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Click
here for case study on working with
trauma following a serious
automobile accident, reported in Psychotherapy Networker. |
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Death of an Infant |
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Janet is a divorced 49-year-old woman with two grown
children. She works as a unit secretary in a pediatric clinic with a
multidisciplinary team of specialists who treat children on an
out-patient basis. Two days before her first consultation, an unexpected
event traumatized the whole team, but it especially affected Janet. A
fourteen-month-old baby for whom they had provided treatment since birth
developed serious health complications and was brought to their clinic
by a distraught mother. The baby died unexpectedly before she could be
rushed to a hospital, leaving the entire staff devastated. Janet was hit
hard emotionally when she heard what had happened and saw the child's
grief-stricken mother. Twenty years earlier, she had lost her own
three-month-old baby, Stephanie, due to health complications. She knew
the mother’s anguish through her own tragedy. The pain of her loss had
stayed with her throughout the years, flaring up intensely when external
events triggered her memories.
Janet came to my office stating that it was time to
finally heal from her on-going grief and describing how it impacted
other areas of her life. While taking her psychosocial history, I
learned that she had been raised by parents who were emotionally
unavailable to her and that she had been married to a man who'd had
numerous affairs with other women before she finally summoned the
courage to leave him. It became clear that neither her parents nor her
husband had given her support to grieve the loss of her child. To
complicate matters, after Stephanie died, the doctors confirmed their
suspicions that Janet’s child not only had serious heart problems, she
also had Down’s Syndrome, a fact that her husband insisted remain a
secret between them. To keep what little peace there was in the house,
she hesitatingly agreed to this demand and waited for years before she
spoke of it to anyone.
The first session involved taking her history,
developing rapport, exploring her treatment goals, and introducing a
number of energy-based techniques. Since Janet came to me based on the
recommendation of a friend I had treated some months earlier, she was
already open to the idea that energy patterns in the body impact
emotional states. She listened attentively to my explanation of the
techniques I was recommending, and she readily agreed that we use them.
In beginning to identify an initial target issue, I
considered several possibilities. Should it be the fact of having lost a
child and the unspeakable pain she experienced? Should it be her sadness
over her daughter’s short, illness-plagued life? Should it be the lack
of support from her family as she was grieving her baby’s death? Should
it be having to cover up the Down’s Syndrome? While this kind of trauma
naturally has numerous aspects, a bit more conversation revealed what
she considered the most painful part. She had called 911 at the moment
she awoke from a nap to discover Stephanie not breathing. Paramedics
came immediately and took the infant away to the hospital, and then,
because of the effects of the baby's internal bleeding, the family
choose to have a closed casket funeral for her. Janet never had a chance
to hold Stephanie and say goodbye. She could recount this part of the
trauma only haltingly and through deep sobbing.
After determining that she had no neck or shoulder
problems, I introduced Janet to energy checking, using middle deltoid as
the indicator muscle. I assessed her basic energy flows, using checks
such as the hand-over-head method for polarity reversals, K-27 therapy
localization, and checking for homolateral vs. cross-over energy. I
found a global psychological reversal that corrected easily by tapping
the "karate chop" points while stating three times, "I deeply and
profoundly accept myself, even if I never will be happy." The indicator
muscle also had weakened when she placed both her fingertips and the
knuckles of her hand on her left K-27 point. Together we went through
the collarbone breathing technique, and I gave her a handout to remind
her of how to do this exercise, recommending that she perform it each
day before she returned. This way, when she came for our second session,
the neurological disorganization we had identified would likely be
resolved.
We scheduled Janet’s second session four days later.
She indicated that she was eager to experience the energy-based
treatments. Before we began, she wanted to talk about the
disappointments and sadness life had brought her and to better
understand their connections to her memories of Stephanie. While we had
in the first session identified her not having been able to say good-bye
as the first issue we would address, it appeared that a different focus
was emerging. It centered around the chaos that reigned in her life
during Stephanie's three short months: the lack of support from her
husband and mother, having to care for their three-year-old child while
dealing with all of Stephanie’s health problems, living in a house that
was being remodeled, and feeling stifled under her husband's mandate to
keep Stephanie’s suspected Down’s Syndrome a secret. I had her develop a
headline that would combine her thoughts and feelings as she pieced all
of this together. It became, "I felt helpless and powerless when I was
caring for Stephanie." When we energy checked her SUD for this problem,
it was 7.
As in the first session, I checked for a global
psychological reversal, but this time none was present. Further
assessment for specific reversals uncovered a body-level belief that it
wasn't possible for her to get over this problem. We discussed this a
bit, as she had come in saying that she both believed she could get
beyond this and that it was time. I explained how energy patterns aren’t
always congruent with the beliefs we consciously hold. We treated this
reversal by having her massage neurolymphatic points on her upper chest
("the chest sore spots") while repeating three times, "I deeply and
profoundly accept myself, even if it is not possible to get over this
problem." A recheck showed that the muscle now stayed firm following a
statement about it being possible to resolve the residue of her sense of
helplessness and powerlessness while she was caring for Stephanie." Two
criteria-level psychological reversals were identified when energy
checking the statements, "I deserve to be over this problem," and "I
will allow myself to be over this problem." After massaging the "chest
sore spots" to treat the "I deserve" issue, the energy check revealed
that further treatment was required. I had her tap the point underneath
her lip (central meridian) as she again affirmed self-acceptance. The
reversal corrected.
As happens from time to time, simply clearing these
psychological reversals resulted in a lower SUD. Janet's had now dropped
to a 3. Without my prompting her, she reported already feeling different
about the memory.
Using the meridian diagnostic method ("alarm
points"), followed by a treatment for each meridian that checked as
being disturbed, I found that governing, central, bladder, stomach,
spleen, liver, heart, large intestine, lung, and small intestine each
needed attention. This large number of meridians indicated to me that
there were a number of emotional frequencies that resonated with her
issue.
After stimulating the treatment points for each of
these meridians, I directed her through the 9 Gamut brain activation
exercise. Then I had her take a deep, relaxing breath. During this first
round of tapping, I had also introduced several affirmations. Responding
to the heartache and anger she felt during that time of her life, I had
her say, There is love and forgiveness in my heart" several times as she
tapped on the radial point of her little finger to stimulate her heart
meridian. She was able to do this calmly. When we came to the large
intestine meridian, I had her affirm "I forgive myself; I did the best I
could" as she tapped the radial point on her index finger. It was my
sense that she might be feeling a remnant of guilt over not being able
to handle the situation in a more effective way, and I have found that
guilt is often associated with the large intestine meridian. In fact,
tears welled up in her eyes as she said these words while she tapped. We
paused for a minute or two while she reached for a tissue and regained
her breath, but then she wanted to continue. I often see this issue, the
need to forgive and be gentle with oneself, dislodge deep emotions.
