Reprogramming our Emotional Hard-drive 

Published by Humanistic Psychology Journal  ahp Perspective May  2003

 Maud Nordwald Pollock

 

It was March 2000 and I was on in Switzerland on my European Workshop tour, when the call came. It was**** Karin von Wolf one of my participants, a Holistic MD Psychotherapist. "I wanted to tell you a wonderful success stories" she said. Karin is a many time repeater of my workshops and someone I considered a potential teacher of my method, because she lived the work. In my life "Walk your talk" is fundamental.  

What is this method that gave Dr. von Wolf this success? To find out, we have to return to 1974 when the spiritual part of my personal journey began, with meditation and the study of Spiritual Science. Preceded in the 60's by therapy with Albert Ellis, who’s rational thinking deeply affected my life view, and followed by a degree in Philosophy, an interest in Holistic Medicine and the study of hypnosis in Italy. In 1982 I learned Therapeutic Touch, at the New York University’s School of Nursing. This become an apex experience that completed a level of growth in my spiritual consciousness. I went from believing about the subtle spiritual realities and our human potential to do healing, to knowing this is possible. I finally felt I found my true life’s purpose and a vehicle to share my knowing, when I was invited in 1984 to teach Therapeutic Touch to Italian Medical Doctors in a workshop at the Libera Università della Nuove Medicina (an avant guard Holistic Medicine Continuing Education Center) in Milan, Italy.  Because I am multilingual, also speaking fluent German and Italian,  this opportunity to give workshops in Europe, inadvertently launched my 4^th and final life career as a Spiritual Teacher nee Human Potentials Consultant. 

By 1989 after innumerable workshops to health practitioners in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria  I realized that there was something missing when only teaching the healing. It was important that my participants have the ability to be emotionally detached when involved in a healing interaction. Therapeutic Touch consciousness requests  that we be able work in a state of unconditionality, of  "no judgment" as to an outcome, no need to “succeed” nor fear to “fail”. Obviously what is needed for this state, is a very stable ego. This stability depends on “self love,” which seemed to me, to be deeply lacking in most of my health practitioners, even by their own assessment, usually being substituted by the famous helper/ healer syndrome. The vehicle I developed is a method and its companion life view that I call  "Feeling Dissolve"©. Consequently  the focus of my workshop shifted from teaching first how to heal others, to first healing ourselves. My  approach deals with our emotions, how to master these in all situations of our lives, particularly  when we do healing work.

 In the last 13 years since I introduced "Feeling Dissolve"© it has evolved from a rudimentary self-help method  to a very powerful psychotherapeutic tool. The method and the  life philosophy proposed "Feeling Dissolve"© enables us to move away from childlike victim consciousness into an adult empower state of self- responsibility and the ability to accept the co-creation of the circumstances we call life.  

"Feeling Dissolve"© is a multifaceted method that includes body, feelings, mind and spirit. It is not only an intellectual process, it engages the physical and non physical parts of our being. Years of working with the vibratory energy fields my hands contacted while treating with Therapeutic Touch, confirmed the reality of the existence of these fields, as fact. Some differences in quality my hands experience, I realized, is vibratory information that has nothing to do with the vibratory disturbances felt in the field when doing TT, it is information pertaining to different vibratory layers or Light Bodies, that ultimately have different purposes and functions.  

If you are someone who is familiar with Therapeutic Touch,  Reiki, or Healing Touch, you would be familiar with the very first Light Body or Etheric Body also considered our health Aura. (Around and through the whole physical body, perceptible at about  3-5" outside the skin boundary.) It is the layer on which treatment of traditional Krieger/Kunz Therapeutic Touch, takes place. But beyond this 1^st vibratory layer, there is a 2^nd one that moves through and around our body as well and normally extends about 15 or more inches outside the skin boundary. I call this 2nd layer Light Body,  the Feeling Body and it is, to me, the container of all feelings, positive and negative that we have experiences since conception. This is, in essence the vibratory receptacle of feeling information, our emotional hard drive, that conditions our life view and is the cause, in the case of negative experiences, of our suffering. This is the dimension with which we interact when implementing the method of "Feeling Dissolve"©  

As professionals, you have been exposed innumerable times, to the term "let it go", and know difficult it can be to actually make this happen. And the saying is "we can forgive but we can't forget" and this is true in most cases. It goes without saying that there are approaches that enable people to truly let go, but for the average person, that saying holds true. And that is because, the feelings are still there, like information in our hard drive, even after it has been deleted. We can intellectually rationalize events away, but deep in our psyche the feelings we experienced still condition our attitudes, beliefs and behavior. After all trying to transcend what conditions us is the whole purpose of psychotherapy. To understand why and how we function, and help us through this understanding, to better deal with our life. All this is fine and good, but I have discovered, that the most effective way to move beyond what haunts us, is to remove the pertinent information completely out of the field. We could liken it to a form of energetic surgery, that permanently removes the emotional cancer that has made us ill. Don’t get confused and think "Feeling Dissolve"© is some kind psychic surgery, it is not, it is a combination of presence of mind and energy work, that we do for ourselves and can do with others.  

The technique that evolved through trial and error over years is a simple one, it duplicates the phenomenon in physics of the particle and the wave. A wave becomes a particle when it makes contact with a laser beam. Feelings can be treated, when we “attend” to it. Nothing new in that, the difference being, that in this case the therapist, or I for myself, if I am working on my own issues, materially pull the vibrational information out of the field with my hands. At first it was the sensitivity I developed from doing Therapeutic Touch, and by now years of experience in working with participants, enables my hands to recognize the difference in quality of the vibrations of the feeling being treated, where it is, and when it is actually gone.

