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When Alcohol Does Not Work

August 2, 2011 By

Linda called me late at night asking for help. When I asked for a description of her problem, she said she had not slept for three nights. When I asked her what had caused her sleeplessness, Linda explained that her son had died in her home of an accidental drug overdose two days ago.

He had just finished a plumber apprenticeship program after years of struggles to overcome childhood and adult problems. He had gone out with friends to celebrate the beginning of his new life, and when he returned home very late, he went directly to bed and fell asleep. But as she was heading to bed Linda checked on him and noticed that something about his breathing seemed off. So, Linda had stayed awake most of the night to periodically checkon him. Early the next morning, after dozing off briefly, Linda went in and found her son had stopped breathing completely. She called 911 and the dispatcher instructed her in rescue breathing, but, despite her efforts, her son never revived even after paramedics arrived.

Now, she told me, whenever she closed her eyes to rest she found herself confronted with a vivid image of her son’s dead eyes looking at her as she gave him CPR. If she did fall asleep for even an instant, she would awaken with a jolt to find his eyes staring at her.

Linda was beside herself. Sleep deprivation provides a sure path to complete dysfunction. Linda said she had tried everything to get some sleep but couldn’t get any relief. ”What’s the last thing you tried,” I asked. “Vodka,” she responded. Many people commonly use alcohol to medicate themselves, and, in most cases, enough alcohol will cause you to fall asleep. If you sleep in an alcohol-induced slumber, though, you will not rest well. In this situation, even large quantitieswere failing to do the job for Linda. Occasionally she would fall asleep only to awaken moments later with a sudden start and that image in her mind.

Linda knew she needed to sleep, so when I suggested she try Thought Field Therapy, she tapped as instructed without hesitation. After just two rounds of tapping, I could hear her becoming sleepy, and when I asked her what she saw when she closed her eyes, shereplied, “Nothing but blackness.” Linda was asleep by the time I put the phone down.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds. If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

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Cinnamon and Sierra—Getting to the Good Feelings

July 21, 2011 By

This is a story about a hard time in my family’s life, and how we got through it. I hope what we learned will help you and your family get through your hard times.

My name is Bobby, and I live with my Mom and Dad, my older brother Johnny, and our cat, Cinnamon. We have a beautiful house and a big yard. Johnny and I have a great room, which we share. We all love and take care of each other and are always there to help each other. We have time every day to talk and play. And when I need it, my parents or my brother help me with my homework and other stuff.

In our room, Johnny and I each have a bookcase. On mine, the bottom shelf holds all my sport stuff. I keep my safety pads and my helmet for my scooter and bike there. My baseball glove and my basketball are there, too. The next shelf holds my collection of space crafts and my favorite toys. On the next shelf, I have all my favorite books, videos, games, and papers from school that I have saved. Sometimes I find fun things from the Internet that I like to have, so I print them out and keep them there. I keep my most special things on the top shelf of my bookshelf. I have pictures of my friends and the places we have been together. I have pictures of my family. But, my most special picture is one we can never take again. It’s a picture of Mom, Dad, Johnny, and me by the fireplace with our cats, Cinnamon and Sierra. Johnny is holding Cinnamon, the big calico with all those colors. I am holding Sierra, the big tabby.

I miss Sierra. She died after she was hit by a car. Sometimes it seems like a long time ago, and sometimes it seems like it just happened. Our cats came from Friends of Cats, a place where homeless cats go until they find a home. Sierra was with us for as long as I can remember. She was always here. In our house, we have one rule for the cats: Cats stay inside, because we live on a busy street and near a big canyon with cat-eating coyotes. But sometimes Sierra would find her way out of the house. We don’t know why she liked to go out, but she did. Cinnamon never likes to go outside.

One day in the fall, we came home after school and Cinnamon was sitting on the sofa waiting for her afternoon pet, just like every day, but Sierra was nowhere to be found. She was not in the bedroom or in the kitchen. She had not gotten locked in a closet or shut in the laundry room. So, we did what we always do when she gets out. We all went outside to bring her back inside.

We looked in the backyard. We looked under the porch. We look over the neighbor’s fence. I was looking up in the tree in the front yard. (Once we found her climbing around up there.) I looked out in the street, and I saw her. She was lying in the street and did not move when I yelled at her to get up and back to the house. Then, I yelled for my mother. When she arrived, she went into the street when no cars were coming and picked Sierra up. When she laid Sierra down on the porch steps, she didn’t move. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t move. Her month was open, but she wasn’t breathing. I wanted to hear her purr, but when I touched her she was stiff and cold.

