A Theory and Treatment of Your Personality. Garry Flint
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British Columbia
Part I: For the Self-Help Reader
Chapter 1: The Discovery of the Process Healing Method
The Process Healing Method is a treatment intervention for a wide variety of mental health issues. The discovery of the Process Healing Method took me by surprise. I was an experimental psychologist, a man of science and, though what I was seeing was extraordinary, I could hardly deny what was happening before my very eyes. The theory behind Process Healing is unusual and forced me, as a psychologist, to shift my way of thinking about what causes us to think and behave. This is a shift that I invite my colleagues to make with me.
A major part of this shift in thinking is that this method uses the subconscious in all stages of therapy. The subconscious is a part of us that has been there from the beginning. It is a brain process that starts to learn before we have sensory experience. I learned to trust the use of the subconscious to direct treatment, to do treatment interventions, and to certify the adequacy of my metaphors designed to model our mental processes and behavior. This first chapter takes you through the experiences that led me to this novel understanding.
You may wonder if the Process Healing Method is worthy of study and use by either individuals or mental health professionals. Here is some empirical support for the practical effectiveness of this method:
Dr. Joaquin Andrade, M.D. (personal communication, January 10, 2001), spearheaded finding an effective treatment method for patients served in 11 outpatient clinics in Argentina and Uruguay. He was looking for treatment methods to get better results. About 16 years ago, his clinicians started experimenting with Thought Field Therapy (TFT) (Callahan, 1985). This treatment involves tapping on acupressure points to remove pain. For 15 years, the research team collected data to assess effectiveness of treatment. The team contacted patients who had received treatment in a double-blind format at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months (Andrade and Feinstein, 2003). They found the tapping treatment routinely achieved 60 to 70 percent positive outcomes with 29,000 patients.
In 2001, Dr. Andrade (personal communication, January 10, 2001) discovered the Process Healing Method by visiting my web site (Flint, 2005). By following the instructions of the Process Healing course, he learned how to teach the subconscious to treat trauma and tried this treatment method in several clinics. With the first 64 patients who were failures with routine tapping, he realized 60 percent positive results (J. Andrade, personal communication, July 13, 2002). With more experience and some coaching, after treating 200 patients, he found that he obtained positive results with 65 percent of the patients treated (J. Andrade, personal communication, December 14, 2002). The Process Healing Method would probably be effective with all the success cases he had previously treated with tapping. If this were true, then one could estimate that Process Healing would be effective with 84 percent of patients who came to the clinics.
The discovery of the Process Healing Method took me by surprise: The subconscious could do the treatment inside the patient. The subconscious learned the tapping treatment method as the patient did Thought Field Therapy interventions. This discovery process continued over the next 12 years of personal study and research. Trained as an experimental psychologist with an emphasis on the theory of learning, I studied the behavior of rats, pigeons and squirrel monkeys. This training taught me that observation was important (Skinner, 1953, Flint, 1968). I now use this practice of observation in my work with patients. I carefully watch and listen to my patients to notice what I do that causes change in their present experience and in their experience of their issues. I have little formal education in clinical theories to interfere with my insight into personality dynamics. This combination of observation, ignorance of clinical theory, and training in hypnosis, Neurolinguistic Programming and several new, effective treatment methods, resulted in the development of Process Healing as a powerful treatment method. Preliminary research shows that the Process Healing Method is remarkably effective.
The subconscious is explained further in Chapter 2. My patients taught me that the subconscious is a useful ally in identifying and treating issues in therapy. The subconscious is a language process that has access to the neural activity of the entire brain and body. It can learn to change the role of memories by removing or adding emotions. These three properties of the subconscious — ease of communication, access to all memories, and a method of changing memories — make the subconscious an excellent ally in any treatment setting.
I also assume that unique memories cause all brain, behavior, and body processes such as muscle movements and organ activity. An active memory, such as thinking a thought or word, is neural activity. Your automatic response of “Great” to someone who says, “How’s it going?” is a learned response caused by remembered neural activity. When you learn a memory, like meeting someone’s handshake, the memory runs the body automatically to meet the handshake without your even thinking. Memory involves learned neural connections that manage your physiology to create the learned response, namely to run the muscles that cause you to meet the other person’s hand. Memories run all conscious and unconscious learned behavior. Mental problems or issues are memories with associated negative emotions. It is easy to change learned neural connections. Since the subconscious can change the emotions connected to memories, the therapist can try to treat any learned brain or body process when working with the subconscious. I now believe that it is possible to heal any learned mental or physical dysfunction.
The subconscious employs our native language and is open to communication. I have learned to use the subconscious to choose which psychological issue to address and the interventions that would be best. In short, I routinely use the subconscious to direct the treatment of my patients.
The strategy of having the subconscious direct treatment has moved me from doing therapy directed by the therapist to doing therapy directed by the patient. This patient-directed therapy is clearly respectful to my patients. It has also changed my problem-solving approach. I no longer look for solutions from my own knowledge. My problem-solving has become patient-oriented. I now look for solutions to problem behavior in some feature of memory caused by the learning process. Some forms of traumatic experience always cause problem behavior. Any trauma memory from the past distorts our behavior to some extent. I can treat these trauma memories with Process Healing. I use the subconscious to discover solutions to problems and to carry out the interventions.
Solving problems this way has led to the development of a model of learning and memory. Based on clinical observations and the solutions to real problems, this model is practical. Changes in patients’ experience and behavior confirm the effectiveness of using interventions based on this model. The model has become a useful tool, as it provides ways to explain and treat maladaptive behavior. Best of all, solutions to problems with one patient have worked with other patients.
Over the years, I had been looking for faster ways to treat trauma. I learned several different treatment techniques. The most significant treatment technique learned, and the basis for Process Healing, was training to diagnose specific sequences of acupressure points to treat mental issues (Callahan, 1993). The treatment involved tapping on the diagnosed acupressure points. After I returned from this worthwhile training, my next patient taught me that the subconscious could do the tapping treatment. This internal treatment was the basis for the treatment approach that I eventually called Process Healing.
The practice of observation and using directions from the patient are both respectful and essential when working with this theory. This respectful approach and the basic premises of the theory give flexibility to problem-solving and treating difficult mental issues. The theory, then, is the basis for responding to and understanding a patient’s description of his or her mental health issues.
The keys to our personality dynamics are amnesic and dissociative parts. Largely ignored in traditional therapy, these parts act like mini-personalities that serve some function in our behavior. People are not usually aware of amnesic and dissociative parts. I am going to describe how I discovered that amnesic parts could be barriers to hypnosis and that various pre-birth amnesic parts could disturb adult behavior. I also found that the effects of preverbal trauma could have a strong impact on later behavior, while in utero trauma could cause subtle lingering effects on our behavior. Another significant