Tragedy results from leading a ceremony without spiritual protection

We have been following the news very carefully to try to piece together what actually happened in James Arthur Ray’s sweat lodge tragedy in Arizona last month. We have also been in discussions with Adam Yellow-Bird and other Natives who are concerned about what happened. Apparently this man had never been authorized to lead or run vision quests and/or sweat lodges. He did not follow the Native traditions, did not have the proper “spiritual protection” and was completely out of integrity because he used it as a for profit experience.

We feel very blessed that we have always had Native Americans lead our Vision Quests who taught our students to make prayer ties, who put them in their “spaces” in the traditional way with abundant protection, who taught us about true support for the questers and how important that is during the entire process, and who blessed the entire Vision Quest.

So in conclusion, I want to say that we are praying for the families of the people who committed their lives so that the rest of us could learn a very powerful lesson. Natives all across the world are meeting and coming up with statements about the true use of Native spiritual rituals. This has been a very important time for many of them to come together and speak out about the proper use and the misuse of what they have brought to our planet.

Lots of love, Diane and David

Working with abused women and children

Hello Dear Teachers, sisters and brothers,

This is a celebration e-mail.  I want to share with you that magic seems to be happening with the mothers I do therapy with (victims as children and adults in life situations), referrals form Child Abuse Hot line phone calls.  Our energy is spreading.

Diane, I have not started doing group therapy yet, however, in individual therapy I have been handing out your book, “Breaking Free form the Victim Trap”.  These women really relate and like your writing . . . saying, “this is real life”.  I was amazed last week at the dedication to self-liberation and the inspiration I saw in these women.  I am using the tools we learned without doing inductions (having eyes closed and looking within).  For example, what are you feeling?, where do you feel this in your body?, what does it look like (elementals appearing), bringing in angles, God, if appropriate for that person, to help with clearing the energy out, retrieving soul pieces when appropriate, expressing feelings, what decisions did you make about yourself?  how did you decide to behave?, making new decisions, writing out affirmations for homework (mom sharing this with her daughter for daughter to write affirmations for herself).  I am working with ‘forced’ clients……so they keep their children….and they are deciding they like therapy and are engaging for their life, not just to comply with their case plan.  This is so GREAT! 

 THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU! THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!

I LOVE YOU!

SMILES,

Sue

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Dear Sue,

I am so inspired by your email!  During my younger years, I helped establish safe-homes for abused women and children, established a sexual abuse network to work with the children and families and much more. So I know the pain and dysfunction that comes with physical, emotional and sexual abuse. And I experienced how difficult it is to treat these families.

Your words really touch my heart.  I feel so happy that my book and this work can reach those women. I’m so glad that they have access to some healing for themselves and their families through YOU!  I wish I had some of these tools thirty years ago when there was so little to offer them. I like how you are using the Heart-Centered therapy without a ”formal induction” and yet receiving powerful results. These are the families that drove me to discover something more powerful to treat the deep wounds that are passed on from generation to generation of abuse.

Thank you so much for sharing your inspirational work.  When you take the next level of training (PTI Leadership) you will be able to facilitate the PTI groups with them as you receive the skills.  The groups are so powerful because the participants realize that they are not alone in their pain and shame.  Having others witness their stories is so powerful and healing. And they can support each other to move out of the victim trap and into their power.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

I would like to share this on our blog, if that is ok with you.

Love,

Diane

My 40 year-old client’s wise adult is 15

Dear Diane,

I have a question about the adult ego. I have a 40 year-old client that identifies her strong/wise adult with a child age, usually 15 year-old. When I used the script of assimilating a strong adult she said “I don’t know any.” She was able to identify the 15 year-old as able to ask for help, make decisions, able to be confident, but I was unsure if it was appropriate to use that in the adult strengthening given her history of being a parentified child. This patient in the past has also identified a wise adult aged in her 80’s, 90’s, or 100’s, but never an age that is reflective of her current age of 40. I am needing direction in this type of situation.

Thank you for not only this email, but truly, I am so grateful for my experience at Wellness and the path that it has opened me up to in my personal life.
 
Respectfully,
Jannette Eldred
Internship 40 

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Dear Janette,

Thank you for your kind words regarding your work with Wellness.

It is important for the client to eventually be able to experience a strong adult ego state. But for this and many clients, this is the essence of their work! 

