The book Phobias, Disappointments and Grief: A Fast Remedy written by the well-known Russian psychotherapist Andrey Ermoshin presents Psychocatalysis, his own method which has helped thousands of patients to recover from the consequences of psychological traumas. The work is illustrated with detailed examples of working through different kinds of phobias, from the fear of flight to the fear of sudden death. It also provides examples of how Psychocatalysis can efficiently relieve the pain caused by disappointment, betrayal, infidelity or loss of a loved one. Psychocatalysis is an original method based on bringing special attention to one’s inner sensations. After 30 years of working with this method the author offers the readers this step-by-step guide to self-regulation which can be useful for everyone who needs help with his or her problems or is going to help others.

The method and the working algorithms, are described in a highly intelligible manner, including reference materials and artwork.

Preface

This book, that you have in your hands, will help you to overcome phobias and other kinds of traumas in a fast and effective way. It will give you the necessary tools for a fresh start and will help you move towards health and success.

Everybody can face psychologically challenging and traumatizing life situations. We have to resolve these situations in order to remain healthy, happy and successful. And we have to learn a way to overcome these obstacles and to move on. This book is about how to use self-regulation to easily and naturally get through the effects of stressful events, including not only phobias but also betrayal, frustration, and grief. Here you will find many examples of how people managed to purify their body and mind of the destructive and paralysing build-up of negative experiences using the resource of their own inner sensations. Thousands of patients have already used Psychocatalysis and have been able to acquire new strength and knowledge to become healthy and to bring their projects to life. These cases show that it’s possible to overcome phobias and other psychological traumas if you follow a simple algorithm which only requires tuning in to your own sensations.

Psychocatalysis, a method which I have developed, has been in use for decades by myself, my colleagues and my patients in Russia and abroad, and is based on the body’s fundamental resource of self-healing. It is actually an acceleration of the processes which should be happening in the body naturally, but which are delayed for various reasons and need now only to be activated.

In my first book, Objects inside the Body (Moscow, 1999, 2004, Riga, 2007, Kiev, 2013), based on years of practice as a psychotherapist, I described the positive effects of Psychocatalysis in the most complex cases. The book had a significant response, and my new friends, colleagues, patients and other interested people have kept on discovering the potential of the method. I am very grateful for their support.

The second book, Geometry of Emotion (Moscow, 2008, Kiev, 2013), shows how emotional charges accumulated in the body can be easily diagnosed through a simple drawing test, and how this approach can help us to work through problems, one by one.

The third book, A Nice and Easy Way to Learn Foreign Languages: Self-Regulation as A Method of Quick Acquisition of Knowledge (Moscow, 2014), describes a very comfortable and light manner of learning foreign languages, as well as a quick way to grasp new things. The book offers the reader a series of self-regulatory exercises based on the method of Psychocatalysis, which will not only make your learning process more efficient and help you find an easier way to learn but will also contribute to the overall health of the body.

The three books I have mentioned above can become a good supplement to this volume, but you don’t have to read them before this book. I have tried to make it simple and clear so that you could get the maximum benefit from this book and save your time. My goal is to share my experience and to provide you with a convenient technique of healing traumas. Whether you are a professional psychotherapist or you want to work through your own problems, this book and method will help you.

The book consists of three parts relating to the three most frequent types of problems.

The first part is about overcoming phobias, these are obsessional fears which are formed in a situation when a person couldn’t generate an adequate response to a stressful situation. I will explain what is going on in our mind when it goes through unexpected stress. However, it’s not only about determining a diagnosis. The main goal is to heal the wound, to restore the integrity of the body and to learn how to react calmly and rationally to what used to cause fear.

A good example is always better than long and complex explanations; that is why the first part of the book contains a lot of actual cases from my work with patients. They provide details of how one can overcome the effects of traumas starting from slight intimidation to multiple phobias, and from fear of aggression to fear of enclosed spaces. In this part I will also offer some algorithms, designed to help you adjust and maintain the results you have obtained. The “method of diagnostic phrases” and the method of “guiding the knowledge to the body” will help you to reinforce your success.

In the second part we will get a broader perspective. Here we will talk about overcoming the whole range of psychological traumas: disappointment, unjust accusations, and loss of loved ones. How can we live through grief, betrayal of a friend or infidelity of a partner? How can we get rid of recurring dreams which reveal a deep emotional strain? How can we react properly to abuse and insults? Using real life examples, I show how to master the impacts of such trying events.

I dedicate special attention to the most difficult cases when the psychological trauma results from the consequences of brain damage, such as when the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen or other complications. Psychocatalysis also proves to be useful in these cases.

My method is all about making decisions and starting to act. The goal of this book is to help you to get rid of the dead weight of the old stressful feelings, to recover and to move on. If you focus on helping the inner wisdom of your body, a miraculous renovation of your life will happen. You will experience personal growth and develop such qualities as integrity, balance, and competence. This will bring your spirit to the next level and create a basis for your personal fulfilment in all areas of life.

Please, feel free to ask any questions via email at [битая ссылка] erm@list.ru.

You are always welcome to visit my websites:

[битая ссылка] http://www.psychocatalysis.ru/

[битая ссылка] http://www.psychoscanner.com

I will be grateful to get feedback from you or to meet you during one of the self-regulation trainings which we organise!

