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Why on earth did I do that and how can I change? A psychic medium’s view on the importance of the subconscious in healing using Matrix Reimprinting using EFT (Part Two)

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In Part One, I argued for the crucial role that our subconscious mind plays in our everyday lives. Indeed, I cannot emphasise enough just how important it is that we bring about a global shift away from the pre-eminence that has been historically accorded to our conscious minds. Once we recognise that most of our personal, social and cultural problems are directly attributable to the inherently invisible operation of our subconscious ‘programming’ then we can begin to take responsibility for our individual, collective and planetary well-being.

But precisely how can we take such responsibility for our well-being? Well, firstly, you need to want to change for the better and, as I pointed out in Part One, the role of a psychic can assist you on this first step towards healing by pinpointing false beliefs and past emotional blockages that are ‘buried’ in your subconscious. As Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman rightly point out, we do have ‘the ability to rewrite our limiting beliefs and, in the process, take control of our lives. However, changing the programs requires that we activate a process other than engaging in a futile, one-sided dialogue with the subconscious mind’ (2011, p. 41). In other words, and secondly, we need to engage in self-healing.

Undoubtedly, taking those first steps on the healing path can be rather daunting, which isn’t helped by the seemingly ever-growing array of healing ‘modalities’ from which to choose in the holistic-therapeutic marketplace. However, my purpose here is to underscore the real, and frankly, revolutionary efficacy of what is known as Matrix Reimprinting using EFT (Dawson and Allenby 2010; Dawson and Marillat 2014) combined with Radical Forgiveness (Tipping 2002, 2011): both are necessary for genuine healing and individual flourishing. Please understand that I am not suggesting that all other healing therapies be dismissed in one generic stroke. On the contrary, I found Reiki (receipt and attunement), counselling (or ‘talk therapy’), acupuncture, reflexology and Process Acupressure to be helpful on my healing journey [1]. In fact, I would proffer that for some, as I found myself, one or all of the latter are crucial starting-points. Certainly, my Reiki attunement gave me the initial courage to remove myself from highly toxic relationships while counselling afforded me a much-needed safe space where my voice was unconditionally respected and, moreover, heard. Equally, it was during counselling that I began my process of unravelling (albeit consciously) my painful past. Nevertheless, the salient point I wish to make is that ultimately each therapy or ‘modality’ I have mentioned has its own relative intrinsic limitations.

The paradox of ‘talk therapy’ and why it isn’t enough

My initial attunement to Reiki opened up a new world for me. Not only did it give me the courage to extricate myself from emotionally-toxic relationships it also kick-started my incipient awareness of my psychic ability, which subsequently proved invaluable as an EFT practitioner. However, this is to jump ahead. In removing myself from toxic relationships, I continued with a further Reiki attunement and regularly received Reiki treatments. But I found that this was nowhere near enough in helping me to facilitate my need for happiness: my chronic back pain remained, despite prescription pain killers, as well as my over-fondness for alcohol. It was at the end of a Reiki treatment that the practitioner urged me to see a counsellor, which, she felt, might help in this regard. I had always resisted friends’ recommendations to seek counselling, not because I believed it to be unhelpful or unwarranted, but simply because I just wasn’t ready.

For the record, my sessions were, at the time, very helpful for me. It was during these sessions that I was helped to see that there had been no real love in my life and, for the first time, I was able to cry deeply without alcohol. I was listened to with compassion and understanding and was helped to make sense my own unacknowledged ‘take’ on the world by a very skilled and adept therapist. There is much more positive commentary I could provide, but ultimately, and with the benefit of hindsight, this was a necessary yet insufficient part of my healing journey. At the end of the day, unbeknownst to me remained a very deep well of unprocessed dissociated traumatic memories and repressed emotions. My back pain worsened.

This is the paradox of counselling: on the one hand, and speaking from experience, being able to talk freely, without judgment and properly listened to are profoundly important and beneficial processes. Indeed, to have my understanding of people and situations objectively reflected back to me was very helpful in the clarity I gained. On the other hand, however, I was not healed of my conscious and, as I later found out, dissociated emotions, traumatic memories and false beliefs. As Dr Mary Lynn Karjala, a psychologist, puts it:

Merely talking about a trauma rarely changes or heals it. When we talk about a painful event, it’s as if we rip ourselves open and spread our guts out on the table. Then, if there’s no healing or transformation that follows, we end up stuffing all back in. But now, we not only have the original trauma, we also have a secondary layer of retraumatization (2007, p. 99).

