scienceofselfhealing.com

David came to see me on the advice of a holistic practitioner he’d been seeing. A Vietnam veteran, David had experienced a multitude of traditional Western medical and holistic treatments and therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The specific issues, the things he wanted to change, were the feeling that he was treading water, couldn’t do anything successfully, and that he was a victim of his life burdened by a terrible sadness that nothing could relieve.

As a writer with a publisher waiting in the wings for him to finish a novel, his creativity was crippled and his sense of futility blocked him from completing his book. This was especially serious for him, not only as a missed opportunity, but also because writing was one of his unrecognized methods of stress-relief. A recent trip to Africa and the experiences he had there had galvanized him to once again seek an alternative and change his life.

Most PTSD actually begins long before adulthood. In David’s case, childhood events led to the creation of certain behavior patterns (programs) in response to stress. These programs were reinforced by his Vietnam experiences and affected every area of his life. David chose to do an Ultimate BreakThrough.

What We Did Together

We determined what the greater problem was and how David would know it was gone. Practicing a couple of recommendations I made at the end of our first session, David reported a noticeable difference when he returned a few days later for his second session - he had not experienced one episode of paralyzing, overwhelming sadness in that time, something he said was “very unusual” (many BreakThrough clients report immediate improvement in how they feel after the first session). We used a variety of techniques, including NLP, Time Empowerment™, hypnosis and energy work, and we set a goal 8 weeks in David’s future. Four sessions (a total of 10 hours) later, we were done breaking through the issue that had brought David to me.

The End Result

David achieved his goal ahead of schedule - within a few weeks, he was writing again. Three months later, he sent me the first short story he’d written in a very long time, saying, “Just finished a very short story. You are responsible for this [his bold].” Of course, David is the one who was responsible; I was just his “tour guide,” having shown him how to get where he wanted to go.

His Testimonial

“…My family is pretty amazed with the way I’ve been since Flo Carpenter happened to me…the most significant thing is that I have not had any problem to date with that crippling sadness, and that is wonderful. Depression issues have not been a problem either. You have opened many doors for me. I have quit [going to] the PTSD ‘group’ sessions. The ‘friend’ who guides me, I now realize, is my unconscious mind, my oldest and most loyal companion.”

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My clients know that when we resolve an issue in one area of their life, it will most likely affect all areas in some way. However, we can only effectively resolve one major issue at a time - it’s the way the mind works - there is no magic pill or silver bullet that solves everything at once. We’re “peeling the onion,” meaning that when you remove one layer, there’s another underneath; getting to the core, our core, is a lifelong process, and occasionally, we need help along the way.

PTSD is much like the onion; it can be large or small, and have many layers or just a few. Watch for the story of David’s second BreakThrough experience one year later.

Science has determined what the Ancients already knew: everything vibrates, or said another way, everything is energy. We also know, based on science, that energy of a certain vibration attracts energy of a similar vibration - this is known as the Law of Vibration, first referenced several thousand years ago, and today commonly called the Law of Attraction. And THOUGHT IS ENERGY.

What wasn’t discussed in detail in the film The Secret is that all the positive words you can think of will not compensate for negative thoughts and feelings that run on a different level of your consciousness. For instance, let’s say you’re consciously visualizing an island vacation, soaking up sun, playing in the surf, eating dinner oceanside, but underneath your vision, a little voice is saying, “Right, like that’s going to happen; what do you think, money grows on trees? How are you going to pay for THAT?”

You now have positive words and pictures coming from your conscious mind, being undermined by negative thought patterns from your unconscious mind, and it takes a lot of positive thoughts to outweigh a negative one. It’s enough to derail manifestation of your vision.

Why does your unconscious mind do that? Because it’s been programmed by the events and experiences of your life to expect certain things and react in certain ways. Perhaps there was a lack of money in your family when you were a child, or your parents experienced the Great Depression of the twentieth century. Even though they were children at the time, the fear of lack and scarcity during that period may have determined their adult lifestyle, and therefore your lifestyle. You may even have learned or inherited their fear.

Fear is a negative emotion, and old negative emotions, remembered by your unconscious mind (it remembers everything that’s ever happened to you) are a central factor in why some people think the Law of Attraction doesn’t work. It works, it just doesn’t work unless you’re fully congruent about what you want, and by that I mean without conflict between your conscious and unconscious minds. This is the real secret.

Some people find it easier than others to convert to the positive on both levels of consciousness, and some find it impossible to do so without help. That’s because negative emotions from the past, which are still held on the unconscious level, have created negative thought and behavior patterns that run automatically and below the surface in response to the environment and the events within it.

There is a way around this. Releasing negative emotions from the past disconnects those behavior patterns and gives you an opportunity to create new patterns. Once this happens it’s possible to achieve the congruence necessary to make the Law of Attraction work for you.

Sound interesting? If you’d like to know more, see the information on my website regarding BreakThrough Programs.

Anxiety is a warning from your unconscious mind to focus on what you want!

Have you ever wondered why something you considered beautiful was considered uninspiring at best by someone else? Or why eye-witnesses to accidents or crimes never seem to agree on what happened? Or why an event from childhood that you remember with joy is remembered with anger or sadness by your sibling, or maybe not recalled at all?We take information in through our senses (sight, sound, feel, taste, scent, etc.), process it with our critical thinking faculty (i.e. conscious mind) and send it to the unconscious mind for storage. Perception is the meaning, or label, we attach to that information. The catch is that we’re bombarded by enormous amounts of information every second - different sources say anywhere from 2 million to 400 billion bits of information per second, 24/7, waking and sleeping - and the conscious mind can’t process (attach meaning to) all of it.

The conscious mind can process only an infinitesimal amount of this information - an average of 130 bits per second. Using a hierarchy of selection, your conscious mind picks the information most important to it in that second, and someone else’s chooses what’s most crucial to them in that moment. With so much information to choose from, the likelihood that two people will choose all the same information is low to non-existent, & the probability that those two people will attach the same meaning to the common bits is, well, just not going to happen. This is why each of us has our own unique perception of the world around us.

To paraphrase Mike Dooley, the delightful and inspiring speaker, author, and creator of TUT.com (TUT=Totally Unique Thoughts), it’s as if everyone on Earth wears glasses, and every pair of glasses has different colored lenses. The lenses not only color the scene differently, but based on their color, they may also block out certain other colors. Some lenses might block the color blue, others the color yellow. You can see how this would give each wearer a different picture (perception) of the world around them. Oh, and you can’t trade glasses with anyone else; you can only IMAGINE what they see!

The same principle is at work when our minds are selecting which information to pay attention to. As with the hypothetical glasses, you can’t trade your perceptions with someone else so they’ll see what you see, or vice versa. You CAN, however, understand that there’s a reason why individuals have different views of people, places, things, and events, and why it’s such a waste of energy to try to convince others that they’re wrong and you’re right. You’re both right, based on the information your minds are processing!

We’re each doing the best we can with what we have to work with, and what we have to work with are our perceptions of the world around us. Can those perceptions be changed? Yes. We can each, individually, create change within ourselves that will help us perceive differently, so the answer is a qualified “yes.” Qualified, because while we can mindfully change our own perceptions about what’s happening around us, we cannot do it for others.

If you want change, your only choice is to change YOU in some way, and understanding how perception works when interacting with the world around you is another step on the path to change.