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Judith A. Swack, Ph.D. The HBLUTM Approach to PTSD Treatment
It’s critical to understand the structure of a damage pattern in order to treat it. It’s not so much the technique, it’s the structure. Let me give you an example because this is very important. Let’s look at a phobia. It is a one-sentence structure with two clauses. The first clause is, “I’m afraid of something.” The second clause is “because it will result in death, eternal torment, or rejection.” The second clause must describe the very worst-case scenario.
For example, “I am afraid to feel anger because I will kill somebody.” The story ends in death. If you use a meridian tapping technique while focusing on, “I’m afraid to feel anger because I’ll hurt somebody,” the phobia will not clear because the second clause is not extreme enough. A phobia is life and death because it’s a fight or flight reaction. You have to know the structure.
I’ve had colleagues who had phobia-induced blocked energy fields for years. These were trained energy psychology professionals who could not unblock themselves because they couldn’t name the worst-case endings for their phobias. They tapped to clear their phobias but they didn’t clear them. I explained, “You didn’t name the worst-case scenario”– what I sometimes call “hitting the edge”. I helped them name the worst-case ending for their phobias and, bang, they cleared them. You have to understand the structure, you can’t just go throw in a technique, like tapping and expect results.
Let’s say you have a loss trauma. For example, I worked in the same lab with a woman with two young sons whose husband announced at breakfast one morning that he was leaving her for the woman he was carpooling with. She came into the lab that day completely shell-shocked. She started drinking and dropped out of her Master’s degree program. Having treated many people for trauma, I discovered trauma imprints in the body memory and has a basic structure that is the same for everyone. I researched and published an outline of that structure.
In the moment of initial shock, you imprint shock and fear, anger and rage, sadness and sorrow, and hurt and pain. You have to treat all four of those groups of emotion. You can’t just treat the shock and think you’ve cleared the trauma. You have to check every single line or what you don’t treat remains a problem.
People also believe “it’s my fault because ____(fill in the blank)”, or “it’s other people’s or God’s fault because ____ (fill in the blank)”, and you have to treat that belief. Loss trauma comes with a feeling of emptiness, usually in the heart or stomach. People get a sensation in the body and don’t realize that it’s not a physical sensation–it’s an emotional sensation. Then they start to eat or drink to fill this void even though it’s not a physical hunger or a physical pain. They make their bodies sick because they’re trying to use the wrong technique to treat the feeling. For some individuals, trauma may contain other negative emotions like bitterness, hate, loneliness, and disappointment and other limiting beliefs.
One of my favorite negative emotions is called a dead part. You have to muscle test and ask, “Is there any part of you that feels, I’m already dead because of this trauma.” If you don’t ask, you won’t find it because dead parts don’t talk. I asked a client I was treating for trauma, “Where in your body is the dead part?” She said, “I don’t feel anything.” I said, “That’s right, where’s the non-feeling feeling?” She pointed to her stomach. On any line of the trauma outline, you can treat with meridian tapping techniques, but you could also use other Energy Psychology techniques. Any technique that releases negative emotions from the body will work.
You have to combine the structure of trauma with the technique. HBLUTM understands the structure of trauma and uses a step by step protocol to clear all the negative energies of that traumatic experience. If you just clear the shock and fear from a trauma and muscle test, “Are you 100% cured of this trauma?” it will say yes, but it won’t be true because you may still have anger and rage. I teach people the structure of loss and violence trauma, which you also could use for physical injury.
PTSD is a layered structure, with basic loss and violence in it except that it’s a threshold trauma caused by a history of repeated trauma stacked up in the nervous system. I call this pattern History Trauma. It isn’t just one trauma. Let me tell you the secret to treating PTSD. InPSTD, you have a series of traumas build-up in your body over time. Your body stores stress that builds up until you experience one too many examples of this type of trauma and the nervous system goes over threshold.
Twenty-four to forty-eight hours later, you start having PTSD symptoms, panic attacks, insomnia, flashbacks, tremors, depression, addictions, headaches, learning disabilities, and so on. The whole nervous system is screwed up. At the time the body goes over threshold tolerance for trauma, it triggers a protective mechanism, called the blocking mechanism, where the unconscious mind blocks the memory of severe trauma from the conscious mind (as in blocked memories of sexual abuse). The unconscious mind throws a circuit breaker which puts a phobic block between the body memory of the history of repeated trauma and the conscious mind.
If a well-meaning therapist who doesn’t understand structure tries to get you to access a memory that is behind the block, doing so will re-traumatize you. The trick for treating the history trauma that is the cause of PTSD is to treat the blocking part.
One of the first steps in the HBLU protocol for treating history trauma is to name the trauma theme. Common examples include, Early Childhood Neglect and Abuse History Trauma, Military History Trauma, Cancer Treatment History Trauma, Mentally Ill Family History Trauma, etc. Let’s say we’re working with Mentally Ill Family History Trauma. I ask, “Where in your body is the blocking part? Where is the resistant part that can’t bear to think about that stretch of history?”
The client identifies a location in their body, and I’ll say, “Great, we’re going to talk to just the blocking part.” I use my sweet compassionate voice and say, “Blocking part when you think about that stretch of history do you have any shock or fear?” I muscle test all the answers from the blocking part. I’m using the trauma outline except I’m clearing the trauma from the blocking part! When the blocking part responds, “Yes, I feel shock and fear” we muscle test, “Where in your body is the blocking part’s shock and fear?” The blocking part may respond, “My heart.”
