Look at Your Successes

1) Look back at the times last year when you were most consistently successful in maintaining a pattern of achieving the things that are really important to you.

2) Identify the factors in your experience during those times that contributed to your success. Perhaps it was special support from others like your Master Mind Group, or the motivation of deadlines, or perhaps you found a time of day or season of the year that works best for you. When the pattern becomes clear, set out to create more of that factor in your life this year. Establish little rituals to ensure that you remember these building blocks to your success: beginning or ending the day with the same routine, rewarding yourself with cherished experiences to celebrate successes, or insuring at least one good laugh every day.

Build on Your Strengths

First, you need to know what your strengths are. Too often, we focus on our weaknesses which causes us to feel shame, discouragement and low self-esteem.

1)      If one of your strengths is being extroverted, incorporate connection with others in your plan.

2)       On the other hand, if you are introverted, allow yourself the time and space you need to go within and process. Then when you are clear internally, move out to process and connect with others. Draw from your own internal strength and wisdom.

3)      If you have a strong sense of intuition, make use of this and begin to trust your inner knowing.

4)      If you tend to be more rational, left brained, use these skills to get clear on your next steps. Then find ways of structuring your pursuits that utilize your particular strengths.

Clear Plan

1)      Set no more than three goals. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much and then end up doing nothing.

2)      Set the clear steps you need to accomplish your goals

3)      Ask for support. You do not need to do it alone. This is a strength of belonging to the Wellness Network.

Gratitude. There is great power in gratitude and its ability to positively impact your psychological and physical well-being. We escape the mundane and find the sacred through thankfulness. “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world” (John Milton).

Imagination. Imagination is the nutrient-rich soil that we need to germinate new ideas with new enthusiasm. We have suggested focusing on successes and strengths, not failures and weaknesses. But there is a time to stop focusing altogether, and to allow the quiet, reflective pondering of “beginner’s mind”. When you refrain from defining too precisely what you want to manifest, your mind and the universe around you open up to previously unseen potentials. And what is delivered to your doorstep may be actually vastly more adventurous and fulfilling than anything you could have defined precisely with your own calculations.

Imagination expresses in many different ways: dreams and daydreams, symbols and metaphor, visual art and music and movement. Be receptive to the many splendid inspirations that present themselves to you every day. Be open. Imagine that!

New beginnings are an auspicious opportunity to chart a new course.

We envision the coming year 2012 to be full of opportunities for growth, healing, and selfless service for us all.

Wrap it without anyone knowing what the wrapping looks like. Then put it in a paper or plastic bag so wrapping does not show. Bring it to the give away in the plastic or paper bag so no one knows it is from you.

The gifts are placed in the center of the Circle, anonymously. When it is time to gather for the gift giving, everyone sits around all the wrapped gifts. The eldest person chooses a gift first. When the gift is chosen, the “giver” comes forward and sits next to the chooser. The chooser unwraps the gift and then the giver begins to tell the story of the gift and what it has meant to them. Then a photo of the two people and the gift is taken.

The giver now gets to choose a gift. So they now become the chooser. The new chooser now picks a gift. Then whoever’s gift that is, now comes forward to share their process of giving this gift. If it occurs that the process comes to a halt, the next oldest person comes forward to choose a gift until all the gifts are given.

If at the end the only gift left, belongs to the only person left to choose, this has significance. Ask the person to talk about their process in choosing this gift. Perhaps they had some hesitation in really letting go of this gift and so now they get to keep it.

We hope you have a wonderful December and wish you the best in 2012.

Thank you for an excellent question. I believe the three most important things included in the process of providing deep healing and release of past traumas are:

1)         The energetic somatic release of the painful emotions, which in turn releases the embedded shock and body armoring.

2)         Containment of the process and of the client’s energy. The hypnotic trance is induced, managed, and terminated all in an orderly way. We titrate the emotions through the extinguishing process. We help them to create a safe resource state with anchors that they can always return to and use. Ego strengthening is begun before the therapeutic part of the session, and continued throughout with corrective experiences of empowerment. There is an agreed upon signal to use if they wish to interrupt the process or take an intermission: “1, 2, 3, stop”.

3)      The corrective experience.  They abreact feelings bringing in the adult to express for the child what the child could not express at the time of the trauma, thus overcoming early inhibitions. Their experience is legitimized. They learn to attribute the abusive behavior to the abuser, not accepting it themselves, and to discriminate between self-identity and introjections. They reconnect memories and emotions to events, giving meaning to past events that were experienced as bewildering.

