“Helen” compared her mother to Snow White—pure, sensitive, absolutely special and fine. But also very unstable and often suicidal. She said that growing up “I was there to support her to have a happy life”. Always struggling to be good enough for her mom, Helen believed that she couldn’t have any negative feelings or her mom would literally die.
Though she did her best as a child to adapt to this unbearable pressure, Helen could never actually help her mother—and her mother eventually did kill herself. A tangle of frustration, anger, shame and grief dominated Helen’s life, even 20 years after the suicide. Helen felt that “If I’m not meeting the needs of others then I have no right to be alive at all”.
Shortly after her mother’s death, Helen had a nightmare which was still very present for her. It carried powerful negative feelings and had come up again and again over the years. Helen asked if Hacking Reality could be used to work with her dream self. I’d never tried before but we decided to go for it. Here is the dream as Helen told it to me:
She was in the back of a van, being driven somewhere, and there were many dead bodies wrapped up in cloth or shrouds. One of these was her mother’s and Helen was holding it in her arms.
Suddenly Helen realized that her mother was not dead and began to unwrap her. Though she appeared skeletal, her mother glared at her. “She hated me for believing that she was dead. She said I only wanted money—inheritance. I said ‘no’ and gave her a kiss on the forehead, but she pushed my face away with her cold dead hand”.
Recounting this dream filled Helen with horror and a terrible feeling of rejection. We did some tapping just to bring the overall intensity level down.
I had Helen imagine stepping into the scene as her current self, while freezing her mother. She took her younger dream self’s hand and asked what she was feeling and was told ‘intense pain and hurt’. Asked what she’d learned about life from this experience the dream self said “There is a wall…no trust in others that they mean well”.
I had Helen tap on her dream self for sadness, rejection, hurt, the feeling that there is a wall, and a sense of hopelessness. After a few rounds the younger self (and Helen) began to feel much more peaceful and okay.
We asked the younger dream self how she would like the scene to change. She wanted her mother to react in a sane and loving way. Normally this might involve tapping on the mom, and perhaps going back into mom’s childhood to tap on one of mom’s own younger selves. In this dream memory, however, we simply allowed mom’s skeletal body to crumble into dust and asked for mom’s spirit to show up.
Immediately Helen’s face transformed—her eyes were closed but she had a look of intense rapture. I asked if mom’s spirit was there and Helen simply nodded and smiled. I gave her some time and then suggested that if there were anything she or her younger self wanted to ask or tell her mother, that this was her chance.
Helen told me her mother’s spirit was radiant, completely relaxed, loving and happy. After a few moments she said “Okay, we’re finished”. The wall was gone, replaced by a certainty that “we really love each other”.
When asked, Helen could still remember having had that terrible dream, but it was no longer present in the same way. It was distant and devoid of feeling—eclipsed by this new, wonderful picture and relationship with her mother.
47 years of pain, hurt and confusion resolved. Instead of being drained by a host of difficult intrusive memories, Helen felt that her mother’s spirit would now be present to her as an ally. There might be other traumatized younger selves to work with, but something fundamental had shifted.
This depth and intensity of healing is not unusual when we contact the spirits of parents or other loved ones—even if the relationship was troubled or the death problematic. Because we really are working in the quantum field, I believe that some part of the loved one actually does show up for the healing and reconciliation.
I should mention that for Helen this powerful dream reimprinting happened during our fifth session. I don’t believe we could have started with this. We’d done a lot of good work already to make this possible.
Copyright Rob Nelson 2022
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