Mary. One client described being forced, as an 8-year-old child, to perform physical and sexual acts with siblings and animals during family and ritual events. In one instance, Mary and her sister had been hung from a rotating spit, used for smoking game. She was given a variation of Sophie’s Choice: she could ask to be taken down herself or ask that her sister be removed from the fire; she chose herself. The sister was allowed to live and was removed as well, but the guilt Mary felt after that choice remained with her. As a thirty-something, she experienced long-term symptoms of panic attacks, night terrors, burning sensations along her extremities, and severe difficulties breathing. Feelings of tremendous guilt, shame, and fear were also present. When Mary was able, as an adult, to understand the events (through the help of an HTI consultation), she was able to forgive herself. At that point, all symptoms related to these memories stopped.
| Millie. A forty-something-year-old mother of three living in the Midwest, Millie was in intense pain with severe pelvic bleeding. She had already received a blood transfusion from her family doctor. Previous incidences of bleeding and pain always stopped after a few days. Her gynecologist was puzzled when normal medical procedures brought no relief. Millie experienced intrusive thoughts with the awful feeling that she was going to die. Millie turned to her therapist on the suggestion by the doctor that she learn to deal with stress. After an hours-long consultation with Millie, her therapist, and HTI’s Mr. McCarthy, Millie shared this story: When she was twelve years old, her grandmother discovered a pregnancy from incest by Millie’s father and conducted an abortion. (Until that time, the grandmother had been the only safe adult in her family.) After the abortion, Millie heard the adults say she was bleeding and would die. Her grandmother used a homeopathic cure of a clove-saturated rag placed inside the uterus to stop the bleeding, resulting in intense pain. Using the Core Integrity Model, Millie was able to explore, understand, and resolve the memory that was the basis of her symptoms. Her pain stopped immediately; her blood flow lessened and totally stopped within a few days.
| Mike. Mike, a specialized surgeon, was a client who had to suspend his practice to protect himself and his patients due to his own symptoms of seizures and blackouts. He had been in therapy for several years to help him recover from severe sexual abuse and physical beatings from his father and uncle. Core Integrity Model tools helped him to identify and make sense of events he experienced in a Southwest hospital, where he had been taken by his father as both a child and adolescent; while there, he received injections in each carotid artery to anesthetize one hemisphere of his brain at a time. At the end of each visit, he was then given electro convulsive therapy (ECT) treatments and told that the injections and ECTs would erase the memories of the family abuse. After recovering these (and other) memories, he was able to return to medicine and his practice.
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