“Is she dead?” Johnny asked Mom.

“Yes,” said Mom and then told us to go in the house while she took Sierra to the garage. Then she called Dad.

Dad looked very sad when we all went to the backyard to bury Sierra. She was in a box in a deep hole Dad had dug. Dad said we all should tell a story about Sierra. He remembered when Johnny and I were still very little and Sierra was new to our house. He said the three of us would fight over the best spot on the sofa, but Sierra always won.

Johnny talked about one time when he was really sick, and every time he woke up during the day Sierra was looking right at him and purred until he fell back to sleep.

Mom laughed as she told the story of Sierra bringing a mouse into the house, and how everyone got so crazy chasing the mouse to get it out of the house again.

I wanted to tell everyone that whenever I would have a problem at school Sierra was always there when I got home and would make me play with her until I forgot about whatever had happened earlier that day, but I just couldn’t talk.

So, Dad said I could tell my story later. Then Dad covered Sierra in the box with dirt and put up a wood marker. He said after we have time to think about what we want to use, we will find a permanent marker instead—maybe a tree or a statue.

That night Johnny woke me up. I was breathing hard and felt all sweaty. Johnny said I was yelling out loud, “Get out of the street!” I was dreaming that Sierra was in the road with a car going by her. I couldn’t get back to sleep, and I just lay there. The next day at school, I fell asleep with my head on my desk. It felt like a hard day to get through, and that night at home Johnny had to be told to get off the computer about 20 times by my parents.

As the days went by after Sierra’s death, things got worse for me. Every time I remembered Sierra or saw a picture of her, I would just see a picture in my mind of how she looked lying in the road when I found her. I took down the picture of the family with Sierra in it, so I wouldn’t be reminded of her. I pushed Cinnamon away when she would try to come into our room, because she reminded me of Sierra.

My heart felt like a balloon with no air in it.

Mom and Dad kept telling my brother and I to go school and practices and to be with our friends. All I wanted to do was forget about Sierra lying in the road and figure out why this had happened and where she was now. I kept asking questions about death. All my friends and teammates had something different to say about what happens after you die. One day, Dad and I had a long private talk about death as we worked in the garden. He told me what is known and what people believe about death. He told me what our family has believed since his great-grandfather’s time. I liked having some idea about where Sierra was now, but it didn’t make my bad dreams go away. Sometimes I thought it must have been my fault that we didn’t find Sierra in time to keep her out of the street. Other times I would think that it was Johnny’s fault that she got out of the house. Mom had warned him to be careful when going in and out of the house. I remembered lots of times when Mom had told him to not be so careless in leaving the door open. Thinking about this made me start worrying about what I was doing or what others were doing, because I didn’t want anything else bad to happen. And that made me unhappy and not much fun to be with. I started getting into arguments with everyone over little stuff that didn’t really matter.

Things changed when Uncle Roger came to dinner, though. Uncle Roger has seen animals and people die a lot in his job. He works as a firefighter, and he understood exactly what I was talking about when I explained to him about the picture of Sierra in my head.

He told me that even grown-ups sometimes get a picture or memory of an ugly thing stuck in their heads. When that happens, we do all kinds of things to make the picture and the terrible feelings that come along with it go away. Then he told me that the best way to get rid of those “in-your face pictures, feelings, and memories” is to tap them away. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but Uncle Roger showed me how he did it. Then I followed what he did right there in the dining room.

Thinking of the ugly picture of Sierra, I felt the bad feelings inside and showed Uncle Roger how big the bad feelings were by spreading out my arms to show the size of the hurt I was feeling. Then we tapped together, Uncle Roger on himself and me on myself, with our fingertips on the side of our hand, under our nose, at the beginning of our eyebrow in the middle of our head, under our eyes, under our arms on our ribs, under our collarbone, on our little finger, under the collarbone, on our index finger, and under our collarbone. This took about a minute, and then when Uncle Roger asked me to show him how big the bad feeling was, I showed him that it was smaller than before. So, he showed me the next part.

We tapped the back of our hand and did nine different things: closed our eyes, opened our eyes, looked down to the left, looked down to the right, whirled our eyes in a big circle, whirled our eyes in big circle in the other directions, hummed a tune, counted to five, and hummed a tune again. After this we tapped just like we did when we started: at the beginning of our eyebrow in the middle of our head, under our eyes, under our arms, under our collarbone, on our little finger, under the collarbone, on our index finger, and under our collarbone.

