Читать книгу Goodbye, Hurt & Pain - Deborah Sandella - Страница 43

Joan is an attractive and quiet sixty-year-old executive assistant. She has been suffering with hepatitis C for ten years. Exposed to the illness by a blood transfusion, she feels ever more furious with the unfairness of it all. Her liver has been severely damaged, and at the time of her first session she reports her liver function tests are so abnormal, her physicians are recommending chemotherapy, a common practice at the time. Preferring to avoid chemicals, she is seeking something different.

As Joan sits on the couch, she immediately shares a litany of complaints about the bad economy, the high cost of living, and the political party in office. The mild rant of injustice rings with familiarity as if it has been her everyday habit.

When she gently closes her eyes, an imaginary journey into her body begins. Sensing her inner space as three-dimensional, she notices a strange energy around the area of her liver. She describes it as “pure blackness—all the way through”; she winces at hearing the power of her own images. As she focuses on the shape and size of this blackness, details begin to materialize: it is rough on the surface, dry and hard, solid and dense. The hard surface calls her attention most intently, and she travels deeper into it. Here she senses sticky black tar. She sounds anxious as she realizes she can't get it off—the tar is thoroughly stuck to her hands.

Joan is willing to move her awareness bravely into the stickiest part of the tar where an image of the person she needs to speak to is brought into her mind by her imagination. Much to her surprise, it's Joe, the fiancé who betrayed her twenty years earlier. They had been together for years when she discovered his affair with another woman. Joan has not engaged in another relationship.

After her imagination materializes an image of a loving guide to give her a feeling of safety, Joan begins to speak aloud directly to the image of Joe. Having tapped a previously closed well of emotion, she spontaneously finds herself saying things she has never considered, let alone spoken. The words flow like water from a pitcher:

Joe, you hurt me so badly when all I wanted to do was to love you. How could you do that to me? I wanted to be with you more than anything, and you ruined it all. . . . You ruined my life. I've never been the same. How can I trust anyone again? I can't even trust myself to choose a man. How could I have loved you so much, when you didn't give a hoot about me? I hate you! I hate what happened! I hate life where my only true love fails and I am alone.

As Joan dips further into her sorrow and voices deeper levels of rage and shame, she gradually arrives at a feeling of emptiness, and she begins to look and sound different. The lines around her eyes that make her look older relax, and the color of her complexion brightens. She begins to speak with a self-aware voice:

I should never have trusted you, Joe. Years before your affair, I noticed how you looked at my sister. You flirted with all the girls. I guess I was so flattered you chose to be with me, I turned a blind eye to the kind of guy you really were. You were a womanizer from the beginning. If I had it to do over, I'd break up with you the first time you were disrespectful to me by ogling another girl while I sat next to you. I would tell you in no uncertain terms, Joe, I refuse to stand for this kind of disregard. I deserve better. I am leaving you.

Joan's voice is transformed from helpless and frustrated to independent and strong. She has released the stuck memory of Joe and succeeded in standing in her power. As she turns her attention to her body, she sees the black tar in her liver is gone. Though her eyes remain closed, she describes feeling “relieved” and smiles. Searching for this new energy of relief in her body, there's a bright white light in the center of her chest. Immersing herself in it, she feels unweighed down, calm, and happy. These good feelings are visceral, and she leaves feeling changed.

Over the next year, Joan comes in seven more times and again ventures into her body to uncover deeper previously unrecognized issues. Her attention is drawn consistently to her liver, where a new quality presents itself. Once she senses her liver filled with heavy red energy, another time with jagged glass. Each time, mining her body for details takes her into deeply felt pent-up anger and rage. During one session, she travels to her teen years, where she undergoes surgery for scoliosis and is hospitalized, immobilized for many weeks. Even more excruciating is the reality that her family rarely visits.

Joan keeps rewinding her life further back in time with each session until eventually a toddler appears. Looking through her vulnerable three-year-old eyes, she sees her older sister as the parental favorite, with little Joan feeling unloved. In the innocence of childhood, “little Joan” assumes she is “less than” her sister and “not good enough.” As her adult self supports the little girl to speak, her parents listen and tearfully apologize for their unintentional ignorance. She finally feels seen and heard by them, and her perceived history changes from the inside. She feels the reality of being loved all along; it was all a misunderstanding. As Joan has a physical experience of feeling loved by her parents, the old unloved belief dissolves like magic. After a year and eight sessions, Joan strides into the office beaming to share:

Guess what! The results of my liver function tests are NORMAL! I see now I was holding all that anger in my liver. Isn't that strange? I didn't know I was doing it at the time, yet I was. I feel so different. My body is so much lighter and brighter. I am now a woman who believes she deserves to have what she wants—I own my feelings and speak honestly. I am so happy.

Joan's story demonstrates how processing one's past emotional life is intimately related to health and vitality. She suffered for ten years with hepatitis C, but after eight sessions over a year the illness remitted.