Medical science is genius. When it figures out how to eliminate those serious side effects of its medicines it will be even better, of course.

But the field has not generally taken into account the inherent human healing mechanisms which, if allowed to work freely, significantly add both to maintaining and restoring health.

Illness and injury are scary. The fear drives people, blindly dependent, into the hands of practioners. Being thoughtfully aware of how to employ one's own inherent healing abilities, and to blend these with a rational use of medical aid, remarkbly raises the quality of healing and the chances of enduring health.

What follows is a story of how one person defeated the onset of a life threatening illness by employing the benefits of both his inherent healing power and medical accomplishment.

The Background

I have been working with this client, the subject of this article, for many years, and I continue to do so. Here is the story as it unfolded over months and years of counseling.

In 1970 he joined a lay counseling workshop in which he learned several critical things about human beings and human healing.

The learning fundamentally consisted of: the discipline, art and skill of real, deep listening; the importance of trading (solid chunks of time) such listening with another or others; the ability and courage of allowing new and old (repressed) emotional pain to come up and out (for discharging, i.e., releasing, and detoxifying the effects of trauma); how emotional pain, left unattended, converts to chronic distress habit patterns (of feeling, perceiving, reacting and behaving - the basis of depression, anxiety and all of the so called mental/emotional and psychosomatic disorders); the causes (systematic oppressive conditioning) of distress patterns and repression of thinking, emotions and the power of righteous action; and the inherent nature of human beings (a composite of fine qualities that, left intact, produce healthful, successful, confident, joyous, fulfilling lives) that can be substantially, and theoretically fully, restored.

(A good reading of “Life, Love, Health and Happiness” in the Healing forum will amplify all the above, and serve as an effective guide to healing and restoring one’s power and well being)

In 1976, after six years of practicing the above skills in “Listening Partnerships” with peers, he was attacked by Adult Onset Asthma.

The six years of practice certainly put him on the road of restoring health, power and well-being, but deep as chronic distress is his system was not yet able to withstand the unexpected physical attack of the “illness.”

Between 1928, the year of his birth, and 1970, for forty two years, his system, like that of almost everyone who is raised in an oppressive society (most of human societies), was subjected to the conditioning, internalization and repression of psycho/emotional distress and to its damaging mental/physical effects. It was too huge a pile for six years of doing, on average, two Listening Partnership sessions a week (trading an hour each of listening with his partners) to prevent the sneak attack of asthma.

The Triggering Episode

He was spending a week-end with a dear and close friend who also knew the skills of listening and discharging. On Sunday morning he awoke in their comfortable hotel room. He rose on an elbow to greet his beautiful friend and the morning with a kiss on her lips, when suddenly he bolted upright and in a panic announced “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe”

This, of course, aroused her full attention. He swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the bed. She joined him and sat next to him, taking his hand in hers and silently listened to him, since in that startling moment there was nothing else to do. She knew better than to panic herself and ply him with questions.

As scared as he was the six years of training and practice came to the fore, and he whispered aloud “what’s the hurt, what’s the hurt” over and over. He must have been breathing at least a little, since he had not passed out, but it felt as though no air at all was coming into his lungs.

After moments of asking himself that question, a few tears started to trickle out of his eyes. As they did, he began to actually feel himself breathing. They continued to sit there another five minutes with his tears, by now, almost streaming down his face. It was clear that the discharge of tears (old grief) was restoring his ability to breathe more fully. His friend continued to give him that powerful, silent attention which permitted the tears to flow without interruption. Talking or asking him questions in those moments would have distracted the natural healing process that was taking place.

The relief was great. However, when he stood up and attempted to get dressed, each move produced a spasm of not breathing and consequential physical weakness. With each step by step he had to stop and put his attention (and hers) on that question “what’s the hurt” (no answer had yet emerged). And after step by step of breath stoppage and tear discharge, he got dressed. She got dressed, packed their bags, helped him out of the room and down to the car.

