guilt – Page 3 – TFT Trauma Relief

TFT Relieves Grief of Elderly Russian Immigrant

I work with a unique population–Russian immigrants 65-years-old and up. Our practice is in the heart of a Russian community, famous Brighton Beach. Coming here to the U.S., my patients brought with them a myriad of issues – some are unique only to this population group and some are universal for all elderly–the loss of social status, familiar surroundings, life-long friends, rich Russian culture, profession or career, and part of the family (left behind).

And much more…They miss the traditional cultural closeness of the family. They come here so they won’t be separated from their children, and their children often move to different parts of the country, leaving them in Russian neighborhoods to take care of themselves.

They also have unique pain and memories: fighting in WWII, running from Germans, famine and labor camps of Stalin’s era, and concentration camps or ghetto.

They are now getting older, with more medical problems that also affect their emotional well-being.

One of my patients, Mrs. L, is in her early seventies, looking younger than her age. She is a good-looking woman, but behind her smile there is pain.

Ten years ago she immigrated to the USA from Moscow with her mother and husband. Their daughter, who stayed behind to have a baby, was supposed to come a few months later. She did not. She stayed in Moscow, had one more child and eventually lost her visa. Now she is not able to even come to the U.S. for a visit. Mrs. L went to Russia a few times to see her newborn grandchildren.

Five years ago Mrs. L’s mother became ill and passed away. A few months later she lost her husband to cancer. Now she is alone and is not able to visit Moscow any more. Her doctors advised her not to fly that far. “I had a big family and now I do not have anybody. What do I do? I cry every evening, feeling so lonely.”

I treated Mrs. L with the emotional trauma algorithm and gave her a handout to use at home. She uses the protocol every time she feels lonely or wants to cry. She tells me that it helps her enormously and she is feeling better.

I am very glad I learned TFT–and have it as the main tool in my tool box. It helps my patients enormously.

TFT Relieves Pain of Euthanizing Beloved Pet

From Tim Bruneau:

My border collie, Murphy, was an extraordinary spirit who enriched my life immeasurably. He was, in effect, “the nicest person I knew”…cheerful, happy, and affectionate to all. When he reached the age of fourteen, his health began to fail dramatically, and slow organ failure had reduced his life to a miserable existence.

In an attempt to make the most compassionate decision possible, I sought the advice of his veterinarian and subsequently had him euthanized.

While I had psychologically prepared myself for the process of mourning his absence, I truly had not thought about the intensity of emotion that would be precipitated by my having made the conscious decision to have Murphy’s life ended. I was genuinely devastated by feelings of sadness, guilt and confusion for weeks after his passing.

I had met Dr. David Hanson in my work as an entertainer, and in one of our many conversations, he told me of his work in the arena of Thought Field Therapy.

When he offered to help me address my challenges in mourning Murphy through an impromptu session of therapy, I consented with only faint belief in its ability to help.

Despite my hesitation, the session proved to be a miraculous experience. Almost immediately afterward, I felt a clarity of thought and a lightness of spirit unlike anything I had experienced in weeks. Dr. Hanson’s treatment allowed me to process emotions that had simply remained in my head and heart as an unsolvable puzzle of pain and angst.

I will always be grateful for the gift of his healing treatment, TFT, and I encourage anyone who has suffered a loss of this nature to seek it out.

TFT Relieves 11-Year-Old Boy of Trauma & Shame

TFT even works with people who don’t want to reveal what their upset is about, as Dr. Theresa Gormly, chiropractor, demonstrates in the following story:

I had such a great experience with TFT today with an 11 year old who was very depressed and crying all the time according to his mom. He was begging her not to tell me about his shame related to seeing a sexually explicit picture on the internet. Anyway I told him just to think of the experience (without telling me what it was about) and we tapped it out. Evidently before treating him he was preoccupied with thoughts about it and had alot of shame around it.

He transformed before our eyes. At the end I asked him to think about it and he couldn’t get it to come to mind. He hugged me and his mom and kept saying “thank you”. After I treated his mom I went into the waiting room to say “good-bye” and he looked at me and said “I still can’t think about it” with a “thumbs up”. So nice!

TFT Relieves Mother’s Trauma from 9/11

Diane Bahr Groth, TFT-Adv, shares how she used TFT with a mother whose son was tragically killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11:

Today I worked with a lovely woman who lost her only son in the World Trade Center disaster. He was just 24 years old and newly hired by Cantor and Fitzgerald who lost 700 people. She has allowed me to share her story.

We spent approximately 2 hours together. She was at peace when she left my office. The most difficult aspect of the session was to help her alleviate the pain associated with her son’s last phone call to her.

Miraculously his telephone in the office worked only long enough to call her. He described the scene of horror to her very calmly.

“Mom, something hit the building. The ceiling is coming down, the walls and floors are coming apart and there is smoke all around. I have to tell you that I love you and I am going to die”.