Louis Cozolino (The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, 2002,  p. 27) has a number of suggestions for how to facilitate neural integration in psychotherapy. He proposes that neural growth and integration in psychotherapy may be enhanced by:

1. The establishment of a safe and trusting relationship.
2. Gaining new information and experiences across the domains of cognition, emotion, sensation, and behavior.
3. The simultaneous or alternating activation of neural networks that are inadequately integrated or dissociated.
4. Moderate levels of stress or emotional arousal alternating with periods of calm and safety.
5. The integration of conceptual knowledge with emotional and bodily experience through narratives that are co-constructed with the therapist.

The first item speaks for itself: without feeling safe, no client is going to risk the vulnerability of working to heal trauma. The second item means that we need to address all the ways individuals process information. Some people are visual, some are auditory, some kinesthetic. In facilitating a session, we obviously don’t want to expect a non-visual person to “see” or a non-kinesthetic person to “feel”. We emphasize the narrative of experience with someone who does best with verbal language, while we utilize the physical with someone who does best with ‘hands on’ experience. Some people relate literally, others to symbolic or poetic metaphor.

The third item is crucial for effective healing. Cozolino (p. 46) states that “all forms of therapy are targeting dissociated neural networks for integration.” We engage the person as they were at the time of the trauma, which means some of their processing was not functioning properly. In a moment of trauma, the hippocampus goes offline. It is the brain structure instrumental in the synthesis of experiences which provides a conscious structure, context and a time stamp to the experience in the process of memory encoding. In traumatic states, Broca’s area, a circuit of interaction with other brain areas that plays a vital role in the production of language, located in the left hemisphere, may be inactive. So trauma resolution involves re-experiencing the trauma with corrections so that the hippocampus can understand context (that particular man, but not all men, are abusive) and time-stamp the experience (prevent a memory in the past from seeming to float in time and invading the present). We want to encourage the person to speak her truth and verbalize her feelings in order to activate the Broca’s area of her brain during a re-living of trauma. Here we are activating both the fear circuits and language circuits in ways that enable clients to reorganize their damaged neural connections.

The fourth item is commonsense, really. We all have limits to how much intensity we can tolerate, and when we have reached that limit, it is time to take a break. We ‘take a break’ by treating shock, allowing quiet time for reflection, helping the client find internal resources, nurturing the client with external resources, and attending to his overstimulation. We ‘take a break’ so that we can then return to disturbing material when affective regulation is under better control, and there is more capacity for an integrated brain response. Psychoanalyst Fred Pine calls this “striking while the iron is cold” because it delays the intervention from a moment when the conflictual issues are bubbling over and the client is not able to handle it. (Developmental Theory and Clinical Process, 1985, p. 153). The therapist must be careful, however, not to delay “striking while the iron is hot” (when the timing is right for the issue to be confronted) as a rescue of the client who doesn’t need rescuing or as a means of avoiding emotionally challenging therapeutic work.

And the fifth item on Cozolino’s list means that we must reach our clients in their physical and emotional experience, as well as their mental or cognitive understanding. Talking alone is not sufficient to heal trauma. The memories are carried deep in the unconscious, embedded in the body, recording “fears set down at a young age in the amygdala, the one part of the brain that never forgets. That’s why therapy is seldom successfully done in a session or two, and is never simply a matter of ‘explaining’ to people how irrational their thinking is, or how counterproductive their behavior.” (Mary Sykes Wylie & Richard Simon, Psychotherapy Networker, Sep/Oct 2002, Discoveries from the Black Box: How the neuro-science revolution can change your practice).

These procedures wrapped together in the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy protocol are coordinated to actually help rewire the brain circuits that were damaged in early trauma, without re-traumatizing the client.

Now on a practical and personal note, we work with people all over the country/ world who are losing or have lost important people in their lives. And we never know when it may be someone’s time to go. One day life seems great, the next day someone we know commits suicide, or gets a serious diagnosis, or is in an accident and dies, or is disabled. If we have what Dr. Fritz Perls labeled “unfinished business” with that person, it may be too late or inappropriate to finish it. When David’s brother Peter was suddenly murdered in his sleep by his mentally ill wife Nancy, we got to see how this whole principle works. There was rage towards the wife, of course, and feelings that still have not been resolved even after five years. Some family members had unfinished business with Peter that were suddenly frozen in a timeless void and certainly could no longer be resolved. I have seen this over and over. Those with unfinished business have difficulty grieving because their resentments, or their regrets, got in the way. I have watched at family gatherings how anger, resentments, guilt and blame still contaminate the fond memories of the person who has passed on.