But in the case of therapy when working with a client,  it is not a solitary action. I am not “doing” something  to a passive client, as in Therapeutic Touch, here is participation. Whatever event disturbers the client, is spoken about, but instead of the person going on an on about the topic, the therapist has the client focus on what exactly he/she “felt” when the event took place. What did you “feel”? and where in the body did you “feel” it? i.e. sorrow or anger. Once this has been established, the client is encouraged to make the feeling tangible and accessible for treatment, “the laser beam contacting the wave,” so to say. For this we use our creative imagination. The client is invited to give the feeling a form, shape, anything will do, from a solid object  to a abstract cloud. This something  has a size, color, density, volume, weight, and can be located inside or outside the physical body. The refinements, structures and subtleties that permit us to identify the feelings that become these metaphors, naturally cannot be covered in this introductory article. For in-depth understanding it is necessary to learn the approach through experiential workshops. But I can say, that the information gleaned is profound. By our removing it out of the field, as one would remove disturbing energy when doing Therapeutic Touch, the client is able to make a judgment shift, to see the situation through different eyes. Because literally, the veil that blocked pure, detached and objective vision has been “materially” removed. And the greatest beauty of this work is that the person does not have to wallow through every detail of their painful experience, by focusing directly on the where and the metaphor, that form, the information can be gently removed, for ever. The client's life can be deeply affected and changed for the better.

In the context of a workshop, after participants have focused on what is troubling them, I personally have removed, in the moments it takes to pull the frequency out of their system, painful life long haunting memories, resulting from rejection or abuse of a sexual, physical or emotional nature. It never ceases to amaze me how fast this method works and how profound is its effects. "Feeling Dissolve"© is particularly healing and helpful by rebuilding “the self”, and allowing for  a new level of relationship with abusive parents or care givers. Gone is the resentment, hurt, rage and pain, replaced by a peaceful state of acceptance. Not resignation, NO, true forgiveness from the most profound level of that individuals being.  So "Feeling Dissolve"© helps us to love unconditionally, while remaining true to ourselves as valid and empowered individuals. We are able to free ourselves of feelings of victimhood, worthlessness and as helpless. We are only able to love others unconditionally when we first and foremost love ourselves unconditionally. But to do that, in my view, we can only love ourselves, if we accept our parents unconditionally, as being neither good nor bad, but doing their best, based on their own history and with what they had available in consciousness at the time. Since we are our parents not only genetically but through their modeling and conditioning, by either accepting or rejecting who they are, in my view, makes us either accept or rejecting who we are. The more we remove antagonistic feelings, the more we heal ourselves. The implementation of "Feeling Dissolve"© can change the dynamics in relationships, be these personal, family, friends or work related. If I change myself, I change the world. 

So here was Karin on the phone, sharing her success story with me. A truly wonderful story that validated the effectiveness of this work. She had been working with a client, a schizoid woman. Dr. von Wolf  incorporated both Therapeutic Touch and "Feeling Dissolve"© into her practice approach.  So I asked: " And you used "Feeling Dissolve"© with your client? "No" she said, "The first thing I did was to evaluate her field by using Therapeutic Touch. I found that field felt just as you describe the schizoid field, in your book." (I published a Therapeutic Touch treatment guide in German, based on experiential information, my own and that of American TT practitioners specialized in different areas of health care i.e. midwifery, oncology etc,; and in this case, on the experiences of a psychotherapist who did extensive TT work in a psychiatric hospital.  "The field was concentrated in the head area and thin to non existent as I moved to the feet. From this I concluded that this woman was not balanced nor integrated or grounded in her body. And because of that she could not access her feelings, so "Feeling Dissolve"© was not appropriate at this point. For the first sessions I concentrated on bringing her down into her body using Therapeutic Touch. Once this had been accomplished, and it took several sessions, she was able to confront her trauma and  we were able to speak about what was troubling her. Her story was that she had been sexually abused as a young child." It is known that sexual abuse can trigger disassociation, in cases of rape for example. This occurrence, based on my knowing, I call “going out of body”. It is the experience of observing ourselves from outside ourselves, not an unusual phenomenon. Usually the happening is only an instant, before an accident or some other emotionally stressful experience, and then we reintegrate into our body and continue on our way. In case of deep traumas however, an individual can just stay out, unable or unwilling to return because of the deep pain experienced; accompanying the body through life, but unable to function in a grounded and practical way in the every day world.   

This was Dr. von Wolf's client’s case. "Not only had my client been sexually abused, she in turn, abused younger children at about the age of 12. Unable to integrate with her body, she was uncontrollably conditioned by her emotions. She was haunted by profound feeling of shame and guilt for what had happened to her and what she had done. This transformed into paranoid thinking, a belief that “everyone knew” what she had done. Once she become integrated into her body,  we were able to access her feelings and  implement "Feeling Dissolve"© treatments. And Maud! it was amazing how this woman changed in a relatively short period of time, her facial expressions, her body language and her state of being. My client is a totally different person from that disturbed woman who first come to me. Working together, allowed me to energetically remove those feelings of guilt, shame and anger. Once this was accomplished she was able to see the events from a neutral point of view, which enabled her to heal and become functional.” Dr. von Wolf considered this case as an outstanding success because of the profound transformation and the relatively short period needed to complete the process, not years but months.