Because she was the parentified child, it is understandable that she had no role model of a strong, successful, adequate adult in her life. She sounds like the adult child of alcoholics, who never were children because of needing to take care of the parents and then as adults, become like little children because their emotional growth has been stunted.

So even though we try to get an adult ego state at the beginning, we often have to do the work of the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy first. Be patient and realize that as you do the inner child work, your client is learning to become the loving nurturing parent within. This nurturing parent within will continue to grow like a little flower at first, which later on will bloom tall, bright and strong.

So it would be good to start with the fifteen-year-old that has stepped forward. Rather than just working with her in the adult ego strengthening portion of the process, get your client to go back to the time when this 15 year-old had to be “the adult.” Doing the regular regression work with the “adult child” will help you understand why the words strong and wise don’t work for her. But it will also give the 15 year-old a chance to express herself, gain compassion for herself, and begin to “grow up.”  Then have an inner birthday party for her and have her become 16, then 18, etc.  Proceed that way until her wise adult is near the age of 40. This is a method for working with developmentally arrested ego parts and helping them to internally mature.

You can explain to her ahead of time that this is what you will be working on together as part of her therapy goals. She may have dreams about this and may experience this young girl actually maturing within her. Again, there is no rush and it may take a year depending on how much abuse, neglect, and shock she experienced as a child.

Let me know how this works and any other questions you have. I will be putting your question and my answer in my Blog as I think other people would be interested in this as well.

 Sincerely,

Diane Zimberoff, LMFT

Blessings in Disguise

When I returned from India in 1980, I went to live in a rural community in Washington state to reunite with my daughter and to find my new path. However, at that time I also needed a steady income just to pay the bills. I found work as a Child Therapist at the Mental Health Center, which was considered something I could count on as far as employment. During that time, I established myself in the mental health community and gained respect for my therapeutic skills. Suddenly, after being there for approximately one year, President Reagan said the economy required huge cuts and so began “Reaganomics” – a slang term for slashing most of the mental health budgets around the country. I was laid off, along with many of my colleagues. We were all in shock!!

However, David and I had also been practicing Master Mind groups and learning the power of getting clear, very clear about what we wanted. We made a Vision Board and placed on there pictures of having a Healing Center in the mountains where people could come to stay and to do their professional as well as personal growth work. We created our mission statement of “Teaching the Teachers and Healing the Healers.” In my new book, Longing for Belonging, I discuss the process of this transformation in depth. It is now our reality and deeply fulfilling to both of us as well as to our thousands of students from all over the country and many parts of the world.

Today, some people, especially those working in agencies that may be cutting their budgets, may be experiencing something similar to my 1980s experience of fear of loss of security. However, most of our Heart-Centered Therapists who are in private practice say that their practices are filled to overflowing right now. People are anxious, wanting to chart a new course in their lives, and are seeking therapy.

The Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy is a perfect tool to help people get clear about what they really want in their lives. Now is the time to create your own business, to start your private practice or to take the risk that you were afraid to take when you had steady employment.

One example is a young woman who has had a steady job at a Tech company for 18 years. She had great security, the best benefits and an important position. On the other hand she was not spiritually fulfilled and has been very attracted to Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy, first as a client, then as a PTI group member, and then as a Six-Day student (audit). She wanted to be involved in this work in every way that she could. She realized that her job, was just that: a job! But her heart and soul was attracted to the personal transformation work that we do here at Wellness. So after completing every one of our programs that she could, she then began asking to assist. She assisted every PTI group that she could and was thinking about going back to school at night to get her MA in counseling. Suddenly, due to the economy, she was laid off and was told to start looking for a new job. 

She went into shock about being laid off from her secure job. She told me that now as she looks back, she would have never been able to leave that job on her own. Giving up personal security is a very difficult thing to do. So, now she is at a major crossroads in her life; sometimes referred to as Mid-Life Crisis, I call it Mid-Life Transformation. Being at this crossroads can be a huge opportunity to reach out for that new path that feeds your soul, a blessing in disguise as they say. Or it can be a way to desperately grasp on to what has always been familiar, safe and boring. It reminds me of the classic Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman. Willie Loman didn’t die physically, it was his spirit that died by doing something that he didn’t have the courage to change.