It appears that when we have not completed our work with close family members and friends, we have difficulty letting them go when they are trying to leave, trouble grieving when they do go, and continued turmoil that lives on within us seemingly stuck without end. David’s mother Helen was the best example for our family of how to let go of the blame, anger and regret. She was immediately able to truly forgive Nancy with an amazing display of compassionate love and true caring.

This is what I see with Steve Jobs and George Harrison as they passed on. They seem to have completed their relationships with those closest to them, and in fact with the whole world! They are both shining examples of living life to its fullest, and dying in a way that inspires those left behind. So this healing work that we do is about completing unfinished business with people in our lives to the best of our ability. So that if we or they should be facing death suddenly or unexpectedly, there is nothing in the way of pure caring. This allows people to grieve cleanly without the contamination of regrets, blame or judgments. It allow family members and friends to let go more easily so that the dying person is free to “go to the light” when their soul is called to do so. And it allows those left behind to take inspiration to live their life every day to its fullest potential.

“All the Spiritual lessons you will ever need can be found in Nature.” Karunamayi

I am drawn into my garden this summer to tend my flowers, and I notice that some flowers are not blooming the way others are. So I give them more fertilizer, more water and pray for more sunshine.

After awhile, I notice that intervention has helped some plants, but not all. There is one particular plant that has no blooms and the leaves are beginning to curl up and wither. Suddenly the lesson comes in the form of a question. Do the roots have enough room to expand?

I begin to check and discover something interesting. When I dig deeper, layer by layer, I discover the truth. I remove the top layer, the beauty bark, which is used to cover up what’s underneath and make everything look good! The next layer down is weed barrier. It is used to prevent anything that I have not purposely planted, from growing. The weed barrier does prevent weeds from taking over and choking the plant; however, if it is too tight and the beauty bark is too thick, it can also prevent the nutrients and water from getting to the roots, thus killing the plant. When the beauty bark and weed barrier are so thick, these ultimately prevent the light from getting to the roots of the plant.

I begin to remove the weed barrier to discover that the roots of the plant have also been prevented from growing and expanding. They have become stunted due to the barrier and the beauty bark. As I remove the barrier, I begin loosening up the soil around the roots to give them more room to grow. Now I can fertilize, giving them the nutrients they need to expand and blossom. As the roots receive the proper nutrients, the leaves can receive the light and actually send this down to their roots for expanded support.

I water and wait to see the results. The results are amazing! Within just a few days, the leaves uncurl and are no longer withered. Then flower buds begin to appear and within a week, beautiful blossoms are showing with rich colors of deep purple.

So what can be learned from this in terms of how we can expand and grow? What is your beauty bark covering up? The beauty bark can represent the facades you may use to pretend things are just fine when underneath perhaps they aren’t. How much energy do you spend “covering up” what is just below the surface? Then deeper than that, what is your weed barrier? What do you cover up at an even deeper level to control the wildness within? Do you keep your true feelings repressed, only to then become depressed, withdrawn and nonproductive? What defenses do you use to keep people from supporting you?

True personal expansion involves removing the beauty bark, pulling back any barriers to expanded personal growth and allowing yourself to truly flourish. The most important lesson from this is that our roots represent our support system. If the support system is not strong or we don’t use it when we have it, then we wither and don’t blossom, just like the plants. When our root system – our support system – is strong, then we can receive all the nutrients we need to grow. This is the only way we can receive the light that is always available to us.

The personal transformation work that we do teaches us to dig deeper to discover what blocks us from flourishing in our personal as well as in our professional lives. It is powerful to look below the surface to discover who we really are and what we are truly capable of growing into. As we remove the beauty bark of our shadows (such as playing the good little girl or boy, the perfectionist, the know-it-all and other facades), we become more real and discover more energy to thrive. Through this work we learn to release many of the defenses (weed barrier) that were originally designed to keep perpetrators out but ended up keeping everyone out. With fewer defenses, we can open up to trust and to attracting people who really do want to love and support us.

This is spiritual transformation. Without the barriers and facades, we now recognize and trust our own spiritual connections. We recognize the light and can truly let it in.

Love, Diane Zimberoff

What we hear over and over is that these men fell prey to their desire for power. Although this may be true, are these not symptoms of addictive behavior that mental health professionals would consider categorizing as sex addiction? Sexual addiction, or sexual compulsivity, is defined as any sexually-related, compulsive behavior which interferes with normal living and causes severe stress on family, friends, loved ones, and one’s work environment. The compulsive behavior completely dominates the addict’s life.  Sexual addicts make sex a priority more important than family, friends, and work.  Sex becomes the organizing principle of addicts’ lives.  They are willing to sacrifice what they cherish most in order to preserve and continue their unhealthy behavior.

