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Real Therapy With Results & Without Reliving Pain Or Trauma – Transcript

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The Subconscious Rapid Transformation Technique

“Crying & Reliving Pain & Trauma Doesn’t Heal You”

Transcript of Interview of Patrick Wanis PhD by Clifton E. Brantley LMFT.
Real Therapy With Results, And Without Reliving Pain or Trauma. Listen to the interview here

Patrick
This is Patrick Wanis, Human Behavior and Relationship Expert PhD and creator of SRTT (Subconscious Rapid Transformation Technique). This is a special technique that I developed over many, many years of working with countless different clients. Primarily as a result of actually having many people ask me if I could work with them on the phone and along the way, I ended up incorporating multiple disciplines and multiple therapies to create what is known as SRTT as well as adding some of my own elements.

Some of those elements are controversial, particularly if you are trained in traditional therapy and so Clifton E. Brantley, who is a licensed marriage and family therapist came to me. He actually attended to one of my workshops, then I did a private session with him and he’s just started taking the course to learn the actual therapy. Clifton was, of course, quite intrigued because some of the components of SRTT are counter-intuitive. They go against the grain of what traditional therapy, tradition psychology, psychoanalysis etc., teach.
So Clifton, thank you very much for inspiring me to actually have this conversation because before we started the recording you asked a very important question regarding the feeling of pain during therapy. So go ahead and please give me your perspective and question.

Clifton
Yes. So for us as a family therapist, one of the things that we want to do is to bring emotion into the room. When I’m working with the client. I like it when they start to cry and start to feel the emotion. I want to take them there and I want them to, you know, tell me what they’re feeling and my thinking was that, that helping them to get that out and heal but in taking your course and working with you, I noticed that you actually don’t want the client to get into their emotion and so my question was, why is that?

Patrick
Okay, that’s a fair question. So, this is interesting because it is controversial.

I come to it from various perspectives. The teaching that you have to bring to the surface the emotion so you can release it, be free of it and be healed, stems back to Freudian’s Model, which is the hydraulic model. That means push it up, let it come to the surface, and then suddenly it will be free or released almost like a gushing oil well. But that is not true.

It’s false.

And here’s how I’m going to rip apart that entire concept.

How many people, even someone listening to this interview right now or you or I, have experienced the following?

You’ve had some either very sad, disappointing news, or other traumatic event and maybe you’ve had a loss, maybe you’ve broken up with your husband or wife or partner, you’ve lost a job, and you are crying yourself to sleep or you’re crying for many days in a row, sometimes for months at a time.

Well, how come you weren’t healed after the first crying session?

Why wouldn’t you heal after the second, the third, or the tenth crying session?

All that happens in that moment is, the emotion comes up and maybe you start to cry, and you start to feel better at the end of crying session because you’ve released particular endorphins or particular chemicals in your body that calm you down but that doesn’t heal you or the actual issue that created the sadness or brought about the tears in the first place. That’s number one.

Number two: if you actually believe that bringing the emotions to the surface and expressing those emotions will heal you of the pain, then please let someone explain to me why a person that’s abusive will be in a state of anger, will express anger, will take that anger out on his wife, his children, or mother, or child, or whoever it is and they’ll be in that anger, they’ll express that anger and it does nothing. In fact, I teach that the longer you stay in anger, the worse it gets, and you actually perpetuate the anger.

This also goes back to the concept that I think began somewhere in the 1980s and I know someone did it on Oprah and it was absolutely absurd and ridiculous – grab the pillow and punch it.

Yes, and then what?

That doesn’t heal me of the anger I have towards my mother, my father, my ex-husband, my ex-wife, my ex-boyfriend or girlfriend that cheated on me; it changes nothing.

All it does is it engages enough endorphins in my body, so I feel a little bit better in that moment and maybe I get a bit of a high or I tire myself out but it doesn’t heal me of the issue. I’ll still have the thought in my head, I’m angry at my partner, I’m mad at my partner, I feel betrayed, or I feel guilty, or I feel ashamed, or I feel foolish, or I feel stupid.