On their way back to Los Angeles, the breathing continued to improve. She dropped him off at his apartment. He assured her he felt strong enough to take things from there and he promised to get to a doctor. She had her life, she had to go, and he further promised to call her and keep her posted.

The Diagnosis

Since he was a veteran and had gone to the VA hospital on various, but not many, occasions, he called and made an appointment for the next day.

After a full battery of tests over several days the good doctors informed him of their diagnosis. It was an attack of Asthma (adult onset). He had no history of the symptoms, his father had no such illness and his mother died at the age of forty-two, when he was eight and a half, so there was no way to tell if it was a family condition.

He got a second opinion which confirmed the first. However the symptoms seemed to subside.

He lived, at the time, across the street from the business, in Hollywood, which he co-founded with a friend. They were quite successful for almost ten years. His partner wanted to move on and he intended to do likewise, and now with the Asthma he decided to sell the business.

By this time he was enrolled in City College, in Santa Monica, California, and he wanted to pursue other classes. He thus needed to move to Santa Monica.

Two weeks before the sale of the business took effect and making the move, he once again came down with the same symptoms. They were not enough to immobilize him completely this time, but they were enough to make him very weak. He had to spend a lot time resting.

He went back to the hospital for further testing. This time the diagnosis was even more frightening. The doctors informed him that the condition was now chronic; there was nothing they could do to cure it. They gave him about two years to live during which time the condition would degenerate to emphysema and thence to death (they put it as tactfully as they could).

They said they could put him on steroids and other heavy meds in order to make him more comfortable (comfortable with the idea of having two years to live? He thought, “No thank you”).

Since he strongly suspected that the condition was related to chronic distress, having experienced the relief he got from discharging the tears, he politely rejected their offer. He asked them for the lightest medicine they had, just to keep his bronchial tubes open enough to move about, and function enough to care for himself and to attend classes. (He had to step away from his work and career because, of course, that took a great deal of energy which he no longer had - he vowed some day to return to his work)

The Healing Strategy

His plan, of course, was to take the light stuff (Aminophylline, they called it) and decided to do a listening/discharging session every day with one of his listening peers, whoever was available.

He got on the phone and set up the sessions. His peers were totally supportive. They came to his apartment in Hollywood, and then to Santa Monica after he moved. They were wonderfully supportive.

He had a session at least five days a week. More and more the discharge of everything ensued: talking (recalling as much of the old hurtful memories that were immediately available, tears (old grief), cold sweat and trembling (old fear), hot sweat, cursing and pounding (repressed anger), laughter (the tip of all these distresses), and all together, one form tumbling after, sometimes on top of, another (humiliation, guilt, powerlessness, all the repressed distresses).

Is such a pile of repressed distress abnormal? I’m afraid it is quite typical. In the thirty six years that I have counseled others (in 1986 I was licensed as a psychotherapist), hundreds of others, from all walks and strata, and becoming much more aware of the way the world works and its effects on humans, it is very clear the depth and amount of chronic distress we individually, and collectively, carry. We humans struggling to survive and thrive in our oppressive societies and, sadly, families, cannot escape the influence of the social and generational habits of oppressive conditioning. These habits are ancient and perpetuated generation after generation.

Memories, Evaluations and Insights

Session after session there came released memories and insights (rational evaluation) following on the heals of the healing discharge, and detoxification of the trauma chemistry (adrenalin, cortisol, norepinephrine, steroids and others, triggered by the large and small traumas (lifetime hurts), and held inside due to the (psycho) emotional repression typical in society. Eventually (by our early teens) these hurts and chemistry rigidify and convert into chronic distress patterns (syndromes of compulsive painful feelings, perception, reaction, behavior, physical problems and ultimate deterioration).

From the moment we develop a central nervous system everything we experience, every sensation, every event, is registered in our neural system and memory banks. We don’t consciously remember it all. Our memory is like the tip of an iceberg. Much of it is organized in larger schema, and the material that is internalized as part of hurtful experience (which constitutes a great deal of our histories) is repressed.