When an individual’s life has become unmanageable due to addictive and compulsive behaviors, they are wisely counseled to seek “rehab”, that is, treatment. If the addiction were to alcohol or drugs, any of the men named above would have been encouraged to go into treatment. But our culture is slow to recognize sexual compulsivity as the addiction it is. And so we are left with endless speculation about “Why are some men so self-destructive sexually?” The answer is the same as why some people are self-destructive with alcohol or drugs. It can become an addiction, and addicts are self-destructive.

The media has only gone skin deep and has not discussed the foundational root causes for these bizarre behaviors. Yes they say they are sorry, yes they say they won’t do it again, and yes they may be sincere about it. Yet those experienced with addiction know that without treatment, the addict is likely to repeat previous behavior.

I encourage the media to find experts in the mental health profession that can speak to this and provide valuable information that would help everyone better understand this much overlooked addiction to sex – and the treatment that is available for it. It will not go away on its own, and better understanding will begin the healing process for all of us.

Sexhelp.com is a website created by noted psychologist and author, Dr. Patrick Carnes, to help those affected by sexual addiction and compulsivity, whether it be the addict or a friend or loved one of the addict. There is a great deal of valuable information on the site, including assessment questionnaires and extensive resources.

Answer: Yes. Nearly all claustrophobic reactions go back to the individual’s prenatal and/or birth issues. The steps in treatment are clear for those who have done advanced trainings with us. 

1)      Have them describe their exact experience on the ship. These reactions may also occur in an elevator, on an airplane, or even in a car.  These are all enclosed vehicles where there seems to be no way to escape.

2)      Write down their exact words, since these are extremely important. 

3)      Try to find out what the exact fear is. The fear at first may be of choking, or suffocating, but ultimately ask if they are they afraid of dying? A dramatically intense reaction usually indicates that the source trauma was experienced as life-or-death.

4)      Then use the main script to regress them to the source of these fears. They may at first go back to being locked in a closet, nearly drowning in a pool, being held down by a bully, or some similar experience.  They may have several of these experiences so process each one fully.

5)      Then continue back to the source which will usually take them back to their birth. Processing birth issues takes advanced training, however. This is greatly healing for claustrophobic clients.  I have had magical results often in one session.

6)      If one session doesn’t heal this completely, there may be past life issues connected to the reactivity.

Thanks for your question, Diane

Dear Christine,

This is not an issue of the client not being deep enough. As long as she is having feelings come up, she is definitely in a sufficient ly deep trance state. There are times when a client opens their eyes, mostly because they fear what is coming up in the regression. Here are some suggestions.

1)   Ask her to close her eyes again. Then re-instate a resource state for her. If this is the first session, you can use the adult ego-strengthening anchor to remind her she is safe and that there is an adult present.

2)   Then bring her back to the memory or feelings that were coming up just as she opened her eyes.

3)   Proceed with processing the feelings.

4)   If she opens her eyes again, then repeat the anchor and reminder that an adult is present.

5)   You could also bring in her spiritual connection as another anchor to remind her she is protected.

6)   Then continue to process the feelings.

7)   This is the process of titration where we move slowly and just let them handle as much as they are ready for.

8)   Often when as a fairly new practitioner of Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy you begin working with clients, you expect the sessions to be like the ones you have seen on the videotapes in your class. Remember, many traumatized clients need to move much slower than we do in the classroom.  Take your time. The most important aspect of each session is for the client to feel safe enough to allow this deep traumatization to come back to their awareness.

Lots of love,

Diane

“Assumptions are the termites of relationships.” – Henry Winkler

We unconsciously make assumptions and judgments about:

1)      Other people’s behavior

2)      Other people’s intentions for a behavior

3)      Our own behavior and intentions

These assumptions came up in our Healing Relationships Workshop.  For example, a husband goes to the store to get something for dinner. He knows his wife will be hungry and tries to find out what she would like. He calls her, but to no avail. Then he tries to decide what she may want. He had asked her in the morning but she didn’t know what she might want 10 hours later. When she gets home in the evening, he has gotten himself what he likes and says, “I didn’t know what you wanted, so I didn’t get anything.”

The woman immediately goes into a fury.  She angrily replies, “Have I ever gone to the store and gotten something for myself and not for you?  No, of course not!  I would never do that to you.  Now I have to go back to the store to find something for myself.”