Afterwards, Uncle Roger asked me to think about Sierra again, and the hurt was so much smaller that I wanted to tell him and the rest of the family what I had not been able to say when we buried Sierra. So I did.

Everybody cried, including me. And I realized that everybody missed Sierra, including Cinnamon. I decided the next time Cinnamon curled up next to me, I would not push her away. That night when I went to my room I wanted to put back the family picture with Sierra in it. When I looked at it the hurt started again, but Mom reminded me to tap. We went through the tapping routine that Uncle Roger had written down for me. After we tapped, I felt happy to look at the picture of all of us on my shelf.

I still miss Sierra, but the ugly picture in my mind is gone, and I just think about our good times together now. It’s so good to remember her purr and the feel of her furry tail brushing against me when I would read with her lying against me.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

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Using the Feelings From My Father’s Death

July 19, 2011 By

I have used Thought Field Therapy many times to help myself deal with my own grief and to come to grips with the reality of life. My father died over 30 years ago at the age of 51 as a result of an industrial related cancer. I feel sadness when I think of him and miss him in my life. I also miss his presence in my mother’s life. I don’t always feel a need to tap when I think of him. Sometimes my memories bring up positive and joyful feelings, and sometimes the sadness of his loss keeps me grounded in the reality of my life. However, I can find no sense of justice in my father’s death. No matter how I think about it, I cannot say that he deserved a painful, early death.

My father’s illness resulted from his efforts to support and care for his wife and children. He had performed many labor and blue collar jobs, including cleaning plating tanks, maintaining electrical transformers, and working in a magnet factory. He found the best jobs he could, given the fact that he left high school before graduating to work his family’s farm when his step-father became sick. He did finish high school the same year as my older brother, but by then he had suffered extensive occupational exposure to carcinogens.

More often than not, our culture and society does not treat hardworking men and women fairly. Often many are put in harm’s way to serve the financial and power interests of a few. My father did not choose cancer nor was it fated. He was not treated fairly by life. Do I sound sad and bothered? Do I sound angry? I am, but not so angry as to keep me from my memories. And I tap when the feelings overwhelm me, and I cannot function. I also tap when the overwhelming feelings interfere with my commitment to making the world better for men like my father.

Justice does not exist in the nature of the world or in the institutions of our society. Justice exists in only in the relationships between people. When we treat one another with love, care, and concern justice exists. Only when rules and laws support our love, care, and concern for one another does justice go beyond individual relationships. This is my belief and a guiding principle in my life. My father was not shown the basic concern for safety and well-being in his workplace that I think is right. So, I take my sense of loss and injustice—and my anger—and I channel it into doing something to change this for other men like my father.

I chose to become a social worker because of the explicit role this profession has in making change in the larger systems that impact individuals. I tell this story about my father to teach others about the importance of the environment that forms the context of our daily lives. I support all efforts to improve regulations and laws so they protect us in the workplace and in our homes. Even as a psychotherapist working with individuals who struggle to take more control of their lives, I encourage them to act with care and concern for all who share their world. I encourage individuals to act in ways that demand attention to injustice, as part of a community to change standards of care, and as a voting participant of a representative form of government. In this way, my emotions become a source of power when I am not overwhelmed by them.

Despite my feelings about the injustice of my father’s death, the action steps I’ve taken and the way I have chosen to make my response to my father’s death a positive force in my life keep me from becoming frozen in loneliness and hopelessness. I feel all my feelings and their full force fuels my actions. I will grieve for my father in this way forever, and I know this is a good thing.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact http://rlbray.com/contact page to email him directly.

 

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“I get it now”—Sharing to Be Understood

July 12, 2011 By

“I want to come in with my husband to talk about his affair,” said the woman on the other end of the phone call.

“Is this marriage counseling or divorce counseling?” I asked, since I needed to know how to approach their session. I didn’t receive a clear-cut response. After she answered a few more questions, however, it became clear that the woman’s husband had agreed to come to counseling—and anything else she wanted—in the hope the marriage could be fixed. She explained to me that her husband told her about his affair when it became obvious that the secret would be out soon. He said he revealed the truth at that time in an attempt to protect her from hearing about it from someone else. So, we planned an appointment.

Two nice people in their mid 50s showed up in my office. They had been married for over 25 years and, judging by their interactions, they seemed very much married in all the good ways. By this I mean, their communication with one another appeared excellent, they were respectful of and caring for one another and both talked openly about how much they loved one another. Their problem lay in the fact that she felt so terribly angry and hurt by her husband’s several-month long affair with a past employee. In fact, she was so, hurt that she did not know how she could stay with him.