Equally, Dr Phil Mollon, a very well-respected clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who, in the late 1980s, began working in a general psychiatric setting, found his skills and knowledge were of limited help.

I became aware of how extensive the experience of trauma had been in the childhood and adult lives of many of these patients – and how unhelpful conventional talking therapy, of whatever kind, often was in relation to trauma. Although the troubled people I saw might begin to tell me about their experiences, and we might achieve some understanding of their development and the dynamics of their mind, this did not seem to help. Sometimes it would make people worse; self-harm would be a common outcome (2008, p. 4).

Process acupressure: almost there

To quote Mollon further:

I am compelled to the conclusion that purely talk-based forms of psychotherapy, although not without value, are simply not able to engage with the realm in which the patterns of emotional distress are encoded – the area at the interface of the psyche and the soma, the body’s energy field (p. 2).

In other words, some form of body-based therapy is required, which explicitly works with our body’s energy system. Note, though, that Mollon isn’t dismissing talk-based therapy: quite simply, on its own it is insufficient. However, following my counselling and Reiki sessions, I was recommended to see a Process Acupressure practitioner. The timing could not have been better, and, as it turned out, she was literally 5 minutes’ walk from my home and, at the time, only one of three qualified practitioners in England!

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Process Acupressure (PA) was developed by Dr Aminah Raheem (1990) as a holistic way to work with the active energy of both body and soul for healing and growth. During a PA session, the client rests on a massage table, fully clothed, and the practitioner applies firm, gentle finger pressure to specific combinations of acupressure points, and encourages the client to notice what they are experiencing. It is completely soul-led. To begin with, I had two sessions over two months and, to my utmost astonishment, found I was free of my chronic back pain for almost six months! Naturally, I couldn’t fathom out how only two sessions could literally stop my pain. It was thus as a direct result of this remarkably profound healing (during which repressed memories of my early childhood surfaced, among other things) that spurred me to engage with palpable gusto the literature on the mind-body connection and repressed emotions [2].

The gift of matrix reimprinting using emotional freedom technique (eft)

However, despite having frequent PA sessions over a 4-year period, at the same time I was introduced to what is known as Matrix Reimprinting (henceforth MR), which uses Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Prior to the development of MR, EFT had been breath-taking in its healing powers. Indeed, Phil Mollon, for example, found EFT ‘to be the most extraordinarily effective, rapid, and gentle form of emotional healing that I had encountered in 30 years of clinical practice’ (p. 61).

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Naturally, for reasons of space here, I cannot do justice to the history and precise dynamics of EFT. I strongly recommend that you read at least one of the following: chapter 4 of Dawson and Allenby (2010) & Dawson and Marillat (2014), chapter 5 of Mollon (2008) and chapter 2 of Craig (2008). EFT is based on the traditional Chinese medicine system and involves tapping on acupuncture points with your fingers (thus utilising same principle as PA). While tapping, you bring to mind and verbalise, in a specific manner, physical symptoms and/or negative memories. Essentially, when you are in good health, energy flows freely through the meridians in your body. Trauma and stress create blockages in the energy system. Consequently, energetic blockages can (and often do) result in disease.

As Dawson and Allenby note, EFT is not a talk therapy since EFT works with both the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind, so you may find that issues you thought you had resolved with talk therapies still retain some emotional intensity once you start tapping. I have found this to be the case during many psychic-led EFT sessions in the past, where consciously a client is adamant about a certain issue they have resolved, often about forgiveness, which wasn’t the case subconsciously.

Working with the ‘echo’ and rewriting the past

It was during a teaching event in 2006 that MR was born. While working on one of his course participants, Karl Dawson found that he was making little progress, so he asked her if she could see her younger self as a picture in the memory. She replied, ‘I can see her so clearly, I could tap on her.’ Karl encouraged her to tap on the little self while he continued to tap on her. This resulted in a speedy resolution of her issue.

This event has resulted in truly monumental results for EFT-based healing. I cannot emphasise enough how Karl Dawson has, quite literally, found, and subsequently developed, the key to real and profound healing at all levels and for that I extend him my deep gratitude. Indeed, my life changed radically once I started having MR sessions, working on myself using MR and then developing the tools of MR both for myself and my clients.

