trauma
A therapist can use the same treatment procedure to treat preverbal traumas — traumas that occur before the development of verbal skills. One can access preverbal traumas by asking directly or by presenting stimuli to elicit the trauma part. In one case, a young boy had had 16 earaches between the ages of six and twelve months. I triggered emotions associated with the trauma of the earaches by putting my hand next to his ear. After I treated this trauma with EMDR, he would allow me to put my hand near his ear without an emotional response and showed no emotional reaction. This resulted in a marked change in his behavior at school. In the next session, I tested his response to the trauma-related stimuli by moving my hand near his ear, and he had no fear. I told him to imagine that I was wearing a white coat, and I put my hand near his ear. Again, emotions flooded his experience. Matching the conditions of his trauma evoked even more intense emotions then I had previously seen. I treated these emotions by using EMDR
Lingering early trauma
A patient complained of mood swings, which resembled something like manic-depressive behavior. I considered novel ways to explain the cause of manic-depression or at least the mood swings experienced by this patient and others. What if some prebirth and preverbal neural activity was switching in and out, causing the rapid mood changes? Could it be that some form of trauma occurred during the prebirth and preverbal periods before the brain structures and functions developed fully? I hypothesized that a specific trauma occurred and that this trauma associated with the neural activity of memories of the entire brain. This led to guessing the possibility of lingering trauma picked up in utero.
I speculated that the first trauma that a fetus would experience would be the emotional response caused by the limitation of movement. The limit of physical activity causes a memory of the emotional response, or at least a neural response associated with hurt. During this frustration, the brain is working without well-defined neural patterns. Under these conditions, a trauma would associate with all the neural activity of the entire brain. Later, specific areas of the brain would increase their activity and assume muscle control, midbrain activities, and other functions. Later still, those specific areas that actively serve particular functions can erase the early trauma memories. Finally, after active pathways of brain functions and muscle movements had fully developed, the early trauma memory would only remain in the relatively inactive neural areas of the brain. A great portion of the brain may not have constant repetitive neural activity, and this is where the traumatic memory of the early constriction trauma lingers. I call it lingering prebirth trauma.
I tested this theory with an intervention I carried out with many patients, a treatment I discovered by working with the subconscious of my patients. To treat this supposed condition of lingering trauma, I used a treatment intervention developed to treat trauma pain associated with eye position and the shifts between brain-hemisphere activities during trauma. The intervention involved the Callahan 9-Gamut Procedure (Callahan, 1985) in the following way.
Direct the patient to tap steadily on a point on the back of the hand, a half-inch behind both of the large knuckles of the ring and little finger. While tapping, direct the patient to look straight ahead, close her eyes, look down to the right, look down to the left, whirl her eyes in a circle in one direction, then whirl them in the other direction. Then direct the patient to hum a tune, count from one to five, and then hum a tune again. The subconscious said that this procedure would work to treat these hypothesized traumas lingering in quiet areas of the brain.
The following case had a prebirth trauma so I tried treating lingering trauma. I tapped on the 9-Gamut spot on the back of both hands of the patient and had the patient do the 9-Gamut treatment. The patient said that after doing three 9-Gamut treatments, she was dizzy. After three more 9-Gamut treatments, she had pain in her side and stomach. After four more treatments, she had anger and pain. After four more, the subconscious signaled the completion of the intervention. Then she had pain in her head. I followed the directions of the subconscious. After two more 9-Gamut Procedures, this pain was gone. The treatment was obviously having some effect on neural activity and produced some behavioral effects. She reported that the procedure weakened self-limiting beliefs involving guilt.
I used this procedure of repeated 9-Gamut treatments with a child. He experienced dizziness, sleepiness and then dizziness that he described as “like emptiness in my whole head with something swirling around.” Then he felt more dizziness. Then he felt clearer and I assumed that we had completed the intervention. In the following session with this young fellow, the subconscious led me to develop another procedure, working on the entire brain. This time, the patient repeated the following intervention suggested by the subconscious: Tap eight times on his forehead and eight times on the back of his head. In the following replications of this intervention, the patient felt progressively more tired and dizzy. Then he had a headache, and then he felt a little “drunk.” The subconscious told me to treat this last feeling with the eye movement procedure (EMDR). A week later, this patient said that he was doing better at school, that he felt it was easier to concentrate, and that he was becoming more independent in his play.
The subconscious as the treatment agent
One month after I completed the Thought Field Therapy diagnostic training with Callahan (1993), I received an incredible learning experience from another patient. This woman came into my office complaining of feeling incapable of handling her financial problems. I used the Callahan diagnostic and treatment techniques to treat the belief: “I can’t control or manage my life.” She immediately had the insight that her boyfriend was reinforcing her feeling of being incapable. While I was talking to her about this possibility, she said, “I feel this tickle on my upper lip.” I asked her subconscious, “Subconscious, are you trying to tell my patient to tap on her lip?” The subconscious said “yes” by raising the index finger. I had the patient tap on her upper lip. We continued talking.
Again, she felt a series of sensations at different points on her head and face. I inquired again, and the subconscious told her to tap on the points where she felt the tickles. At one point, she said, “Oh, God. They’re going too fast! They’re going too fast!” I said, “Hold it, subconscious. Hold it.” I asked the subconscious if she could do the tapping on the inside to treat the trauma while the patient just sat. The subconscious said, “Yes.” I asked the subconscious if she would do it. The subconscious said, “Yes.” Consequently, the patient sat there with her left arm on her lap and her right arm pointed up. After a minute or so, she said, “Wow! All this energy is flowing out of my fingertips.” She said that she felt clearheaded and capable, and knew what she wanted to do to resolve her present financial predicament. I believe her subconscious had completed treating some traumatic history having to do with competence. The subconscious, to my surprise, had learned to treat internally. This experience showed me that it was possible to have the subconscious treat a patient’s issue without my intervention.
The subconscious in trouble
After this experience, I systematically started to teach the subconscious of my patients how to do self-treatment — the internal tapping. I had another patient who had 60 parts that were ready to receive treatment. After treating many parts, I wanted to find out the number of untreated parts remaining, and so I asked the subconscious. To my surprise, what I learned from the subconscious was that she had independently treated nine parts in the preceding weeks. I asked her if she had tried to treat the suicidal parts that I had identified in an earlier session. She said, “Yes.” With further inquiry, the subconscious said that she became frightened when she provided treatment of those parts on her own. By asking leading questions, I discovered the suicidal parts had flooded into the Active Experience and had started to run the body. They presented a serious suicidal threat. The subconscious was “frightened;” in other words, she recognized the danger of suicide. Other parts that became active had difficulty protecting the patient from the intent
