP 8 is to begin the Decontamination practice of moving impulses back into their proper Ego State.
STEP 9: Your fist behavior Decontamination is the most significant. It will take the most repetitions, and the most effort to catch the impulse and move it before the behavior can show itself. STEP 9 is each time you allow your impulse to fulfill itself as a contamination rather than moving the impulse before it manifests back into its proper Ego State, apologize. EVERY TIME you actually do the Gremlin, Child, or Parent behavior from the Adult Ego State, choose a person near you and say out loud, “I apologize for delivering a Child / Gremlin / Parent Ego State behavior from my Adult Ego State. I wish not to do this any longer.” People may not understand how important this is for you. That does not matter. Trying not to appear crazy, or trying not to disturb someone by only speaking into the limitations of their current ability to understand is adaptive behavior, typical of the Child Ego State. By its very nature, Decontamination is your effort to break your own rules. Nonetheless, your Decontamination work may make a few people uncomfortable, and to some people you may appear to be a little insane or neurotic. NOTE: If having to apologize is not a strong enough penalty, the next level is that each time you deliver a contaminated behavior, give the person you apologize to one dollar in cash. If it gets to this level, you will need to start carrying around a bundle of one-dollar bills with you. Keep checking in with your 3Cell about how this is going.
STEP 10: When your selected contamination behavior stays in its home Ego State for 3 full days after you put it there, it is time to select your next behavior impulse to Decontaminate. The procedure is exactly the same as before, although you should still keep a percentage of your attention on your first behavior to make sure it does not escape and try to contaminate you again.
This is how it goes. Behavior after behavior, one behavior at a time, relocate the impulses back into their appropriate Ego State before they manifest, and hold them there until they stay home of their own accord. The behaviors actually feel more comfortable when they originate from their home Ego State.
Most Decontaminators find that once their simple behavior impulses are relocated out of the Adult Ego State, the bigger, deeper, and more complex contaminations become manageable to relocate without so much tendency to fooling yourself about whether you are actually Decontaminating or not. When the biggest contaminating Ego State is removed from the Adult Ego State, for example the Child Ego State is removed, then you immediately switch to the next contaminating Ego State, say the Gremlin Ego State, and keep doing the Decontamination practice, again, one behavior at a time until it stays home by itself.
There will come a moment when the balance of Adult Ego State presence and power tips over so the Adult Ego State has majority vote and is not contaminated any more. This is when the Adult world opens up. This is an astonishing and revelatory experience, a ‘pole shift’ event. The world starts working differently for you – the way it is designed to work – where possessions and actions that seemed of the highest importance suddenly fade as if they were a mirage, and new perceptions and relations which were previously inaccessible and therefore irrelevant give you the utmost reward. When your 5 Bodies are balanced out in your daily activities and your Adult Ego State is Decontaminated, a doorway to the Archetypal Domains stands open as if it has always been waiting to welcome you. Here is where the great adventures begin. Here is where a sense of the miraculous enters your everyday life.
WARNING: Your 3Cell Team never becomes unimportant. If you ever find yourself absentmindedly disconnecting from your 3Cell, we suggest that you suspect your Gremlin busily trying to hijack your life back into the unconscious contaminated condition before you learned about all this stupid stuff. Thinking that you can remain unconscious and irresponsible about having adopted an Adult Ego State contamination survival strategy, or that a contaminated Adult Ego State does not really matter, or that your contaminated Ego State will correct itself after a while… are all fantasy worlds. Living in a fantasy world is a personal choice. A tsunami of reasons may wash through your mind about why your 3Cell members are idiots, why there is some secret hierarchy in Possibility Management, why all these next culture ideas are overwhelming, why nobody but you can be trusted. What we have found is that in each person’s successful Adult Ego State Decontamination there was a phase when it became more important for them to trust their 3Cell more than the voices in their head. This was certainly true for me (Clinton Callahan). I have said it before and I will say it again, my Decontamination 3Cell saved my life.
