July/August 2008 Alternative Health
Shifting Despair

by Howard Brockman

Sarah, a reference librarian at a large university in Portland, had been seeing me for post-traumatic stress from childhood abuse. For the past three months, she had been sick with various ailments, from localized infections to aching joints throughout her body to pervasive exhaustion. She was worried about her immune system and did not understand why she had been unable to overcome or resist these physical problems.

As I now held the space for Sarah to talk and process her feelings and thoughts about the difficulties she was having, she realized that the central issue was despair. Sarah described this experience as a progressive snowballing of hopelessness. When she gets discouraged enough she cannot use the tools that she knows and falls into this deep well of despair.

I interjected at this point and suggested that we begin muscle testing to see if we could find an intervention that would collapse the energy fields carrying the information which perpetrates her despair.

Frontal Occipital Holding

Of all the interventions I use, frontal occipital (F/O) holding is the centerpiece of Dynamic Energetic Healing because it has given me such profound experiences in moving in and out of dreamtime in the therapeutic context.

The F/O holding intervention was originally developed by Three in One Concepts for reducing stress-related tension. Their version of the method requires the therapist to gently place the palm of one hand on the client's forehead while placing the other hand on the occipital bone at the back of the client's head. While the therapist's hands are held in place, the client focuses attention on the problem. In a relatively short time, the negative emotional energy that was keeping the problem in place shifts, often dissipating completely.

How does F/O holding work?

There is some speculation that the palm of hand stimulates neurovascular reflex points (located on the forehead), thereby increasing vascular flow through the body and inducing a state of relaxation. Others believe that practitioners become sensitive to the pulses in these reflex points and that the therapist waits until the pulses synchronize. In either case, clients are supposed to stay in the process until they are aware of a positive shift of the internal problem state, such as images changing from negative to positive, a depressed mood balancing to neutral or a deep sense of overall physical relaxation occurring.

- Howard Brockman

Sarah's muscle testing indicated frontal occipital (F/O) holding as the best intervention. I directed Sarah to reflect on everything she had shared with me and continue thinking about her despair. As I gently made contact with her, I immediately began receiving impressions of an Old World community that struck me as European. I saw a dark cloud like a fog pervading this European village. It spread like exploring, probing fingers engulfing the entire community. I immediately knew that this was the Black Death of medieval times, consuming everyone who it came into contact with. As I had this knowing, overwhelming feelings of despair, tremendous grief and hopelessness washed through my body.

As the scene changed, I started getting impressions of the despair and helplessness of victims of the Nazi death camps in World War II. These karmic memory impressions contained all the qualities and features that Sarah had described feeling just a few minutes earlier.

Now that I had the information, I was praying for help from any spiritual resources either of us had. I had identified the source of the thought fields as being karmic and had determined that Sarah needed spiritual help (among other things). In what seemed like just a few seconds, I moved deeper into the dreamtime experience and saw my upper-world Tibetan master turn from his mountaintop meditation place and begin chanting, directing the very specific vibratory healing energies toward Sarah.

Finally, what I saw made me shudder. As I realized that both of these past-life memories were representations of morphic resonance at the collective level, I saw dark ghosts emerging from Sarah. My Tibetan master took responsibility for redirecting them to wherever they needed to go next. I was overwhelmed with awe at what I had seen. I was tremendously grateful for the healing power of this spiritual resource, which released very old, powerful memories that were directly influencing Sarah to experience despair.

When I was finished, I shared everything that I had seen with Sarah. My perceptions about these karmic influences seemed amazing to me, but Sarah said they made perfect sense to her. Although she had never had past-life memories of the medieval Black Death, she had had many intuitive intimations of having lived through the Holocaust in a death camp.

Sarah then began to make some current-life connections to her family of origin. She realized she could never get her parents to stop hurting her no matter what she did or what she said. She realized that as a child she could never have made them stop doing the terrible things to her that they did. She also realized in this moment of clarity that this is one of the main reasons why she often feels inadequate in making decisions about changing anything in her life. This was all about those feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that led her deeper into despair.

Just before ending our session, I wanted to reassure Sarah that the work we had done was complete. I wanted to let her know that she had made a profound change not only at her belief level but at her very core. I had her say out loud, "I'm a victim of my despair." I muscle tested her and her arms went weak.

I then had her say out loud, "I now know I have resolved the experience of despair for myself." Her arms were strong as steel. This was confirmation that the work we had done in that session, both cognitively through our initial dialogue and energetically through the F/O holding intervention, had been very powerful healing work.

Howard Brockman, LCSW, author of Dynamic Energetic Healing, is a Salem-based psychotherapist. With extensive training in processwork, core shamanism and energy psychology, he has created a unique synthesis of psychospiritual healing methods. Visit www.dynamicenergetichealing.com. Excerpted from Dynamic Energetic Healing with permission by Columbia Press.