Читать книгу The Quickening - Gregg Unterberger - Страница 19

Natalie had awakened in the middle of the night with a profound sense of evil surrounding her. She felt like hell itself was burning in her belly as a rage like she had never before experienced went through her. The young mother wondered if she might be possessed. What if I hurt someone? She asked herself.

Natalie was just twenty-six years old, and her four-year-old son, Donny, was asleep just a few doors down the hall. In desperation, she prayed feverishly, repeatedly, hoping against hope that the feeling would dissipate, while her husband John slept blissfully unaware of the murderous rage that had erupted in his petite wife. Could this evil somehow spill over into the other room? She would spend the rest of the night unable to sleep, wrestling with this question.

Natalie, attractive and fit, dressed in the latest designer clothes, showed up in my office asking me for a past-life regression some two weeks later. Whenever someone comes in asking about a specific therapy, I usually ask why. I want to make sure that I am tailoring my approach to my client’s needs. If someone is having marital problems because they have poor listening skills, it seems a little silly to trot off into another lifetime to try and track down the problem.

Running her hands anxiously through her short red hair, Natalie told me about her encounter with the dark side. She said she had repeatedly seen and heard my name in her meditations in connection with a past-life regression. Although I was certainly open to the idea of Natalie being divinely guided, I wondered if this interest might be due more to the fact that Natalie’s cousin had seen me several years before for a past-life regression. My reputation wasn’t completely unknown to her, and I was concerned that she thought a regression would be a quick fix.

But Natalie began sessions twice a week; she was experiencing the frightening feelings almost every night. Sleeping pills helped, but often left her drowsy and exhausted all the next day. The cycle was beginning to take its toll on her. I taught Natalie some relaxation techniques and some ways to tame the anxiety tiger. I knew these were temporary fixes, but Natalie tried them and did get some relief. We had to dig in and get something done soon, but I was reticent to do a past-life regression until I knew more.

In one session, Natalie told me how she had “made a scene” at a Chinese restaurant. She had been having a plate of noodles with her son and her favorite aunt. The aunt playfully asked her son for a kiss, and he bashfully turned away. “Aw, c’mon Donny, give Auntie Billie a little kiss,” she pressured, as Donny tried to crawl under the table. Billie began making kissy noises and ducking her head under the booth to try and reach Donny when Natalie exploded. “Stop it! Stop it! He doesn’t want to be kissed! LEAVE HIM ALONE!” Her aunt froze—as did most of the diners within three or four tables. Natalie, realizing her overreaction, felt her face blanch as she looked blankly around at the other patrons, nearly as shocked as they were.

“I just don’t know what came over me. I just freaked out and started screaming at the top of my lungs.” I thought for a moment and gave Natalie a chance to compose herself. Even in the telling of the story, she was clearly agitated.

“It sounds like it was a very uncomfortable and embarrassing moment,” I said.

She nodded, feeling understood. I paused for a moment.

“Natalie, do you have any memories of sexual abuse?” The blood drained from her face, and she slowly nodded. “I can’t help but wonder if this has to do with everything that is happening to you.”

“But I am so frustrated! All I have are these vague memories—I tell myself that it didn’t happen. But maybe it was my grandfather. My parents were also members of this weird swingers group; about every two weeks or so they would go down into the basement with other couples.” She sighed heavily, a long world-weary, hopeless exhalation. “I don’t know . . .” She trailed off and looked at me bewildered. Then suddenly, she teared up. Natalie sat up instantly in her chair, agitated. “I just want it to all go away. Is there some way you can hypnotize me and just make it all go away?”

“I’m sorry, Natalie. I wish I could. It’s not quite that simple.” I said.

“But if I can’t remember it, how can I ever get over it?” she said, her voice cracking, an octave higher.

“Well, there is good news. Some of the techniques I use can be very helpful in resolving these issues, even if we don’t have a specific memory to work from.”

Her chin down, her eyes tilted up, hopefully. “I just feel like I am going crazy.”

“I don’t think so. I actually think you are getting better.”

“What?” asked Natalie, incredulously.

“I think that evil you felt in you wasn’t some kind of dark spirit. I think it is more likely that it is the rage that has been pent up in you for years.”

As I continued to go through her family history with Natalie, she talked at length about her parents, who were largely absent. Her dad worked all the time and was rarely seen, except to dole out criticism and punishment. Her mother, Natalie reported, rarely even cooked dinner for the family and took root on the couch every night. Many nights Natalie went to the refrigerator only to find it empty. “I might as well have been invisible for all they cared.”

“Do you ever get upset with your husband John? Are you afraid he doesn’t see you?” I asked.

“Oh, all the time! He is a great guy, and I know he loves me, but he can get so wrapped up in his job or a football game that I think he forgets that I am in the house.”

“Given your childhood, can you see why that would upset you?”

“Yes, of course . . . but John really does see me and cares about me. He is different from my parents. But he says I am overly dramatic about everything. Maybe he is right. What’s wrong with me? He probably doesn’t deserve that I am so hard on him sometimes.”

“Maybe not,” I said gently. “But I can certainly see why it would be touchy for you.”

At eleven years old, Natalie moved in with her Aunt Billie and things got much better.

“She was the mother I never had.”

“I am glad that you found some respite from your parents and the swingers. When you were little, what do you think would have happened if you had gotten angry at your parents?”

“Are you kidding me? They would have just made fun of me. Mom probably would have hit me. It would have made everything even worse.”