Then we clear that emotion using a technique chosen from a menu of ten techniques I teach to clear trauma in HBLU Module 1. Most commonly, the client calls for a meridian tapping technique. When the blocking part’s shock and fear are cleared, we move on to, “Blocking Part, when you think about that stretch of history, do you have any anger or rage?” “Yes, I do.” “Is that the next thing we need to treat?” “Yes.” “Where is that in your body?” “In my stomach.” “What technique do you want to use?” We muscle test through the list of techniques and treat. Then I ask, “How does your stomach feel now?” When that emotions tests clear we clear the next emotion on the trauma outline. “Blocking part, do you have any hurt or pain when you think about this history?” “Yes, I do,” and we proceed to test for and clear layer after layer of the trauma outline.
By the time we we’ve gotten down to the dead parts, the anticipatory phobias, etc. the trauma memory and energy from that history has drained out of the body spontaneously. In one session, just clearing the trauma from the blocking part drains all those years of trauma memory in the body, right out the floor. People lose their craving for alcohol, and their brains turn back on; they feel happy and depression lifts, no more panic attacks. It all drains out. If they have six or seven or eight versions of history trauma, then it can take up to six sessions, but usually three sessions will clear it.
Let’s say somebody has Holocaust history trauma. They didn’t experience the Holocaust but their grandparents did and it gets passed down through generations. When treating History Trauma I ask, “Do you have any trauma from your mother’s side of the family in this stack?” If yes, “How many generations back?” “What about your father’s side? What about past lives?” You carry stuff from past lives and your ancestry, all stored in your body. When we clear the blocking part and the ancestral and past life trauma drains out as well.
It’s a geographical something you can move. Do you think that you discovered that? I did discover that. I’ve made a lot of original discoveries. The whole trauma structure is an original discovery of mine. The structure of History Trauma is my original research. You need to write a book. I actually have one partly written, it’s been in my computer for years and I just need to finish editing it.
How do you protect yourself from taking on some of the client’s pain and anger and negativity. I learned this from Mary Louise Mueller, called the Boundary Tap. You think about a situation or a context where something gets to you. I visualize this as I’m a cell with the nucleus and my energy field is arm’s length around me. The edges of my energy fields are my boundaries. So here’s the nucleus and here’s the cytoplasm and protoplasm as it were and here’s the cell membrane. In a cell, the membrane is selective; it opens and closes depending on what you need and what you want to put out. Through the cell receptors. Exactly, receptors and channels, so if you have a puncture in your membrane then stuff floods in and you flood out.
Basically, I pay attention to am I overreaching myself and popping my own bubble? Or is something getting to me that shouldn’t be getting to me that’s not personal? Then I name it and boundary it. For example, I had to separately boundary every negative emotion. I installed100% boundaries for people’s anger, grief, sadness and fear. I’d tune into that memory where somebody blasted me with anger and I felt polluted. I muscle test, “Do I need to install 100% anger boundaries?” “Yes.” Then I start tapping on my sternum with the intention to install the boundaries with my own and other people’s anger so I can choose to take it their anger in, or not, and I can choose to express mine in certain ways.
After setting the boundary with anger, if people are angry, I can now just hold space for them but not take it in. If I did absorb something that is toxic for me that is not mine, I feather it up then back out, just flick it out.
I also set 100% boundaries with every one of my psychic abilities so that I turn it on when I want and don’t get flooded with people’s unconscious minds talking to me. As healers, we sometimes get overly responsible for others, so I established 100% physical boundaries and 100% energetic boundaries. I boundaried every one of my senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. It only takes about three minutes to set a boundary.
I had a client who I was working with to get happily married. She went out on a date and did something outrageously bad. I was actually shocked, and I felt genuinely angry with her. My first thought was, “didn’t your mother teach you anything?” Fortunately, I didn’t react to that. I just noticed my reaction and sat forward. I said, “obviously we need to figure out what caused you to do that, so stand up and let’s find the pattern.”
When I went home, it took me about 20 minutes to figure out I needed to set 100% boundaries with people whose mothers are incompetent. It took me about 20 minutes to get the word incompetence because it had to be just the right word. Then I did three-minutes of boundary tapping while thinking, I’m your healer; I’m not going to be your mother. You also have to have political and TV boundaries.
Enneagram Twos or Nines tend to break their own boundaries from the inside by overreaching to help people, but they can reinstall the boundaries by doing the boundary tap again. The only thing that will break a boundary besides overreaching from the inside is if something traumatizes you. Trauma breaks boundaries. Using the HBLUTM protocol for clearing trauma resets the boundary.
I wonder why a quadriplegic man who was in my Mind Power workshop was so painful for me. Ordinarily, I’m not reactive but he stayed with me. Check to see if you have 100% boundaries with tragedy, and remember in HBLUTM we check the body level, the unconscious level, the conscious level and the soul level. I also check the etheric and unknown levels. The boundaries have to be 100% at every level; otherwise you get leakage.
You might be okay with pain in general, but you might not have 100% boundaries at a particular level on a specific kind of pain. You can muscle test and ask how you want to name that boundary issue, or you may need to install 100% boundaries with tragedy which is different.
I think it has something to do with feeling so powerless. You would install 100% boundaries with people who are powerless or 100% boundaries with powerlessness. You have to muscle test the title of the boundary, again it might take 20 minutes of guessing until you name it exactly. Then you install the boundary with muscle testing.
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