However, the main breakthrough was Karl’s discernment of what he conceptualises as ‘ECHOs’, namely, Energetic Consciousness Holograms. Crucial to this breakthrough is the recognition of the (psychological) reality of dissociation [3]. As Dr Karjala (2007) rightly notes, dissociation is a very common mental mechanism, which most of us have experienced in some form. For example, you may have experienced driving along your familiar route only to realise upon arrival that you couldn’t remember most of the journey. Classically, you’ve been listening to someone talk and suddenly your realised that you hadn’t heard what he or she was saying. Dissociation is also a defence mechanism that the human mind uses to protect itself from thoughts, feelings or experiences that are very painful or disturbing. Such mechanisms are subconscious in operation, so we’re not aware we’re actually using them. They have to be subconscious precisely in order to shield us from painful experiences. For example, someone involved in a car accident may have no recollection of the accident since their subconscious is shielding them from the immediacy of severe physical and emotional trauma.

For our purposes, we are concerned with dissociation as an intrinsic part of the human mind’s response to trauma. As psychoanalysis recognises, when we experience severe trauma, a part of us ‘splits off’ to protect us from it, dulling or, in fact, blocking our memory of it. As Dawson & Allenby further point out, at the same time, ‘another part of us relives it over and over again, below the threshold of awareness, so it is as if the trauma has never really ended for us’ (p. 41). In relation to childhood trauma, Mollon writes thus:

The fragmentation into parts seems to be a typical reaction to severe interpersonal trauma, where no escape or soothing from trusted caregivers is available. It is somewhat analogous to the way that an injured sea vessel may be protected by sequestering and sealing off an area which has been holed. The ‘part’ experiencing the trauma will be sacrificed in order to enable the rest of the system to continue its life and development. This means that the part containing the trauma does not participate in the main development of the rest of the system. That child part may then continue to believe the trauma continues. It is trapped in the trauma and frozen in time (pp. 207-8).

The ECHO is precisely the ‘trapped’ or ‘frozen’ trauma that has split off from conscious awareness; ECHOs are dissociated energetic parts that are not located in our brains but in our local ‘fields’. Their role is quintessentially strategic in protecting us from overwhelming emotional distress and pain. Dawson’s theorised location of such dissociated parts as outside our bodies is radical. He suggests that when we tune into the energy of the original memory, we tune into the ECHO in the field and this brings the original energy of the memory back into our body.

As Dawson and Allenby put it:

These ECHOs are like parts of us frozen in time. They have their own personalities based on how we were at the time of the traumatic event… Our ECHOs hold on to the trauma to protect us from it, but they can only do so for so long, as it takes a lot of energy for them to hold it at bay. This is one of the reasons why a lot of trauma, left unresolved, leads to disease. And you may notice that as people get older, if they have unresolved trauma they become more and more affected by it (pp. 42-43, my emphasis).

It thus unsurprising that through extensive self-work using MR in particular, I no longer suffer from chronic back pain, eczema and chronic asthma. Furthermore, however, they write that MR not only changes

your relationship to the event, it also changes your point of attraction. Remember the Law of Attraction: what you focus on is what you attract? If you have lots of traumatized ECHOs in your field, you will keep attracting more of the same, however hard you try to be positive. So, when you release the energy around the ECHOs, you will start attracting something different as well (p. 43).

We do need to be clearer about reference to the Law of Attraction here, particularly given the furore surrounding the publication of The Secret [4]. It needs to be emphasised that ‘attracting more of the same’, as they put it, is subconscious and thus, as they rightly point out, being positive, as discussed in Part One, does not result in direct positive change. Moreover, it needs to be made clear that people who engage in self-destructive repetitive behaviour are not consciously focusing on what they ultimately ‘attract’. Here I would like to underscore the subconscious compulsion to repeat trauma. As Dr van Der Kolk puts it:

Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma. These behavioural re-enactments are rarely consciously understood to be related to earlier life experiences. This “repetition compulsion” has received surprisingly little systematic exploration during the 70 years since its discovery, though it is regularly described in the clinical literature (1989, p. 389).

