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More Healing Tales
"M.," a fifty-year old woman who looked somewhat nervous and frail, came to me to learn how to do Therapeutic Touch, in order to work with her mother, "W.," an eighty-year-old woman with Alzheimer's. Her condition had worsened to the point where her son (M.'s brother) and his wife, could no longer care for her. M. was granted a leave of absence from her work to care for her mother, so that she would not have to be put in a home. Many families want to care for a parent with Alzheimer's, but find that the stress is too great. It is a complex and demanding job.
Therapeutic Touch is a non-invasive healing technique, which does not require actual touching. The practitioner works with the patient's "energy field," anywhere from an inch to six inches around the patient's body, looking for imbalances and rebalancing it. The technique is used by nurses in many hospitals, including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It has been found by many to be helpful in the healing of wounds and fractures, in relieving pain, in promoting relaxation, and in giving the immune system a boost.
During our first session, which M. attended with her sister-in-law, upon observing my combination of Therapeutic Touch with mind/body communication, usually in the form of exercises and games suggested to the client, M. appeared skeptical. A Therapeutic Touch practitioner might not speak at all during a session; whereas M, who had seen a video about Therapeutic Touch, now heard her teacher asking questions, tell stories, and suggesting things the client could do in her imagination. M. kept up a barrage of probing questions as, "How can you center so quickly?" "How can you talk while you do this? I couldn't concentrate." "How can you feel anything when you hold your hands like that? I couldn't feel anything that way."
M. reported that she had had back-pain since childhood, and allergies since infancy. In order to utilize that good, skeptical, questioning energy in a healing way, the game was, so to speak, to put a question to her back. What, exactly, did the pain feel like? How big was it? What shape was it? How intense was it?
She reported that when she focused on it, it turned into a question mark. She seemed surprised by this.
Since a question, a real question, implies that you do not know something, the next step was to use the state of not knowing to M.'s advantage. When asked how she would feel if she had back-pain, but did not know it, and had allergies, but did not know it - she might be sneezing, but she wouldn't be aware of it, and no one else would, it would simply be happening somewhere, but she would not know about it - would this be a better situation? she agreed, with some amusement, that it would be.
At the end of the session, she apologized for
having asked so many questions, but was reassured that she had the
right to question. There are some frauds around. She had not been
able to feel any results, but was given the suggestion that sometimes
results "kick in" later, and perhaps some of the work
we had done would pay off. We made an appointment in two weeks,
although it was not clear that she would want to keep it. However,
she did, and her demeanor was entirely different. At the beginning
of the session when asked for feedback, she seemed aglow and said
that she had more energy at the end of the day now, after working
with her mother. She now seemed excited about what we were learning
and, during the session, she reported that she had recently learned
that you did not always have to know, and that this was a revelation.
At our third session, M. announced that her back pain was gone.
It was now non-existent. She had taught herself, gradually (since
she does not trust instant results,) to not know it was there. When
she's working with her mother and starts to feel it, she tells it,
"Not now, I'm working with Mom," and it goes away.
To the question was there a point when she did not have allergies, she could not remember one. She had had them as long as she could remember.
At our fourth session, she announced that her allergies were now gone. They were non-existent. Being from a religious back-ground she had, in her imagination, gone back to a place of baptismal innocence, before there could be any evil, and asked Jesus to heal her.
During our fifth session, I visited M.'s home, so I could meet her mother. M.'s brother and sister-in-law joined us. W. sat on the couch, an old woman with a happy face and a mellow, musical voice. She talked sweet nonsense and sang a lot and smiled. "You might feel frustrated that you're not reaching her, but she has the look of somehow who is loved and taken care of. She doesn't look like someone in an institution, among strangers. Linear logic might be gone, but there are other, non-verbal languages you can learn to communicate with her in because SHE is not gone."
"You might let your mother's voice roll down your spine and relax you - like a lullaby. And invite people over to meet her wonderful mother. Don't think of her as something to be hidden. To be 80 and to be happy and loved is a wonderful thing!"
M. noted that her mother did seem to know things in her own way; for example, she would know that another son was coming to visit two days before he arrived, although his name was not mentioned. As W. received Therapeutic Touch on her knees and feet, she laughed, as if wondering why this strange man was sitting on the floor. After the Therapeutic Touch, W., who very rarely said anything coherent, said, "You are worse!" Rather than assuming this meant nothing, a more humble approach is to wonder what it MIGHT mean, respond to it in those terms, and see if a dialogue can be established that goes somewhere interesting. If, in comparison to her, I'd gone down, though I was actually the same, she might be finding a way to say that the Therapeutic Touch was helping her. Rather than leave her statement unattended, it might be interesting to respond, "No, I am not worse, YOU are better!"