Interestingly, at this point, her SUD (which had been
a 3) elevated to a 4, most likely because of her emotional reaction to
the affirmation. We continued go through the alarm points and treatment
points, with the occasional 9 Gamut in-between. I didn’t use any other
affirmations. My use of affirmations is purely intuitive. Sometimes I
use them; sometimes I don't. I will occasionally cycle back and forth
between using them with one round of tapping, and not using them on the
next. On a subsequent SUD-rating, the number had dropped to 2.
She told me it was now harder to access the memory,
and that it seemed more faded. We went through one more round of
diagnostic and treatment points and I lead her through another 9 Gamut
routine. This time I re-introduced the affirmation for the large
intestine meridian ("I forgive myself; I did the best I could"), in
order to clear out any remaining remnants of guilt, and now she was able
to say the words without tears. She reported that the SUD was now at 0,
which was verified with an energy check. A smile spread over her face.
She nodded her head slowly up and down as she told me that the memory
felt quite different now. She had finally felt a release from the
emotional pain that had been so tightly linked with memories of
Stephanie. She said, "What happened is still very sad, but I no longer
feel the deep ache that I’ve always felt whenever I think about
Stephanie." Even after I challenged her to try to get upset about it,
she said that the pain was gone.
I gave her a handout with a set of energy exercises
that I thought would be of general benefit to her. I also suggested that
she tune into her thoughts about Stephanie several times before our
session the following week, and I gave her a list of the points to tap
(heart and large intestine were the last to clear, so I selected these),
along with the related affirmations, if difficult emotions returned when
she brought Stephanie to mind. I told her that based on my previous
experience with similar issues, I expected that the treatment would
hold, but that another aspect of the problem could surface. If one did,
we would talk about it and treat it at our next session. Janet left
saying she believed that the extra body weight she had been carrying
since shortly after Stephanie’s death was related to the emotional pain,
and she asked if we could focus on that in a subsequent session. We did,
with success, but that is another report.
A woman who suffered with periodic bouts of severe
depression had been treated over a period of years with unsuccessful
talk and drug therapies. She believed that if she were able to heal the
torments from her past, her depression would lift. She responded well to
chakra work. Over several months, distasteful or forgotten scenes from
her childhood would emerge and the traumatic energies associated with
them were purged.
It seemed she had energetically cleared truckloads of
bad memories she had not been able to release through talk therapy, but
she was enormously disappointed with the outcome. While she was no
longer so entangled with the traumas from her past, they were not
replaced by any kind of happiness. When caught in her old story, she at
least felt an intensity when she would cry and wail and go to pieces.
Now nothing made her feel alive.
I [Donna
Eden, an energy healer with clairvoyant abilities]
could see that her energies were gridlocked. Over the years, they had
spiraled down into extreme life-negating patterns. Her radiant circuits
were hardly even moving, and when I looked at her energies, I could see
no radiance anywhere in her body. Her energies had a uniform dull
appearance. Even after the significant, desirable healing of her
childhood wounds, her body was simply unable to come out of its
deadness. Deep tension and negative thinking had become habitual and
were deeply ingrained. She in fact hated the idea of "positive thinking"
and was irritated by people like me who seemed "too happy."
She herself certainly wasn’t going to look foolish by
acting happy, but she longed for more passion and a sense of aliveness.
As the inner deadness persisted, she went into greater despair than
ever. Her treatment progress ceased. Her disappointment and negative
thinking began to dominate the sessions. We reached a point where I
wouldn’t even let her talk during the treatments so she would stop
countering the energy work with incessant negative patter. This was over
20 years ago, and I’d not had much experience at that point working with
the radiant energies, but I decided to experiment.
As I applied techniques for activating the radiant
circuits, the first thing to happen was that tension would leave her
body. This allowed the radiant energies to begin to move, which
literally began to flush the negative energies from her system. Then she
would feel something akin to happiness well up from inside her. It was
an odd sensation for her. She knew glimpses of happiness from when she
would receive a compliment or something good happened in her life, but
this was coming from within. From one session to the next, the feeling
would remain longer. She had been using marijuana and other drugs to get
high. The radiant energies gave her the same feeling. This amazed her.
It was hardly an instant cure. It is necessary to
rebuild the radiant pathways when habitual energies gravitate toward
deeply established negative patterns, and it is hard not to feel
negative when this is the energetic foundation of your emotions. With
persistence, the pathways did re-build. Her bouts of depression
gradually ceased, her pessimism shifted, and she became more upbeat in
both her mood and her character.
At 53, Wendy believed she had found the love of her
life. She invested both emotional and financial resources into a
charming man who, she realized by the time of her first consultation, 14
months into the relationship, was abusing her on both fronts. Wendy’s
journal notes are interspersed with the treatment report.
At the beginning, the relationship brought me so much, opened me,
stimulated me. It woke me up from an emotional and spiritual doze. Our
love was so complete, so deep, felt like such a true soul connection,
unlike and stronger than any I have ever known. The actual reality is
proving to be a long, long way from the romantic fairytale I had
woven. Now I have become a VICTIM of my love. My heart resists my
inner knowing that this is a destructive relationship. I can’t find
the strength or the courage to let it go and get on with my life. It
is like clawing my way out of a pit of honey. . .so sweet, but I am
drowning in it.
Wendy presented as an articulate, strong-minded,
intelligent woman who tearfully described her dilemma in terms of having
to "amputate a part of myself with no anesthetic."
I have always been able to draw upon my strong
logic and will. They have never let me down. But they seem useless
now. I have tried everything I know. Nothing has worked. Every time
I am about to break it off, the pain is unbearable and the yearning
to be with him is overwhelming. I am like a rabbit frozen in the
glare of headlights.
Wendy showed no signs of neurological disorganization
during the initial energy checks. When formulating the problem, however,
the energy checks became unreliable. The indicator muscle stayed firm no
matter what the question or feeling state. Wendy had used the word
"frozen" several times, and it was as if her energies themselves had
become frozen.
While having her think about the problem, I directed
Wendy through several techniques for correcting neurological
disorganization, including the Cross Crawl, tapping the K-27 points,
holding the Wayne Cook posture, tracing around the ears to sedate triple
warmer, and the Third-Eye/Navel Hook-up. After this sequence, which
required somewhere over 5 minutes, her energy checks became consistent
in response to true statements and false statements.
Her SUD shot up to 10 with the thought of ending the
relationship, tears flowing down her cheeks during the energy check.