As he discharged every day, and detoxed the trauma chemistry (through studies it was discovered, for example, that enzymes present in the system of people with depression were drained out through their tears when they were emotionally releasing), more and more of his memory and evaluative system became unoccluded, that is, free to process the material that had been stored in his neural system since he came into being. The material became accessible to his consciousness.

The insights and evaluations were profound to him and his recovery. Some of the insights were astonishing. First, he had a felt memory (as opposed to a picture memory) of what it was like in his mother’s womb as he was developing, and why it was so.

His mother was full of fear relating to her function as a mother. She and her husband, his father, had a son who died from an infection when he was eight years old. Being from Victorian Europe with old fashioned ideas and family rules, in addition to his personal distress and issues, his father’s entire reason for being, his self esteem and purpose was wrapped up in his son. When he died, his father (who had a pattern of rage so intense that he did not have to physically assault the target of his rage in order to instill dread) blamed his mother (in the old culture the mother took care of the house and children, the father provided). He made his mother’s life an emotional and psychological hell from then on. He was not conceived as yet.

The insight he had about all this, that became more and more clear as his sessions proceeded, was that mother had internalized the fear that if anything happened to any of the other children, (there were three others after the first, before he came along) her husband could kill her. In effect his treatment of her certainly did add to her decline and death at the age of forty two (he was eight and one half). Her tombstone reads “beloved mother,” but not “beloved wife.”

(Let me hasten to add, while it is imperative that adults take responsibility to heal and straighten out their lives for their own sake, for their children and for the well being of society itself, no one alive is originally at fault for the patterns of distressful behavior we are subject to, given the habit pattern of conditioning perpetuated generation after generation. Perhaps over time, we will generally become aware of the intense dysfunction of society and take on that responsibility)

She was terrified of being a mother after that; perhaps not consciously. This was behind her being out of the house, doing her charity work, so much of the day, preparing food in the morning then turning the care taking role over to his older sister.

Why did she continue to have children? Under the old rules, that was her job as a wife. In his sessions he often saw her as a distant, powerless and depressed participant as father acted out his male role compulsion.

The felt memories, as well as the aware memories, continued to flood up. Because of the fear, it was colder than normal in her womb. The fetus he was felt her physical distance as if attempting to draw away from the existence of the new life inside her.

This registered in his neural system, wiring up his brain development in such a way that a predisposition of depression

formulated in his psycho/emotional areas. The resulting ideation that finally crystallized and erupted into his consciousness (after weeks and months of sessions) was that he was not worth having, not worth being alive, that her suffering was somehow his fault that his job was to save her, and even at that he failed.

The psycho/emotional effects of such early trauma (prenatal and early childhood stages) are not readily accessible to our conscious awareness (unless and until we seriously work on our life material). For this reason he did not realize that each loss or perception of loss added to the weight of the depression. The early depression syndrome, of course, warped his perception and conditioned him to interpret many events as losses, and worse, into ideation of fault, guilt and ultimately, unworthiness.

As a typical child and a young adult, unaware of the deep distresses that were building in him, he acted as best he could on the pursuit of play, learning and later, the task of finding ways to carve out an adult life. In our younger years, with those hundred billions of neurons in our brain, we have quite a bit of functional resource to operate on, before more of that resource is inhibited by the growing distress (in some folks senility, Alzheimer’s and other conditions result).

And typically in the oppressive system, he confronted life repressing his emotional reactions to the bad moments and events, unmindful of the toll the distresses were taking on his physical and mental systems. If he cried as an infant it was rare. He has no memory of discharging his distress, so shut down by the internalized “rejection” and terror was he.

He recalled infant memories of hearing, and feeling, nightly fighting between mother and father. The tone of their fighting was not the cliché kind of screaming and screeching, but rather the far scarier, suppressed kind, hissed through clenched teeth and laden with dangerous intent.

As a six month old infant he witnessed father, in that junk yard dog viciousness, attack his older brother because of his facial aberrations.

