The key here is to separate your feelings from the incident, and to intellectually understand that you have to apply acceptance to the feelings, not necessarily the incident itself, in order for the feelings to clear. Don’t struggle with trying to accept the incident if you can't easily do so - focus on the feelings and work with them, taking them through the steps. Put blame aside for just the duration of the processing session. It's just a matter of relaxing into the feelings, to stop resisting and fighting them, allowing them. I don't know what 'solipsism' is, so I can't comment on that, but it may be that you do not have a thorough comprehension of the ECP psychology, so you're getting stuck. Since this is such an important topic for many people, I am including here an excerpt from my new book DEEP CLEARING, which will be out soon. Study this for a few days and then let me know if it helps - I'll comment again.
Trauma
Trauma is the involuntary shutting-down to severe feelings. The mind clamps down, keeping painful feelings from conscious awareness, in an effort to protect. There is often a sense of disassociation, of going numb, blank, sometimes feeling out of the body. The feelings are not allowed to complete their cycle and so become trapped in the subconscious, from where they project themselves, just as with any trapped feeling, and cause the emotional disruption known as post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma, therefore, is only a more drastic version of the usual suppression syndrome we have discussed. Trauma and PTSD, no matter how severe, absolutely may be addressed with the method you are learning here.
Trauma can occur anytime, although childhood trauma has always been emphasized in traditional psychology. Any highly stressful experience, at any age, can result in trauma. Obvious potentially traumatic events would include assaults and other violent experiences. But occurrences less dramatic can also be traumatic: When your spouse did not support you; when you were ridiculed; when you lost money. Don’t be afraid to go into a traumatic memory just as you would any event, but remember to go slowly if it’s an extreme experience.
Trauma cases can be brutal, and it’s reasonable to question if processing principles can apply. They can. But they may have to be more gently applied. For example, what about taking responsibility for war atrocities, violence, or childhood sexual abuse, as well as less physically harmful but equally traumatic experiences such as financial ruin, treachery, desertion, humiliation, etc.? In the face of such horrors, intellectualizing about taking responsibility can seem tactless, insensitive or even cruel; yet, if we apply the principles, if we have faith in the principles, we may be able to accept and eventually release our deep pain because the blame principle still applies. If we are deep into blame, including unconscious blame, healing is prevented.
The principle for taking responsibility: We have attracted extreme experiences because of suppressed negative energies contained inside. The feelings have built up to the point of explosively manifesting. If there is no apparent cause to which such extreme suppressed energies can be attributed, the only possible explanation has to come from a metaphysical origin: Subconscious energies from previous existences are brought into the present life and attract corresponding experiences.
Acknowledge that these feelings are coming from the suppressed subconscious, and are only being activated by the event.
In some way that we do not fully understand, the energy trapped inside has brought this event to you.
The purpose of the experience is to make you conscious of trapped negative energy so it can be healed and released.
Put aside any blame that may be present and focus on the feeling behind it.
Allow yourself to take responsibility, even if only in theory, even if only for this session.
When you take responsibility, you EMPOWER yourself – you stop being the victim.
Recognize that this is a Karmic experience, coming from your subconscious past, being reflected by the present.
We don’t know for certain why this difficult experience has come to you. It may be part of your Karma, which can have two meanings: It can mean that negativity from the past is being cleared in large amounts, or it can mean that certain souls take on difficult experiences to strengthen them.
What are the feelings in trauma cases? Being hurt, experiencing the physical and emotional pain of being attacked, the threat of death, severe loss, breach of trust when you were a child, acute heartbreak, and so on. Serious trauma usually occurs in the lower feeling centers – Survival, Power, Sex – or with Heart issues.
In highly severe trauma cases, an alternate personality can be created that splits itself off from the prime identity, resulting in the fascinating phenomenon previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder, now known for no good reason except to use confusing, pretentious language as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In theory, therapy would consist of contacting each of the personalities and releasing trapped feelings. If you think you might have DID, it might be best handled with a therapist. You would be guided into experiencing each personality and carefully letting the feelings be activated.
