What is Matrix Re-imprinting?

Mar 3

Matrix Re-imprinting is a strategy to reduce the intensity of memories or past events which are causing emotional triggers in the here and now. It is a subconscious reprogramming tool and a platform through which unhelpful beliefs are replaced with new supportive ones.

Matrix Re-imprinting is a modality created by Karl Dawson, EFT Master practitioner, student of Gary Craig and Founder of EFTMRA. It is a development and a natural evolution of EFT (read What is EFT? here), which Karl began practising with clients in the early 00s and subsequently went on to teach to thousands of others through his academy.

Matrix Reimprinting is a natural evolution of EFT

Often when practising EFT, a memory or past event will come to mindbody this can be explored and worked on through EFT, allowing the emotional intensity of the memory to be reduced, giving the client greater clarity and understanding of how this event has been affecting them in the present. Read more about EFT here.

Matrix Re-imprinting takes this concept further and is a platform which allows you to safely and easily access beliefs which have formed that are negatively impacting you in the present and to rewrite them; processing what you felt, recognising what you needed, giving it to yourself and imprinting it on an energetic level. It's a mindbody process, which can make it more powerful than a talking therapy for those who are visual or kinaesthetic thinkers, as many creative and neurodivergent people can tend towards.

What are the origins and thinking behind Matrix Re-imprinting?

Similarly to both EFT and Breathwork (read What is Breathwork? and What is EFT?), the thinking behind Matrix Re-imprinting is a combination of both the ancient tradition from which EFT is derived (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and modern psychology’s understanding of of trauma. For me, my training in Matrix Re-imprinting closely aligned with ideas postulated by Professor Franz Ruppert which highlight the fragmentary effects of trauma on the psyche.

How trauma affects the psyche

When we experience a trauma, a part of our psyche splits off to contain the unbearable feelings, so that we can survive and continue with our lives. Trauma is anything "deeply distressing or disturbing" and is defined by a person's experience of what happened rather than the actual event. In other words, the trauma is the emotion experienced at the time. It’s also important to note that a traumatic event does not have to be a major event, like a car accident, terrorist attack or the experience of living in a war zone. Developmental trauma or “small t” trauma which occurs during childhood (particularly before age 7 years old) may have as lasting or even greater an impact on beliefs and behaviours and a person’s ongoing experience of their life.

A natural protection mechanism

This “splitting off” of the psyche when trauma occurs is a natural protection mechanism which we share with other animals – in the face of imminent death (real or perceived) we go into shock. The mind dissociates from the body. This way we never have to fully experience the trauma (the unbearable emotion). On the flip side, the part of us that splits off never stops experiencing the trauma. It is still a part of our awareness at an unconscious level.

When you experience trauma in your past, for your current self, it’s a memory. Perhaps, a really well buried one. For the split off part of your psyche - your past self - the event is happening right now. If you have a traumatic experience at 5 years old, the part of your psyche that split off to protect you still has the same consciousness as in the moment the trauma occurred. Though you may have lived a long time since, had many experiences and learned new things, your 5 year old self is still trapped in that original event and emotion.

A fragment of your younger self frozen in time

This is why emotional triggers happen: Something happens in the here and now which unconsciously pulls you back to those difficult feelings you felt as a 5 year old, but didn’t know what to do with or have the opportunity to process at the time. This explains why we can have disproportionate reactions to events or to completely neutral statements made by a loved one. We can feel intense emotions that don’t immediately appear to make sense, like fear or anxiety when nothing obviously bad seems to be happening in the moment.

Often it’s at the point that trauma occurs that your younger self will have formed beliefs or made decisions about what this event or series of occurrences means about the world. Beliefs such as:

I’m unworthy of love

People aren’t to be trusted

It’s dangerous to show vulnerability

I only deserve love if I am useful

I’m not supported

People I rely on will abandon me

Beliefs which can be so deeply embedded, they underpin how you exist in the world, interact with those around you and go about living your life. It’s these beliefs that Matrix Re-imprinting can quickly identify and replace with alternative beliefs which are helpful and feel empowering and expansive rather than restrictive.

What happens in a Matrix Reimprinting session?

During a Matrix Re-imprinting session, the “client” is effectively one (or many) of these past versions of yourself, and your practitioner will encourage you to visualise using EFT tapping (Read about EFT here) on your past self and guide you to interact with them.

This is done in imagination - you visualise tapping on your younger self. Where EFT is very fast and effective (tapping on oneself in reality), tapping directly on the younger self is even more powerful. Even with the most challenging memories, it often takes just a few minutes to tap away distress.

When you connect with your younger self in a memory, you will always begin by asking, “what are you feeling?” and at some stage in the process, “what belief or decision did you make in this moment?”

Re-imprinting the new belief at an energetic level

At the end of the process you will conclude with a new belief or decision and create a new version of the memory which is positively emotive. This is embedded on an energetic level with a visualisation technique. More often than not, after this process, when you look back at the memory worked on, you’ll connect with the new scene formed and feel the positive feelings associated with it. In your life after the session, you will find your belief system has shifted somewhat, which begins to change your experience of life.

It’s important to note that whilst the aim of this modality is to alter the picture for the benefit of the younger self (and the present self still carrying unsupportive beliefs about the world), it is not the aim to deny that the actual event took place. Your adult self can always access the original memory if you want to, but the emotional distress will likely be reduced or gone altogether.

The younger self is no longer trapped, re-living the unbearable emotion over and over. By allowing the emotion and hearing what the past self needed and felt at the time, you have effectively process the emotion and the broken part of the psyche has been reintegrated.

An example from my own experience

During a Matrix Re-imprinting session in my training, a memory of myself as a child playing a game of chess with my dad arose. I connected with my younger self for whom these games tended to feel difficult and disheartening.

My adult self can see my dad was focused on teaching me “the rules”, wanting to impart how wrong it is to cheat and how I must dust myself off and start again when I was beaten or failed at something. This is what a cognitive or talking therapy approach to this memory could result in, a person overriding the emotions of what the younger self felt with rationalisation and adult understanding.

Connecting with the child self to feel what needed to be felt

However, Matrix Re-imprinting allowed me to easily connect with the buried child self who felt crushed by this approach. She’d formed the belief in that moment that things had to be difficult, to feel like a struggle and be worked really hard at in order to be worthwhile. When asked about it, she explained she needed fun, play and loving lightheartedness to learn that getting things wrong or failing need not be something to take so seriously; that finding the fun is key to enjoying the journey and getting back in the saddle after a set back.

Through Matrix Re-imprinting, my adult self was able to explain this to my dad in the memory. I was facilitated to rewrite the memory as one where we played the game any way I wanted, with fun and lightness at the heart of the gameplay. We played a game of chess where, though we took turns, I got to move every piece in whatever direction and however many spaces I liked. There were jokes and laughter and it was a lot of fun. Working on this memory (and others like it) changed my relationship with my dad in my present reality.

What previous clients have to say about Matrix Reimprinting

“The sense of resolve I felt after, versus the block I faced before felt very powerful, in a way I’d been lacking in my business. The realisations and breakthroughs continued in the days after.”

“During a single session, I gained real clarity and perspective. The EFT Matrix resized my feelings to the appropriate level and gave me awareness of the root of my issue, so it has less power to hold me back.”

Rebecca Caution