In a subsequent session, we used a Brainspotting technique to desensitize the “fire in the belly” anxiety that had plagued Natalie for months. (We will explore brainspotting at length in Chapter Seven.) As we worked, I asked her to notice what was happening in her body physically. She reported an energy, almost nauseatingly sick, that wanted to come up, while another energy in her fought to keep it down.

“I HATE this part! I wish it would go away!” she growled, her eyes tearing up.

“How far back has this battle inside you been going on?” I asked.

“As long as I can remember!”

“What would happen if you let this energy out?”

“It would be awful, terrible, something evil would happen,” Natalie revealed in horrified tones.

“Like what?”

“Someone will get hurt,” she said menacingly. “I just want to kill myself.”

“Why?” I questioned.

“Because, I am so evil!” Natalie was utterly convinced.

“What if you are not evil? What if you are just angry?”

Natalie couldn’t answer that, but by the end of the extended session, the pain and intensity of the fire were dramatically reduced. Natalie said the emotions were all still there, but the physical discomfort had been cut in half. She felt better for the first time in months. I told her that there was still more work to do, but I thought it was likely that she would feel even better when the emotions settled down and she got a good night’s sleep. In my experience, there can be a raw quality to more intense therapy sessions when they were immediately finished that fades within a few hours. But on the off chance that she needed me, I gave her my cell phone number and told her to call me.

That Friday afternoon, I had no idea how glad I would be that Natalie had my cell phone number.

I was halfway through cooking one of my famous Saturday morning homemade omelets, when the phone rang. It was Natalie. “Oh my God! It’s back. The evil is back! John was teasing Donny and playing “tickle monster,” and when he came after Donny, I just freaked out. I mean, Donny was smiling, he wasn’t upset . . . but all of a sudden I wanted to kill someone when I saw that . . . and then I wanted to kill myself!”

I tried to think on my feet, wishing I had put an extra scoop of French Roast in the coffeepot. I was in Chef Gregg breakfast mode, not quite ready to staff the suicide prevention hotline. But reaching into my psyche’s closet, I managed to grasp my therapist ball cap and snap it firmly on my head.

“Natalie, take a deep breath,” I said, taking one myself. “I am so sorry. I know this is frightening.” I could hear her exhale. I needed to take her temperature. “Do you really think that you will kill someone?”

She paused thoughtfully.

“No, I mean . . . I would never kill anybody. It’s more like I am AFRAID that I am going to kill someone, and then I just want to die. Does that even make sense?”

“Perfect sense,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice choking. I could hear the sheer panic in her expression. “Do I need to go to the hospital?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I think we need to meet as soon as possible,” I said. “Is John there?” I asked, a firm urgency to my voice. “Can you have him drive you to my office?”

Natalie said he would and to expect them in twenty minutes.

I slammed down a second cup of coffee and jumped in my car, praying for guidance as I drove to my office. Although I certainly had not ruled this out, it was hardly what I expected. As I unlocked the doors of my office and flicked on the lights, I raked through the memories of her last session: Natalie said the physical manifestations of her anxiety had gotten better, but her emotions felt the same. As it turned out, although we had accomplished some level of desensitization of her trauma, nothing had “settled” after the session. Seeing Donny chased by his dad had probably triggered memories of her own abuse and justifiable anger. But Natalie experienced this as the “evil” within her surfacing, and when she saw it in herself, the shame and guilt overwhelmed her. She wanted to die.

I knew we had to somehow release that rage from her system. But as long as she thought those feelings were her mortal enemy, how could we do that? I remembered that in the last session she had shrieked, “I HATE YOU!” when we touched in on this energy within her. How were we going to resolve this?

Minutes later, Natalie was at my office. She looked visibly shaken. It was hard for her to sit still in her chair, and she wrung her hands nervously. Words tumbled from her mouth like an avalanche.

“It happened again. I woke up in the middle of the night, just overwhelmed with panic. My heart was racing. All the things you taught me to help with the anxiety just flew out the window. All I knew is that I was furious, angry. I wanted to do something bad to someone. What kind of horrible monster am I?” she exclaimed, her eyes wet with tears. Her question was sincere.

“I don’t think you are a monster, Natalie,” I responded very quietly.

“But I do! It was almost like some part of me was taunting me, daring me to do something really evil.”

My mind raced. Voices taunting her? Was this schizophrenia? Somehow, it didn’t quite click.

But this was tricky. As most therapists know, when someone hates themselves enough, there is the possibility that they will take their own lives. But for my clients who are parents, I can always gently remind them that their children need them. Many a patient has decided not to commit suicide because they don’t want to see their children suffer the pain of their death. But if Natalie was really convinced that she might hurt her son, she might justify the suicide as a way to keep him safe.

While these thoughts streaked across my mind, Natalie simply looked at me with expectation. Something about her expression brought me out of my thoughts and into the room. She looked down at her hands before quietly remarking, “I really do think this is connected to another life.”

I took a moment and inhaled a deep breath. My immediate response was that she needed to express the pent up rage. And yet, in previous sessions, we had tapped into at least some of her fury, but it was still accompanied by a sense of shame. Every time she would start to experience anger, another part of her mind threw cold water on the experience. The anger that needed to be honored was tamped down by a terrible shame. It was the kind of double-bind that could stall therapy for weeks or months. Maybe Natalie’s gut feeling was right. I was still convinced there was probably some kind of abuse in her current life that “drove” the traumatic responses and her panic.