Cindy was a 41-year-old woman when we started working together. We logged 54 sessions. She had issues with her husband, feeling lonely with him, even though he was emotionally and financially supportive. She would eat compulsively, no particular food. She was overweight and guilty about that. She believed she was a Multiple, and although we never went too deeply in that direction, she sometimes spoke of lost time and other Multiple characteristics. From my point of view, I felt as if she was caught in a revolving-door cyclone of dark energy that she could not break free of. Events and personalities were attracted to her, acted on her, all because of the darkness within.
Her main issue was childhood sexual abuse, and continuing PTSD. Her history was extreme and shocking. Both her father and mother had sexually abused her, starting from a young age. Her parents belonged to what we would now call a pedophile group, in which she had been passed around. She reports that her first severe abuse was when she was vaginally penetrated at the age of 6 with a coke bottle, at a meeting of the group. Her father often displayed rage and disapproval, except for praising her when she performed sexual acts for him, and she grew to crave the approval. At 13, she became pregnant by her father and had an abortion. This became an additional trauma, as she felt torn from the child.
Her mother was no less brutal. Cindy recalls one event where she was playing by herself in her bedroom after school, around 10 years old. Her mother came home from work and barged into the bedroom and forced her to perform oral sex on her. “I can still taste her,” she reports. In the course of our dialogue, numerous other elements came into the picture: Other dark characters, witchcraft-like cursings, and occurrences that would suggest a satanic undercurrent in rural Missouri, where she grew up.
How to approach this? There’s always a sense of trepidation with horrendous cases such as this. Can the process really work? Can the client really apply the steps, especially the acceptance step? Again, the starting point is always to observe the principles. In all of our sessions, we began by talking for a while about current events or a particular memory that had been revived, and then we entered the Alpha-State mode. In Alpha, we would go into the feelings behind what was just discussed.
I always think in terms of the Centers of Consciousness when approaching a major issue, which I find helps to clarify it. Sexual abuse for both genders I would place as a second center issue, the Power center, the archetypal feminine sexual center, where receptiveness is one of the key psychological qualities. The sexual aspect of receptiveness has two potential, dualistic possibilities: It can be a voluntary, loving act of taking in; or the negative experience of being violently controlled, subdued, enslaved, and invaded. These are the negative core feelings to take through the process. They would be accompanied by first-level emotions of rage, fear, disgust, and hate.
Cindy had psychotherapy counseling, but felt she had never moved to a feeling level, which is why she was attracted to work with me. She also had an interest and background in metaphysical healing. She was psychically sensitive and had explored past lives, and had discovered much negativity there, where she “did bad things.” I think she was able to see or sense the continuity of her experience, how it carried over from previous times and had manifested in this life. Her acceptance of it seemed to be a spiritual, intuitive acquiescence and not primarily a logical, left-brain deduction. Although of course we did not have any scientific evidence on the authenticity of the past-life influence, her acknowledgement of it did seem to fit in with and contribute to her healing mind-set.
So our work proceeded. We applied the steps, we went slowly through all the memories. We brought up feelings and relaxed into them. As we did, other forgotten memories would surface. We owned and witnessed those feelings, processing them, sometimes with emergency sessions. There was a lot of childhood regression – going back and becoming the child. With each memory, feelings would be activated. These were both the first-level emotions and core feelings mentioned. As we took them through the process, they gradually dissipated. This is the essence of the process in action: The processing of emotions/feelings activated by traumatic memory results in the release of those emotions/feelings trapped in the subconscious, which served to attract those experiences in the first place.
If you are struggling with the idea that suppressed violent negative energies within are responsible for attracting such extreme experiences, I would ask you to give it time. This kind of realization comes with increasing awareness. But in the meantime, remember that you only have to extend acceptance to the feelings, not to the events connected to them. Perhaps you will be in agreement with the logic that feelings resisted in the past must be accepted now in order to release trauma. But, I believe you will find, if you accept feelings, that you will have accepted the event in a certain way as well. This does not mean you condone, permit, or invite any harmful event to continue.
After 2 months of weekly sessions with me and working on her own, Cindy reported “feeling good for longer periods.” It was a gradual uphill ascent after that.
