Jane was suffering from dystonia (a painful and uncontrollable spasming in her neck). She’d recently left an abusive long-term relationship, and was suffering chronic pain throughout her body, along with severe anxiety and bouts of self-loathing. On disability and barely able to care for herself, Jane found herself becoming reclusive.
As we began working through her recent divorce, trauma from the past began surfacing. Major trauma, including witnessing the death of her baby brother when Jane was just 3 years old.
Like many of my clients, Jane had already “worked through” these memories in ‘talk therapy’ but had never actually found relief. Each time we tapped through a major trauma I was secretly optimistic we’d gotten to the root of the dystonia. But despite overall improvements to Jane’s health and outlook, her spasming and pain would return again and again.
One day Jane casually mentioned being in an automobile accident. In contrast to the horrendous abuse she’d suffered, it seemed pretty minor. She wasn’t even injured in the collision. Even so, I’d been reading The Body Bears the Burden, by Dr. Robert Scaer, and was eager to explore the memory.
Much of Dr. Scaer’s 35 year career with chronic pain, involved victims of motor vehicle accidents, many of whom developed serious PTSD after seemingly trivial collisions. Invariably these patients had a history of traumatic abuse as children. His work in the neurophysiology of trauma and the role of disassociation in PTSD is groundbreaking.
Jane explained that a car came out of nowhere and broadsided her own car, directly where she was sitting in the back seat behind the driver. Jane related the event with no apparent emotion, and happily told me how the driver of the other car was very polite and apologized profusely. She hadn’t been hurt physically, but did remember being a bit dazed and “out of it”, possible signs that she’d disassociated.
We began tapping: “Even though that car came out of nowhere…” and immediately Jane began experiencing very intense fear! Her whole body was shaking. She was very surprised and wanted to “leave and get away from here”. I urged her to keep tapping.
We tapped on every aspect I could think of: “that horrible sound, that BANG” and “I was trapped and couldn’t get out” and “there was nothing I could do, I was helpless” and “my body was thrown and shaken”. With each new aspect Jane would exclaim, “Yes! There WAS a terrible sound!” or “Oh my god, I WAS trapped, I couldn’t get out of my door and panicked”.
Jane was absolutely stunned that so much intensity was stored in this memory and told me so again and again. She’d had no idea this was an important event, yet the feelings we were releasing were overwhelming.
We’d tapped the intensity way down (from a 10 down to maybe a 2 or 3), when suddenly her eyes went wide and she exclaimed, “This wasn’t the first crash! There was another!”
Years before the crash we’d been working on, Jane had been broadsided, again from the left, when someone ran a red light. Once again, the car came out of nowhere and there was nothing she could do. Potentially a much more deadly accident, Jane had walked away seemingly unscathed, though in hindsight she’d clearly disassociated.
As we tapped through this second crash, yet another forgotten memory burst into awareness. Even earlier, in her early 20’s, Jane had been driving at dusk and two boys on bikes had come out of nowhere, again from the left, and passed right in front of her car. Only by jamming on the brakes did she miss hitting them.
Although no one was hurt, she remembered that the incident had plunged her into a state of deep shock for several days. This memory was much more emotionally charged than the two collisions. Jane was fixated on the idea that she ‘could have killed them’ and that she ‘wouldn’t be able to live with myself’.
As we tapped on this intense ideation, Jane was suddenly remembering the death of her brother. She cried out, “I am three years old again” and re-experienced overwhelming feelings of guilt over not being able to prevent it.
Although we had tapped on his death and those same feelings over a number of sessions, somehow this experience of nearly hitting those boys had driven the emotional trauma deep into her body. This massive dissociation set the stage for Jane’s dystonia, a kind of the compulsive turning away from what she could no longer bear to see.
This was a breakthrough session and Jane’s dystonia did fade away. That said, this was not a “one session wonder.” It actually took a lot of courageous work over quite a few sessions to achieve this blessed relief for Jane. But still, it was an exciting and encouraging victory I wanted to share with you.
Copyright 2023 Rob Nelson
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