CONCLUSION

Medicine is the art of imitating Nature’s healing ways.

HIPPOCRATES

THERAPY

The symptom occurs in a person. If the person has the symptom, the person has the connected causal and biological felt sense. Having the felt sense, the person also has the conflict with its whole history, and will undergo the newest event according to his or her limiting beliefs. By the same token, the person has the best possible solution to the problem: his or her own.

If the therapist is master of his technique, then the patient can be the master of his healing. As for me, I have healed only one person: myself. This means that when I burn myself, I am the one who repairs my skin. If, one day, I break a bone, I will repair the bone. My biology is intelligent—it won’t make a liver or skin in place of my bone. It’s my biology that heals me.

As a therapist, I have tools that I learn to master and that I propose to patients. Do they want to use them? How will they use them? That is not under my control. My objectives can be defined as follows: free up meaning and emotion, promote healing, take the evolution—toward happiness, for example—and make it attractive: in fact, make it irresistible, move into a new operational mode, change!

One of my colleagues often says to his patients: “You have cancer? There’s going to be a death. So act so that it’s not you but rather your old way of functioning that ends up dying.” Because if you have cancer, diabetes, a cold, itching . . . it means that there is something that has led to that, something preexisting. You have to act so that it’s that something which dies, which disappears—that way of being in the world. It has to be the anger, the put-down, the sadness . . . that’s what has to take its leave, or be transformed, or grow up. A radical change, a turning around, or a conversion is demanded by the biology through the language of symptoms.

Before it enters the biology, before it enters the body or before it becomes a disease, there is a form of thought that we call a belief. The person has a belief, which could be, for example: “Life is not worth living” or “Any time there’s fire, I’m in danger.” There are beliefs that are simple and others that are harder to find. Sometimes they can be very mixed. For example, the person may not know how to communicate or how to be in touch with his or her emotions: “because if I express my emotions, I’m in danger; if I don’t express them, I’m also in danger. What can I do?”

I have a patient who told me her belief was: “If I get better, I’m going to die!” Another patient said, “The day I am no longer depressed, I know that my mother will no longer have any reason to live; she says that there will be nothing left for her but to die.” So long as this patient had not dug down to uncover that belief, which was completely unconscious, she remained ill. And it was fine that way: her mother, thanks to her and to her depression, continued to live!

At the origin of all problems, there is always an event—tied to a family or personal story—and a belief that is independent and continuing. Even though the child did not have his hands cut off (see the story in the introduction, page 8), a belief continues after the ordeal and the person runs the risk of experiencing whatever the belief dictates unless it is deprogrammed. There are beliefs that fit well and are positive and there are others that are less so or can be very limiting.

BECOMING AWARE OF OUR BELIEFS

First of all: Listen.

Statistically, we have twice as many ears as we do mouths! I’m inclined to deduce from this that we are made to listen twice as much as we speak. My first tool is Rogerian listening. Carl Rogers, who was an American psychologist, developed a very refined way of listening that is not authoritarian, but is instead welcoming and respectful of the other person. It involves a listening to what is not said that underlies what is said. The other person constantly speaks to me through his name, his gestures, his assumptions, as well as through a thousand and one verbal or nonverbal cues arising from his inner world—among others, those concerning his unconscious history of conflicts.

The second tool I use is NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), which elaborates the structure of an experience.^*3 Every experience corresponds to a structure. There are our internal processes (values, beliefs), our internal states (emotions), and our internal and external behaviors (illnesses). The NLP allows me to have a road map of the structure of the problem. The structure is more important than the content.

The third tool that I use is Ericksonian hypnosis, which is a noncontrolling, therapeutic form of hypnosis. The human being is much richer than he believes, and it is useful to hold to this truth as well as to the problems. I am convinced that the unconscious really wants to be well and that it will take firm hold of anything that leads in that direction. Hypnosis provides access to the unconscious resources.

We can imagine that we have in one hand: Why am I not well? and in the other hand: How to be well. On one side: exploration, analysis, understanding; on the other side: training sessions. It is interesting to learn, to learn to be well, to be in contact with inner resources that are there but that are just not connected. There are people who are completely at ease in certain situations and very ill at ease or threatened in other circumstances. So it’s a question of simply allowing, giving the permission to go forward while being in contact with the resources, with full assurances of safety. In this way, the problem is put into contact with its solution and with the necessary resources.

