the effectiveness of using interventions based on this model. The model has become a useful tool, as it provides ways to explain and treat maladaptive behavior. Best of all, solutions to problems with one patient have worked with other patients.
Over the years, I had been looking for faster ways to treat trauma. I learned several different treatment techniques. The most significant treatment technique learned, and the basis for Process Healing, was training to diagnose specific sequences of acupressure points to treat mental issues (Callahan, 1993). The treatment involved tapping on the diagnosed acupressure points. After I returned from this worthwhile training, my next patient taught me that the subconscious could do the tapping treatment. This internal treatment was the basis for the treatment approach that I eventually called Process Healing.
The practice of observation and using directions from the patient are both respectful and essential when working with this theory. This respectful approach and the basic premises of the theory give flexibility to problem-solving and treating difficult mental issues. The theory, then, is the basis for responding to and understanding a patient’s description of his or her mental health issues.
The keys to our personality dynamics are amnesic and dissociative parts. Largely ignored in traditional therapy, these parts act like mini-personalities that serve some function in our behavior. People are not usually aware of amnesic and dissociative parts. I am going to describe how I discovered that amnesic parts could be barriers to hypnosis and that various pre-birth amnesic parts could disturb adult behavior. I also found that the effects of preverbal trauma could have a strong impact on later behavior, while in utero trauma could cause subtle lingering effects on our behavior. Another significant finding was that amnesic and dissociative parts could fool the therapist. The possibility of deception keeps me alert to explore unusual results further. Another finding, contradictory to my beliefs, was that I could damage the subconscious. I will describe this later.
The journey started when a patient showed me how the subconscious could teach me to do better interventions. This experience challenged my more traditional approaches in my clinical practice. If the subconscious could teach me how to do therapy better, why not routinely use the subconscious to become a better therapist? This patient’s subconscious helped me to create an intervention to move traumatic pain out of conscious experience into the unconscious while doing Eye Movement Dissociation and Reprocessing (EMDR) (Shapiro, 1995). EMDR involves having the patient focus on both a painful issue and on the movement of my fingers, which are moving back and forth in front of the patient at the same time. Though underwhelming to my EMDR teachers at the time, the intervention that I developed effectively reduced the intensity of emotional pain experienced while doing the eye-movement treatment. It also served to control the problem of emotional flooding when doing eye-movement processing. Emotional flooding occurs when the patient experiences all the traumatic pain as if the trauma were happening again. It also clarified the role of the dissociative process. The intervention causes the experience of the active memory not to be in the conscious experience, but in the unconscious experience.
My interest in theory led me to meld ideas based on learning theory (Skinner, 1953, 1957) and chaos theory (Freeman, 1991) to explain the active ingredients of EMDR (Flint, 1996, 2004). The theory explaining EMDR is the basis for Process Healing. The following is a brief introduction to the theory underlying Process Healing.
I want to emphasize to the reader’s entire personality that the purpose of this book is to provide information. Some aspects of the personality may be threatened or triggered by the information in the book. The treatment method, which is taught to the subconscious, can be seen as the primary threat that has to be assessed carefully. Before the subconscious learns to treat trauma, all the barriers to treatment must be resolved. If some of the content of this chapter triggers emotions or internal voices as you read, perhaps you should consult a therapist before continuing. If you feel a flood of emotions at any time while reading this book, please stop reading, use your best judgment about continuing, and consult a therapist.
The Theoretical Basis for Process Healing
About 13 years ago, I started thinking of the brain as a chaos process (Freeman, 1991) and wrote a paper describing the active ingredients of change when using EMDR (Flint, 1996, 2004). Since that time, this theory, described in greater detail later, has helped me establish rapport with my patients. I explain to patients that memories start forming shortly after conception, not after birth, which is the common opinion. All areas of the brain begin storing memories while the brain is developing. At some point, the brain starts developing responses to sensory stimulation. The auditory stimulation by words, phrases, and sentences that come through the mother’s body and stomach wall are remembered. By the time of birth, the fetus has many verbal memories, but no language.
After birth, learning continues with remembered verbal memories, but now neural representations of objects and actions are associated with the words. The memory of words associated with objects and actions becomes a functional language. This language, learned without sensory experience, becomes the subconscious. Because the subconscious has no sensory experience, he or she is able to “see” learned history and the internal dynamics of active memories. The subconscious can also control internal processes to cause changes in the experience of memories and behavior by treating the emotions associated with them.
At the same time as this language of the subconscious is developing, the Main Personality starts learning. The language learned by the Main Personality initially associates with internal and external sensory experience and, later, with pleasure and pain and basic needs. The subconscious and the Main Personality, therefore, learn two different neural representations related to the same experience. The subconscious learns without sensory experience and the personality learns with sensory experience and, later, with other properties.
Active memories are in the Active Experience, which is part of our Behavior System (see Figure 1-1). Before I make the distinction between conscious and unconscious active memory and dormant memory, I am going to tell you about dissociation. Because of the vast amount of information caused by active sensory experience and different memory activities, a process called dissociation is created. Dissociation reduces the quantity of information that we experience in our conscious experience. In Figure 1-1, the double lines shown crossing the Active Experience represent the dissociation process. The dissociative process causes all or part of a memory or sensory experience not to be experienced in our conscious experience and, therefore, creates the unconscious Active Experience. Unnecessary or painful parts of a memory can be “flagged” by the dissociative process in order to move the unwanted parts of a memory into the unconscious. These flagged memories are called “dissociated.” The activity of dissociated memories is in the unconscious experience and not the conscious experience.
Memories that are not part of the Active Experience are called dormant. While all dormant memories are by definition inactive, they are all potentially active — waiting to be triggered. They are ready to be switched or triggered into activity in the Active Experience. The terms memory activity or active memories used here always refer to those memories that are active in either the conscious or the unconscious Active Experience, or both. Memories that are available to be triggered are called dormant.
The subconscious has access to everything experienced in the brain in both the conscious and unconscious experience. The subconscious does not experience any form of hurt; in other words, trauma never damages the subconscious. Later, I will explain how I was able to hurt the subconscious by having the subconscious do something not normally done. Fortunately, I recognized the problem and was able to repair the subconscious. It is important to stress the fact that the subconscious appears to be always whole and healthy with no barriers to inhibit the view of the internal “reality.” When I talk to a patient about the formation of the personality, I explain the reasons why intense traumas cause amnesic parts.