And so therefore, if I still have those same thoughts, emotions are going to come up again and again. So I’ve never met anyone who either had a crying session, I think there is another word for it isn’t that like a cry fest  – or who got really angry and punched a door or wall or smashed something; I’ve never meet anyone who’s done that and then was healed. I’ve met a few that have done that and then they felt better for a few minutes.

It’s important to understand that experiencing more of the same emotion does not neutralize or release the emotion, nor does it get to the root cause of the emotion.

That means there’s an incident, there’s a thought, a belief that is creating this emotion. And just experiencing more of that emotion or expressing more of that emotion will not change the subconscious belief, the subconscious incident or the subconscious thought or perspective that created this emotion.

So to release that emotion I don’t just ask someone to just express more of that emotion, nor do I encourage them to cry over that emotion. Instead, I use a special process – a really simple and highly effective process – which you, too Clifton, have experienced to release that emotion. And again, it’s not done by reliving pain, reliving trauma or expressing more of that same emotion.

And having said that, I do though still encourage people to get in touch with what they are feeling. You’ve got to also have emotional intelligence – that means emotional awareness. Be aware of what you are actually feeling: is it anger? Is it sadness? Is it loss? Is it hurt? Is it disappointment? Is it rejection? Is it invalidation? Is it a sense of worthlessness, etc.?

Yes you’ve got to get clear about that.

However, asking you to express that emotion and make you feel it in your body is not helpful to you, and it doesn’t relieve you of the actual cause; it doesn’t neutralize the emotion, it doesn’t release the emotion, it doesn’t remove the emotion. Crying can make you temporarily feel better and then when you walk out of the office, when you’re back home, you’ll just end up reliving that pain and that negativity again. Why? Because unless you clear out the root cause of that emotion, you’ll keep re-experiencing it.

And I’ve had many clients come to me saying that they’ve done other forms of therapy, they’ve been in those sessions, and they are encouraged to release the emotion, to cry to express it, to express their anger, and then when they go home they feel exactly the same! They haven’t released the actual root cause of the issue and of the emotions.

I recall, and this is a funny story now that think of it: many, many years ago, when I was professional dancer and I lived in Africa, and one night during a performance, the sound system broke and I don’t know what else happened but I was so angry because I had no idea you how to control my emotions back then. I took my fist and I punched a glass wall. I cut my hand, and I had to wrap in bandages and go on stage and dance. It didn’t heal me of any of my issues; it just made me realize what an idiot I was at that time for punching a glass wall and cutting my hand.

But nonetheless on a serious point, [00:10:00] if you think about your situation between your clients, I can understand why you would say to me, “Listen Patrick, I want them to open up and I feel or I believe that if they cry they’re making themselves vulnerable.” Now, that part I understand but that doesn’t heal them. So what I do in SRTT and I think you and I did this together, I’m sure and I didn’t recall if you brought up emotion, but I’m sure you did because everyone does. In the process of SRTT, if my client starts to the feel the emotion, I say to them either pause or stop and I say, “this is not about you, this is the about healing the younger you. “

Now, if someone’s listening to this and they haven’t had a  session with me or haven’t started to study SRTT, then they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. So what I do, the focus of SRTT is identifying what your core issue is.

What is it you want that you don’t yet have?

And you might say, “I want confidence.” and I say, ‘What’s the block to confidence?’ “Well, I’m experiencing anxiety.” Okay, anxiety is the belief that your world is out of control, coupled with the attempt to try to control that which you can’t. So what’s your earliest memory or experience of feeling anxious? And then the client might say “it was 5 years ago.” Then I‘ll say, ‘Is there another memory before that? Now, keep going back to the time that they were a child.’ Now, from that point you pull up a memory. It is critical that you disassociate from that memory. Now, I’m not referring to Dissociative Personality Disorder, I’m saying that you detach yourself. Instead of re-living the trauma, I want you to look at the experience as a third person and so then when you are looking at the younger you and you say, “Yes, I was in my mother’s house when I was 8 years of age and my father came along and slapped me” and then I’ll say, ‘Whoa, Whoa. Stop. Let’s look at the younger you. You’re not there; you’re here in this room with me. We’re looking at that little boy or that little girl that was hit by mom or dad. Can you see that child?’ And what we’re doing is we’re detaching from the emotion because again, to phrase it in another way, I don’t want you to relive the trauma.