There is another opportunity in the current financial situation: to discover what we were really wanting to accomplish with all the materialism that consumed so many over these recent years. By historical standards, the average American is rich beyond measure. Our homes have ballooned in size and our cup of coffee has quadrupled in price. How has that worked out for us? The disturbing trend was documented by psychologist Tim Kasser in his 2002 book, The High Price of Materialism. Kasser’s conclusion was decisive: the more you believe happiness comes from material wealth, the more likely you are to be depressed, distressed, and anxious—and the less actual well-being you’re likely to experience. There is a fascinating article about our devotion to materialism in the March/April issue of Psychotherapy Networker titled “You Can Never Get Enough of What You Don’t Really Need.”

And, of course, the current financial uncertainty is indeed a blessing in disguise if we recognize the opportunity to re-clarify our values and our priorities, and to devote our energies to what feeds our soul – that is, after all, what we were really shopping for in the first place.

Whenever there is upheaval in your world, it’s like a deck of cards being tossed up in the air. Everything is being re-shuffled and new opportunities become available to anyone who is willing to get very clear on what they want. You must get very clear on what feeds your soul. What is your passion for life? What do you want to be doing for forty or more hours per week and for the rest of your life? What did you come here to do? Do you see yourself as a paper-pusher or a healer? How can you reach your highest goals and manifest fulfillment in your life? To take a risk like this, it takes courage, clarity and a working Master Mind group. The time is right and the time is NOW! 

Lots of love, Diane

Putting out the Clarion Call

At the outset of 2009, a new year with great promise, I would like to frame the opportunities available to us as answering the call to live our destiny and fulfill our purpose.

Joseph Campbell suggested that one fundamental story underlies all inspirational myths throughout history and across cultures, the Journey of the Archetypal Hero. The hero’s journey always begins in the ordinary world, with the hero receiving a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (the call), where he or she will receive initiation. If the hero accepts the call, and it is a choice to accept or refuse, the hero must face tasks and trials, sometimes alone and sometimes with assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve great gifts of self-knowledge and new powers. The hero must then return to the ordinary world with these gifts, often facing challenges on the return journey, and use them to improve the world. The hero, now returned to the community, issues the call to others who themselves yearn for a journey of their own.

This is what we do, energetically, when we invite people to participate with us. There are times when we put out the call to attract people for a class, or a project, or a therapy group. This process begins with an idea or a creative moment. Many people have lots of different ideas about what they would like to manifest in the world. At times we may think, “I’d like to teach this class or write this book or accomplish this task.” So what is the difference between the millions of thoughts, dreams and hopes that humans have everyday and the idea of “putting out the call?”

When we put out the call, our soul knows that what we are asking for is really going to happen. There are no doubts, no thoughts of unworthiness and no ego. The call comes from a place inside of us that “knows” that there are souls out there waiting to be called. We know that there are souls that are yearning to re-connect and to “come home.” We know, with all of our being, that these souls will answer the call. There is no fear inside of the one who issues the call, only clarity. The clarity is knowing that we are on the right path and that this is a spiritual path. The clarity is trusting that those who are ready to respond to the call, will hear it. Clarity is knowing that those who are ready to respond to the call will be in the right place at the right time. The one who calls knows that the Universe is always working perfectly and that all needs/yearnings will attract the correct fulfillment.

The stronger the yearning is in someone, the quicker they will respond to the call. They will search through books, classes and the internet to find the fulfillment of their yearning. The internet is a great tool for searching since computer users are in their subconscious mind, in a trance state induced through eye-fixation. The subconscious mind is able to attract what is needed because it can read clues. There are certain words, pictures and feelings that are energetically emitted through a website. Most people can read energy even though this reading is not done on a conscious level. Often times there is instant recognition through a picture of someone who has previously been our teacher and who may be calling us back. Or the call may come through a dream. Messages in dreams are often loud and clear. They may come through words, clear pictures or a vibrant image that carries a clear message. The call is often sent out so clearly by the teacher that the student cannot miss it; by the healer that the client is attracted like a magnet.

Now you may wonder why the teacher or healer puts out the call. They often become clear about their purpose on the earth, sometimes very early in their lives. It is part of their own spiritual development to learn what they must teach or how they must heal, and how to reach those who need them. When they are ready, they put out their message, and it is often very serendipitous how the correct people are attracted to them at exactly the correct time for things to fall into place. At this point, the teacher or healer is humble yet free of unworthiness, heart-centered and emitting lovingkindness. How can it fail that those who yearn and seek come together with the one who has put out such a clarion call. This is the unspoken half of the equation, “Seek and you shall find.” That is to say, “Offer, and those who seek will find you.”