There are also the tools of Marc Fréchet, who discovered memorized cycles in our biology. Secrets of the family are sometimes found in this way. Marc has developed different elements, such as lines of siblings and the transgenerational notions, which other authors have also spoken of.

PREVENTION

In relation to prevention or prophylaxis, I’m simply going to give a few comments. I’ll begin with a specific case. Several years ago, my eldest daughter, who was seven at the time, had received the present of a marvelous doll with long blond hair. While she was away for a short time, her little sister, who also found the doll very beautiful, undertook to cut its hair. The older daughter, when she saw what had happened, was at first angry and then she cried. Our reaction, as parents, was spontaneously to tell her, “It’s not serious, it’s nothing, it’s just a doll, don’t make such a fuss about it . . .”

However, seven years later, she was still suffering and still bore a grudge against her little sister. When someone expresses a feeling, what is our reaction? Are we really comfortable with that?

My first advice is to allow and even facilitate the expression of the emotion that is felt. We fear other people’s emotions whether they are children or adults. Remember: If you have a troubling emotion, it is because there is something you have not been able to resolve or bring to a conclusion. And if you have a symptom, it is because you have not been able to express an emotion or a felt sense. So let’s not be too quick to give advice, which cultivates dependency. And never criticize. Criticizing is a crime. You can really harm someone because you have not wanted, known how, or been willing to hear his or her felt sense.

One patient said to me, “My little dog is dead.” As far as I’m concerned, I can say that it’s not serious—it’s only a little dog. But for this woman, it’s much more. It’s her life, it’s her being that she’s expressing. If she cannot speak of it, if she cannot speak of her feeling, her hurting, or if you ignore her, if you use a biting tongue, if you criticize her—you kill her. Passively. The person is there with a dagger in her heart, and you don’t let her pull it out. You tell her it’s not serious! However, she is asking for only one thing—that she be listened to, that she be allowed, that she be able to free herself by expressing her emotion.

Another preventive element is connected to the notion of beliefs. I’ll return to the example of the woman who thought she saw her grandson have his hands cut off before her very eyes. She had an emotion that she was freed from in therapy. But she still had the belief that “it could happen one day.”

I’m thinking of another woman, who had been raped when she was twenty-four. Since then, she harbored fear and anger. She worked on it and became able to recall the incident without a troubling emotion. But twenty years later, she is still single, leading a life without sexual activity—because she has the belief that “a man is dangerous.” This is a belief, not an emotion and for her it is a piece of evidence and a truism. What’s necessary, then, is to encounter that belief and deprogram the limit of that belief, as it can be limiting to come to the age of thirty or forty and to have no sexual life, no husband, no children. . . . (In any case, that’s my belief!)

When speaking of prevention, something to keep in mind is that the human being is unknown to himself. This is like the man who is looking for his keys at night under a street lamp but he has no luck finding them. Someone passing by asks what he is doing. He says that he’s looking for his keys. The passerby offers to help, and after a few minutes, since they still can’t find them, he asks if the man is sure that he lost them just there. And the man replies, “No, I know that I lost them elsewhere, over there, where it is dark.”

“Ah, I see, but why are you looking for them here, then?”

“Because there is light here and over there it is dark!”

Likewise, we look for the key to our problems and to our suffering only where there is some light—where there is consciousness. We don’t want to go into the dark, into our unconscious mind, where we might find all the monsters and ghosts from our past and where there is anguish. It’s difficult to go there all alone and we sometimes need someone to take us by the hand in order to lead us into our own unconscious: the problem is not so much getting in (since that takes place at night and in our nightmares) as it is getting out. And in order to be sure of getting out again, we would like to go with someone who has already traveled this path and who is not afraid to go into the darkness simply because he knows how to get out again.

And if there is a guide who is able to go there and come out again, I may have the unconscious intuition that the darkness is not as dark as all that. If for someone the unconscious is conscious, the unconscious is no longer unconscious but is a uni-consciousness—the one, conscious of himself in himself.