Indeed, it was Freud who noted that individuals who do not remember past traumatic events (ECHOs) are ‘obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience…’ (cited in Levy, 1998, p. 227). Thus, as Michael Levy rightly notes, while re-enactments ‘often appear to be consciously chosen, they have a quality of involuntariness’ (1998, p. 228). So, while we may think we are in charge of our own decision-making and choices, as we found in my last blog (Part One), this is fundamentally not the case: our subconscious is in the driving seat, not our conscious mind.

Matrix Reimprinting provides a unique and revolutionary therapeutic process to access our ECHOs, those dissociated ‘live’ emotionally-charged and belief-encoded memories that lie beneath our conscious awareness, which, once healed, ineluctably enables us to lead a fundamentally more positive and fulfilling life. Now, again for obvious reasons of space here, I cannot elucidate in detail the dynamics of MR healing. However, there are two things I would to say before giving my own example.

Firstly, when all the stress and trauma of an event or incident has been released, it is essential to ‘rewrite’ or ‘reprogram’ in order to effect permanent positive change. This is done by working with the ECHOs that have been holding the trauma for us since the moment that picture or image was created. The outcome of the memory is changed by

bringing in new resources, inviting someone else in for support or saying or doing what wasn’t said or done at the time. We can also prepare the ECHO for what is about to happen. This is not denying what happened, it is simply changing the old picture to affect well-being in the present. Neither is it planting memories. It is just replacing negative memories with positive ones. From a quantum physics point of view we have endless possible pasts and futures. So it is like tapping into a different past while still acknowledging the lessons learned from what we have been through (Dawson and Allenby 2010, p. 76).

Secondly, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that beliefs and emotions have parity of importance [5]. I say this for two reasons. (1) At the end of their book, Lipton and Bhaerman (2011), for instance, provide a list of ‘belief change modalities’ to facilitate ‘the rewriting of disempowering, limiting, and self-sabotaging beliefs in the subconscious mind’ (my emphasis). (2) Equally, Karl Dawson’s latest book (co-authored with Kate Marillat) is titled ‘Transform Your Beliefs, Transform Your Life’. I am a little concerned about the specific focus on beliefs in the latest MR title. Without question, false beliefs need ‘rewriting’ but so do the emotionally-charged events that surrounded them. Indeed, long-term life-depleting and hugely debilitating emotions such as shame, guilt and rage may require fundamentally more MR work than belief-change.

A personal example: rewriting a traumatic event with my dad

As with many of my initial MR sessions, I would arrive at my therapist’s practice feeling inexplicably angry. During the start of one MR session (around 2009), I remembered, with vivid clarity, an event that took place in 2002. As I found with most of my ECHOs that surfaced during MR, it was as if the event or events had taken place yesterday. This is a recurrent theme of MR and underscores the fact that our ECHOs are located outside the temporality of our conscious minds and thus adds palpable credence to the oft-remarked point that ECHOs or dissociated parts are ‘frozen’ in time. My MR practitioner, Wendy, got me to describe what was happening in the image. Basically, it was a very sunny May or June early Friday morning. My dad had reluctantly offered to take me to Bath Spa train station so I could get to Keele University (where I was a visiting Lecturer) for my afternoon seminar. I knew the instant we were up that he was angry about driving me (despite the fact I had offered to book a taxi the evening before).

As we approached the bridge adjacent to Sainsbury’s (Green Park), there was no traffic; only a significant number of pigeons in the road. Well, you can probably imagine what happened next. I don’t know how many pigeons my dad killed that morning, but what the MR session brought up was how I had dissociated immense horror and sadness at what he had done. When working with my ECHO, Wendy asked me (in the image/memory) to ask my dad to pull over by the kerb. I was surprised at this request and immediately went ‘into my head’, as it were, and told Wendy that my dad didn’t pull over and that, in fact, we said nothing until I said good-bye at the train station. Despite this, Wendy asked me to see what might happen, and so I re-connected with my ECHO and, to my astonishment, my dad obliged and parked by the kerb! Incredible.

I couldn’t believe what happened next. In the image, he told me, among other things, that he knew my mum (his wife) and his mum didn’t love him and burst into tears (I only ever recall my dad crying twice) and we both hugged. Both my ECHO and I sobbed during this session. I was able to release the stress, tension and anger at what he had done both to me and to the pigeons. My dad apologised and I forgave him. This is what we mean by ‘rewriting’ trauma in MR. I remember (consciously) what happened some 12 years’ ago and through MR healed and re-wrote that Friday morning event.

