How I found help for my incest and terrible car accident traumas!
By the time I reached Jerusalem, I had reached the end of both my patience at how much pain I was in and my ideas of what to do about it. I had been through many different kinds of therapy and body work. I was even a licensed therapist and certified body worker myself. So I knew how to think about healing. But I could not heal my own body, at least not enough to feel at ease and comfortable.
Because I was having difficult learning Hebrew and knew that I had been diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder, I made an appointment with a speech therapist for an evaluation. She suggested that I find a neurolinguistic programmer and change some of the basic messages that I had been living with all my life. She said that I had some dyslexia with Hebrew but before I worked on that, I had to clear out some of the incorrect information that I was using to live my life with. I was given Eliezer’s name as someone who practiced neurolinguistic programming and called to interview him. I wanted to be sure I was working with the right person. I was on a fixed income and wanted what little money I had to go for the right treatment.
When I spoke to Eliezer, I knew I wanted to see what he could do for/with me. He first said he thought I did not need NLP work, that I needed to get the trauma out of my body and it was the trauma that was creating the pain. I had spent many years working with trauma survivors and what he said rang true to me. As long as the trauma remains in our bodies, we are not free to live the life we were meant to live. Free to live up to our true potential and creativity. I decided to make and appointment and see what would happen.
The method that we worked with (Tapas Accupressure Technique-TAT) is deceptively simple and easy to use. The theory is we have 12 energy centers that basically match our organ system. For example, there is a heart meridian, lung meridian, stomach meridian, etc. Each of those organs and consequently energy centers absorb unresolved trauma and create a negative reaction in our bodies. The more we hold on to the trauma, the more our bodies are filled with stress and tension. TAT engages the meridians, the seat of the body’s healthy reactions and replaces the traumatic messages with the most important information for the survivor, that the trauma happened long ago, is over and the person is now okay. But this is okay, not in the sense that there is no pain or reason to focus on the trauma but that the person is out of the trauma, is not still endanger because of it. But can feel themselves free from that situation and free to create a different kind of life based on the reality of what is happening right now, not what already happened in the past.
This was crucial information to me. It’s not that I had not known that concept before but no matter how many times I told myself that, I still felt like I was sitting or standing or lying in the middle of the trauma with no way to escape. But working with TAT, I found myself out of the trauma experience. Sometimes I was sitting alone in the room, sometimes dancing with myself or others, sometimes laughing and joking with people who had before been my tormenters.
For the first few sessions, I felt complete release. My body had never felt so good. I was relaxed, peace, had so much more energy, and was more social. People who saw me said I looked as though I had just woken up from a long nap and was refreshed.
But I would not be telling the whole story if I did not add this next piece. After the first 3 or 4 weeks, the work became harder and I was dragging myself through my past traumas with less ease. But and this is very important, with the same kind of equanimity that I had discovered during the first few sessions. I could feel more of the pain of the trauma but I felt it through a veil of healing. I knew it was leaving my body and I knew new layers of trauma were coming up but I was not reliving the trauma. Rather I was releasing the trauma and through that release, I was discovering different parts of myself that I did not know were there or rediscovering parts that I hadn’t had access to for many years.
Between sessions I tracked my progress. There was always some positive change even if I also had more memories or more experiences of different traumas than the one I was working on. But the positive changes didn’t leave even when something new was coming up. I maintained the work I did in the office and added to it both during the week and at the next session. I paid very close attention to what I was feeling, thinking, doing. How high my level of stress was. How much I wanted to be with people, or be alone. I tend to want to be alone so I paid attention to when that was intensified and when I was able to be more social.
The biggest piece of trauma that I worked on was a car accident that happened when I was five. I had three serious injuries and was incapacitated, in bed for 4 months. In doing this work, I connected pains in my head, leg, and shoulder and back with injuries I had received from this accident. Some of them were obvious but I had not connected them. Some were not obvious at all and I was stunned at how long I had been carrying this pain with me. As I focused my attention on each part of the trauma, my body released the trauma and breathed life into itself.
Besides the dimension of working with trauma that actually happened in my life, we also worked on the trauma that happened to my ancestors and to me in other gilgulim. I had done a lot of work about my family and my own past lives but this work got to the heart of the issues-how the traumas of my family affected them and also affected me through them.
There is one thing I would caution you about. It is crucial to be willing to change, to be willing to let go and have your life become more natural and comfortable. All of us can get used to the affects of the trauma and assume that a physical pain or emotional pattern will be with us always. The pain of the trauma has to be more severe than the fear of letting the trauma go. We have to be willing to go through some pain to let go of the pain. One of the wonderful things about TAT is that it does not require us to relive the trauma in order to heal. We may experience some discomfort and some fear but it passes quickly and easily. TAT makes room in our bodies for the natural body/psychic rhythms to take over.
Overcoming Stresses and Becoming Communicative
To Eliezer Spetter!
During the last year, my husband had to deal with many difficulties at his place of work and in addition to that, his father was seriously ill. These difficulties caused a situation of almost complete detachment from the happenings at home and with his family. When he returned home, he wasn’t attentive at all and unable to pay attention to his children or his wife. Actually, it felt as if he was in a bitter and sad bubble all the time, and not one of us was able to break through it.
This situation obviously caused a lot of pressure and unnecessary anger at home. All attempts to suggest some kind of solution were met with a refusal by him that stemmed from the deep despondency he was in.
At some point, my husband decided to find the strength to get some kind of help and chose you. Immediately after the first meeting, I felt that something had changed. He spoke with me! Finally, we returned to having real discussions as we used to, not only the passing necessary information.
The frequent meetings with you didn’t change the existence of the difficulties, but they did give him good, effective methods to deal with them. The ability to cope and the understanding of what was happening to him brought him back home! He became once again the father involved with his children’s lives and a husband sensitive to my needs, too.
I thank you for this very much!
