Phobias, Disappointments and Grief: A Fast Remedy

The problem is that the consequences of what we have been through leave their print on our psychosomatic profile.

Time of change

A constructive drawing of a person, a simple test, can prove this. Draw an image of a person using rectangles, round-shaped elements and triangles. There should be 10 elements in the drawing. Now specify the age of the character.

It is most likely that the age of the character will point back to some crucial moment in your life. Body proportions in the drawing that are unusually bigger and wider than the rest of the body can indicate areas of strain. Other parts of the body, which are often the limbs, are designated by triangles, which means they are in state of “desolation”. We’ll turn back to this test further on in this book. It is also described in detail in my book Geometry of Emotion (A. Ermoshin, 2008).

The situations described are connected mostly with adaptive stress. Yet as we have mentioned before, some cases do not only cause strain but significantly alter the state of health of a person. They catch the person off-guard and are so hard to embrace that they end up causing trauma.

It’s hard to go through it without getting wounded

It is hard to find a person who hasn’t experienced disloyalty of friends, disappointment in people who seemed to be ideal or aggression from other people for no reason at all…

Life isn’t all a bed of roses, says the proverb.

However, even the situations which are not so dramatic from the point of view of an adult could be traumatizing. For example, when entering an elevator, a person expects to go out at a certain floor in a minute or two. But all of a sudden, this device designed to save people’s energy, stops, and the light goes off. This is just a temporary stop. Somebody will certainly come to help, because people need the elevators and their functionality is monitored. It is enough just to press the emergency button if the person wants the help come sooner. Alternatively, the person could knock loudly on the doors to get somebody’s attention. Also usually it’s possible to use a mobile phone which almost everyone has in his or her pocket, or the person could just have a rest, think about things or even meditate. Is there any difference between a person at home and the same person inside an elevator? Usually there isn’t. All the power stays with this person, all the inner self-regulation mechanisms, which have been forming for thousands of years, work the same way!

This is how an adult, a self-assured person understands the situation. Yet a boy or a girl could imagine that he or she would never go out of this unfortunate elevator or see his or her parents ever again…

That isn’t true, of course, and soon everything will be fine but because of this loss of self-confidence, even if it’s just for a moment, a child’s mind might “catch” this fright, and it “settles down” somewhere inside and begins to control the state of mind even after the child gets out of the elevator. (This is exactly what happened to my patient Julia; you will read her story later in this book). The fright generates the fear. Even the thought of the unpleasant experience.

Enthusiasm of a bouncy dog brings no joy

Psychological traumas can be caused by the situations when a person encounters circumstances which are threatening for their life or for their honour and dignity, and which he or she is not ready to face. A large dog decided to play with a three-year-old girl, kicked her down and tore her dress. How will she react? Would she be able to sympathize with the dog’s enthusiasm and feel the joy of life? It is unlikely, as she definitely doesn’t have enough self-confidence. Instead, she feels afraid.

A person who has enough “resources” reacts differently. Serge has just got out of a suburban train and suddenly he gets gripped by the neck from behind by a large man from a crowd of drunken friends. It’s a do-or-die situation. These guys have been recently discharged from the army, there’s no way he can beat them. Serge tries to loosen the grip a bit and asks the aggressor: “Wanna become friends?” – “Yeah!” answers the bully suddenly. The bully then loosens the grip, they get acquainted and in a minute the jolly crowd decides to walk Serge home so that nobody could bother him. The shocking gesture of the bully masked a clumsy attempt to make friends. Serge helped him to understand this and was rewarded for it.

There is a bright feeling of assertion growing in Serge’s body from his capacity to answer life’s challenges. And in the girl’s mind there is a dark strain.

The goals of this book include presenting a solution for such tension resulting from a trauma. We will begin with fears, as this kind of problem is particularly frequent. All of my observations are based on a large medical practice and are verified by the work done with a number of patients.

Part 1. Work through Phobias and Panic Attacks

1.1. Introduction

Ten minutes

I’d like to point out that in many cases five or ten minutes can be enough to work through the fear and improve the life of the patient.

As an introduction, I’ll tell you a story of a successful recovery from a fear of spiders. This is a story which I personally like to recall from time to time.

One day in Paris

There’s a cafe called “L’Apostrophe” in Paris, on Colonel Fabien Street. Once a month it becomes a rendezvous point for local hypnologists and turns into a “Hypnocafé”. Professionals from the psychotherapy world gather there to learn about foreign specialists’ methods or just have a cup of coffee together.