W. would sometimes rev up to spit, and her daughter or son would try to catch it in a Kleenex. It became a game. Once the woman made her daughter miss and spat on her robe and said, proudly, "I did that!" "She needs objects, bridges to the outside world. Your spit is inside you, and if it ends up on the robe, rather than disappearing into the tissue, it becomes an object. It can be referred to. It has to be dealt with. Cleaned up. So during those times that the spit can't be caught, you could learn to treasure it. It's a good thing, an "it" that helps your mother."
W.'s daughter-in-law had torn cartilage in a knee that she wanted help with. After her treatment, W. began rubbing the nice, blue strap of her blue robe. In response to the stranger in her house communicating with her by rubbing his shirt, she said, "It's good fabric." She used to be a seamstress. A tear can be sewn up. Mended. A knee can be healed. The fabric is good.
The old woman would talk and laugh and sing and then slump over for a little while. Perhaps this indicated that she was putting reality together in her own way, and it exhausted her, and she had to recharge. Perhaps her "nonsense" was not purely nonsense, but a different kind of language, like the language of a dream, that can be decoded. "While working with your mother, you might use the fact that she speaks nonsense to your advantage. She might try talking to her - saying anything you feel like. You might talk about the stress of the job of taking care of her. You have nothing to lose - your mother won't understand anyway. You might confide in her, talk to her about your problems. You might also see if you get a response! It might occur after a passage of time - a day, a week - but it might occur."
"A woman like your mother might be intimidating to people not because she might say things that are nonsense, but because she might say something that is all too TRUE!"
When asked how her allergies were, M. said that again, they were virtually zero. She had had the acid test. Around cats and dogs she has severe symptoms - tearing eyes, itching, etc. She had had her hair cut by a woman she met for the first time and went to her apartment. The woman's cat sat across from her the whole time, watching. No allergies!
Her chronic back pain was also still better, but she had strained herself catching her mother from a fall, and now felt stiff all over.
During a Therapeutic Touch treatment to heal M.'s stiffness, we played a little word game, wherein she would think of the different meanings of words such as "turn," "flexible," and "option," and then, "mean," which her mother commented on in her own nonsensical way. "Yes, we're just playing with words, the way you do. We're trying to learn to do what you do so well."
"The word 'mean' can have a very negative meaning, but also some wonderful ones. You can mean what you say. The golden mean, which is such a healthy thing. Why don't you use the word 'stiff' in a sentence and change its meaning to something beneficial, but unspecified? You wouldn't know what the other meaning of the word is, but it will be beneficial."
Near the end of the treatment, in the unconscious language of intuition that is appropriate to Therapeutic Touch, there seemed to be a sense of M. calling, "I give all this attention to my mother, but what about ME? I'm in pain. I have deep emotional pain. I need help and comfort, too." At that point, M. said, "Matthew, I'd better stop," and got up and lay down under the blanket. Later she remarked that she had been completely and deeply relaxed - that was all she felt. She never became this relaxed.
M. was a "word person" - she was multi-lingual
and had great skill with languages, so by playing with other possible
meanings for words related to "stiff," her bodily stiffness
had left her. This is healing through the unconscious, not by direct
command, or by medication or physical manipulation, but by tapping
into the healee's own energy, and suggesting ways that she can use
it differently.
W.'s stomach suddenly hurt and she clutched it with her hands. "Her
hernia, probably," her son thought. The friend in her household
began performing Therapeutic Touch on it and supplementing the movement
with cooing sounds, until an intuition came to forget the stomach
and attend to her hands, directing attention to them with Therapeutic
Touch movements and the words, "Your wonderful hand."
She immediately took her hands off her stomach, as if it were better
now, and looked at them wondrously, and flexed her wonderful hands,
and then seemed free of pain.
Later, she moved her hands in the air, as if experimenting, moving them as if doing Therapeutic Touch, and then casting out the excess in that odd, instinctive gesture so characteristic of almost everyone who does T.T. It was not only her family who was learning this new healing technique - she, too, had not lost her ability to learn.
As I was leaving, it occurred to me to go back in and say goodbye to woman who was so full of joy and humor and music, even at the age of eighty. I said it had been wonderful to meet her, shook her hand, and thanked her for her hospitality.