When a client or a patient is in front of you and they start to cry because they were abused, or molested, or raped, or hit, or something else happened in them as a child (or betrayed, or neglected, or abandoned), getting them to experience that emotion that they experienced the first time is only making them relive the trauma.

How is that healing?

That’s like saying to a person that has PTSD, “Keep experiencing the trauma and you’ll get over it”, but they don’t and I think maybe that’s the best way to explain it. I think the best way to say this, think of someone that has experienced trauma – that could be someone that’s in the military, that could be someone who was in some form of an accident – that could be someone that was raped or sexually abused or molested. What happens? They are already living their trauma in their head. It could be in the form of nightmares, it could be in the form of day mares, meaning that it just pops up randomly.

And what’s happening is that person is already re-experiencing that trauma, and that doesn’t heal them of the trauma. So the process of SRTT is to say, we need to do two things. We need to uncover all of the emotions that the client experienced, we need to be able to list them, identify them, describe them and then validate them.

We need to get the client to speak to the younger you, that means to yourself;  what you are actually doing is you’re actually giving yourself permission to feel those emotions but not within your body right now. That means you look back at the child and for the first time, you are able to say, “When my mom didn’t show up to pick me up from school, and I waited for an hour, and I’m standing there outside the school, what that little boy or little girl felt while waiting outside the school was abandoned, neglected, alone, afraid, anxious, confused and also felt I’m worthless because my mom is not here to pick me up or my mom forgot me or my mom doesn’t care enough to be here.” So we know that’s the thought and there are also emotions attached to it. If we validate and identify those emotions, the person then has the chance to recognize, it’s actually over.

And then we work on changing the belief and the belief is, ‘because my mother didn’t show up, therefore she doesn’t love me therefore, I’m not worthy, I’m not good enough and I’m not lovable’, and these are the ridiculous interpretations that children make.

So again, I don’t want the client to experience a trauma, I don’t want the client to feel the pain because it doesn’t heal them of it and in fact that only makes them worse. Why would anyone want to come to you or me if they know they are going to be re-experiencing pain? Instead, I want you to be able to, and this is something that obviously people who take my course would understand, all of that emotion is coming from the subconscious mind, something triggers those emotions and there’s a belief that is also part of those emotions and it’s all in the subconscious mind. When I get you to detach yourself from what happened in the age 7 or 8 or 6 or 3 or even 2, you are looking at that and now you’re going to bring conscious wisdom, understanding, enlightenment and knowledge, and a new perspective to the subconscious mind as well as to that incident that happened all those years ago. That’s where change occurs. Does that make sense, does that better explain it?

Clifton
That does makes sense and it’s extremely helpful, but it does make me have another question, though. So you want us to experience, take the client back to the emotion but their experience or I experience but they are talking to their younger self. It is possible though, to have the client experience the emotion themselves and validate the emotion or do they need to be dissociated from it? You know what I’m saying?

Patrick
You want to be detached from the emotion, and I’ll explain why.

Let’s imagine that the 3 of us are in a room: you, me and let’s say the younger you. Let’s say the younger you is separate to you, it’s just a little boy that’s age 8 and that little boy experienced exactly what you experienced when you were eight. And you look at this little eight year old boy and you see him in the corner, and he is looking out the window, and he is crying, and you go up to him, and you connect with him and you say to him, “Hey. What’s happening?” And maybe he can’t verbalize the emotions but you’re asking what happened and he says, ‘I’m waiting for my daddy to come home.’

“Why isn’t your daddy here?”

‘He is always late, he always comes home late at night’, and you say, “So, you’re sitting here every day?”

‘Yes, I’m waiting here every day.’ And of course, for the child, it feels like that’s what they do all the time. Then you start to recognize the emotions, and you say what are you feeling?

The kid says, ‘I’m feeling sad.’

“Why are you feeling sad?”

‘Well, because my daddy is not here.’

And then you say, “What else are you feeling?”

And he says, ‘I’m feeling afraid.’

And each time he says I’m feeling sad, you say “That’s okay. I understand, it makes sense.”