After setting the problem into her energy field with a resonance lock,
we checked for psychological reversals (PR) related to the problem. Not
surprisingly, a PR was operating with the statement, "I want to end this
relationship." This was resolved by tapping the triple warmer point
beneath the little finger on the back of the hand while taking full
breaths and stating, "I deeply and completely accept myself, even if I
don’t want to end this relationship." She was startled and encouraged,
then, when the muscle stayed firm in response to "I want to end this
relationship." Two other psychological reversals were also identified
and resolved, a criteria-related PR around the statement, "It will be
good for me to get over this problem," and the deep level PR of "I will
get over this problem."
With the ND and PRs resolved, the problem locked in,
and the SUD rating established, we began to go through her alarm points.
In sequence, the following meridians were identified, correction points
for each were tapped, the affirmations listed below were suggested by
me, and she stated them as she tapped the points:
LUNG: Inside of wrist, "I have faith that this will turn out all
right."
BLADDER: Forehead points, "I feel hopeful."
SMALL INTESTINE: Bottom of cheekbone, "I know what I want."
TRIPLE WARMER: Outside of eyebrows, "I am safe."
STOMACH: Cheekbone points below eyes, "I trust in Spirit."
The first time through the alarm points for lung,
bladder, small intestine, and triple warmer checked as needing
treatment. I had to experiment a bit to find which treatment points
would correct the imbalance and also formulated the affirmations based
on some discussion. Different combinations of the meridians appeared
during each check through the alarm points, until the last go-through,
when no disturbance was found on any of the meridians. I was surprised
that heart meridian was not involved, but it was not.
Between alarm point rounds, I used a variety of
balancing techniques, such as the 9 Gamut, and rechecked the SUD level.
It dropped several points after each sequence, except for one time. In a
PR check that time, the indicator muscle lost firmness with "It is
possible for me to get completely over this problem." The correction
involved rubbing the chest "sore spots" along with the affirmation, "I
deeply and completely accept myself even if it is not possible for me to
completely end this relationship."
After about thirty minutes, all meridians were
balanced around the issue and when I repeated the initial
visualization, I scored 0 and I realized I could breathe freely and
did not experience the palpitations, clenched stomach, tears, or
anxiety that previously I had felt.
Magic? Too good to be true? As far as I'm
concerned a bit of both. For the first time, I felt I had truly made
the decision to end the relationship and had the courage and
strength to carry that decision through into reality. But it seemed
too simple. Would it hold?
There are never any magic bullets! My part of the
bargain was to remember to regularly tap the points—my homework. For
almost two weeks, I would do this four or five times a day,
particularly whenever I felt myself "wobble" over the issue. Then
for another couple of weeks I would tap twice a day.
By the time, toward the end of the session, that
Wendy was able to imagine ending the relationship and feel the SUD as 0,
she was both amazed and seemed quite confident. The positive outcome
projection procedure went easily. However, she was leaving town shortly
after the session so I was very explicit in the homework, which involved
the five treatment points that had been identified. Her reflections
three weeks later:
The tapping was the key I needed to unlock my
prison door. I am free. I have cut the connection. In the first
couple of days, it was only on the "etheric" level, but now it is on
the physical level as well. It was not easy, but I did it! The tears
stopped flowing after that first session and a deeper "knowing" and
trust that all will truly be well emerged. Whenever I felt myself
enter an emotional wobble in my resolve, I would tap with all my
might for a few seconds and it seemed as if, almost instantly, a
strength would begin to flow into my body and the gremlins were
silenced.
Wounds need time to heal, but with that single
session and my homework, I can feel that healing happening, free of
infection, a healthy process, free of bitterness or regret. The
obsession and the madness are gone, and the ability to find joy in
other aspects of my life has returned in full, along with an
excitement about how my life will unfold and a feeling of inner
peace that I survived this lesson! Without the therapy, I fear I
might still be drowning in that honey pit.
A 41-year-old African-American woman was ushered into
my office by a colleague. She was sobbing uncontrollably, virtually
unable to speak. As I welcomed her into my office [Larry
Stoler, Ph.D., is the therapist], she
needed support to make it to the couch. She sat down and continued to
sob. At one point, she curled up in a near fetal position. She was
unable to tell me what had happened without falling back into another
paroxysm of sobbing.
I work in an Integrative Medical Center and I had
been briefly told that this patient, who I will call Rose, had come in
to see the physician in our office. In the course of her visit with him,
Rose broke down and began sobbing hysterically. When she could not stop
crying, she was brought to me. I was told that her crisis had something
to do with losing her job.
Despite my inquiries about what was wrong, Rose
remained unable to talk without breaking into sobs. At this point, I
decided to intervene more directly. I told her that I knew something we
could do that would help her calm down. Was she okay with doing this?
She said that she was. I began to introduce her to the EFT (Emotional
Freedom Techniques) tapping points, but because she couldn’t do the
procedure while she was sobbing, I began, with her permission, to tap
the points for her. After a couple of repetitions, she began to calm
down, and she was able to continue the tapping treatment herself. In
addition to doing EFT, I encouraged her to deepen her breathing and to
focus on her immediate experience of being in the office with me.
After about 10 minutes, she was able to talk about
her situation. She described how she had been unfairly accused of
wrongdoing in her job and was on the verge of being dismissed after 15
years of employment. We discussed how she was planning to address the
immediate crisis. She was aware of steps she could take with her union,
and was considering consulting an attorney. It appeared that she had
become settled enough to make these appropriate plans and would be able
to act upon them.
As we were ending, she expressed her amazement about
the session. She didn’t understand how she was able to regain her
composure so quickly and she noted that she was calmer than she had been
for days. I explained to her how the methods she had used, particularly
the tapping, are procedures that stimulate and support a person’s innate
healing responses.
I reviewed the EFT process with her and gave her
written instructions for her home use. I suggested that she use the
procedure twice each day, in the morning and evening, and anytime she
began to feel upset. I scheduled another meeting 2 days later.
Rose’s demeanor had changed radically by the time of
her next session. She was calm, articulate, and engaged. In a series of
weekly sessions over the following two and one-half months, I combined a
variety of energy methods beyond tapping—from Chilel Qigong to charka
work—with supportive psychodynamic psychotherapy. The energy procedures
were successfully used to directly address continuing periodic anxiety,
a nervous twitch in one eye, her self-judgments, her negative inner
dialogue, and distracting thoughts around issues such as feeling
burdened, being vulnerable, and being treated unjustly. They were also
used to help her cope more effectively in her job. As she was able to
make a link between family of origin situations and her current problems
at work, energy methods were then applied to core issues such as
betrayal and loss of trust. She also used tapping techniques to manage
emotionally charged issues as they came up in her life.
