Three Case Studies from Rapid Core Healing by Yildiz Sethi Details

Case Study 1

Emotional Mind Integration

Weight

Weight is a complex issue. Simply put, it can be summed up as ‘calories in equals food ingested, versus calories expended in activity to maintain a healthy weight. This depends on the quality, quantity and the frequency of food intake and the amount of physical activity or exercise that someone does. It also includes factors of genetics and other health factors and stages of life. Generally, good eating hygiene ensures a good healthy weight for a body type and stage of life. So, what goes wrong?

Something goes wrong with good eating hygiene and, in spite of many attempts to recover weight loss, it remains elusive. This may be because of physical illness, medication, lifestyle and nutrition choices, as well as emotional disturbances. If all other factors have been addressed, or if good lifestyle and nutrition cannot be followed and are repeatedly sabotaged, then the source of the issue may be emotional or psychological.

There can also be ‘comfort eating’ due to stress, anxiety, sadness or anger.

These emotional stressors may trigger disturbed EM states that take comfort in eating and, hence, result in the weight issue.

In addition, many people successfully lose weight and then put it back on when they are in stressful situations. Hence, the underlying problem is often the way someone copes with stress, emotions or self-esteem.

A woman in her thirties came to see me about losing weight. Whenever she was stressed or overwhelmed, all she knew about healthy eating and exercise was forgotten, as she gorged on junk food and didn’t give herself space for exercise. The EM state for her stress or comfort-eating part showed in the EM process that it had started in her early teens when she was separated from her parents for a few months. In that time, she had been living with another family while her parents completed their relocation to a new town. This was a shock to her, as she had to negotiate living with a family that had very different values to her own. She had to cope with a new town, school and a very different parenting style. The children of the new family were largely left to fend for themselves in their eating and she had no choice but to do the same. After the EMI process, with healthy EM eating parts in charge, she was able to cope with her stresses and maintain a healthy lifestyle where her weight reduced in a sustainable manner. It was no longer a problem for her.

Family Constellation

Case Study 2:

Jenny was 30 years old when she came to a workshop and wanted to work on her issues of depression and perfectionist tendencies. In the interview prior to the constellation, the following information was given.

Jenny’s maternal grandmother and her baby died in the childbirth of her ninth child. The mother and baby were taken away quickly and quietly and the children were not allowed to go to the funeral or say goodbye to their mother or sibling.

The grandfather keenly felt his responsibilities in having to look after the rest of the family and, even though he was deeply shocked and grieving, he quickly took another wife. The new wife looked after the children so that he could work to keep an income coming in for the survival of his family. The grandmother was rarely spoken of again.

The sixth child of this family was a girl called Mary, who was five years old at the time of the deaths, and she was so shocked by the loss that she lost the ability to speak for several months. Mary was Jenny’s mother.

Jenny said that she had always been aware of a sense of deep shock and sadness and could never understand why she felt this way, because she had quite a nice life with her parents, with no tragic circumstances that she could recognise. However, in looking at her history and through a constellation, these dynamics were relatively easy to uncover and resolve.

In the constellation, Jenny placed a representative for herself and her mother, with her mother looking back and Jenny looking at her mother’s back. The representative mother was numb and cold and the representative for Jenny was deeply sad. Then representatives for the grandmother and her baby and the grandfather were put up with the new wife. The representatives for the grandmother and grandfather looked at each other for a long time with tears falling down their faces and then embraced. It was obvious that their relationship had been one of deep love.

The representative of Mary (Jenny’s mother) stood in front of her mother looking transfixed and numb for quite a long time and then was given a healing sentence to say, “I am too numb to feel”, and then powerful feelings of anger surged through her as she asked her mother, “How could you leave? How could you just leave us like that? I am so angry”.

Then Mary sobbed deeply into her mother’s shoulder. Her anger turned to sadness and was released.

The constellation ended with deep gratitude to the grandmother as the head of the family and to the grandfather who had hidden his shock and grief due to the need for the survival of the family. Then gratitude was expressed for the second wife who had willingly taken on the role of caring for the family in the best way she could, knowing that she was the second choice of the grandfather. The representative for Mary was much relieved and the representative for Jenny, her daughter, looked relieved and said she felt lighter and happy.

Analysis

Mary couldn’t understand where her warm and loving mother had gone and why no one would talk about her. Mary grew up and married in due course, but often suffered from depression.

Her daughter, Jenny, grew up feeling her mother’s sadness as a secondary emotion and yearned to see her mother happy.

She did everything she could to make her mother happy and became an overachiever, but nothing worked to lift the weight she saw there. She became depressed when nothing worked to help her mother, which gave her a sense of hopelessness.

Here is a very simple example of how a tragic event can be passed down through the relational bonds of a family and continue to have an effect on generations into the present.

Children do not have the emotional development to grieve as adults do and have a tendency to shut down emotionally or feel numb. When they do start to feel again, there is often a lot of anger, mostly at the injustice of the loss, before they can come into contact with their deep grief and enter the normal grieving process. In this case, the trauma of the situation and arrested grief was passed onto future generations and experienced as depression by Jenny. After the therapy, Jenny was no longer depressed and was able to relax more and not be so concerned with pleasing others.

If Jenny had gone to a psychologist for CBT, they would have focused on her symptoms of depression and perfectionist tendencies and given her exercises or strategies to attempt to change her thinking and behaviour.

This may have given her some awareness of what she was doing, but probably would not have helped her to unlock the source of her disturbance or emotions that were present, not only in herself, but in her family system.

Prior to my introduction to FC, I would have engaged Rogerian P-CT style counselling for her to explore her life experiences and, in particular, what was affecting her in the here and now. While this would be useful in raising awareness and utilising the value of the therapeutic relationship, it is unlikely that we would have found the depth of resolution that we found in the FC process. In addition, even if we had uncovered the source of the issue, I would not have known how to deal with the original situation in a way that was healing and transformative in as brief and effective a manner.

Rapid Core Healing
Case study 3

Separation, Anxiety and Weight Problem

In another case, a woman had a weight issue that she felt was related to her mother. Her parents had separated when she was young. She had lived with her mother and her mother’s new partner through her formative years. In the session, it became obvious that she was very connected to her father and deeply sad at the lack of contact she had with him. Her father was overweight. In the session, she said, “I can’t let that go, as this is my only link to him”.

The session proceeded with EMI and family constellations to provide her with sufficient connection to her father so that she could let go of the need to be overweight. Prior to this, she couldn’t let go of the only connection she had with her father until a new healthier connection had been discovered.