And then he says, ‘I’m feeling afraid.’

And you go, “That’s okay, I understand. In fact, it’s okay because I’m here.”

What you’re doing is you’re expressing empathy and compassion to that little child. So guess what I’m just getting you to do – in a way that I couldn’t get you to do in any other way?

I’m getting you to actually express empathy and compassion to yourself for the things that happened to you and or to the things that you might have done as a child.

If I came to you and I said, “So Clifton, your mother and father they abandoned you, they neglected you, they didn’t feed you, they didn’t love you. Well, you know be compassionate towards yourself.” Well, you wouldn’t know how to do that because that’s just words.

Even if you say, “Patrick, I’m willing and I consciously want to be free of that pain or I consciously want have compassion for myself,” you won’t be able to do it. But using this method, I’m actually helping you to find an easy way where you don’t experience any pain, you don’t relive the trauma and you’re expressing compassion to that little kid – the younger you – whether you’re a man or woman, because no one else ever expressed compassion and empathy to them when it happened. Do you understand what that means?

Clifton
Yes, but that then gives me another question.

Patrick
Go ahead.

Clifton
What is the value then of, me validating the little boy VS me being in the emotion and the third is validating the little boy?

Patrick
Because, I first believe that validation should begin with you. Now…

Clifton
With yourself.

 Patrick
Yes. Okay here’s the problem, if you are a therapist validating the client, that client can become attached to you. You’re going to become an authority figure, they’re going to be turning to you for emotional validation [00:20:00] I don’t want the client – unless you want the client coming to you for rest of your life – I don’t want the client doing that.

I want to, and this is speaking sincerely, not just something I’m saying. I don’t want the client to be dependent on me. I want them to be dependent on me when they really, really need help and they say, “Patrick I need help and guidance”. I don’t want them be dependent on me for their own sense of self-worth, or for their own identity, or for their own self-image, or for their own self-esteem, or for their own sense of value. I want them to become empowered. And becoming empowered means that they’re not going to be dependent on the therapist, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, a life coach or anyone else. They’re going to be coming to you because you’re going to guide them through the process to help set them free.

And here is the other thing now that you have asked a really good question, all your other questions are good too, this is just another one. If you are encouraging them to depend on you for validation and for compassion, how are they going to learn to do it for themselves? If I teach you in this process to be compassionate, it’s going to be easier for you to be compassionate for yourself later when you do something else. I’m teaching, I’m reprogramming but for the better. Because 99.9% of the people that will be listening or be in the session or who will take the course, even if they are practitioners will experience the following. And that is: they either didn’t get validation as a child, they got invalidated as a child, or they simply were not validated.

So there is three; I teach there are three: there’s validation, non-validation and invalidation.

So non-validation means that your parents just didn’t say anything, you spoke and they basically ignored you or they just didn’t respond. That’s not being validated.

Validated is you spoke, you responded and your parents said, “Yes, I hear you, I understand your opinion is important. I may not agree with you. I may not still let you do what you want. However I’m listening to you and I understand what you want.”

And then invalidation is when the parent listens to you and says, “You shouldn’t be feeling that, your feelings don’t matter, your feelings don’t count, you’re wrong”; that’s invalidation.

Invalidation and non-validation are very different.

Non-validation is just ignoring the child. Invalidation is listening to the child and rejecting the child’s thoughts and feelings. Validating is listening to the child and then accepting the child’s thoughts and feelings.

So I want to help reprogram the person to learn to validate themselves, learn to have empathy for themselves and learn to express compassion for themselves.

I don’t want them to become psychologically dependent on me and I don’t want to suddenly become their mother, father, or their authority figure. I don’t want that role. I want to be their coach, more than their parent. In fact, I don’t want to be their parent at all. So that’s another reason why I would say, I want them to do it for themselves because I think the other thing that’s so important for them is, and you experienced this yourself when you do it yourself, it has a different impact because you’re doing it of your own volition and you’re doing it from a different place. It’s not someone outside of you that’s validating you, it’s you and therefore it has greater power.

It’s that which results in the transformation because even when your parents might have said to you, you’re stupid, you’re an idiot, or they said something against you, they said the words and you believed the words.