As she talked about her concerns, the wife stressed that she was at a loss when it came to understanding how her husband could have done what he had done, especially with this particular employee. The other women, who was known to both of them, was older than the wife, by the husband’s judgment was less attractive than his wife, and had a long history of emotional and financial problems. While the wife recognized her husband’s courage in being honest with her and believed the affair was over, she could not stand the thought of what he had done to her and to their marriage.

As I talked with them, I had to admit I shared her confusion about what was going on here. The husband’s behavior seemed out of character and not in line with what he said was important to him, what he wanted, and how he had lived his life previously. So, doing what therapists do, I started asking some probing questions about their history. In response to questions about when they thought things in the marriage started changing, I found out that about five years earlier their 19-year- old son had died in an automobile crash. The father and son had been best friends and had shared lots of sporting and outdoor activities. The mother and son had been very close also.

The moment their son’s death was mentioned, both the husband and the wife became overcome with their grief. They cried openly and appeared to sink into depression. I stopped them from retelling the story and led them both through a Thought Field Therapy process. They used traumatic stress patterns that included both guilt and anger. At this point, the session’s focus turned from the couple’s marriage to helping them to grieve for the loss of their son and to share the story of his death. We tapped each time they sank back into a depressed state, until finally they could tell me the whole story without overwhelming upset or depression.

As they talked about their marriage after their son’s death, it became clear that the joy had left their relationship along with their son, and since then they had simply been getting by day-to-day. Additionally, this wife and mother had gone into a deep depression that had lasted for about three years. While talking about what they had done to live through the loss, the husband talked about how his affair began. He explained that at the time the other women had made herself available to him, he was feeling so dead inside and hopeless that he lost sight of what mattered to him. As he said these words, a visible change occurred in his wife’s affect and demeanor. She reached out to him and cried with him and told him, “It will be okay.” After some more tapping, she told her husband she wanted to find a way to stay with him and make the marriage work. She admitted that she would need help learning to trust him again, but she said she really wanted to try.

When I asked her how she had come to her decision, her response was very clear. When she heard her husband talking about how dead and hopeless he had felt at the loss of their son, she had related to his words, because she had felt the same way. She knew how crazy that feeling made her feel and what she herself was capable of doing to try to rid herself of that emotion. She got it. She had found a way to understand how her husband could have had the affair. With this explanation, she could go on with the marriage.

The couple worked hard to do what had to be done to reestablish trust in their marriage. They worked out a system where he had a dedicated cell phone that only she used. He would answer this phone under any and all condition, at work or play, in the middle of conversation, or racing a car. He was always available and accountable to her.

They had a few more sessions with me but did not need any long-term work once they found a way to keep talking. The course of their marriage counseling was shortened considerably, because Thought Field Therapy helped them get unstuck from the place where they had gotten stuck in the grieving process. Thought Field Therapy helped them bring the pain of their loss down to a level where they could feel alive and have hope again. From that place, they could also feel their love for one another and continue their marriage. Additionally, they could focus upon their daughter while keeping the memory of their son alive.

When her older brother had died, she often was ignored by her parents, because she too would easily become overwhelmed, triggering all three of them. This would cause a shutdown in communications and grieving. Now, they all had a way to share their loss and to move forward in their lives.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

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Getting Through the Pains to the Memory

July 8, 2011 By

A woman in her late 40s approached me after a presentation at a conference and asked for help dealing with the loss of her son, who had died three years earlier. A young man in his early 20s, he had been killed in an industrial accident. She was an experienced mental health professional and was able to describe to me her sense of being stuck in her grief. She said she was unable to move beyond the overwhelming pain she felt whenever she started to think of her son.

“How may I help?” I asked. As soon as she began to respond to my question, her tears started flowing and a look of pain spread across her face. Without further prompting, I led her through a Thought Field Therapy treatment sequence, and calm returned to her face and the tears slowed.

I then asked, “What happened to your son?” and immediately the look of pain returned. After another treatment sequence, she was able to describe for me the emotions that had overcome her when I asked the question. She said my question reminded her that he was gone and she was without him, and this caused her to feel generally overwhelmed. Each time she became conscious of her loss, her focus of attention then led her to imagine how he died. She wondered about the moments before his death, the pain he may have felt, the thoughts he probably had, and the feelings he experienced dying alone.