At the time of this writing, ten weeks after the
initial session, Rose is no longer complaining about being anxious. She
is dealing effectively with the on-going problems coming from her
workplace. She is exercising regularly and taking good care of herself
physically. She smiles freely and openly. In a recent appointment, she
told me that she has never been happier.
Jan’s childhood was marked by extensive sexual abuse
from her father. While she reported that she had not been preoccupied
with those events, she had many symptoms that she felt stemmed from the
abuse, including promiscuous preoccupations, loss of love for her
husband, excessive fear when her husband yelled at the children, and
inability to engage in oral sex.
An approach that I [Fred
P. Gallo, Ph.D., is the therapist]
call the "container technique" allows such traumatic memories to be
dealt with while at the same time containing the overwhelming emotions
that are buried within them.
I asked Jan to recall a few instances of the
incestuous abuse, incidents that were representative of the abuse in
total. She recalled 3 events. I asked her to give each a SUD rating. The
ratings ranged from 5 to 8.
Next I asked her to place all of the memories in a
container. I explained that the container could be anything. She chose a
box. With the memories stowed in the box, I emphasized that she could
dismiss them from her conscious focus as we proceeded with the energy
techniques.
The treatment could now continue, directed toward the
events in the box without risking abreaction or otherwise reactivating
the trauma. I had her use the Leg Lock to energetically engage the issue
for the purposes of treatment and used the NAEM (Negative Affective
Erasing Method) tapping procedure, combined with various techniques such
as the elaborated eye roll and a variation of the 9 Gamut. After each
round of tapping the NAEM points, I asked her to guess the events’ SUD
level (without bringing the actual events to mind).
Within a few rounds, she guessed that the SUD was "0"
for all of the events. I then asked her to actually bring the set of
events to mind. She was able to detect a slight charge, about a 1. We
repeated the treatment until she was sure that it was a 0. It required
only one additional round of NAEM before she could think about the
events with no distress. The SUD was 0.
I then challenged the results by asking her to focus
intensively on the memories, to live with them deeply for about a
minute. Still no distress!
To further challenge and affirm the results, I asked
her to bring the incidents to mind amidst various activities and eye
postures. These engage different levels of brain functioning and can
access latent distress. For example, I asked her to place her eyes in
several positions and while thinking about the events, to hum a tune
while thinking about the traumas, and to count while thinking about
them. Still no distress.
Next I asked her to talk to herself about the events.
Still no distress. Finally I asked her to tell me about each event.
Still no distress!
The final test is for the client to be in situations
that once triggered symptoms. To increase the chances that symptoms
would not occur in her back-home setting, I used the
Outcome Projection
Procedure. I had her identify and think about various triggers while
visualizing a symptom-free response. She gave a rating of how believable
the scene was to her on the PBS (Positive Belief Score) rating of 0 to
10. It was already quite high from the earlier treatment, and by holding
the positive outcome in mind while tapping the gamut spot, it moved up
to 10.
Her traumatized responses to the memories were now as
resolved as I knew how to facilitate resolution in that initial session.
I continued to work with her on other issues, but from the first
session, she had come to understand that her feelings of estrangement,
and her part in maintaining distance from her husband, were ways of
avoiding thoughts about her trauma. Within a month, she was reporting
much greater intimacy with her husband and substantial improvement in
their marriage.
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"Louise" originally consulted me [Patricia
Carrington, Ph.D., is the therapist]
for problems she had "leaving home." She was a highly competent
executive in a major corporation, a large, rangy young woman with
startlingly blue eyes, a pretty face, and the ways of an exuberant
child. She would often burst into my office like a whirlwind and start
talking before she was seated. |
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At the age of 32, Louise was still living with her parents
and almost daily had verbal battles with her mother, on whom
she was nevertheless very dependent. She couldn’t drive 40
miles from her home to my office because she was afraid of
driving on highways and over bridges (she had to cross the
Hudson River to arrive at my office), so on the few
occasions when she came to see me in person, her mother had
to drive her. The rest of the time we worked over the
telephone. |
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Louise’s therapy took place more than ten years ago,
and it is the case I am presenting to Energy Psychology Interactive
because it includes a ten-year follow-up. A decade ago, it didn’t occur
to me to use a tapping procedure to handle Louise’s dependency problems,
and I confined its use to dealing with her fears. Today I would
immediately apply energy methods to the kind of deep personality
problems she was displaying. Had I been able to do so with her, it would
probably have enabled us to get to much deeper layers of her problem
more rapidly and more effectively. |
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In these "frontier days" of the energy psychology
movement, all I was using was a rudimentary, single algorithm method
which I had developed from Roger Callahan’s technique, an approach I
called "Acutap." When I later became acquainted with Gary Craig’s EFT, I
collapsed my Acutap method into that, and EFT has been my "energy
psychology" ever since. But even back then, though my approach didn’t
include some of the powerful attributes of EFT, such as the introduction
of the "reminder phrase," the subtle delineation of multiple aspects of
a tapped-on problem, and the clinical variations of the method known as
the "Art of Delivery"—my basic single algorithm was surprisingly
effective for many purposes. |
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At the time I was seeing Louise, I was still somewhat
timid about using a tapping method because back then few
psychotherapists were using such methods and many of my colleagues
resisted my efforts to tell them about it.Before I had started to use tapping with Louise we
were already making progress by talking about her problems and helping
her "grow up" a bit emotionally. She had begun dating "Ted," a man in
whom she was genuinely interested. Then, to everyone’s surprise,
including Ted’s, he was suddenly transferred to Australia and he and
Louise found themselves on opposite sides of the earth. It was at the point that Ted phoned Louise to tell
her that he was going to get a week’s vacation from his job that the
challenge occurred which led to my use of tapping with Louise. Ted
couldn’t fly home for his vacation because he had to handle some duties
in Australia, but he offered to pay for Louise’s plane fare if she would
join him for that week. Would she fly over? |
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Louise was thrown into deep conflict. Not surprisingly, this
young woman who feared highways and bridges, was absolutely
terrified of plane travel. However, in her usual precipitous
fashion, Louise announced to me that she was determined to
join Ted for that week in Australia even though she was
terribly afraid of being in strange places and "petrified of
plane travel." Could I "fix" her fears for her in time? |
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That was a pretty tall order. "I" (notice that Louise
didn’t say "we," I was supposed to do it for her) had only three weeks
to accomplish this feat. The multiple fears that Louise displayed,
embedded as they were in a context of deep personality problems
revolving around her dependency on her mother (and on other mother
figures, including this therapist) and her obvious immaturity on certain
levels, would ordinarily have required a long course of psychotherapy to
resolve. Did I dare tackle them in three weeks with a relatively unheard
of procedure?