Radical forgiveness: the final ingredient and a note of caution

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As well as healing the event, the MR session afforded me the opportunity to forgive my dad. Healing and forgiveness are inseparable. As Dawson and Allenby point out, MR often leads to ‘a place of forgiveness, particularly of the perpetrator of the traumatic experience’ (p. 80). They also add that forgiveness is not to be forced or feigned and often in traditional therapeutic practices where a client will say they have forgiven their perpetrator consciously, they will not have done so subconsciously. I couldn’t agree more, and have myself experienced just how long and often very painful the process of forgiveness (of others and oneself) actually is. Indeed, during psychic-led MR sessions, I found it the case for most clients that they had not forgiven their wrong-doers, despite consciously arguing to the contrary.

The need for radical forgiveness

I often see, on Twitter especially, two quotes in particular: ‘Forgiveness is not something we do for others. We do it for ourselves’ and ‘Forgiveness does not change the past but it can enlarge the future’. Firstly, radical forgiveness, as Colin Tipping (2002, 2011) calls it, is fundamentally about those who have hurt us and loving them unconditionally as well as ourselves in the process of forgiveness. Secondly, MR-based forgiveness does indeed change the past so that we can heal and love unconditionally in the present. Now, underpinning Tipping’s Radical Forgiveness is (a) we have bodies that die but souls that transcend death; (b) while our bodies and senses tell us we are separate individuals, we are all one; (c) we are not human beings have a spiritual experience; rather, the reverse is the case: we are spiritual beings having a human experience. For Tipping, in traditional forgiveness the willingness to forgive is present but so is the residual need to condemn, which means that victim consciousness [6] remains and nothing changes. While in radical forgiveness, victim consciousness is dropped and so everything changes.

In fact, for Tipping:

Radical forgiveness begins with the belief that nothing wrong happened, and there are no victims in any situation (p. 53, original emphasis).

This seems somewhat counter-intuitive and you may well indeed ask which planet Tipping is on. Well, I came across Tipping’s work after I had started my own process of forgiving and so the above quote made sense to me in the context of having received PA and subsequently MR, since it was at this point that I realised that I had been profoundly hurt precisely because the people who hurt me had themselves been so deeply and profoundly wounded. Let me be clear: this was not an intellectual process but one that involved the release of repressed and dissociated rage, anger, shame and hatred over a relatively long period of time. In other words, I had to feel the full extent of my victimhood, which meant accepting many deeply painful truths I had been avoiding (though both repression, denial and dissociation) before being able to forgive with my own heart. As Tipping rightly notes in this regard, ‘only love has the ability to transform energies like child abuse, corporate greed, murder and all other so-called evils of the world’ (p. 122, my emphasis).

In fact, my healing using both PA and MR has shown me just how the people who hurt us are those who teach us the most important lesson of all: how to love and only when we are ready. I had no idea that I had known my mum in previous life-times and that her behaviour was pre-agreed. But that’s the point of not-knowing, since we wouldn’t learn if we were consciously aware at the outset of our souls’ agreements. It was only through forgiving that I came to Tipping’s paradoxical end-point of knowing there was nothing to forgive. Essentially, then, radical forgiveness, as Tipping readily acknowledges, is ‘less of a therapy and more of a process of education… Radical forgiveness is a spiritual philosophy that has practical application to peoples’ lives insofar as it gives them a spiritual perspective that they can apply, in the manner of self-help, to whatever problem or situation that they are dealing with’ (p. 71, my emphasis).

The note of caution

The latter quote is incipient of a real tension, since spiritual philosophy put into practice in the manner of self-help, as Tipping puts it, is almost tantamount to therapy. In fact, my 2002 copy of Radical Forgiveness is Tipping’s second edition, in which he writes thus:

As I write this second edition, I confess that the extent to which the tools in this book have proven effective more than surprises me. I find myself in awe of how extraordinarily powerful they have proven to be in helping people heal their lives. […] Thousands of people have used the worksheet or listened to the 13 Steps CD or walked the circle in the Radical Forgiveness Ceremony and have experienced in their lives (2002, pp. 187-188).

