Process Healing:
A most respectful path to personal
growth
by Garry A. Flint,
Ph.D.
Process
Healing is a treatment intervention that is very good with all emotional
problems. It is especially useful for persons interested in personal growth.
We all have negative experiences in
our youth or as adults. These experiences frequently intrude in our thoughts and
actions. Negative experiences do not feel good and reduce our quality of life.
With this treatment process, one can gradually eliminate negative beliefs,
memories and experiences. This healing leads to personal growth. It is
accomplished by using your inner-self healer. I call it the subconscious.
The subconscious is especially
useful in everyday applications. It can learn to heal negative beliefs, memories
and experiences just in the course of life. This means it can operate to
automatically reduce emotional pain interfering with our quality of life. Also,
you can simply ask him/her to treat negative beliefs, memories and experiences
as they arise. Sometimes my patients feel like a different person each day for a
number of days after the first session. This process can certainly facilitate
personal growth.
Process
Healing is taught with metaphors that describe the development of the
subconscious, the main personality, amnesic parts, dissociative parts, brain
functions and other constructs that can be used to treat difficult emotional
issues. I have refined the process over the last nine years. It works because
the metaphors seem similar to the experience of personality parts, memories and
the subconscious. All brain functions and body activities are assumed to be the
effects of memory activity. Therefore, when necessary, one can attempt to treat
any behavior, brain or body issue by using the subconscious.
Process Healing is particularly
good for healing traumatic memory parts. Parts, as used here, refers to amnesic
parts, dissociative parts, active memories or any aspect that has emotional or
physical pain and wants to be healed. With all people, there are usually some
amnesic parts that were formed in utero, at birth, in an accident, in a
near death experience or in a trauma. The treatment of some people is extremely
complex and others straightforward and routine. The treatment of most people is
usually routine. The leverage for getting parts to heal is that all parts want
more satisfaction and less pain. If they don’t, the barrier for healing can be
resolved.
The flow diagram herewith
describes the steps taken when teaching Process Healing. This involves first
organizing the personality system and, later, engaging in the treatment process.
I will walk you through the flow diagram. Organizing the system requires getting
rapport with all parts of your personality. When you talk to the main
personality (MP), you also communicate to all parts of your personality that are
awake (2). They hear the communication. The description of the development of
the personality is an important step in the teaching the treatment process and
establishing rapport. Here’s how it’s done.
The therapist talks and draws the
figures on the paper shown on the diagram. I start by showing the timeline of,
first, the development of the subconscious (a) (S) and then the development of
the main personality (b) (MP). The subconscious starts developing first. I point
out that words and phrases are learned in some form of memory while in
utero. These words and phrases are later associated with objects and actions
after birth. This causes the language of the subconscious to start working. This
language of the subconscious continues to develop during the remainder of a
person’s life. The main personality develops in a similar way. As we behave, we
add to a memory that is used to run the body. This memory starts before birth
and expands during the remainder of our life. All memory is always active,
waiting to be triggered into experience. If a memory is not in our experience,
it is dormant or asleep.
Our behavior is formed in what I call the active experience (AE) (c). All internal and external stimulation, active behavior memories, emotion memories, unconscious processes and our last response are in the active experience. Some of these active memories form a collage of memories to give us our next response. What we think and do are primarily collages of previously learned memories.
Click on thumbnail for expanded view
We use the behaviors formed in the
active experience to survive. The dissociative process (d), which causes the
conscious and unconscious experience, is gradually formed adaptively to exclude
unnecessary information from our conscious experience. The association process (e) has the same
function, but it works with our entire personality memory. When the association process is damaged
by trauma, we may see loose associations, which gives us too much information,
or concrete thinking, which cuts off information and the ability to understand
metaphorical comments.
The presentation continues with a
discussion of the time-line of a traumatic experience (f). This is important in
the explanation of the formation of amnesic parts. Curiously, when there is no
memory that is relevant to the situation to form a response and the emotions are
intense, the brain takes over and mobilizes the most appropriate behavior to try
to survive (g). This rapid mobilization results in the formation of an amnesic
trauma part. The brain mobilizes and pushes the main personality (MP) to sleep.
It doesn’t experience the trauma. The behavior or active memories during the
trauma becomes the memory of the new trauma part. The trauma part (TP) is later
pushed to sleep at the end of the trauma by the return of the main personality
(MP). The main personality leaves and later returns to the active experience so
quickly that there are few associations between the main personality and the
trauma part. This is the cause of amnesia, which keeps the main personality from
knowing what happened during the trauma.