They might have hit you and you made the interpretation that therefore ‘I’m bad, I’m wrong, and I’m not lovable, and I’m not worthy.’ In other words, no matter what the parent did to you, it was you as a child that made the interpretation and the conclusion. So therefore, the best way for me to help you is to get you again to make the new interpretation and the new conclusion, but not out of force, not because I said it, but because I helped you to see it for yourself. Does that make sense?

Clifton
Yes that does make sense. That’s extremely helpful. My last question, at least I think is my last one. What if the trapped emotions happened beyond what I call the shaping years, ages four to seven, and it happened like in the first year of college. Is that possible? Like does that happen or is it always in the childhood? If it happens later, what then?

Patrick
I have actually done the same process where I get you to detach from the original incident and I’ve done it with adults who went back to age twenty-five and twenty-six.

So, for example I had a client who’s a wrestler, who was molested by the massage therapist. But at the time, he was twenty-five. Well how are you going to deal with that? Now, if he said to me, ‘I was abused’, I might say “Was that your earliest experience?” and in this case it wasn’t. He was actually abused first as a child around age four and nonetheless, if we’re going to work with that incident of twenty-five or twenty-six (and we’re going to one day), I’m still going to use the same process and it does work because you’re going to get someone to realize three things: number one, it wasn’t your fault or number two, if you did do something wrong to forgive yourself, and number three forgive yourself for being human.

So let’s say you didn’t shout or you didn’t scream or you didn’t try to stop it then I’ll say well “Why?” Maybe the client says, ‘I was afraid, I was frozen, I was paralyzed.’ Well, that’s a human response. Forgive yourself for being human. It’s okay. You didn’t have any control over that. Let’s say that someone actually did something wrong. Let’s say that it was the father who says, “I was always angry with my child and I always shouted at my child and I neglected my child”; I’m still going to need to do the same thing to ‘forgive yourself for being human’ as well as trying to make amends with whoever it was that suffered. And then of course, the fourth part is again to understand: we’re all human beings, we’re all imperfect, we all make mistakes.

So even if the incident happened in college, you can still help the client to disassociate from that or rather detach from that, and to see it in a new perspective and then ultimately to recognize at a subconscious level. It’s over, it’s finished, it’s not happening anymore. But just like P.T.S.D., the reason you feel the pain is because it keeps looping in your mind at a subconscious level and all that happens is someone says something and it triggers you, and when it triggers you, all of that old pain and trauma just comes up again. Do you understand my point?

Clifton
Yes

Patrick
You know, every time that I have a client who is there on the phone or in front of me and they’re starting to feel that intense emotion while they’re doing the work with the “Younger You” – that means the younger version of themselves – I always say to them if they bring up emotion, “Stop!” Or I’ll say, “What are you feeling?” and they might say, ‘Sadness.’ I’ll respond with “Whoa! This is not about you; this is the little child that’s feeling the sadness. You’re here right now and our only role is to help that little child.” So what you’re doing is you’re learning. And I haven’t studied the full neurological aspect or component but you’re almost cutting off those old wires, those wires of the brain that are programmed and which created a link from this to that, from the pain to that that incident.

So now, and I can talk about extremely traumatic experiences that clients have had and in one session I’ve ended that trauma, I’ve ended the emotional link to that. For example I had a client who was, I think four or five years of age, couldn’t get out of a burning building. And so of course whenever she would think of that incident, she would experience extreme anxiety, extreme fear, she would tremble, get nervous, have heart palpitations, etc.  Now I’m going to in that one session, end those emotions. Not by hypnotizing her and commanding her to let those emotions go. Not by hypnotizing her and telling her it’s all over, but rather by bringing the wisdom and the understanding, so that she understands what that little girl was actually going through. See the other thing too, is that many of us when we have traumatic events or awful experiences in the past, we are confused by all the emotions we feel. We’re overwhelmed, we can’t identify what we are feeling. And it’s just been recently proven by a neurologist that when you articulate the emotion, you actually reduce the impact of the emotion. And that was astounding to me because I only learnt that very recently and I thought, well this is bizarre because this is what I’ve been doing and teaching for ten or fifteen years but I never had the science behind it to say, ‘well when you look at the younger you and you say that little child felt sadness and you say that’s okay, I understand. And then you say the child felt afraid and confused’, I knew it was working to reduce the power of the emotion. [00:30:00] I just never knew it was working at a neurological level; meaning I didn’t know the science behind it to say, “Listen, science supports what I’m teaching you, now I know why it works or how it works.” I always knew it works, I just didn’t know why it was actually working, if that makes sense.