Whether the worksheets and CD (both of which I have found beneficial when combined with PA and MR) constitute therapeutic intervention isn’t the salient issue here, since on their own they are, regrettably, intrinsically inadequate. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise given Tipping’s emphasis on coaching at the expense of therapy. However, the following quote (in the context of finances) from his 2011 book Radical Self-Forgiveness underscores the serious and, frankly, dangerous flaw in his work:

The answer to this problem lies not in trying to reprogram the subconscious mind (which is almost impossible anyway) or in making overtures to our saboteur self, but in using our Spiritual Intelligence to sidestep the subconscious mind altogether. We can accomplish this by using the Radical Self-Forgiveness process (2011, p. 229, my emphasis).

Firstly, you can’t side-step your subconscious mind and, secondly, you can heal it. Tipping then goes on to proffer the writing of three Radical Forgiveness letters to effect the required change. This is a recipe for disaster, which is a real pity given Tipping’s superb explanation of true forgiveness, embedded in our spiritual growth towards unconditional love.

However, I want to quote Lipton and Bhaerman, since their words on forgiveness nicely complement Radical Forgiveness, since no-one is to blame:

Once we realize that our past behaviours were predicated on the invisible operation of the subconscious mind, we afford ourselves the opportunity to forgive ourselves. It helps us to know that our invisible behaviours derived from the beliefs of other people, who, in turn, were programmed by others, backward through time…. Neither our parents nor their parents were aware they were acting out a pre-written script. In this regard, it is important to remember that all the people with whom we have ever interacted were also engaging in invisible behaviours derived from programs downloaded into their infant subconscious minds. Consequently, they, too, were unaware of how their invisible participation and contributions impacted our lives (2001, p. 41).

While I would add matters are a little more nuanced ontologically speaking, the essence of their commentary is clear enough.

Locating the echo: the potential role of the psychic medium in Matrix Reimprinting

Before I left my teaching career, I used to provide readings at Psychic Fayres mainly in Dorset during my school holidays. At the same time, I set up a website (no longer in use) www.psychic-healing.co.uk. My aim here was to provide psychic readings and offer EFT. I had two principal reasons for doing this. Firstly, at the time I was incredibly enthusiastic about Matrix Reimprinting (using EFT) and experienced first-hand its amazing healing potential. Secondly, I found that during my psychic readings, information about clients’ repressed and dissociated memories and emotions would be provided by my guide. (Please note that it was not always appropriate for me to divulge all information received, especially in regards to dissociated memories of abuse.)

The receipt of such information is remarkably time-efficient and always specific to the client’s current emotional capacity for healing. As we saw in Part One, a client had forgotten that he had repressed anger that his father was absent when one of his children almost died. This specific event had not been healed. Equally, for example, I had a female client come for a reading during which she expressed her worry about failing her Criminology degree. I received psychic information that her fear was connected to an event with her father during her early teens. She agreed to return for an EFT session during which I was guided to ask the client to see if she could connect with herself as a teenager. In the event, she was able to heal an ECHO that arose during an altercation between herself and her father at the bottom of the stairs in their home. It was during this altercation that her father berated his daughter for being stupid. This false accusation led to false subconscious belief-acquisition, which was re-written during the MR session.

Finally, and crucially, I found that many of my clients’ SUDS (specific unit of distress), did not match what I was hearing psychically [7]. Often, when such clients started the MR process, their level of anger, for example, was substantially higher. Furthermore, ECHOs themselves are not always aware of how sad, angry or devastated they are, which requires considerable skilful work. I have to say this does concern me since not all MR practitioners are psychic and thus may not realise, along with their clients, that key events and emotions have not been fully healed. Consequently, if anything, this means that practitioners should always aim to follow their innate intuition and work strategically with clients whom they feel have not fully processed painful events and memories. It also means that psychics can play such a strategic in providing information regarding the actual extent of healing achieved.

Notes

[1] For me, PA was the most effective of all the therapies I tried but, unlike Matrix Reimprinting (MR), it is somewhat slower and does not engage with the substantive rewriting of past traumatic memories and beliefs.
[2] I would strongly recommend reading John Sarno (2008) The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mind-Body Disorders Gerald Duckworth & Co.
[3] In talking about her medical training during the 1980s, Dr Marlene Steinberg writes:
At that time dissociation – by which I mean a state of fragmented consciousness involving amnesia, a sense of unreality, and feelings of being disconnected from oneself or one’s environment – was a relatively new concept… We had yet to establish that dissociation, as part of our standard response to trauma, is a near-universal reaction to a life-threatening event and that mild or moderate experiences of dissociation are as common in otherwise normal people as anxiety and depression (2001, p. vii).