As she talked about her understanding of how he died while doing the work he loved, the pain returned to her face and she started to cry again, this time very hard. Her upset now was associated with the fact that she had encouraged her son to pursue this work that he loved and also was good at doing. After an additional tapping treatment, she was able to talk about her guilt as irrational and put these feeling in a manageable place.

As we talked more about her son and their relationship, we had to tap for the anger she felt about some relationship choices he had made. With the anger and guilt gone, she was able to speak about her love for her son, and this again started her tears flowing, this time accompanied by deep powerful sobs. I offered immediately to do another Thought Field Therapy treatment, but she refused any further help. Instead she said, “This is where I have been trying to get to for three years. I am remembering the last time I saw him at the airport, and I hugged my baby good-bye.”

Grieving is painful, and suffering through a loss is hard work. Not even Thought Field Therapy can alter this reality. Tapping can manage the overwhelming pain and, by so doing, allow you to consciously engage in the process of integrating your loss. That’s what it accomplished for this woman.

I received a post card about six months later from this mother reporting that she was doing much better. She was grieving, but no longer felt stuck in the process, and had finished a couple of projects done in her son’s name. These projects had been started right after his death; previously she had been unable to complete them, because thinking about her son had been too painful at that time. She was able to do the work of grieving, and to honor her son by finishing the projects, because Thought Field Therapy provided her with a way to manage her pain when it became too great. To fully integrate her loss, she had to be able to feel her love for her son and accept her life as changed now that he was physically absent from it—something all survivors of loss must do.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

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Staying Available to Heal Ourselves and to Help Others

July 6, 2011 By

As long as the correct sequence is tapped, Thought Field Therapy relieves traumatic stress symptoms at impressive speed under any conditions, and the role of the interventionist or helper remains minimal. I had a chance to remember this fact at the worst moment of my life when I offered Thought Field Therapy to someone in need.

I was attending a memorial service for Trey, an 11-year-old boy, who had died a week earlier. This boy had held a special place in my life, since my wife and I considered his parents our oldest and dearest friends. Trey had died unexpectedly at a friend’s birthday party when a strong wind caused a large redwood tree branch to break off and fall on him just as he happened to be running underneath the tree. The branch hit him in the head, knocking him unconscious.

As his mother put it, Trey’s death represented a “blameless event.” Emergency Medical Services arrived in a timely manner; Trey was air-lifted to an emergency room at the best hospital. There the doctors and nurses did more than the standard protocols required to try and revive him before declaring him dead.

Seven days later, about 500 people attended Trey’s memorial service at a junior high school. Before the service, his mother greeted friends and family. I was standing nearby as she hugged one woman in particular. She mouthed the words “help her” to me over the woman’s

shoulder. I was an emotional wreck myself. When the woman stepped back, however, I saw she was in uniform and realized she was the first emergency medical technician on the scene after Trey had been hurt. I could see she was having a very hard time coping. So, I identified myself

as an International Critical Incident Stress Foundation-approved instructor for critical incident stress debriefing and a Certified Trauma Specialist. The woman explained that although she had been to a critical incident stress debriefing, for the last week she had been unable to get the picture of Trey out of her mind.

Using the Thought Field Therapy protocol, I asked her to rate her upset. On a 1-10 scale, the picture in her mind was so vivid and disturbing that she rated herself a level 10. In the middle of this very crowded room, I led her through one extended trauma tapping pattern.

When we had finished, she reported the picture of Trey had disappeared.

I had treated myself with Thought Field Therapy many times throughout the week. Without having done so, I know I would not have been available for that emergency medical technician or for other friends who needed help coping with Trey’s death. Trey’s loss would continue to be painful no matter what and all who knew him would grieve his death, but tapping gave me a way to remain functional and available for my own healing and for helping others.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

 

 

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Using TFT to Deal with what Really Happened

June 16, 2011 By

Looking at the Pictures – What Really Happened?

Suzy, had come in about six months after the death of her fiance. He had died in her arms as they waited for help after a car crash in a remote area. Suzy, her fiance, his best friend, and his girlfriend had been spending a couple days in the country. That night they had been drinking, and, at some point, the two men decided to go into town for more alcohol. She and the friend’s girlfriend stayed behind. The two women watched from the front porch of the house where they were staying as the lights of the car went off the road about a mile away and then ran to the scene.

