the span of a trauma, but having few neural connections to the Main Personality. Amnesic parts also have executive function and can create novel adaptive behavior, while dissociative parts are more like skills and can only create adaptive behavior that was previously learned.
Patients often hear comments in their thoughts or experience a “Yes” feeling while I talk. This makes the model of the personality I am presenting true for them. However, in most cases, the subconscious will communicate in the first session by using finger responses, signaling “Yes,” “No,” “I don’t know,” “I don’t want to tell you,” or by making no finger response.
My Neurolinguistic Programming Training (NLP) (Rice and Caldwell, 1986) taught me about auto-treatment. Auto-Treatment is obvious when personality changes occur without any outside influence. One can teach an NLP intervention, called the six-step reframe (Cameron-Bandler, 1985), to treat issues at night while the patient sleeps. When this works, the patient asks to change beliefs or behaviors when he or she goes to bed and awakens with the change completed. After an experience with a certain patient, which impressed me with the power of the subconscious, I decided to extend the auto-treatment notion. Since then, I have found barriers to auto-treatment in other individuals. The subconscious can treat these barriers to enable it to treat issues automatically and to perform independently of the active personality.
The Subconscious Can Teach the Therapist
The first clinical experience that caught my attention occurred when I was seeing many patients with multiple personality disorders. One of my patients allegedly had 200 dissociated or amnesic personality parts. These parts were all amnesic or unaware of one another because they could not communicate. This patient was difficult. Often, the part that came to the session did not believe there were any other parts. Sometimes she didn’t know who I was. She learned that by talking as fast as she could, she could prevent dissociation. When she dissociated, a trauma part would begin to run the body. She always dissociated during the latter half of the session. The active amnesic part was usually willing to work with me. I treated parts using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) (Shapiro, 1991). I had to be careful using this treatment with the patient because of the possibility of emotional flooding. This patient taught me something important that changed my life.
One day, after completing a session, I turned my back on the patient to write an appointment card. I heard a loud gasp. As I turned around, I saw her pushing her chair back with her feet. The chair was bouncing across the floor. When she stopped bouncing, I saw the patient’s eyes open wide and moving back and forth rapidly. I noticed that her eyes focused just above her knees. She said in a panicked tone, “I see a white light; I see a white light.” I calmly reassured her that the experience was not unusual. I asked if I could talk to her subconscious. The subconscious said, “Yes.” She said, “No.” Most of her parts did not like me talking to her subconscious and parts. Her response almost always came out, “Yes, No.” I asked, “Subconscious, are you telling me that I should do the eye movements down near the knees?” The subconscious said, “Yes.” The visual hallucination immediately stopped. This experience prompted deliberate exploration, using the subconscious to orchestrate and refine my treatment interventions.
From this point, I increasingly began to use a semi-hypnotic technique with my patients. While the patient was awake, I used finger responses to talk to the subconscious. I communicated by asking leading questions to which the subconscious said, “Yes” or “No.” The subconscious advised me in which order to treat issues and indicated which therapeutic technique to use to treat an issue. I felt that my therapy was becoming more respectful to all parts of the patient while addressing treatment goals that were more relevant to the patient.
Treating Emotional Pain in the Unconscious
By working with a patient’s subconscious, I developed a treatment intervention to control flooding while doing EMDR The treatment intervention provides for painless treatment of trauma pain by combining EMDR and the dissociative process. By suggesting that the pain be dissociated while treating the trauma with EMDR, the dissociation process takes place and the trauma pain moves from the conscious experience into the unconscious experience as the processing continues. The patient does not feel the painful trauma emotions during the treatment.
Stimulation of the brain with the eye movements causes an exchange of the painful trauma emotions with the relaxed or neutral emotions that are active (Flint, 1996, 2004). With repeated eye movements, the pain gradually reduces to the point where the trauma memory is no longer painful. I used this process with four or five other patients who also helped with minor details in developing this treatment technique. The technique has been effective in treating severe trauma because it lowers the chance of emotional flooding into the conscious experience. Patients ranging from nine to 52 years have responded well to this procedure.
Subconscious Directed Treatment
My theory is that different neural patterns of eye movement are active during trauma. This neural pattern becomes associated with the memory of the traumatic pain. Bearing this in mind with many of my patients, I have asked the subconscious to tell me the direction of eye movement that is most helpful for treating the patient. I have received many unique and interesting instructions from the subconscious. For example, with one patient, the subconscious told me to move my fingers in random, smooth, circular strokes while moving my hand closer to and farther away from the patient. In addition, the subconscious told me that I should hold a silver pen with a gold tip in my hand for the patient to follow with his eyes. Though I forgot about the pen nearly every session, the subconscious always reminded me to use it. For five weekly sessions, this unique procedure, “ordered” by the subconscious, continued. During this time, the patient had a continuous severe headache. The headache stopped, indicating the completion of treatment. The subconscious no longer reminded me to use the gold-tipped pen. For this patient, this unusual treatment neutralized the pain of seven years of viewing frequent gory traumas and deaths.
Discoveries
Barriers to hypnosis
In hypnosis, some patients were difficult, if not impossible, to put into a deep trance. There seemed to be a barrier blocking the trance induction. While addressing this problem, I received strange finger responses. I discovered that prebirth traumas caused prebirth parts. In some ways, prebirth parts are just like the amnesic parts previously described. However, the experience of prebirth parts in utero is similar to the young subconscious; namely, it is always awake. Prebirth parts learn to relay information from the subconscious to the personality. These prebirth parts can become barriers to getting deep trance. I learned to establish rapport and talk to the prebirth parts. I usually got them to accept treatment with EMDR or to become quiet. With these barriers quiet, I was able to put the patient into a deep hypnotic trance.
Prebirth parts and behavior
The awareness of prebirth parts helped me to overcome barriers to communication with the subconscious. Often, while I was building rapport with the subconscious, I discovered the presence of prebirth parts. When I treated a prebirth part with EMDR, I asked the subconscious to manage the rate of experience of the traumatic memories of the prebirth part. I provided eye movements to treat the part’s trauma. This approach was effective with many of my patients. The effect sometimes resulted in a subtle but pervasive change. One case example is a patient who had a tendency to wail like a baby when she was upset. She had been a difficult, disruptive patient during treatment at the local clinic. Treating the trauma of the prebirth part that caused the wailing made the wailing behavior stop. At the end of the session, she told me her mother said that her father had kicked her mother during the pregnancy. The mother started bleeding and had a cesarean delivery.