(Another insight: father was conditioned with great shame about himself. His psoriasis reflected that distress of shame, and his skin eventually became like a portrait of Dorian Grey which he hid under his otherwise impeccable three piece suit, synonymous with the mask he showed to the world)

Again father did not hit, but he loomed over his quarry with reddened eye, frothing mouth and taut muscles prepared in an instant to launch a deadly assault. His six month old psyche internalized this terror, “I better not ever cross papa, he would kill me.”

Yet another insight about father: that second episode of the asthma, two weeks before the sale of his business, was triggered by the impending” loss” of the business. The business was, unconsciously, a symbol of success by which he had to prove to “papa” that he was worth something; that he was successful. The loss of that psychological security, indeed, hooked up with all the invalidation he had internalized. Not being able to discharge (release) his grief, or even to being aware of the grief, forced his system erupt out in the somatic symptoms called asthma.

He remembered, again as an infant, sitting on the bed, eyes glued to mother (when she was home and doing tasks), every day waiting for a look, for a word, a gesture aimed at him from her. None of it came. It was as if he did not exist. Not long ago his sister confided to him, during one of their conversations about their childhoods, that mother would often ask in private “how’s (little brother) doing?” He realized how much she must have suffered guilt and anger at her inability to be “mother.”

His sister was assigned, so to speak, to be the surrogate mother to her brothers. So many older children in families are conditioned to take such responsibility, even to be the parent to their parent (prevalent in cases of alcoholism). This is most damaging to their lives and later relationships.

Memories of his relations with his siblings flooded up in his sessions. He remembered how as an infant in his crib his older brother, seven years older than he, the one so abused by father, came up to the bars of the crib and would growl furiously at him and wishing him “to die.” It was understandable. Here he was, this physically beautiful child on whom father showered (when he was in a better mood) affectionate attention, and here was his brother who suffered the cruel loathing from his father. Brother’s pain had no where to go but towards him, his infant brother.

Other memories and insights emerged as his sessions continued.

His middle brother became father’s favorite because, for one thing, he emulated father’s patterns and explosive temper which he gave back to father (which cracked father up and earned his respect). However father still showered him with good attention. This made middle brother very nervous in fear of losing number one status with father (that old sibling rivalry, in this case, in spades).

Yet he adored middle brother and tried to learn from him by copying his skills and accomplishments. Middle brother in turn would put his efforts down, and at times manipulated him into fighting with him. Being four years older than him, middle brother invariably used this as an excuse to beat him up.

Over time the ideation he internalized from this oppression was that he had better not succeed or else he’d get severely punished for it.

Sister had a great deal of anger. This was understandable since her childhood was being stolen from her, having to be the surrogate mother at a tender age for her younger brothers. Nevertheless she found time to play. Having to toughen up under the role imposed on her and also internalizing father’s rough demeanor, sister became a tom boy, beating all the neighborhood kids at games. Her favorite game was marbles.

Needing to feel successful somehow, he used to steal her marbles and ended up losing them to other kids. Sister was furious at this. She’d target him with a wicked eye and proclaimed in a wrathful tone, ‘now, I have to go out and win them back again!”

Sister was his only ally in the family. When she wasn’t angry with him, she protected and cared for him. Over time he became fearful of making her angry and losing her care. He had internalized a growing fear of testing his ability to confront and achieve new things and challenging tasks.

The crowning episode of hurtful conditioning in his early childhood came when he was six years old. Father returned home from a late night, playing poker (he was a compulsive poker gambler, and a very great player; not playing the cards so much as studying the playing habits of his opponents). This one night was a rare time that he lost at the game.

The next morning, after counting his money (he somehow almost always knew how much was stuffed into his key pocket) he harshly accosted sister accusing her of stealing twenty dollars. She vigorously denied doing it. He became angrier; she started crying which she never did, at least not in his presence). He couldn’t take it any longer.

After all, sister was his one protector, his one safety line in the family. Already having internalized the dangerous possibility of father’s rage, he impulsively stepped in between him and sister, puffed out and defiantly thumped his chest, and decried “I did it, I did it!”