So you want the person to identify the emotions and then you’ve got to change the belief, the belief that either, I have no control over my world or my dad hit me and therefore I’m always going to be rebellious or afraid of authority figures, but if I help you it is to bring that new understanding to subconscious and say, “Your dad doesn’t represent every man in the world or your mother who was say, selfish or cold, or narcissistic doesn’t represent every woman in the world.” So see, I’ve got to uncover these beliefs and I’ve got to change those beliefs to set you free.

Clifton
Wow. That’s good and extremely helpful. Extremely helpful.

Patrick
You’ve got some really important questions. Do you have more?

Clifton
That’s all I have right now especially dealing with the emotion because that was the key thing like I said for me; the emotion is kind of like, they call it like the diamond. Like we’re trying to get to the emotion, but now it’s like, okay. We get to it so then what do we do with it? But I definitely like this approach better. It’s much more, what’s the word, it’s less painful. You know and less traumatic for the client.

Patrick
Now here’s the other thing too. Also if you’re going to be there with a client and they’re experiencing this intense emotion and they’re crying for hours or they’re feeling sad for a long time, you’re also going to feel it because of Mirror Neurons. So Mirror Neurons means when I see something in someone else’s face I will feel the same thing. So if I look at you, and you’re sad and I keep looking at you, I will feel the same sadness. The brain has been designed or it’s evolved to the point of being able to protect me. Because if I look at you and I see you’re angry and I feel that anger I go, “Whoa! He’s angry. I need to get away from him because he might be a threat to me.”

I can also relate to you and understand you better when I can actually feel the emotions you’re feeling. So if as a therapist, your client is sitting there and being sad and crying for five, ten, fifteen minutes, you’re experiencing the same emotions and that’s not healthy. Why do you want to experience the sadness?

And I think there was another question you asked in the beginning or at least you made a comment which I think needs addressing and you said, ‘I want my clients to open up and to experience that emotion so I can help them more.’ And as I said to you earlier in the conversation that means you want them to be vulnerable, I completely understand that. There’s another way to do it. So sometimes with clients who are very, very shut down but still are willing, they want help, so it’s not that they’re shut down, they just don’t know how to connect to those emotions.

I’ll start by asking, What is the memory? What actually happened.” They’ll say, ‘Well I was eight years of age.’ And I’ll say “Just tell me that little boy or that little girl, Mary. When she was eight, what happened to her?” And then they describe it. And then maybe I’ll say, “Well, what do you think that child felt?” Or, I’ll say, “Look in the eyes of the child, what do you see and feel?”

And then they might just say one emotion, maybe they’ll say no emotion; they might say ‘I see an innocent child.’ I’ll respond, “Great! If you look deeper in the eyes of this little girl, what do you see and feel?” And maybe by then, they’ll bring up one emotion but they’re still struggling because they don’t want to feel the emotion. That’s why they’ve shut it out. So, if they’re that shut down I’ll say to them, “So what happened to this little girl?”

‘Oh! Her father hit her.’

“So what do you think is the effect on a child that’s eight years of age that gets hit by her father? “

Now I’m going to get them to think about it from a different perspective and keep asking the questions to say, “Well was this little girl close to her father?” I’ll keep going on and on and asking more questions saying, “Well look, let’s look at it. This is a little eight year old girl, she’s helpless. She’s in this room, she’s all alone, and she’s just been hit by her father. You told me she’s sitting in the corner; she’s sitting in the corner, she’s trying to hide. She’s trying to protect herself. So what else do you think she felt?”

