When the Problem Isn't the Problem: Examining the History Behind the Problem

Do you ever feel blocked and frustrated in your personal development? Have you ever been frustrated that conventional and complementary therapies are not helping you?

There are times when treatments of various sorts simply do not bring about relief or cure for a given psychological or physical issue, despite having had medical examinations, medications, complementary/ alternative therapies and home remedies. In cases like these, I find that the simple process of reviewing a person's history may very often reveal other important issues sitting in the file drawers of their memory banks. When these issues are identified and addressed, the problems can then be cleared.

Example of a psychological issue:
Pat was an outgoing 32-year-old secretary who lit up any group with her presence. She was popular in the company where she worked, in her church, and loved by her family, but could not maintain a relationship with a man for more than a few weeks. She would often find some reason to break it off, finding fault and blaming her boyfriends for one thing or another. With other lovers, she would be devastated when they left her after brief romances, over what seemed to her to be minor arguments.

Gradually, it dawned on her that it was rather unlikely that so many men would all be no good. Despite her best efforts, however, Pat could not break the pattern of souring her relationships with men till they split up.

Working with potent self-treatment methods on her current issues of developing tensions and finding incompatibilities with the men in her life brought only partial relief.

In her family history, Pat had related in her first psychotherapy session very strong hints as to where the problems might have begun. Her father had been alcoholic, a binge drinker who was repeatedly unfaithful to her mother. Pat's parents had divorced when she was 12 and her mother never remarried, remaining bitter and untrusting of men after her unhappy experience in marriage.

This was a fairly straightforward case, and when these memories and their associated feelings were cleared with the self-treatment method, Pat's buried angers and hurts were cleared - from having witnessed many arguments and fights between her parents. After these were cleared, Pat was pleased to find that she immediately connected with men who treated her much better.

Examples of physical issues:
'Toby,' a middle aged woman was experiencing urinary urgency when her bladder was full. Medical examinations showed no infection or other obvious cause for the problem, which persisted over many months. Tapping on the problem directly produced no results.

Returning to the earliest time in life that any such symptoms had occurred, we opened a file drawer with memories of urgency that occurred regularly at age 7-9 on walking home from school. The urgency would increase as she neared home, reaching intolerable levels as she approached the home of a girlfriend that was several blocks from her own home. Toby would regularly knock on her friend's door and ask to use the toilet.

In the WHEE session, as Toby tapped on the urgency she recalled as a child, she came into awareness of fears of returning home. These had to do with anxieties over childhood sexual abuse that had occurred in the home. Toby's friend's home was situated such that this was the place on her way home with the first view of her own home. Toby had worked on the issues of sexual abuse successfully in other therapies, but there was this residual memory of anxieties on returning home that had not been cleared. Using WHEE on these early memories that involved urgency, and clearing further feelings of anxiety about her sexual abuse, the urgency in her current life cleared.

Casey, a 52 year-old businessman, had suffered with shoulder pain for several years. Dialoguing with his pain, he was quickly able to see that his unconscious mind was asking him to delve into emotional pains that had been buried and locked away from his conscious awareness. Just the fact of connecting with his shoulder pain led to an immediate reduction in its intensity. Not having to shout at Casey, the pain did not have to 'twist his arm to listen,' so to speak, quite as vigorously. However, this alone did not remove the pains entirely.

Having taken a thorough history prior to starting to use the self-treatment process, I knew that Casey had grown up being self-critical. He learned this habit because his parents were often critical of him and blamed him for misfortunes that were not of his making. Using the method of tapping on the right and left side of his body while reciting personalized affirmations on this strong theme in his history led to immediate further reductions in his pain.

While many therapies focus on the behavioral issues for searches through the file drawers of people's memories, I find that self-healing works best when searching through the feeling memories files. However, as with anything else in using a self-treatment method, there are no rules writ in stone. For some people the event memory files are the ones that connect from present issues to earlier ones.

What is surprising to most people is that they would never have made these connections on their own. The fact that they lived with these memories for so many years seems to have made the memories fade into the background of their awareness. The memories became part of the wallpaper of their existence, which was so familiar that its patterns did not register in their conscious minds. To the therapist, however, these patterns often stand out very clearly.

With these new, self-treatment methods, the earlier feelings and memories clear with the same ease and rapidity that current-life ones do. This may be surprising to some, who believe that issues which have been buried for decades require a lengthy process of psycho-archeology. My experience of using these new methods is that they drastically shortcut the process of clearing dysfunctional habits, trauma memories and buried negative feelings.

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