At first she thought he was joking but did not interrupt. She realized the severity of the situation and calmly told him she loved him, and to find someone to be with so he would not be alone. Instantly they were disconnected.

She rushed to the television and saw the horror we have all seen over and over. Her husband was in tower 7 and could not be reached.

She has heard her son’s words over and over in her mind and pictured the hell he was in before he died, and felt his fear.

She also expressed fear for her husband’s safety, guilt that she had not said the right words, that she had not protected her son and fear about anthrax.

As soon as she was at peace about her son, she realized that she had been with him so he was not alone–and the “picture” she held in her mind about his last moments was gone. All the other fears vanished as well. She was exhausted, as many clients are after such a session, but left transformed.

*Photo by Macten: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macten/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

TFT After Cougar Attack

Martin Law, C.Psych, describes how he used the TFT trauma technique to relieve his wife’s severe trauma after having witnessed the killing of their dog by a cougar:

It was a beautiful Fall Saturday in November 2001 when my wife (Viv) decided to go for a walk into a forested area close to our acreage west of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Our one year old Samoyed dog (Nakoda) happily trotted along with her.

One of our twin sons (David) tagged along as well, then decided to turn around for home after walking for 75 metres. To this day we are thankful that he chose to turn back for home.

About a half-hour into her walk a flash of light brown came bolting from behind a tree, knocked Viv to the ground, suddenly did a 90 degree turn and pounced on Nakoda.

Totally stunned and bewildered, Viv stood up to witness the cougar mauling Nakoda. The sights and sounds of Nakoda’s death were seared into Viv’s brain as she began to take in what was happening. In a panic she fled the scene, feeling helpless, confused and disoriented, as well as guilty for leaving her beloved dog to the mercy of this wild animal.

I was with our oldest son 60 kilometres away at a tennis tournament when all this took place. Fortunately, a distant neighbour who lived close to the site of the attack was home when Viv came crashing through the bush. He drove Viv home.

While this was a short drive, Viv was panicking, not knowing if David had made it home safely. Fortunately he had and for the rest of the day, Viv and our twins stayed with our neighbour until I got home.

Up until this time, we had no idea that cougars would be anywhere near our acreage. We later deduced that this particular cougar had actually been prowling around our home!!

When I arrived home, I heard the whole story. Not surprisingly, Viv was incredibly shaken up. We talked about what happened and I basically followed the standard protocols for defusing following a critical incident (per the Jeff Mitchell CISM model).

That evening Viv could not sleep, with classic flashbacks to the event, a re-living of the sights and sounds of Nakoda’s last minutes. The next day we Continue reading “TFT After Cougar Attack”

TFT Heals 60-Year Old Trauma from Rape

My name is Rosemarie Solarz. I am currently seventy years old. I would like to share with you a very traumatic experience I had at 10 years old.

My parents went out for a New Years eve dance in town and left my brother and I with a neighbor’s son who was sixteen years old. He told my brother and I (who was 9 at the time) that he wanted to teach us a new game we could all play.

For us it sounded like fun. But it wasn’t. He started doing things we didn’t like and we did not want to play anymore and began to get scared. Before I knew it, he had raped me.

I remember I did not cry because I did not know what had just happened to me. Back then, words like rape were not mentioned. All I could remember the rest of the evening was I hurt and did not feel good so I went to my bedroom and stayed until my parents came home.

The memory of that horrible experience changed the rest of my life. I never had any lasting, healthy relationships, low self-image, worked hard to have people like me, gained weight, self-sabotaged myself and finally a broken marriage to make me feel even more inadequate!

Those memories were stored so deep in my subconscious that I was in my mid-forties before they revealed their ugly self. I had an opportunity to attend a healing mass at my church one evening and the priest that was conducting the healing part whispered in my ear had I been sexually abused by my father.

I just froze! Then I began to shake. Tears came to my eyes. He laid his hand on my shoulder to calm me and said to come see him the next day and talk about. I never cried so hard in my life. The release was more than I could bear, just to have it come out.

He gave me the name of a counselor to go to. I took advantage of many opportunities to seek help. However, I reached the point where I felt I had worked through everything and did not need to go on further.

How wrong I was! For some unknown reason I would shy away from any conversations that would pertain to rape, or anything that had to do with intimacy. Never wanted to be around men and I still felt shame.

However, recently my eldest daughter, Christina Mayhew, completed Dr. Roger Callahan’s TFT class in California and helped clean out all the old baggage I was still carrying around. She taught me how to use the Trauma and shame algorithm technique in order to free me of the remaining pain I felt.

I cannot express strongly enough just how much it has helped me. The experience of this technique is nothing short of a miracle in my opinion. The technique took us no more than ten, maybe twelve minutes. I pray that anyone else going through trauma of any kind will seek out this program in order to receive the complete healing they deserve!