Indeed, the timing of the (still-growing) acknowledgement of the importance of dissociation and the development of MR is stunning. It was only in 2011 that Dissociation in Traumatized Children and Adolescents was published. Equally, Abby Stein’s remarkable Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation and Crime was published in 2007. In accounting for repetitive self- and other-oriented destructive behaviours, it is well worth reading van Der Kolk’s article ‘The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma’. Essentially, dissociated (subconscious) ‘parts’ cause ostensibly consciously-chosen destructive behaviour as a result of the fact that such parts remain unintegrated, unprocessed and thus unhealed. Fortunately, this article can be downloaded for free: http://www.traumacenter.org/products/pdf_files/Compulsion_to_Repeat.pdf
[4] For example: http://www.thomrutledge.com/secretantidote/pdf/PressRel_Antidote_4.pdf
[5] As Dr Mary Lamia rightly argues, ‘our present beliefs are governed by past experiences that are linked to unconscious emotional memories’.
[6] Victim consciousness is defined as ‘the conviction that someone else has done something to you, and as a direct result, they are responsible for the lack of peace and happiness in your life’ (2002, p. 45). I recommend reading chapter 3 on what is not forgiveness and examples of pseudo-forgiveness.
[7] To quote Dawson and Allenby, ‘Given the symptom or issue that you are dealing with a number out of ten for its intensity in the present moment, zero being ‘not a problem’ and ten ‘as intense as it gets’. This is known as the SUDS level (subjective unit of discomfort)’ (p. 55). Interestingly, Dawson and Marillat (2014, pp. 78-79) refer to the SUE scale developed by Silvia Hartmann, which is used to highlight what else might need releasing in the ECHO. Firstly, I have found SUDS sufficient when working specifically with the ECHO, but, secondly, what the ECHO reports is not necessarily accurate and bringing in other people doesn’t always help. Indeed, without psychic guidance, I would not have known, along with the ECHO, about remaining fear, shame, rage and hatred.

Bibliography

Gary Craig (2008) EFT FOR PTSD Energy Psychology Press
Karl Dawson and Sasha Allenby (2010) Matrix Reimprinting using EFT: Rewrite your past, transform your future London: Hay House
Karl Dawson and Kate Marillat (2014) Transform Your Beliefs, Transform Your Life: EFT Tapping Using Matrix Reimprinting London: Hay House
Lynn Mary Karjala (2007) Understanding Trauma and Dissociation Atlanta: ThomasMax Publishing
Bessel A. van der Kolk (1989) The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma: Re-enactment, Revictimization and Masochism, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 389-411.
Mary Lamia Feeling Is Believing https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/intense-emotions-and-strong-feelings/201210/feeling-is-believing
Michael Levy (1998) A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments, The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, Vol. 7, pp. 227-235.
Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman (2011) Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a way to get there from here) London: Hay House
Phil Mollon (2008) Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy, London: Karnac Books
Aminah Raheem (1990) Soul Return: Integrating Body, Psyche and Spirit Aslan Publishing
John Sarno (2008) The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mind-Body Disorders Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Abby Stein (2007) Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation and Crime London & New Jersey: The Analytic Press
Marlene Steinberg (2001) The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation – The Hidden Epidemic Harper Collins
Sandra Wieland (ed) (2011) Dissociation in Traumatized Children and Adolescents London: Routledge
Colin Tipping (2002) Radical Forgiveness: Making Room for the Miracle Global 13 Publications
Colin Tipping (2011) Radical Self-Forgiveness: The Direct Path to True Self-Acceptance Sounds True, Inc.

Links

http://www.soullightening.com/process-acupressure/
http://www.marylamia.com
http://strangerinthemirror.com/
http://www.matrixreimprinting.com/
http://www.efttrainingcourses.net/
http://www.radicalforgiveness.com/
http://www.karjala.com/
http://www.traumacenter.org/about/about_bessel.php
http://www.katemarillat.com/
http://www.emofree.com
http://www.thomrutledge.com
http://johnesarnomd.com/
http://www.tappingthematrix.com

© 2015 Rob Willmott


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