He intuitively expected to be targeted by father’s anger, drawing it away from sister. Instead what happened was surprising and more terrifying to him. It was as if father turned into a killer robot. There was nothing human left in his eyes. Slowly he turned towards him, lifting a cocked arm, pointing his elbow at him, his entire body sprung up tight and menacing.

It felt as if surely he would die. He remembered that all the air whooshed out of his lungs, and with it any trust, power, confidence or other force of survival spirit that he may have stilled possessed at that age. He went almost into a complete and deep depression. Any sense at all that father loved him disappeared.

His memory is blank as to what followed. Obviously father did not kill him.

In his thirties he began to hallucinate seeing the classic movie monsters hovering over him when he turned out the lights to go to sleep. He was fully aware that they were just that, hallucinations, but the terror was great nonetheless. From his sessions the insight he got was that father, himself, was shocked that his own little son whom he adored had turned against him. He thinks in his shock all his own fear and guilt seized his psyche, turning him into that fearsome automaton.

He worked in many of his sessions to solve this terror. He finally did. At age six, again, he went by himself to see the first Frankenstein horror movie. He doesn’t remember being scared by it during the show. When he left the theater, he thought he heard footsteps behind him. He panicked and raced home using every shortcut he knew as a kid. He did not dare to look back to see if they were real. The pounding sound of the steps kept following him until he reached his house and rushed into the door to the living room (This room was always dark, there was no “living” in it at all that he can remember). There the memory stops.

Psychologically he associated the image of the Frankenstein monster with that inhuman apparition that his father became when he challenged him as he was abusing sister. Likewise the other movie monsters became associated with his other siblings who treated him oppressively: older brother became the “werewolf,” middle brother became variously the “vampire” and the “mummy.’ all of whom instilled fear in his psyche.

The function of the hallucinations was to urge him to heal the fear and distress, although he was unaware of this at the time.

He recalled that mother was in a coma (from a growing tumor in her brain). He was eight years old at this time (he has never recalled her being ill until that time. There must still be much pain about that in him that has not yet been discharged) what he did recall is seeing her lying still on her side, facing the left edge of her bed.

He intuited that she was dying, no one in the family told him anything about her or her condition (communication was almost nil in the family. Father never shared anything about his life or his knowledge, and mother seldom said anything about herself, perhaps a bit to sister - there was no model for communication from them, and the children, of course, followed suit).

Until then there was no contact between mother and him. Unconsciously he knew he would never have the chance to be close to her, to hold her, to talk to her or relate in any way.

There she was lying still, unable to “escape.” On two consecutive times, hours or days he has no memory of, he leapt out of his bed (actually it was still the crib they had him sleep in since his infancy) to get to her. Both times he tripped in his urgency (maybe even pushed) each time hurting an eye socket, first one then the other. For many years he carried the small scars next to the eyes.

He scrambled up on her bed. He could not hold her from the front since, as he said, she lay on her left side at the very edge of the bed. He scrunched up behind her, against her ample body, wrapping his arms around her as far as they could go and dug his fingers into her flesh and held on for dear life (actually). He can’t recall who or what removed him from her.

The last he saw of her, that he remembered, was at her funeral. It was a large hall, filled to the brim with people whom she cared for in her charity work. It seemed they were all wailing and crying (most of them were from the old countries of Europe). Only his siblings and he were not crying. They were so shut down in grief and fear. Father was not there.

Her casket was lying open on the stage. There was a three step unit along side of it for the smaller people. The people filed past the casket. Her children were the last to view her. He had to climb the steps. He looked down into the casket. What he saw confused him. There was this woman in black. Her lips were red, cheeks blushed with rouge, her gorgeous, dark, chestnut hair done up in a way he had never seen, her skin very white. He somehow knew it was mother, but she seemed a stranger. Perhaps he had never accepted her death. He thinks he is doing that incrementally over the years of his sessions and healing experience.

