A Natural Way With Life By Richard Landis, PhD

A Natural Way With Life

By Richard Landis, PhD

I recently had a 60-year-old client who experienced her emotions as representing the true meaning of current things rather than as questions asking if the old meanings still apply. Her emotions owned her rather than served her. Her emotions dictated what she would notice in her surroundings. Anything that was inconsistent with her emotions was invisible to her.

During therapy I would distinguish between current emotions, an evaluation or meaning, and body feelingsthat were created in the past, which are triggered by sensory signals (echoes).

As a highly religious person, part of her presenting problem was her having a conflict between the need to believe in a benevolent God and her experience of feeling that she was unprotected,  and that everything in her life was a form of punishment. This dilemma reflected her childhood experiences and life assumptions.

During one session we were doing a guided meditation. I started by telling a story I told my nephew when he was young.  In the story, I related watching the gardeners binding a pine tree outside the window of my office. The sought to protect the young sapling from breaking in the wind. They secured so many lines to its trunk the wind could not move it. As it grew, they attached more rigid lines to the growing trunk. They thought they were protecting it. What resulted was a 30-foot pine tree with a 4-inch diameter trunk the length of its height. The trunk would snap in the smallest breeze without the lines supporting it. The gardeners forgot that a tree must rock back and forth for the cells to be compressed and stretched to stimulate a strong trunk that can bend with the wind when young and stand up to the wind when mature.

I then told my client about when my nephew grew up and had a daughter of his own, I watched how he taught his daughter to walk by just watching over her and encouraging her to explore. He knew that his daughter would naturally learn to walk by herself. It is within all of our natures. All he needed to do was to provide encouragement and to keep an eye on her so when she would inevitably fall, she could get herself up and try again. He knew that if he protected her from ever falling when she was young, she would later develop a fear of falling and stop trying.

Of course, I told each story in minute detail over the 40-minute “meditation” in which my client sat motionless. The emphasis was on the confidence God had in the tree’s ability to grow strong as He created it to be and my nephew’s confidence in his daughter’s ability to learn to walk since he had confidence in God’s building that ability inside of us already.

At the end of the session, I gave my client the assignment, “Whenever you get an echo of the old body feeling that you are being punished because things don’t go the way you want, notice all the reassurances that God has placed around you, telling you that the old body feeling is just an echo.” After 5 seconds of silence she let out a wide-eyed, “Wow”.

At our next session two weeks later, her first words were, “You know, trees are amazing.”  She spent much of the session describing the body feelings she got in different situations and how she was able to recognize their past history and their current meaning for her life.

Commentary

By Eric Greenleaf, PhD 

Rick Landis, editor of our Newsletter, has a literate approach to hypnotherapy. He accepts his patient’s dilemma, her religious ideas, her emotions and her body’s sensations. He first dissociates current emotion from past bodily sensations. Then, utilizing her religious knowledge of God, he builds a true story of Nature, tampered with by men, and contrasts this with his nephew’s fatherly and loving approach to his daughter’s learning and discovery of herself and of life. Dr Landis ties the themes in a new and lovely way for his patient: he asks her, when she senses punishment, to “notice all the reassurances that God has placed around you.” Lovely and compassionate work.