That’s the way to get them to open up the emotions by getting them to think, in other words express empathy, encourage them to understand what did that child feel, what did that child experience? And when you get them to start listing those emotions they will start to open up. And that’s the point where you might have them, you might see them starting to cry, and then you say, “Whoa! It’s not about you; we are here to help this little girl. That’s your only role.”

And then I might say to them, “Please understand. This little girl doesn’t even exist. You’re not eight; you’re twenty-one, thirty-one, forty-two, whatever age you are. That little girl or that little boy just exists in your mind. And the way did that the little child exist in your mind is with a painful memory and painful emotions. So if that child is going to exist in your mind, let’s change the association of the emotions. Let’s change your interpretation and conclusion of that experience so you no longer think that everyone is out to get you or you no longer think there’s something wrong with you.”

And I’ll share one more example to help you to understand what I’m saying here. So I had two clients who both happened to be males, with the same issue. They would call me and say, “Sometimes I just have these violent thoughts. I’m walking down the street and I just want to punch a stranger, I just randomly want to punch someone.”

And I’ll call this person, Robert, just to change their name. So I kept saying to Robert, and Robert would call me occasionally and say, “Am I psychopathic? Tell me is there something wrong with me? Tell me there’s nothing wrong with me.”

And I kept saying, “Robert, there was actually nothing wrong with you. The only thing we haven’t done is we haven’t uncovered the root cause of your issue. There’s something that’s triggering this in you. It’s not that there’s something wrong with your brain, it’s that there’s something coming up. Something is triggering these violent thoughts. You’re angry at someone or you’re angry at the world. And we just haven’t uncovered it yet.”

And so eventually, and this is a client of mine that just used to basically you know want to do coaching sessions, wanted guidance, wanted advice. And then I said, “Robert, if you really want to do this, we have to get to the root cause of the issue.” So then eventually, Robert says, “Okay! I’m ready to do this session”. I then asked enough questions. And what do we uncover? Two things.

One was sexual abuse at age four. The other was molestation around age twenty-one, twenty-two, by a trusted professional. That means this person was an athlete, the other person was I think chiropractor or something like that who’s supposedly working on his body and he’s the one that molested him and there he is, he’s confused. He doesn’t know what to do because he’s thinking ‘surely he can’t be doing this to me because he treats the whole team.’

So the client gets confused.

But here’s the point, the anger came from a specific incident – it wasn’t just random anger. Once we clear out these two incidents – when I say clear out, we release the emotion – he gets to forgive himself because he’s also blamed himself.

He thinks he’s dirty or tainted like most victims of sexual abuse. Once we’ve achieved all of that and he’s gotten to the place of forgiveness – that means to let it go – not condone what happened, but forgive – then that person no longer has violent thoughts. So the emotions are important and they all have an origin.

Clifton
Well, I don’t know, if you are a magic or what. But when you asked me if I had another question; I didn’t, but previously like at one point where you were talking. The question you just answered I promise you, it did cross my mind because it relates to me and I was thinking about you know, “What if a client like they can’t access their emotions, like they’ve been shut out for so long. And so that just crossed my mind, but then it went away and I forgot about it and that’s literally what you answered. So well, I did that but yeah that was my question.

Patrick
Thank you! I think the important thing to understand and this this applies to people listening to this conversation now who are either potential clients or practitioners or someone who’s thinking, ‘I want to get some help, I want to make some changes’; you do have to be ready.

That means you just have to be willing. If you are willing and you go to the right person, you’ll get the help. I can’t force someone to do this. And even with this person with the client, Robert, you know it took him awhile to say, “OK I’m ready to go deeper; I want to find out what is the root cause”, because If I just deal with the symptom what am I going to say to him? Go and find a pillow and punch the pillow or go and work out in the gym. Well this person already does that, he’s an athlete. That makes no difference. That didn’t heal him, of the anger. [00:40:00] and there was an interview I did with an M.D. – Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt, Medical Director of Full Potential Health Care. He’s the one that taught me that this concept of going into the gym to work off the stress is actually false – that all you’re doing is that you’re creating more stress, you’re increasing the adrenaline, increasing the cortisol and that’s not the response to when you’re feeling angry or stressed out. The best way is to actually allow your body to calm down and to go back into a state of homeostasis.