Love, Diane

Complex PTSD and Body Memories

From: Cornelia Swart, Silverton, South Africa
Sent: December 04, 2008

I have a patient who suffered sexual abuse at the age of 9. I started with the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy and when I took her back to the most recent time she felt angry (presenting problem at work). She described the incident but was unable to release the emotion. She said she felt extremely nauseous and even though I encouraged her to express the anger, she was unable to, saying she feels extremely nauseous. She was very anxious about the hypnotherapy and I know that the anxiety might have contributed to the activation of her sympathetic nervous system. I was actually wondering whether this could maybe also be somatic memories of the oral sex she was forced to perform. I took her back to her safe place immediately and terminated the hypnotherapy.

 

My question is on the following paragraph from your article:

 

Also when clients have complex PTSD, the shock must be treated before you can do the release work with them. They need to feel safe, to trust and to learn how to titrate or slowly reduce the amount of stored-up shock in the client’s system.

 

How do I deal with the shock and how do you facilitate the above mentioned process? Your comments will be greatly appreciated.

 

Dear Cornelia,

Thank you for your sincere question. This is a very complex issue and can not be “taught” except in an experiential class. Fortunately, Dr. Yvonne Christman will be teaching a class on “Shock and Trauma” next year when she travels to South Africa. Also Reyhana Seedat and Eleanor Bubb are teaching the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy Advanced course in Johannesburg in which the treatment of shock and trauma is addressed.

 

1) Yes, the nausea is a very common symptom of oral sexual abuse. In these cases, we often tell the person that we will have a cold wash cloth, tissues, drinking water and a plastic-lined waste-basket if they need to regurgitate. You must make them feel comfortable to do that if they need to. It is actually a very natural way for them to release the feelings of disgust that they have been carrying around inside of them. In the hypnotherapy if someone is nauseous, we place their hand on the basket so that they can feel free to “get rid” of whatever has been forced into their mouth. There is no need to feel ashamed of this natural bodily reaction to the horror of a child being forced to have oral sex with a grown man! We may have them yelling at the abuser, “you make me sick” which is giving a voice to the nausea and what it signifies.

You must first address the nausea before the client will be able to release the anger. Once she releases the nausea, then you must ask what she is feeling next.

2) To treat the shock, you may ask her a) what she needs to feel safe. Perhaps a drink of water, a warm Bellie Buddy (which we heat for 2 minutes in a microwave oven) or a cool ice pack to place on her forehead or the back of her neck. Take your time and don’t rush the client. Sometimes all you can do is to provide safety so that the client may feel safer during the next session. Treating shock is an ongoing process with most clients.

3) As she begins to feel safer, you can ask if she is ready to release more feelings, perhaps by yelling into the pillow at the abuser. If she is reluctant to use the energy release hose, ask her what her reluctance is. For sexual abuse clients, it may feel like a phallus. It is good to have a few inexpensive tennis rackets available to use instead of the hose at the beginning.

 

4) If they are afraid of the hose, do an age regression to go back to what that reminds them of (not necessarily in the same session). That will often bring up another sexual abuse memory.

I hope this helps. Love, Diane

Treating Shock and Intrusive Memories in PTSD

One way to work with a client on intrusive traumatic memories is as follows:

“I am going to teach you a technique so that you can turn down intrusive memories when you want to.”

First, hypnotize your client using a standard induction. Now give the client the throttle (a joy stick or something similar to it). Place it in her hand so she has a kinesthetic experience of it. Practice with her to slowly move it to the right, paired with the suggestion that the intrusive thoughts or pictures diminish in size, vividness, and impact. Work with your client to increase somatic and emotional relaxation until this turns down the client’s negative experience. Then slowly move it back to the center, with the suggestion that it will again come into focus. Then move it to the left with the suggestion that it will become larger and more vivid, and it will get bigger. “Now slowly turn the throttle back to the center and see it getting smaller and then to the right until it completely disappears.” Keep practicing this until the client has control of the intrusive memories at will.