I decided that I dared. After all, what could we lose
by trying it? I suggested to Louise that she have her mother drive her
to the office to try a "revolutionary new technique that was being used
for phobias." Maybe we could whirlwind our way through to a solution.
Louise’s mother drove her in to see me, waiting
patiently for an hour and half in the car while her daughter and I
worked on her multiple phobias revolving around being alone and apart
from her mother. I explained that first things come first. We’d have to
tackle her fear of traveling alone by car first before we could address
her fear of flying to Australia by herself.
In that first session we handled Louise’s fear of
driving on a highway. Tap-tap-tap, and after about 6 rounds she was down
from a 10 to a 2. In the "olden days" of energy psychology, a "2" was
the best I could hope for. I never expected to have a client get down to
a zero, and of course, they didn’t.
Next we tackled her fear of bridges. Down to a 2.
Then Louise confided that she was plagued by a fear that her mother
would die. She had obsessive thoughts about this every day which she
couldn’t banish from her mind. Tap, tap, tap and that came down until it
was negligible. Then we tackled her fear of being alone at her place of
work. She couldn’t work after hours without being so frightened of an
unidentified danger that she lost concentration. That came down to a 2.
Louise kept going at this, she had terrific energy,
for one and one-half hours. Fear after fear was eliminated. Then she
jumped up and asked me how she could be sure that the relieved feeling
she had now wouldn’t disappear when she got out on the "real road"?
I told her we didn’t know what would happen, but that
there was an 80 percent probability that it would last. I then asked her
to drive by herself to her appointment next time, 40 miles to my office
and back. Somehow I felt she could do this now and that it would be an
important step in preparation for tackling her airplane phobia in the
next session. But she had to promise me that if she felt anxious while
driving she would stop the car and pull over to the curb and "tap" the
fear down to at least a 2 again. She said she’d do that and then
vanished. Louise moved at an amazing speed!
The following week she was back, having driven by
herself the whole 40 miles. No mother. After she sat down, she fastened
her intent gaze upon me and told me that while she had driven all this
way by herself, she nevertheless had had to stop several times to tap!
She was scowling when she said this as though the method had let her
down. I asked her if doing that had helped. Had she been able to bring
her distress level down? She nodded but looked dubious. The fact that
she had never before been able to drive alone for that distance, and
over bridges too, was apparently not considered too significant. I was
to later learn that this type of "Apex" effect (a denial or minimizing
of the effects of the treatment) is typical of certain clients, although
certainly not of others.
When I asked Louise whether she had had her usual
fears about her mother dying during the past week, she looked
bewildered. No, she guessed not. She hadn’t really thought about it.
What about her fears of being alone in the office building where she
worked? As a matter of fact, she said, she had stayed there one evening
all by herself to finish up some work and, come to think of it, she
hadn’t noticed any fear at all then.
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So far so good despite the lack of acknowledgement on
Louise’s part of her progress. We started on the plane phobia, which
turned out to have multiple aspects. Louise was afraid of going far from
home, of being in a strange city by herself, of being in an enclosed
place, of being anywhere where she was out of control or felt "trapped",
of heights, of a plane crash, of the "swooping" feeling when the plane
rises or dips—you name it; it frightened her. |
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One by one we tackled these fears over the next few
sessions and soon she felt comfortable with the idea of flying—at least
when discussing it in my office. So I gave her some "homework." She was
to go to the airport and watch the planes landing and taking off, tap
away any anxiety that occurred as she watched them, and then walk up to
the ticket counter and tap away whatever anxiety occurred there.
When Louise came back the next week she had in her
purse plane tickets to Australia. When she had tapped her anxiety down
at the airport she had had a sudden urge to buy the tickets. She had
made a decision to go! Our work on this issue was now almost complete,
just a few details to clean up and Louise would, enthusiastically,
depart for distant shores.
Or, so I thought.
The night before her departure I received a desperate
phone call from Louise. "Dr. Carrington, I’m terribly scared!" I asked
if her fears about the plane trip had come back, feeling quite sure that
this was the case. Oh no, she said, she felt absolutely great about the
trip. It was the fact that she wasn’t crying at leaving her parents that
frightened her, and the fact that she wasn’t scared about leaving her
mother. She wanted to know if it was "normal" not to be crying at this
point and to be feeling good about going away alone–or if it was a "bad
omen."
I didn’t waste much time assuring her it was "normal"
for a 32-year-old woman not to be crying at leaving for a week’s plane
trip without her mother. We just started tapping for her fear of "not
having fear" and her fear of "not crying," and brought them both down
totally over the telephone. Louise now felt fine and was ready to leave
for Australia—which she did.
A week and a half passed before she phoned me on her
return to the states and breathlessly told me what had happened. If I
had created an obstacle course to test the strength of the tapping
effects, I could never have dreamed up such an effective one. Here is
Louise’s trip as she recounted it to me.
When the plane had left the airport for Chicago, she
had experienced surprisingly little fear, maybe once or twice she had to
tap a bit, but that was all. When she got to Chicago and they were laid
over for an hour between planes, she still experienced no problems.
It was only after the plane had set out for its
nonstop trip to Los Angeles that the "tests" began. When they were about
an hour out of O’Hare airport, the pilot announced over the loud speaker
that passengers must fasten their seat belts and remain in their seats
because one of the plane’s engines had "caught on fire." He said they
would turn back to O’Hare airport and "try to land", however they might
have to make an emergency landing in a field before that time and they
"shouldn’t be worried" if this happened (!!!).
According to Louise, at this announcement "people
began screaming and praying in the aisles and some were throwing up."
But, she told me nonchalantly that she was one of the few who didn’t
panic. However she did feel pretty uncomfortable when they reached
O’Hare airport and she looked down and saw the fire brigade and the
ambulances lined up waiting to rescue them. "I didn’t feel good about
that at all," she said," but I didn’t panic."
That wasn’t quite the end of her trials though. After
a few hours wait in O’Hare, the passengers were put onto another plane
headed for Los Angeles. But instead of going there nonstop, they were
informed en route that the plane would land temporarily in Salt Lake
City. No reason was given for this. When it landed, Louise watched an
emergency medical crew board the plane, go back about ten seats behind
her, and remove the body of a man who had died of a heart attack while
in flight. It was thought that he had been traumatized by the earlier
fire on the plane. Louise told me that she felt very sorry for the man
when she realized what had happened, but still she "didn’t panic".
There was a little more to go though. Eventually they
landed in LA only to discover that she had just missed her plane
connection to Australia. The airline accordingly announced that it would
put passengers who had missed their connecting flights up at a motel at
their expense so that they could board another plane in the morning. She
would have to spend the night in LA.