Suzy’s fiancée was conscious and able to talk but pinned in the crushed vehicle. His friend, who had been driving, was non-responsive, and the women were unable to get under the vehicle to check on him. Suzy did what she could with her first- aid training while the other woman ran back to the house to try to speed help on its way. My client was left to hold her fiance as he slowly drifted away from her. For a few minutes, they talked of their love and future plans. He had no external injuries that she could see, but internally he we was crushed and bleeding. He was dead when the emergency responders arrived about half an hour later.

In our first sessions, Suzy and I had used Thought Field Therapy to address the intrusive images and memories that haunted her about the time alone with him as he died. These images were making it difficult for her to live her life. After learning tapping and working with me during a few sessions, she was able to care for her daughter once again and to go back to work, two things she had been unable to do after the accident and prior to using Though Field Therapy.

During a follow-up call, Suzy said she had decided it was time to know for sure what had happened that night. She said, “I’m ready to look at the pictures.” She was ready to read the accident report and look at the pictures within it for the first time. Despite being told by emergency responders at the scene and later by the medical examiner that she had done everything possible, Suzy was having trouble understanding why she did not get her fiance out of the car or see the injuries that killed him. Her memories of certain aspects of the evening were very clear, but, as often happens when we are on overload in a crisis, some facts about those hours were not known, recorded in memory, or accessible in present time.

In our session, Suzy and I looked at the new information from the files. As she worked through her memories of that night, she tapped several times when feelings would start to overwhelm her. By the end of the session, I had seen the light go on in her mind several times as she looked at pictures and read the report. With the additional facts, suddenly things about that night made sense to Suzy in a way they had not before. Her sense of loss was not eased much by knowing more about the details of her fiance’s death, but at least now she could understand both her actions and responses.

Unexpectedly, reading the report also provided her with information about the length of response time, which was shorter than she remembered. This eased some of her anger at the local sheriff’s department. After the session, she reported that she could put to rest much of what had been on her mind about the incident for a long time.

For more about how tapping can help and how to tap instructions please check out my book, No Open Wounds.

If you would like to make a comment, please click on the link below and fill in the comments form. If you would like to make your comment to Dr. Bray privately, please go to the Contact page to email him directly.

 

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Filed Under: Grief, Traumatic Stress

Thought Field Therapy – Feelings we need to Grieve

March 15, 2011 By

The recent natural disasters in Japan have resulted in the death of thousands of individuals – each touching so many family and friends.  Thought Field Therapy (TFT) can help us to the feelings we need to grieve sudden loss.

It may sound odd but the biggest problem people have with grief is when they don’t grieve. It hurts so much and we cry every time we remember our loved one is gone. So we avoid the memories and anything that triggers them. It’s a common coping mechanism to manage the pain. Taking the time to be with feelings of love for the one who has died and allowing the acceptance that they are no longer with us is necessary to move on with our own lives.

Grieving is a process we must go through. It doesn’t just happen without our conscious awareness and participation. Overwhelming emotion that paralyzes us is even less helpful. Healing requires knowing that we had the gift of our loved ones presence and now they are no longer physically with us. Thought Field Therapy can help us get unstuck and allow us to move through the grieving process.

A woman once asked me to help her deal with the loss of her son three years earlier. He had been in his early 20s and had been killed in an industrial accident. Although she was an experienced mental health professional and was able to describe her sense of being stuck in her grief, she was still unable to move beyond her overwhelming pain. As we talked, the tears started and I could see the pain in her face. I led her through a TFT treatment sequence and she became calm. When I asked her what happened to her son, the pain returned as strong as before. After another TFT sequence she was able to explain the thoughts that were causing her pain – knowing he was gone, imagining how he died, the pain he may have felt and the thoughts and feelings he experienced dying alone.

As she talked about these feelings the pain returned to her face and she started to cry again. Her emotions were now tied to the fact that she had encouraged him to pursue this work he was good at and loved doing. We continued Thought Field Therapy treatments and she was able to understand that her guilt was irrational and manage her feelings. Next she uncovered some anger she felt about some choices he had made but we were able to move through that so that she could talk about her love for her son. These feelings were deep, strong and powerful and she began to sob. She said this was where she had been trying to get for three years. Now she could remember the last time she saw him and hugged her baby good-bye.

Yes, grieving is painful and hard work and not even TFT can alter this reality. But it can allow us to manage the overwhelming pain and allow us to consciously move through the process of accepting the loss. About six months later I received a card from this mother who reported she was doing much better. She was able to do the work of grieving using TFT to manage her pain when it was just too much. Grieving is the process that allows us to integrate the loss and we must be able to feel the love and accept a life that is changed.

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