Body/Mind Connection and healing for emotional trauma

2002-2003 Not long after the Anger Resolution seminar, Debbie developed intense pain in both wrists, to the point that she had trouble typing. We assumed that it must be carpel tunel or something like that. She went to the doctor and had Xrays. Then he sent her to have an MRI. They could find no apparent cause for the pain. So the doctor had her wear wrist braces and take some time off from typing. The school were Debbie worked as a receptionist, bought a new ergonomic keyboard and installed a sliding shelf which was lower than the desk and more comfortable. Nothing helped. Months went by with more MRIs and more visits to the doctor. Finally, in desperation we prayed for God to give us some kind of wisdom or insight about the causes of the problem. A few days later as I was driving to school, I flipped on the car radio to NPR and listened to the Diane Rhem show listening in my car on my way home from school. (or on my way to school) Maggie Scarf: "Secrets, Lies, Betrayals" (Random House). In the interview, Scarf gave numerous examples of emotional issues which resulted in physical symptoms. Her thesis was that when the negative emotions become too much for us to handle, if they are not processed constructively, they may get downloaded into various organs of our body as illnesses. The author herself had a problem with grinding her teeth in her sleep that defied any kind of normal medical solution. When she sought emotional reprocessing therapy, the therapist discovered that her teeth grinding problem was related to an unresolved conflict with her mother. A few minutes of simple reprocessing therapy removed the original emotional trauma and Scarf never again experienced the problem with grinding her teeth.

When I got back to my house, I looked up the NPR interview on the internet and listened to it with Debbie. I also ordered Scarfs book "Secrets, Lies, Betrayals" (Random House) and read it together with her. I began to feel a gentle impression that Debbies pain in her wrist was not from a physical cause but an emotional trauma of some sort. As we talked, read through the book and prayed for insight, it occurred to me that the only person I knew who did anything remotely similar to the kinds of power therapies discussed by Scarf in her book, was my friend Sam Lopez. I had always taken some of Sams comments about his therapeutic approach with a grain of salt, thinking that he was exaggerating or blowing his effectiveness out of proportion. Sam claimed that he could clear up most phobias or traumas in one, or at the most two, sessions. I remembered once sending a young lady with some emotional problems to a Christian psychologist for therapy. She met with him for five years, and he finally terminated the clientpatient relationship on the advice of his mentor. She never got any better. That experience captured my general impression of the psychology profession. I found it hard to believe that my friend, Dr. Lopez, could cure someone in two sessions. Nevertheless, we were desperate. Debbies pain continued unabated, and her doctor was unable to find any medical cause for it other than generic stress. The kind of reprocessing of memories that Dr. Lopez did in his therapy was not exactly the same as the therapies described by Scarf in her book, but it was close enough to give it a try. I called Dr. Lopez and asked if I could make an appointment for my wife to meet with him. I do not recall the reason now that I did not accompany her to the appointment. By this time, we were already on a friendship basis with Dr. Lopez and his wife Jane, and Debbie felt comfortable going to see him alone without me. Debbie left for the appointment, and roughly two and a half hours later, she came back home

completely pain free. The cause of her pain was entirely emotional and was permanently resolved by one session of reprocessing therapy. Dr. Lopez had used applied kinesiology to determine that the initial emotional trauma had taken place when Debbie was still in the womb. Further muscle testing revealed that the emotional trauma was related to violent anger. Apparently, there had been an emotional intense argument while Debbie was in the womb and she had internalized the anger. After she was born, she continued to be sensitive to emotional outbursts of anger among those around her throughout her life. One of Debbies outstanding personality strengths was her capacity for empathy. Highly empathetic people run the risk of downloading the negative emotions of others into their own soul, or even into their physical bodies, thus running a higher risk of illness from a variety of negative emotions. Once Dr. Lopez had located the original trauma and its cause, he used imaginative techniques to reprocess the traumatic memory. In this case, he had Debbie travel back through the time line of her life and enter in to that specific moment in the womb when she was terrified by angry shouting. Once she was cognitively there, he encouraged her to imagine Jesus coming into the scene (reprocessing therapy can use other neurolinguistic programing techniques, such as changing negative to positive associative colors or locating feelings in a body organ and pushing them out through the extremities. In Debbies case, because she was comfortable with the presence of Jesus, Dr. Lopez chose to use this approach). In Debbies imagination, Jesus came to her, reached inside the womb, and placed his hand gently on her face, and whispered to her not to be afraid, that everything was going to be alight. This was significant, because Debbie always had a reluctance to allow anyone to touch

her face, even me. After she sensed the peace and safety in that initial moment of trauma, Dr. Lopez brought her back through her timeline and checked a series of other emotionally traumatic memories that were organically related to the first memory. Finally, they came to the last traumatic memory that had triggered the painful problem in Debbies wrists. Debbie had been working as a receptionist at a private Christian school. The school had hired a new head who had a prickly personality. One day when Debbie was sitting at her desk typing, her best friend at the school, one of the teachers, went in to the heads office for a meeting. The meeting grew heated and the new head and Debbies friend ended up shouting at each other. When the teacher stormed out of the office, Debbies boss followed her out and came over to Debbies desk, undoubtedly knowing that Debbie and the teacher in question were friends. The head pointed her finger in Debbies face in an intimidating fashion and said I dont know what you think you heard, but this is what happened! all the while shaking her finger threateningly at Debbie. At that precise moment, Debbie was typing and she froze with her hands in over the keyboard in the typing position. As Maggie Scarf discusses in her book on the mind body connection, all of the lifetime of emotional trauma associated with violent anger boiled over at that moment and overflowed the internal rain barrel in Debbies psyche that was holding the accumulated stress associated with emotional violence. It had to go somewhere. Debbies soul downloaded the pain into her wrists. It was at that moment when her pyschosomatic pain began in her wrists. When Dr. Sam brought her back into that recent moment in the school office, he suggested that Debbie imagine Jesus coming into the office and calming her boss down, and comforting and protecting Debbie. Eighteen months of pain after that final traumatic event, Debbie was able to reprocess her memories in the healing presence of Jesus, and in little more

than one hour, the pain was gone and her wrists were back to normal. When she got home, we sat up for several hours while she excitedly told me about the therapy and how Dr. Sam and Jesus had removed her emotional trauma and her physical pain. As the rock band, the Monkeys sang in 1972, I became a believer in my friends therapeutic techniques.