Tell your client that we are doing this to help her feel safer. This helps the client to learn how to regulate and treat her own traumatic shock, in her life outside your office. Here are some other suggestions:

1)      ask what she needs for her to feel safe;

2)      offer her a “Belly Buddy” (warmth) or an ice pack (cold), and/or a sip of water;

3)      tell her that in the future, after she has practiced using the throttle technique to regulate intrusive memories, you will facilitate a hypnotherapy session for her to go back to the traumatic event and change it to a corrective empowering experience (for example, she can successfully run away from the danger, or fight off the attacker, or allow the accident to end with a different outcome; she can experience self-forgiveness to replace any self-blame she may be carrying; she may be able to ask her spiritual connection for an understanding of how her reaction to the trauma can be made into something positive and healing). This is the powerful healing work, of course, providing a corrective experience for the person regressed to the ego state that suffered the original trauma. The throttle technique is only a management tool.

 

This is in response to the following question, which was sent to me recently:

“This is a question regarding a client of mine and hopefully you may be able to give me some insight about ways to assist her in her healing process. 

She is about 46 years old and has suffered severe torture at the hands of some family members and an old boyfriend. I have been seeing her for approximately 9 months. She gets at least 2 to 3 flashbacks a day about the abuse. When I work with her she expresses a need to know what happened so I allow her view the memory for a time and then get her safe. She has difficulty staying in that safe place. She identifies that either that same memory or another one continues to pull her there. She has a tremendous amount of safe people we can pull in, but she identifies that it won’t last. She has been able to tell me that she fears staying in the safe places because she believes that she deserves this treatment and it won’t last anyway. Right now, there is no affect with the memories, but she has tremendous body memories so her body moves a lot during the sessions.

Here is what I have been doing with her: when she is able to get to safe places, I do a soul retrieval, but often she has difficulty staying with it. I reinforce her need to be safe. She is unable to get any of the toxic energy off her so I usually do it for her. I know she has come a long way in the 9 months that I have been working with her, but I want to make sure that I am not missing something else that I might be able to do to help her. If you need more information than what I am supplying you with please feel free to call me.

Thank you for any help you can give me.”

Vision Quest

We have twenty people going out on a Vision Quest near Sedona, Arizona from October 3 through 7.  They are committed to spend four days and nights alone in the desert with no food or water or any of the distractions we usually use to avoid what is sometimes called the “dark night of the soul.” The vision quest is a traditional initiation ceremony brought to the Lakota Souix people, and will be lead by Adam Yellow Bird. There will be another twenty people camped by the fire in support of these adventurers. You can support them as well by holding each one as courageous, strong, well-prepared, and fully conscious. Thank you for your good thoughts.

Complex PTSD

I have recently had two people who have told me that they did the Six-Day certification training and went home to begin using the hypnotherapy with their clients. One question that comes up is who should I use the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy with? And what about people who don’t want to go so deep or who are really afraid of their deeper feelings? My response is this:

1) It is important to understand that some people are ready to go deep and want to move through their healing process faster than others. Each person has their own rate of healing.  

2) People that have a lot of shock due to the abuse and trauma they experienced in their childhood may not be ready to do anger release work.

3) In our Internship program, we are teaching students how to recognize shock and how to differentiate it from trauma. Some of the release work that we do which empowers trauma victims, will only put shock victims deeper into dissociation. This is one reason why joining the Internship is so important after completing the Six-Day Training. 

Because shock is a very complex experience, it is best treated over a period of time rather than in a weekend workshop. Also when clients have complex PTSD, the shock must be treated before you can do the release work with them. They need to feel safe, to trust and to learn how to titrate or slowly reduce the amount of stored-up shock in the client’s system.

There is going to be a new category in the next DSM called CPTSD or Complex PTSD. This is another term for what we call shock. It applies to clients or therapists who experienced any type of abuse as a child, victims of domestic violence and returning Iraqi soldiers. We must remember that shock is very contagious and therapists must heal their own before they can sit in the presence of clients in shock. Like all other issues, we can not effectively treat anything that is untreated in us.

Thoughts on Fear of becoming Violent, on Catharsis, and on Epilepsy

Thanks so much to each of you who are following this conversation. Thank you for all the suggestions and comments, and additional questions. Here are a few thoughts on topics you have raised.

Dear Wendy,

Thanks for your questions about the sexually abused woman and her new baby. It is very common, in fact predictable, that childhood sexual abuse memories and intrusive thoughts will plague people who have not fully released their sexual abuse on the very deepest levels during and after giving birth to new babies. You mentioned that you did three or four sessions with her; however, they did not sound like our typical Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy release sessions. She needs to do the deeper age regression work regardless of whether they put her on anti-depressants or not.