This time on the second Tuesday of the month it was my turn to present at the meeting. My precursors were Jeffrey Zeig and Betty Erickson so I was in good company. I was invited by Jean Becchio, a brilliant specialist in “nouvelle hypnose”.

I was surrounded by a dozen colleagues, and we stumbled into the cafe a little late, slightly wet from the November rain: it turned out that a taxi in Paris is rather unpredictable, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive even if you call beforehand.

It also was a kind of a stressful test for mental equilibrium, but we managed to pass it. People were expecting us, and after a short presentation we could proceed to work.

Regina

A colleague from France volunteered to talk with me in front of the group. She was about 45 and quite skinny. Such people often describe themselves as being indifferent to life. “I don’t care if I’m free or I’m in captivity,” says the Russian proverb. But Regina turned out to be quite cheerful. The only problem she did have was her fear of spiders. One would wonder if there were any spiders in Paris at all. There are no tarantulas, no dreadful black widows or steppe spiders, no scorpions either.

“Yes, there are!” Regina objected. “They’re everywhere!”

“But you know that you are big, and they are small. They can do you no harm.”

“No, it’s me who is tiny, and they are giant!” Regina said and told me that when spiders are mentioned she freezes, begins to tremble, and her hands become cold.

“Your hands become cold, so where does the heat go?” – I asked. The tension and the heat happened to be in her stomach.

I wondered if she was aware of any ways to counteract spiders. One could use shaving foam, or just throw a towel over the spider and then throw it out of a window. Regina shook her head and made it clear that was not her way. It doesn’t work for her.

The black spider flew away with his web

That’s when we begin the active part of our work.

The first working phase. We try to find out where in the body is the thing that frightens her. Regina closes her eyes: “In my stomach.” What is there? “There is a black spider.” Regina makes a decision to let it go away. Regina is observing the process. The “spider” goes out through the top of her head together with its web.

The second working phase. “Where is the knowledge of how to deal with spiders?” The patient finds it to be somewhere at a distance in shape of a small sun. The decision is to let the sun settle inside the body. The patient is watching it going inside through the top of her head and settling in the solar plexus area.

Regina experiences warmth and peace.

We make a test. The patient imagines that she has a run in with a spider. She keeps calm, she knows several effective ways of action and easily imagines what her behaviour will be like if she actually meets a spider.

Before the session the patient felt cold, and now she feels warm. A phobia which had been haunting her all her life finally disappeared as a bad dream. At the end of the meeting Regina came over to thank me and confirmed that she was still feeling the warmth in her body.

My French colleagues felt puzzled: “We usually need ten years to analyse phobias, and here it takes ten minutes… This seems weird.” “You can spend ten years, but if you wish to have the time to live without phobias, I’d recommend you my method,” I said. I also found the reaction of my German friend interesting; his wife Tatiana told me about it. Uwe Pertz is a wise man so his words are even more valuable: “Why hasn’t it occurred to anyone else to do it? It seems so simple!”

Fast facts about developing phobias

When a person finds him or herself in some unexpected situation and is unsure how to act in order to save themselves or their family, he or she feels lost. This person feels like his or her body has absorbed some toxic substance which poisons everything around it. This substance has penetrated the body and reached the stomach, so there arises an unpleasant tension at every thought of the frightening situation. Let alone the discomfort which affects the head or triggers the feeling of anxiety in the chest. Those layers of disorder are more superficial.

At the moment of confusion, the body was open and defenceless, so the inner vacuum got filled with darkness. This moment has passed, and the body has closed but it is not the same any more: it’s “poisoned” by fear. That’s how a phobia develops.

It is not enough just to understand

Most of the actual systems of phobia treatments are based on the fact that people can understand that their fears are illogical. Curing the neurotic fear using Psychocatalysis also begins with realizing that “you shouldn’t be afraid,” but it doesn’t end there.

It is essential to work with the deeper layers of irrational fear. We need to trigger a process which reverses the original process that took place at the moment when the phobia developed, that is: to find something that got inside the body without an invitation, and remove it. Then there comes the phase of getting experience out of the situation, elaborating a sensible attitude to the fact that life sometimes challenges us…

Phobias can be cured fast but it is essential to pass both the phase of “the darkness getting out” and that of “the light coming in”. If this happens then a fear that has lasted for years can be treated within one session.

The active role of a patient

In many popular systems that work with fears, the patient is often just an extra player. But in Psychocatalysis the work is executed by the patient himself and the patient’s body in self-regulation mode. The task of the specialist is to make the patient do this work.