Louise had always had a fear of being in a strange
city. Now she was in a strange city under what can only be described as
rather strange circumstances. She handled this without difficulty,
however. She had been sitting next to a "nice woman" on the plane and
the two of them decided to go out to dinner together in Los Angeles.
Louise forgot to be afraid to of a "strange city" and the layover went
fine.
Her plane left the next morning for Australia, and
Louise described her flight over the Pacific as "a breeze" because
nothing much happened, there was just a quiet ocean to look at.
She then spent a wonderful week with Ted in Australia
and had a pleasant easy trip home. When she phoned me to tell me about
it, she was happy about the trip but was (surprise, surprise) once again
having unpleasant disagreements with her mother. Her therapy was not
over.
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However, from that time on, flying was not a problem
for Louise, nor was driving on highways or staying in
offices after hours. Her company promotion the
following year called for her traveling on the
company’s behalf to many places around the world, and
Louise took it in her stride. Now, ten years later,
Louise is married with two children and has a high
executive position in her company. She has traveled
extensively on planes ever since this treatment and
reports that her fear of flying never returned. |
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A 21-year-old woman had been suffering with
symptoms of OCD for the past seven years. Her complaints at intake
[Robin Bilazarian, LCSW, is the therapist]
included "checking behaviors" and social phobia. Particularly
upsetting was the ritual she felt compelled to repeat each time
she would lock her office door, which included jiggling the handle
15 to 20 times. This was often done under the watchful eye of
colleagues. It was both embarrassing and caused worry that her
colleagues were "scrutinizing" her odd behavior.
The treatment started with corrections for
neurological disorganization. The first intervention was my
adaptation of the
Wayne Cook posture.
I call it the "pretzel." The ankles are crossed, one hand is
placed palm down, and the other hand is laid lightly on top of it,
with the fingers gently interlaced. The inner part of the forearms
are rested on the torso, all held for 60 seconds (thin clients
need to sit leaning backwards so the inner forearms are on the
torso). Then, based on energy testing, the
collarbone breathing
technique was used.
Upon tuning into her need to check the door 15
to 20 times, she reported a SUD of 8. The EFT points were
stimulated using the "touch and breathe" method. This reduced the
SUD to 4. An energy test revealed a psychological reversal around
the statement "I deserve to be over this." After correcting for
it, her SUD dropped to 1. After a floor-to-ceiling eye roll, her
SUD was 0.
To solidify this gain, I used the TFT Peak
Performance Protocol (similar to the
Outcome Projection Procedure).
She described as a positive outcome that she would need to check
the door only twice. I asked her to envision that the next day she
would be able to check the door only twice and to rate how
confident she felt that she could do this. She reported feeling
60% confident. While tuned to picturing herself in the future
checking her locked door only twice, I instructed her to touch
under her arm, taking five breaths, and then touch under her eye
for another five breaths. She then reported 70% confidence. She
repeated this sequence and her rating increased slightly, to 75%
confidence. I asked her to talk to me about what was in the way of
her feeling totally confident. She said she didn't trust herself.
I had her use her own words, "even though I don't trust myself"
and pair them with an affirmation of deep self-acceptance while
rubbing the chest sore spot. At this point, her indicator muscle
stayed strong when she said "I trust myself to lock the door
correctly." And then using the Peak Performance Protocol, her
self-rating quickly rose to 100% confidence.
Our next consultation was a month later. She
reported that she was checking the locked door no more than 2 to 3
times and that she was happy with this outcome. In fact, she said,
she gave it little thought. She also reported that she no longer
noticed whether or not her colleagues were watching her.
I [Robin Bilazarian, LCSW,
is the therapist] had been working for a year with a
40-year-old schizophrenic woman, gently challenging her paranoid
delusions in our twice-monthly sessions, primarily using reality
testing. In the intake assessment, she estimated that she believed
her delusional thinking 60% of the time. A year later, she
believed it about 40% of the time.
At this point, the nurse clinician who was
prescribing her medication asked me to try energy psychology with
her as she had been quite agitated for some time, and there was no
medication left that had not been tried.
I’d not used energy interventions with people
whose diagnosis included psychosis. The patient believed her house
was bugged and that it had been bugged for the past 15 years. She
believed specific people from her past were "out to get" her. She
was homebound unless escorted by family. She was afraid to go to
her mailbox.
I explained to her how acupressure has been
used to help people with their fears, and I asked her if she was
interested in trying this approach. She said she was. I proceeded
slowly, asking for permission each step of the way. I introduced
energy checking—using her name, the day of the week, and simple
addition--to demonstrate how false statements test differently
from true statements, and to show her the method we would be using
to identify psychological and neurological reversals. There were
many of each. We began by correcting her polarity reversal using
my adaptation of the Wayne Cook posture, which I call the
"pretzel" (ankles crossed, one hand down, the other hand on top,
fingers interlaced gently, held for 60 seconds). We then used the
collarbone breathing technique to correct for a weakness that was
revealed at her K-27 points.
Psychological reversals were addressed with
affirmations such as "Even though I believe my house is bugged, I
deeply and completely accept myself" while she rubbed her chest
sore spot. This was followed by stimulating the EFT points using
the "touch and breathe" method, which brought her SUD down from 9
to 5. Further work was done on intervening psychological
reversals, including her wanting to hold onto the problem, feeling
it was not safe to let go of the problem, and feeling she did not
deserve to be over the problem. Each of these corrections was
followed by another round of work with the EFT points and the 9
Gamut Procedure. Her SUD was now down to 1.
I then taught her how she could subtly apply
the touch-and-breathe method to the EFT points even if she were
around other people. I showed her how to discretely do the
"pretzel" for 60 seconds to offset her polarity reversal. I showed
her how, whenever she felt scared, she could, as if scratching an
itch, rest a bent finger on her eyebrow, outer eye, under the eye,
move it under her nose, under her lip, rest her full hand on both
sides of the collarbone, etc. She welcomed the concept that she
could manage her own excessive fear and rage. And there was no
need to "tune into" the problem when she applied the techniques
while the problem was actually happening.
Two weeks later, at her next psychotherapy
session, she reported that she was walking alone in her town
without fear. She estimated that she now believed her paranoid
thoughts only about 20% of the time. The single EFT session
resulted in the same quantitative shift (20% drop) as a year of
therapy, with the same therapist. I am continually amazed.
Furthermore, this obese woman told me she was now losing weight. I
asked her how. She told me she was walking 40 minutes a day and
was feeling well and happy. She told her family that she was using
acupressure therapy. She applied the touch and breathe method with
the EFT points whenever she felt scared, about every other day,
and the fear quickly passed. As we reviewed the procedures she was
using, I realized she has having this much success despite
skipping several of the EFT points.