"When she makes connections, for
example when she was holding her robe and referring to it in words,
try engaging with this strongly." W.'s son learned to communicate
with his mother by keeping a beat on the kitchen counter, which
his mother danced to. It was a tight little musical number. An 80
year-old woman who can dance to a beat tapped out by her son, is
not to be relegated to the scrap heap of history!
With the exception of one or two flare-ups, M.'s back-pain did not
recur, and her allergies remained non-existent. For the back-pain
she had suffered since childhood, she had seen an orthopedic specialist,
a chiropractor, a naturopath, and tried self-hypnotist, without
relief. The naturopath had said that nothing could be done and her
back pain would, in fact, get worse. However, simply by using the
energy she presented, that of a skeptical questioner, and redirecting
it, "M." learned that she had the rather extraordinary
ability to heal her physical ailments with her mind. Following this,
she gradually returned to doing the stretches she had not been able
to do for years and began experiencing considerable improvement
in mobility, until she could squat with ease, something she had
not been able to do for two years. She could also now sit in the
yoga "Child's Pose". She reported that not even when she
first began to do these stretches at age 20 did her body feel as
supple, aligned, and united as it now did. The muscles, tendons,
and ligaments seemed to glide with ease over the bones that "housed"
them and the joints that joined them. They "knew" just
when to tense and when to relax.
When she came to learn Therapeutic Touch, her back-pain was worst
when she was caring for her mother as she lay in bed. She learned
to able to take on the most difficult posture in caring for her
mother and be utterly free of pain.
M. learned how to have conversations with her mother, using the element of time-lapse as had been suggested. One day, for example, she said something profound to W. about something that was troubling her, and over 24 hours later, her mother answered her quite clearly. One day, under stress, M. thought to herself that maybe she would have a drink to relax, and her mother said quite clearly, "Don't you start drinking!"
During one of our subsequent sessions on another issue that had come up in M's life, she announced that she could not turn her mother to her side in the morning to clean her without causing her mother pain. Her mother fought her and she, M., dreaded this moment. "Would you like to turn her without causing pain?" M. said that this was impossible - she would just like to work on it not affecting her so much. "You had incurable back-pain that's now gone, and allergies from infancy that are now gone, and these things were impossible, and now it's impossible that you might be able to turn your mother to her side in the morning without causing her pain." M.'s face flickered with doubt - doubt about her ability to learn to do this, and doubt about her doubt.
"When Milton Erickson was a boy on a farm, he watched his father struggling to pull a recalcitrant cow into a barn. When Milton laughed, his annoyed father said, "YOU do it!" The boy thereupon pulled on the cow's tail --- whereupon the cow reversed direction and pulled him right into the barn. The idea is to USE the resistance of the patient, rather than to oppose it."
"What does your back feel like when you're struggling with your mother?"
"Like it's being held in a vise," M. said.
"Do you have any vices?"
"None. Sweets."
"What if you were to give up being sweet, and move your mother in a way that wasn't sweet, and perfect, but it didn't hurt her."
"But it will hurt her."
"But what if, just what if, you found a way to move her that wasn't sweet, and you didn't do it sweetly, but she moved to her side without pain. Would that be better? All right, you didn't do it sweetly, but it didn't cause pain. Would that be better?"
"Yes, that would be better."
"What IF, without hurting her, you held her shoulders down and said, with your body and your voice, that she wasn't ALLOWED to move to her side, and you communicated that to her. Do you think she would then move to her side more easily? I'm not suggesting that you do THAT specifically, I'm merely wondering. Getting you thinking in a different direction."
She reported that the next morning she woke up and approached her mother with a kind of peace, and her mother went right over to her side, without struggle or expression of discomfort. This happened the following day as well. It continued this way - her mother turning to her side without struggle or expression of pain. Following this break-through, communication more and more flowed between daughter and mother; they worked as a team. M. stated that when she came to learn Therapeutic Touch she was, in relation to the task of caring for her mother, "licked". Now she described her work with her mother as "a breeze." They worked together in a kind of joyous partnership. It got to the point where M. was clearly the best one with her mother, and she hated to let any one else relieve her. With other people, her mother would begin to get aggressive and uncooperative.
One day W. said to her daughter, very clearly, in a voice that was like the way she talked before she had Alzheimer's, "I want them to take a look at my soul." M. questioned her about this, and she said again, very clearly, that this was what she wanted. M. had the feeling that her mother was dying, now, and she had a priest come out and anoint her (which serves as confession when you're not able to confess.) When W.'s time came to die, she died in the bosom of her family, loved and cared for.