So what are the assumptions that each has made about the other’s behavior?

1)      The husband shopping at the store assumed that since his wife didn’t tell him what she wanted, that she might get angry if he came home with the wrong thing. He assumed that she might be more angry if he came home with the wrong thing, than with nothing at all.

2)      The wife assumed that her husband didn’t care about her needs, didn’t think about her and was selfishly only thinking of himself. She judged him to be selfish, uncaring and thoughtless. He judged her as overly emotional and irrational.

3)      Now, in the moment she was too angry to check out her assumptions and he was too confused to check out his.

Our assumptions are directly related to what we project onto others.  Assumptions, projections and judgments are where the fights begin in relationships. After an argument, a good practice in couple’s work is for each partner to look at their assumptions and judgments. If you really want to change your relationships into a healthy communication style, here is a practice couples can do.

1) Sit down with a notepad and begin with the stem sentence:        

a) (Describe Behavior): “When you ________, (the clear specific current behavior). Example: when you went to the store and bought your dinner and came home with nothing for me,

b) Feelings, “I felt _______” (only from this list: angry, hurt, sad, scared, lonely, jealous, guilty).

2) “My assumption is ___________” (I assumed that you didn’t care about me).

3) “The judgment I made about you was ___________” (you are selfish).

4) Ask a question specific to the assumption to clarify the judgment: “Do you care about me?”

5) “What I would like from myself is ___________” (to check out my assumptions).

6) “What I would like from you is __________” (to buy food for both of us when you go to the store).

7) Completion. “I would like to close my clearing with _________” (a hug, a handshake, etc.).

 I hope you find this useful in your relationships. Love, Diane

I have been experiencing very disturbing emotions related to a violent past life experience recently. Worse yet, I feel guilty for having allowed lower spirits or recurring scenarios to intrude into my life. And very confused since I have no clue how to keep them out or away or stop myself from experiencing the Native American lifetime I end up in whenever I let my guard down. It scares me!

Love and good fortune, Chris

Dearest Chris,

The forceful experience that keeps coming to you is an activated astral memory. We all have access to this plane of existence, what Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious,” but usually it only presents itself in dreams, reveries, or other altered states. Sometimes it shows up in an unexpected and demanding way, and this Stan Grof has called a “spiritual emergency” (the link is to a four minute talk by Dr. Grof on the collective unconscious in spiritual emergencies). You can learn to regulate the experience. One thing you can do is to practice titrating those astral memories.

 Process to Titrate Negative Astral Memories

1)       Go back to some of the notes with your “new sacred affirmations” that we write for each person after every session. Continue to strengthen the one that is the most meaningful to you.

2)       Get to where you can take yourself there in a second by using a word, color or another anchor.

3)       Then choose any memory, not a threatening one such as that past life, but perhaps from childhood that is somewhat negative, but not overwhelming.

4)       Take that memory out of your body and put it outside of you as if you are watching a movie.

5)       Then if, when watching your astral memory, you begin to notice tightness anywhere in your body, just say your word, find the color or make the anchor that returns you to your new sacred place of joy, peace, etc.

6)       If you get good at doing titration and feel confident enough, you can bring in a small piece of the next most difficult memory and so on, until you feel confident enough to work with the most difficult of memories.

7)       Another option, when you feel confident with the titration, is to make sure you get the lessons from that lifetime or situation, then complete with a new ending which includes your life lesson in a positive way.

 Chris, please practice this and let me know how it is going.

Lots of love, Diane

Added January 2, 2011:

“The forceful experience” may be an energetic attachment from the astral realm (past lifetime, animal spirit, force of nature).  If there is, that would explain your experience of lingering anxiety and also the  recurring memories each time that you do a session. When you come here for your Internship meeting this week, we will be able to access and remove the attachment.

THE TITRATION PROCESS

For the Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy practitioners this is similiar to the extinguishing process that we use to reduce or eliminate the underlying feelings at the root of our anxiety, fear, guilt and shame.

Titration is different in that it can also be used to actually dissociate the client from the memory.  I am very careful to use this only with clients that I know are dedicated to their own healing on a deeper level. Otherwise, some folks would just use this method to put the memory out of their body as if watching it on a screen. They may just continue to dissociate without resolving the underlying conflicts that have been carried on from relationship to relationship or even lifetime to lifetime.

When we use this technique to consciously dissociate, we always ask the client at the end of the session to put the memory somewhere where they can find it again, but where it will not intrude uninvited.