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Trauma

General

EFT Trauma Session Seemed Complete But Needed More Work

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Hi Everyone,

Sonia Novinsky from Brazil emphasizes for us how a seemingly complete recovery from trauma can still be triggered when new aspects show up. The new aspects, of course, can then be addressed with EFT.

Hugs, Gary


By Sonia Novinsky

I worked with an interesting traumatized client the day before yesterday.

She lost her father about a year ago. A very intimate-symbiotic family. Although she is 29 years old she used to live directly with her mother and father (that is not completely unusual in Brazil).

Her father died suddenly. He had surgery and was recovering very well at home. Nobody expected that he would die but suddenly, when my client entered the home, he was dying. It was a traumatic experience, everybody screaming, lots of despair and pain. After his death we worked with EFT and she seemed recovered.

Often an EFT recovery like this is complete but sometimes new aspects show up in the future that were not treated in the original session. Such was the case here.

She is a psychologist working in an airline company. And Human Resources people were doing a training about crisis, accident etc, which is common in airlines. But when she saw a video about testimonies of an airplane crash she start crying and didn't stop till she arrived in my office. She was shaking, suffocating; she said she has something like an avocado in her throat and no air in her chest. Despair in her eyes. She said that her father dying scene with all family in total desperation couldn't leave her mind for one moment.

I asked her to describe the scene as she was seeing it and to try to be more of a spectator than a participant. But she couldn't, she was crying and she said she was feeling as a participant.

I tapped on her for each detail she verbalized:

I hear my mother yelling. I see my father's face. I see my aunt running and not knowing what to do; I feel my legs and my arms paralyzed in terror; I see my father in my arms. I hear more screams from everywhere.

I tapped for 5 rounds for each detail of the scene. The avocado was gone, she was breathing better after that.

I felt, as it happens frequently, that I needed to work not only with past traumatic scenes but also with imaginary scenes. By this I mean scenes that could happen in the near future. These scenes emerge from traumatic scenes that really happened and become part of them even if they never happened, and they become like future fearful probabilities.

I explored with her on these imaginary scenes and they came out. We worked like this:

Even though I have fear that my Mother can die suddenly as my father I deeply....Even though I believe that if my father died suddenly in my hands it can happen with other people I am deeply connected, I deeply...Even though I have this fear because a tragedy can happen at each moment of my life taking my grounding away, I deeply...Even though I can't trust the continuity of stability of a routine after what happened with my father, I deeply...Even though I think that suddenly I can lost in the next moment someone I love and care and this will mean my death, I deeply...Even though I am sure I will not survive if someone I love and care the most dies like my father did, suddenly, I deeply....Even though I feel I am falling in an abysm because of the incertitude of stability and continuity of my dear's life, I deeply...

She was very afraid of losing her mother, her fiancie, her aunt, her sister. She lost her father, an uncle and an aunt in the period of one year. They all were very close as a family, living together and sharing every detail of personal and family life. Everyone controlling everyone.

What I would like to stress here is that, besides working with past trauma in a moment of tears and despair, it is important to have the courage to work with fantasies of fear through images that are emerging in the client's mind at the moment of remembering the trauma. Mainly what comes out are scenes where the fear of instability, the fear of lack of continuity, the sensation of falling down in an abysm, and they are a re-traumatization that comes inside out.

I don't know if I could express myself. But I think it is very good example of avoiding re-traumatization. After a 20 minute session she was ok and we started working together on some of her professional issues.

She could eat again, (she was more than 20 hours without eating or drinking anything). She said she was completely calm. She spoke about all the crisis management training without feeling anything. She talked about details of the movie that once had made her shake, with a smile on her face. She left telling me, "if I survived my father's dying I can survive anything else."

Sonia

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