His older brother, the one so abused by father, never accepted her death. He spent many years institutionalized during his adult years. He spun a reality for himself that permitted him to survive in a world so frightening to him. In his fantasy mother was in England working in secret for the government. Ultimately he managed to live in the world as it is, squirming in and out of the two worlds as his sense of safety dictated. He died in 1974, living in a half way house. One night he called middle brother, long a successful business man as an adult, and asked, “Did dad ever love me?” Middle brother said, “of course he did.” The next morning older brother was found dead, looking peaceful, in his bed.

All the foregoing pain, repressed within his psyche until 1976, formed some of the fundamental basis that led to the onset of the asthma. When you read the dynamics of distress and healing in the Healing forum of this abovetheswamp.com web site, especially in the document, “life, Love, Health and Happiness,” you will come to understand the organic connection between illness, physical conditions and psycho/emotional conditioning. You will inform yourself about the process of activating our inherent healing mechanisms that enable restoration of mental and physical health and well being.

Tear by tear, relating (verbally sharing) the emotional events, rolls of angry hot sweat and verbalization, bouts of trembling and cold sweat, gales of laughter, tons of yawning, detoxifying the trauma chemistry the distresses produced (and held in through social conditioning - not to feel, not to express our feelings fully), session after session, allowed his neural system to clean out and clear out the damaging effects of the early conditioning trauma.

By 1982 he weaned himself off all medication, and except for two more bouts of asthma like symptoms, each occasioned by loss of close female relationships, one in 1982 and the other in 1988, both of which he quickly healed by discharging the grief of the losses. It is important to note that all three women, these two and his friend in the initial episode (more fully described immediately below) had features very similar to his mother’s.

The triggering stimulus of the initial asthma onset was his friend in that hotel room. Her lovely dark hair, eyes and complexion were similar to that of mother’s, not to mention her femaleness. The identity, or transference as it is professionally called, with mother was very strong. His system, and his progress to date in his healing experience, was ready to produce the symptoms (somatic disorder, as it is referred to) that would force him to work urgently on healing the old and deep distress.

The process, made even more effective by the supportive and thoughtful listening he was blessed to have, the voluminous discharge of all the grief, fear, anger, humiliation, the insights and contradiction of the invalidating ideation, has restored the health of his lungs, which are healthy and strong today, as well as the clarity, rationality and flexibility of his mind.

It is the organic toxic effects of hurt and trauma that overtime, undischarged and repressed, cause wear and tear on tissue, the lowering of immunity and the dysfunction of organs.

If the psycho/emotional hurts and trauma are not healed and released, they will be expressed by our bodies as physical symptoms and illness sooner or later.

I hope you will muster the courage to read and study the dynamics of distress and healing in the Healing forum. I hope you will give yourself the gift of employing your own inherent and natural powers, and great human qualities that you were born with, to restore and maintain health; to regain the joy and ability to love well, be loved and to thrive.

The client continues to have one or more session per week, because his aim is to live, healthfully, at least for as long as it takes to fulfill the goals and dreams he has set out for himself, and to share with others the beautiful benefits of the Listening Partnership process.

His latest insights are that mother really loved him for she brought him to full term; that he is fully innocent of her suffering and death. She bore the fear and the pain and hung around, as long as she could, until she could see that he had a fighting chance to survive. Had she wanted him to “go away,” to die in her womb, unconsciously she could have naturally aborted him. This does and can happen when a growing prenatal life is truly unwanted, or is seriously damaged.

Further, we are aware that the mother prairie dog, ground hog, field mouse will put her own life at risk by luring the predator away from the nest or borrow in order to save her young. In many of his sessions he used this direction “I’m worth risking your life for, I’m worth dying for.”

Just last night, before this day this article was finished, his mind was working in his sleep on this stuff. He awoke with the joyous insight that that was exactly what mother did: she put her life at risk (believing that father would kill her if anything bad happened to his new son) by giving him birth and staying around for his first eight years of life. He woke up finally knowing that he is worth more than all the gold, silver and precious jewels in the world. The direction trumpeted in his mind, “She will not kill me, because she loves me and she would give her life to save me. She wants me to live, be healthy and thrive. I love you, mother.”

He went back to sleep breathing fully and easily.

Now I can tell you, that client is me.