We next applied the technique to the specific
people she felt were out to get her, and we also refined her
knowledge of the EFT points. She left seeming confident and
pleased. By the following session, she estimated that she believed
her paranoid ideation only about 10% of the time. She reported
getting upset in a store during the Christmas rush the previous
week. We used EFT and quickly brought her SUD down to 0. I asked
her if she would go back to this store. She said emphatically, "of
course!" We also talked about her difficult childhood for the
first time in over a year of treatment.
A few days prior to our initial session
[Fred
P. Gallo, Ph.D., is the therapist].
John’s wife left him for his "best friend." Understandably John was
experiencing exceptional distress, feeling rejected, desperate,
heart-aching. He had been pleading with his wife to come back, but she
matter-of-factly informed him that she no longer loved him and she
wanted a divorce.
I asked John to rate his level of distress on a 0-10
scale and without hesitation he told me that it was a 10. I described a
method that I believed might give him relief from this "love pain." At
first he hesitated, stating that he did not want to stop loving his
wife. I told him that the method would only address the pain, not the
love. After some discussion he agreed, and I took him through the "Negative
Affect Erasing Method." Essentially this involved having him tap
with his fingertips at four locations on his body: third eye point,
under nose, under bottom lip, and upper sternum. Within three rounds of
tapping approximately five times at each of these points, the distress
was dissipated. I then asked him if he still loved his wife and he
stated that he did, although he did not feel the pain. I asked him to
try to get back the pain. He was unable to do so after approximately one
minute of "trying." When I saw John for follow-up the next week, he
reported that he only had to use the technique on two instances and that
he was feeling much better.
By the third visit, John came to terms about his
wife, realizing that he was not going to be able to change her mind. He
said that he would give her some time and not go along with a divorce at
this point. He was spending time with his children and friends and
feeling much calmer. He had been placed on anti-anxiety medication by
his physician, but after our first visit he discontinued that medication
without difficulty. Also he had been on anti-depressant medication for
15 years, which interfered with his ability to perform sexually, a
significant factor in his marital problem. He now wanted to focus on
getting off the medication so that he could reclaim his sexual ability.
During lunchtime at a professional conference, one of
my
colleagues [this
report was provided by Gary Peterson, M.D.]
was in the presentation room lamenting about the extreme anxiety she
felt about giving her presentation about child abuse. After lunch, she
and one of her friends were standing in front of the entrance discussing
her anxiety. Her friend suggested I do something to help her
overwhelming fear. She was feeling desperate with anxiety and agreed to
an energy psychology process. We had 15 minutes until the presentation.
We walked to the back of the room and began the
process. She had a SUD level of 8 (on the standard scale of 0 to 10) in
relation to her anxiety about the talk. We corrected the assumed
psychological reversal by tapping on TW-3 (side of hand) and saying "I
deeply and profoundly love and accept myself even though I have this
anxiety."
The treatment was straightforward. Using the reminder
phrase, "my anxiety," she tapped on her face, torso and hand acupoints,
performed the 9 Gamut exercise, and tapped the face and torso acupoints
again. Her SUD had dropped to 6. We proceeded similarly for another
round, and her SUD was 4. With the next two rounds, her SUD dropped to 2
and then 1. After an elaborated eye roll, her SUD was 0.
We worked to increase her Positive Belief Scale (PBS)
to solidify the gains. She tapped on TW-3, visualizing her giving the
presentation naturally and easily. Her PBS moved from 6 (10 being 100%)
to 10 within one minute. The total process took less than 10 minutes.
That evening she was exclaiming to our presenter
group that for the first time, she had done a presentation without
significant anxiety. Her SUD had been between 0 and 1. She had another
presentation to give the following morning. She later told me, with
immense gratitude, that it had also gone well, and she had experienced
no undue anxiety.
Although Margaret was intelligent and able to perform
quite well in her work as a secretary, her social life was filled with
tremendous fear. She presented as shy and withdrawn, and she found it
impossible to take a proactive approach in her relationships. Even if
somebody approached her, her responses were curt. It was all she could
do to more or less listen and nod. She said that she wanted to get over
her shyness and fear. I [Fred
P. Gallo, Ph.D., is the therapist]
asked her what would she be doing differently if she did not have the
fear, and she went on to describe numerous changes in her lifestyle. But
in essence, she said that if she were not fearful in her social
interactions, "I would be able to speak my truth rather than being
afraid to say what I think."
Her indicator muscle was weak to the statement, "I
can speak my truth" and strong to the statement "I cannot speak my
truth." Her response was also weak to "I speak my truth" and strong to
"I do not speak my truth." I also checked for various psychological
reversals by energy checking statements that included: "I want to be
able to speak my truth," "I will be able to speak my truth," "I deserve
to be able to speak my truth," and "It’s safe for me to be able to speak
my truth." On all of these statements, she tested strong, indicating
that there were no reversals blocking her from being able to resolve the
core belief at the root of her shyness and fear.
I used the alarm points to identify the primary
meridian involved in her being unable to speak her truth. It was
the pericardium meridian. I then asked her to make the statement, "I
speak my truth," to which the indicator muscle weakened, and I had her
"lock in" this energetic response using the Leg Lock. I then identified,
using an energy check, an acupoint on the pericardium meridian that
would restore the meridian’s balance while the issue was energetically
activated. It was pericardium-9.
Margaret rated her positive of belief score (PBS) as
a 2 on the 10-point scale, indicating that she primarily believed that
she could not speak her truth. I asked her to tap pericardium-9. After a
few minutes of this treatment, combined with a variation of the 9 Gamut
procedure, Margaret’s PBS was up to 10. She emphatically stated, "I can
speak my truth now!" The changes in her affect and general demeanor were
substantial. Her statements now appeared to be highly congruent. The
results were further reinforced by using the
temporal
tap procedure. Now
having two methods that she knew had an instantaneous impact on the core
belief that was perpetuating her fear of social situations, I advised
her to practice both daily as well as any time she found herself
reverting to the old limiting core belief.
This
case involves the difficulties a woman
encountered after witnessing the September 11 attack on the World Trade
Center. While working in a building near the WTC, "Corinne" watched the
Twin Towers collapse and saw people jumping to their death. This horror
followed several other traumatic events she had experienced during the
previous year. Her terror during the assault on the WTC reactivated the
earlier traumas, significantly increasing her difficulties in processing
it.