Crucial to establishing rapport is
explaining how intense pain is treated without abreactions or emotional flooding
(h). An individualized treatment plan is developed for each member on the
Treatment Team (4). Each treatment plan involves slowly healing the trauma from
start to finish by treating some pain and waiting briefly before treating the
some more pain. In this way, the chance for emotional flooding is eliminated.
This results in all the pain being removed from the traumatic belief, part or
memory. The emotional pain is replaced by current active neutral or positive
emotions.
After the pain is removed and
replaced with neutral or positive emotions, integration can take place. You talk
about the integration of parts (i) noting that all parts retain their unique
structure and no information is lost. Integration involves the main personality
and the trauma part exchanging memories until both have the same memories. After
integration, they all get to run the body without conflict because they have
identical memories. All integrated parts are able to participate in running the
body and experience good times.
The organizing process involves
your convincing parts to join the treatment team (j) by stressing the reasons
for healing (3) and also by explaining away the reasons for not healing or
joining the treatment team (5). Members of the treatment team will all want to
heal their emotional pain, join with the main personality and work on a
consensual basis. You will establish communication with the subconscious (6) by
using finger responses for “yes,” “no,” “I don’t know,” and “I don’t want to
tell you.” No response is a response too. This is a hypnotic technique but
usually you do not have to go into trance. By using finger responses, your
communication with the subconscious and other aspects of the personality is made
easy. It gives you a way of recognizing problems and solving problems. The
organizing process is continued until all parts are on the treatment team.
Respect of all parts of the
personality is shown in the following way. Several checks are made to be sure
that that all parts are on the treatment team and that they all want the
treatment process taught to the subconscious (7). A further check is made to see
that no parts remain with considerations (8). When you are certain that all
parts are on the treatment team, the treatment process is taught by means of a
simple metaphor that most always works with patients age 7 to 85 (8). After the
subconscious is taught the treatment process, treatment plans are created for
all members of the Treatment Team and barriers are removed to enable automatic,
and independent treatment by the subconscious. (10). This method of treatment is
the most respectful of all treatments.
Independent treatment by the
subconscious is really a great personal growth process. When freed to heal, the
subconscious will heal all negative beliefs, memories, and experiences and
aspects just in the course of life. People who are using this process often
notice the treatment process working during the day. Some of the experiences
that people feel when the process is working are the feeling of numbness in the
head, slight head ache in the fore brain, prickly feeling in the brain,
sensations in different locations of the brain, orfeelings in the body.
Sometime, pictures or words are
experienced. When there is a lot of treatment, a person may become tired or
sleepy. It can go on for days if there is a lot to do.
When a person has a trauma in
his/her history, some professional treatment might have to be carried out to
move towards personal growth. Treatment intervention (11) involves healing
parts, painful memories, self-limiting beliefs, personality traits, and the
basis for addictive behaviors. Problem-solving is sometimes needed to work with
parts that awaken and don’t know what is happening (9). With most of the parts
on the treatment team, there is much less difficulty healing problems than
otherwise. Usually within the first 1-½ hours of therapy, a therapist can get
the treatment process taught and demonstrated by treating one simple phobia
(12).
This is a very good method for
overcoming barriers to personal growth. By using the subconscious and asking
questions, barriers can be identified and healed. The model borrows concepts
from learning and chaos theory. This provides a rich basis for problem-solving
or even creating new memory constructs that lead to treating the problematic
behavior or memory. Of course this may require a skilled practitioner who is
especially good at creative problem solving. But in most cases with relatively
normal people, Process Healing will be a welcome resource to use on the path of
personal growth.
Process healing is available free
on the Internet. Access to the PDF file of the Process-Healing course is given
below. When doing it at home, one may have to read the Process Healing course
several times before permission is obtained to read the metaphor teaching the
healing process to the subconscious. Many persons who have downloaded the
Process Healing course have obtained good results.
To download a free course teaching
you the basics: send a post to: free-ph@emotional-freedom.com.
Flowchart for process healing
Click on the thumbnail for full size chart
Biodata:
Garry A. Flint Ph.D.
is a clinical psychologist who discovered in 1993 that
the subconscious could
learn a healing process. With this process, it is
possible to change beliefs
and heal painful memories and experience. Based upon clinical experience,
learning theory, and chaos or complexity theory, this metaphor gives rise to a
personality theory and treatment process that the author believes will be
understood by all aspects of one's personality.
It is very
respectful and works well with dissociative aspects of
personalities. He is
the author of Emotional Freedom, which is also published in Japanese and
will soon be published in Spanish.
Gary Flint lives in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada.
You can find out more about him and his work at http://www.emotional-freedom.com/