So you don’t want to keep engaging in hyper arousal.

I’ve gone off on a tangent. The key point is to say, when the person comes to you and they’re ready, and you have this tool, you can help anyone with almost any issue. There’s only been one or two clients in my entire experience that I couldn’t help and one of them actually in the end said, ‘Well to be completely open, I don’t really want to change.’ And I said, “Why not?” And he said, ‘Because I’ll lose everything I have.’

This particular client was in a situation, they’re in a living situation where they were fully dependent on the other person. They didn’t have to work, didn’t have to take care of anything. And this client knew that if he healed obvious issues, he would leave this person, he would leave his live-in partner and then he would have to go and get work and take responsibility for his life. So at that point in his life, there was more benefit to him to stay in his misery, be the victim and be taken care of, than to become empowered and get out of the situation. So you’ve got to find the motivation of the client and as I said that’s the only person that I can think of that I wasn’t able to help and then he admitted ‘I don’t really want to be helped because I don’t want to change.’

Clifton
Okay, yeah. Wow. Answering the questions is really helpful for me, and it definitely helps me. I think even without having finished the SRTT course, this conversation and interview helps me already to be a better therapist. So, I’m definitely looking forward to finishing the SRTT course but yeah, these were questions like I say ‘we’re trained differently.’ So having this information is extremely helpful.

Patrick
You’re welcome and what I might add too, is when I was working at a rehab clinic in Malibu, the director and I both agreed on one thing very, very clearly. And she said it a different way: she said to meet the client where they are. And I was already of that opinion, I was already of that approach. And then I added something which is that I take the client’s opinions or beliefs, their beliefs and I use them as leverage. I’m not going to try and tell you you’re wrong. I’m going to try and say to you, “Okay, what is the belief?” And let’s use that belief to help you to change the disempowering beliefs. So I don’t know if I’m fully explaining that. I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong; I’m going to find out what else do you believe. For example, if like in your situation, you’re Christian. So if you’re Christian, I’m going to use your Christian beliefs to help you to come to the level of forgiveness. To help you come to the place of compassion. And if you weren’t a Christian and you believe in something else, I’ll use that belief. I’ll use whatever belief you have to help you to get to the better place where you want to be and I’ve got to start where you are. Does that make sense?

Clifton
Yes that makes complete sense. Yes, absolutely.

Patrick
Great. Any other questions?

Clifton
No. No, you’ve been extremely helpful, more than helpful. I can’t wait to like start like getting involved in SRTT and actually listen to some more sessions to really see how you do it. But I know I am overly excited about it so I really appreciate it and I appreciate the time, too.

Patrick
You’re welcome. On the last point, I’d like to add for people who are going to take the SRTT course: people have asked me this before, ‘Do you never get sort of anxious or confused or worried that you’re not going to help?’ And I say, “No, because all I think of is my intention which is to help and I never make it about me. And so the answers will come to you. If you’re purely focused on ‘Let me help the client. ‘How can I help? How can I help?’ rather than thinking about the actual process.” So, as long as you’ve taken the SRTT course, you’ll find the answers of how to do it.

And so my point is here, I’m very flexible in my approach. I’ve got all these steps and I might jump from one step to another depending on what the client presents. But anyway, you’ve started the SRTT course. So as you listen, and once you start listening to the sessions and you start analysing them and understanding the motivation of each of the steps within the process, you’ll find it easier.

Clifton
Okay. Okay. Your answer’s appreciated strongly, extremely helpful, that’s for sure.

Patrick
You’re welcome Clifton. And again I look forward to meeting with you again in person and if I can be of more help, please let me know and thank you for inspiring me to give this interview so that we can help more people.

Clifton
No, thank you. And yes, I will definitely be in touch.

Patrick
Thank you. This is Patrick Wanis of patrickwanis.com. If you’re interested in taking the SRTT course, if you’re a practitioner, go to patrickwanis.com, look under products, look under therapy training SRTT (Subconscious Rapid Transformation Technique.) 

And if you or someone that’s listening this and you think you want help, then you can also go to patrickwanis.com and look up phone consultations where you can book a session. 

Thank you very much for being part of this conversation.

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