While people are in their Internships and PTI groups, I often hear the comment, “Oh no, not my sexual abuse again! I am so tired of that. Aren’t I finished with that issue yet?”

Sexual abuse is a very traumatic abuse of the Soul, and must continue to be healed on the deepest of levels. This fear that your client has is a perfect place to start her next session. Have her go to the most recent time she felt the fear that she would hurt or kill her baby. The baby she is afraid will be hurt is a terrified part of herself that she is projecting onto this baby.  She needs to get this from her own awareness through the Heart-Centered therapy, so don’t tell her but instead allow her to realize it through her work. In the session, when you are healing her inner child after her age regressions, have her connect with her baby (in the form of a second teddy bear), and assure both children that she will keep them safe.

It sounds to me like there is a lot more to this story than sexual abuse; perhaps she was unwanted and there was a contemplated or actual abortion attempt. The womb may have felt toxic or threatening to her. So it is great that you did the womb cleansing and the Ro-han and the discussion about hormones. They are good tools, but they do not get to the source of her terror. Also, group therapy at the hospital will not get her there. 

Again, we want to let her own subconscious mind go back to the source of the fear of killing “the baby” and resolve the conflict. So you need to do the deeper work with her and if there is a PTI group that she could attend, that would be the best! So refrain from focusing on the anti-depressants right now and just encourage her to come weekly to do this work. This baby is an opportunity for her to heal her issues on a very deep level and I hope she will take it. She is lucky she has you and all the great resources you have to offer her.

Let me know what happens.

Dear Dennis,

Thank you so much for joining in the blogosphere with us. I will speak to your first comment about your office space and releasing emotions. I have found it essential that I, as the therapist, feel completely at ease with the client’s outward expression of feelings. That includes being emotionally at ease as well as physically. I have worked in spaces where I felt like you did as far as being concerned about disturbing the neighbors, etc. I found myself becoming more and more tense about the work and that actually does inhibit the client’s expression, of course.

So it is essential that your space is conducive to full expression of sounds and emotions in order for the client to feel relaxed and to achieve the emotional catharsis so necessary to real healing. Remember resistance to anything is fear; whether it is your fear or the client’s, it still causes them to resist!

Regarding advertisement, I do feel that a separate web site for your promotion of the hypnotherapy is a very good idea. Why? Because I know this will draw people to you who are looking for what you have and then you don’t have to waste valuable “therapy time” educating them on the benefits of hypnotherapy and trying to convince them to do it.

There are more and more people worldwide who know the benefits of hypnotherapy and are out there searching for someone just like you, in Denmark or anywhere else. So setting this up on a web site will be beneficial to you as well as to the clients who are really needing help.

Good luck!

Dear Maureen,

Thank you so much for finding us in the blogosphere. I have treated one major case of epilepsy with hypnotherapy with great results. She no longer has seizures and can drive without danger. However, her epilepsy was caused from an accident during her twenties and was not from childhood.

In terms of using hypnosis with an individual diagnosed with epilepsy, one useful suggestion is to use an “active-alert” induction rather than the customary “passive-relaxation” hypnotic induction. A relaxation-based induction may exacerbate certain disturbing somatic experiences. Find a previously learned skilled activity for the client to focus on during the induction which will permit the experience of a highly focused but relaxed state conducive to therapeutic interaction. An example in the literature is the playing of the computer game Tetris (American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 44:2, October 2001). This approach to induction bears similarity to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s principle of flow, in that it involves a dissociated engagement in a subjectively meaningful, skill-based activity. The article is available on the Resources page for members of the Heart-Centered Therapies Association: search for “The Use of a Skill-Based Activity in Therapeutic Induction” by W. E. Winter. Or just click here.

There may well be physical causes of emotional symptoms. Recent studies reported depression in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (Tebartz van Elst et al., Biological Psychiatry, 46:1614-23, 1999). Epilepsy is mentioned as one source of stress that leads to dissociation (Harvard Mental Health Letter, January 2005). Bessel A. Van Der Kolk found apparent similarities between some aspects of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, PTSD, and some long term sequelae of childhood trauma (Anxiety Research, U.K., 1992, volume 4, pp. 199-212).

Let me know how your work with this client progresses.

Thank you for your interest, your comments and questions, and let’s keep the conversation going!