Corinne participated in a Critical Incident Stress
Debriefing (CISD) group. CISD groups are designed to allow people who
have been involved in a traumatic event to express their anxieties and
confusion. They also provide information and assurance about the normal
range of emotional reactions to traumatic events, but they do not
directly "treat" the trauma. Participants in Corinne’s group were
invited to follow up the group session with individual work using
relaxation and stress management procedures. Corinne’s 50-minute
individual session, described here, illustrates how rapidly energy
psychology techniques can begin to alleviate the effects of complex
trauma.
Several months before the attack on the WTC,
Corinne’s husband had died from a painful illness. Her father had also
died during the year, and one of her children was seriously ill at the
time of the attack. In addition, Corinne had recently fallen down a
flight of steps and shattered bones in her arm. She was in considerable
physical pain.
One of Corinne’s symptoms was a continuous buzzing in
her head.. The initial acupoint stimulation focused on her reaction to
the traumatic events of September 11, but quickly shifted to a vivid
memory of her husband in intensive care. He had been fighting
tenaciously against overwhelming odds to remain alive. In the memory
that surfaced, the physician entered the room and told Corinne’s
husband, "I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to save you. There
really is no hope." At that point, as Corinne described with anguish,
her husband turned over, curled up in a fetal position, and died. This
memory had devastated Corinne since the moment of her husband’s death.
As she described it, she kept repeating, "The doctor took away all
hope...all hope." The words, it turned out, expressed her own despair as
well as her husband’s in his final moments.
The therapist targeted Corinne’s lack of hope as an
issue for acupoint intervention. A rating was taken of her subjective
level of distress concerning her lack of hope. Corrine was taught an
acupoint tapping procedure, and in the space of a few minutes her
subjective distress rating had diminished from over 8 (on a scale of 0
to 10) to 0. When the distress associated with a condition such as lack
of hope has been neutralized using an energy intervention, the issue
typically ceases to be an active subjective concern for the person. But,
as is often the case, another aspect of the problem then surfaces, and
this happened with Corinne.
"He was so cold when he gave up hope," she said, "so
cold, and he needed a blanket, and there was none." In addition to
stimulating specific acupoints in relation to problematic emotions, the
stimulation of the energy points is often paired with carefully
formulated self-suggestions. The wording used in working with this next
aspect of the problem employed Corinne’s own words in a metaphorical
sense: "Even though he was so cold, I choose to blanket myself with
peace."
After several rounds in which Corrine stimulated
specific acupoints while focusing on this issue, her subjective level of
distress was again down to a "0" and she felt much more peaceful about
her husband’s death. At this point, her attention shifted to her
father’s death earlier in the year. Again using a self-suggestion
formulated around her concerns and beliefs, a brief acupoint stimulation
routine was conducted, after which she reported a sense of calm about
her father’s death.
Corinne next focused on her broken arm. She described
how she had tumbled head first down a flight of stairs and had only been
saved from more severe injury by landing on a couch that happened to
have been sitting at the foot of the stairs. Again, a self-suggestion
combined with stimulating the acupoints had an immensely quieting effect
on Corinne and on her pain.
At this point, Corinne expressed a need to be alone.
A final self-suggestion was formulated, affirming that even though she
wanted to be alone, she could still surround herself with the feeling of
being loved. By the time she had finished the last few rounds of
acupoint stimulation, the buzzing in Corrine’s head, originally a "6" on
the 0-to-10 scale, was completely gone. She mentioned that she was
hearing differently and that the room seemed quieter to her.
A man whose wife had been deeply hurt by his periodic
affairs was bewildered by her pain, and he was puzzled about why the
other women seemed hurt as well. He looked at these liaisons as a primal
biological function, and he couldn't grasp their responses to them. He
reasoned that these fleeting encounters were so passionate that the
women should be grateful, and his termination of each affair was so
complete that his wife had no reason to feel threatened. He was
genuinely baffled that these women made such a fuss about it all.
Attempting to explain what he considered obvious, he would repeatedly
avow, "You can't fight biology!" His wife finally agreed and decided to
leave him.
They came to me for a
session, not to save the marriage, but
rather for damage control, so they might end it more civilly, less
harmfully. He sincerely didn't want her to be hurt, and he didn't want
his children hurt, but he just could not comprehend her feelings. She
believed he was a scarred human being who turned around and scarred
others. She did not want him to scar their children any further or pass
his values on to their son or his devaluation of women on to their
daughter.
Early in the session I decided to work with the
husband alone. I asked the wife to return in an hour. I wanted to see
his energies separate from hers, and I wanted to determine just how
deeply scarred he was. I focused on his chakras. There was an obvious
collapse of the energy in his heart chakra, but his root chakra told the
most poignant story. As I sensed into its deeper layers, I began to have
feelings and images about his childhood. Or more specifically, it was as
if he hadn't had a childhood, as if there never was for him a time of
innocence. I sensed that he had been in survival mode from early on. I
had images of severe and unpredictable beatings, which he later
confirmed, and that in order to survive he had to disconnect from his
heart.
It was clear that I wasn't going to convince this guy
of anything, but even if he couldn't let the concepts through, he might
have some new understanding if he were to feel his own energies and the
energies involved with his relationships. This was indeed what happened.
After working with and sensing into each of his chakras, and not knowing
if I would have more than this one session with him, it seemed to me
that the best thing I could do was to hook his fourth chakra, his heart
chakra, to his root chakra, the chakra of his sexuality. His was
actually a surprisingly sweet, very loving heart chakra, but it was
essentially cut off from both his awareness and his root chakra.
As I pulled the repressed energy up from deep within
his heart chakra, he felt acute sorrow about losing his wife, a feeling
that had not previously entered his awareness. He began to have many
other feelings as well. When I repeated to him some of what his wife had
said in the first few minutes of the session, he was able to feel her
pain and sadness, as well as the pain of the other women. But his heart
chakra was so separated from his root chakra that he still couldn't
grasp why what he had done had caused them this pain. He still believed
they thought his sexual casualness was bad because they had been so
fully indoctrinated. He contended that it was their stuffy sexual values
that caused them their pain, not him.
I began with techniques to open the circuitry of his
heart and root chakras so they might have more contact with one another.
I made wider and wider circles with my hands to expand the energy of his
heart chakra until it was reaching so far beyond the area of his heart
that it extended into the field of his root chakra.
He felt a buzzing force as the areas between his
heart and his pelvis began to bridge. With this awareness, and with his
heart chakra opening, he began to make connections to what his wife had
said about how, for her, making love always relates to the heart. While
this was not an instant conversion experience, it did leave him willing
to entertain her point of view and to look at the consequences of his
having been cut off, so early, from his heart. Now four years later they
have remained in their marriage, and they both report that it has been a
good and a monogamous journey for them since that session.
Jump to Next Module: Other
Energy Approaches
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