Yours,

Andrey Ermoshin

Introduction

Basic Training

A human being is born already having a wealth of knowledge about the world, just like a wasp which doesn’t need a university degree to build its nest. The information on how to live is written in our bodies and accessed as soon as we need it. Plato said that while studying we merely recall things rather than learning something new. However, even if we have the biggest of experiences, there will be things we won’t be able to recall… Life is always changing, and there will be situations that we haven’t experienced before.

I like the Italian word “aggiornamento”, which is connected to “giorno” (a day); it means updating knowledge and making it closer to the current situation. We can also refer to it as the refinement of knowledge. The goal of such basic training is to get to know how to interpret the contemporary world. The values transmitted by our families and schools provide us with behaviour strategies for modern situations, which we may face without having any information about them in our genetics. Culture makes an update to nature, and the level of our competence rises.

Even with a good upbringing, every person and every generation has to acquire some life experience on his or her own, without parents or teachers by their side. If the intellect accompanied by the cultural resource doesn’t manage to deal with some situation, it can result in adaptive stress or even a trauma. A trauma is followed by an engagement of the primitive strategies of survival, written in our genes “just in case”.

It’s cool to be at school

Even the situations we don’t consider extreme can potentially be stressful: the first time in a nursery, the first day of primary school, having a brother or a sister and other similar events which are quite natural.

Going to school is presented to children as something joyful but trying to get along with rough children and dealing with a strict teacher can cause dramatic emotions for a sensitive child. Having a newborn brings happiness to the family. Yet when the attention of the parents shifts from the older child to the baby, the older child may be in a situation that can bring about a mixture of positive feelings and those emotions that can be hard to bear.

The list of such potentially stressful situations also includes tension in the family, moving to a new place, going to a new class at school, etc.

In life a person faces many experiences: changes in the body during adolescence, passing entrance examinations for college, looking for a job, getting married, having children, climbing the career ladder at the office, overcoming the death of loved ones, resolving social tempests, learning how to take care of his or her health, losing a job, entering retirement. All these events are natural parts of our life, but every single one of them requires adaptation. In many cases this adaptation is obtained through strain and can even lead to a feeling of defeat.

The problem is that the consequences of what we have been through leave their print on our psychosomatic profile.

Time of change

A constructive drawing of a person, a simple test, can prove this. Draw an image of a person using rectangles, round-shaped elements and triangles. There should be 10 elements in the drawing. Now specify the age of the character.

It is most likely that the age of the character will point back to some crucial moment in your life. Body proportions in the drawing that are unusually bigger and wider than the rest of the body can indicate areas of strain. Other parts of the body, which are often the limbs, are designated by triangles, which means they are in state of “desolation”. We’ll turn back to this test further on in this book. It is also described in detail in my book Geometry of Emotion (A. Ermoshin, 2008).

The situations described are connected mostly with adaptive stress. Yet as we have mentioned before, some cases do not only cause strain but significantly alter the state of health of a person. They catch the person off-guard and are so hard to embrace that they end up causing trauma.

It’s hard to go through it without getting wounded

It is hard to find a person who hasn’t experienced disloyalty of friends, disappointment in people who seemed to be ideal or aggression from other people for no reason at all…

Life isn’t all a bed of roses, says the proverb.

However, even the situations which are not so dramatic from the point of view of an adult could be traumatizing. For example, when entering an elevator, a person expects to go out at a certain floor in a minute or two. But all of a sudden, this device designed to save people’s energy, stops, and the light goes off. This is just a temporary stop. Somebody will certainly come to help, because people need the elevators and their functionality is monitored. It is enough just to press the emergency button if the person wants the help come sooner. Alternatively, the person could knock loudly on the doors to get somebody’s attention. Also usually it’s possible to use a mobile phone which almost everyone has in his or her pocket, or the person could just have a rest, think about things or even meditate. Is there any difference between a person at home and the same person inside an elevator? Usually there isn’t. All the power stays with this person, all the inner self-regulation mechanisms, which have been forming for thousands of years, work the same way!

This is how an adult, a self-assured person understands the situation. Yet a boy or a girl could imagine that he or she would never go out of this unfortunate elevator or see his or her parents ever again…

That isn’t true, of course, and soon everything will be fine but because of this loss of self-confidence, even if it’s just for a moment, a child’s mind might “catch” this fright, and it “settles down” somewhere inside and begins to control the state of mind even after the child gets out of the elevator. (This is exactly what happened to my patient Julia; you will read her story later in this book). The fright generates the fear. Even the thought of the unpleasant experience.

Enthusiasm of a bouncy dog brings no joy

Psychological traumas can be caused by the situations when a person encounters circumstances which are threatening for their life or for their honour and dignity, and which he or she is not ready to face. A large dog decided to play with a three-year-old girl, kicked her down and tore her dress. How will she react? Would she be able to sympathize with the dog’s enthusiasm and feel the joy of life? It is unlikely, as she definitely doesn’t have enough self-confidence. Instead, she feels afraid.

A person who has enough “resources” reacts differently. Serge has just got out of a suburban train and suddenly he gets gripped by the neck from behind by a large man from a crowd of drunken friends. It’s a do-or-die situation. These guys have been recently discharged from the army, there’s no way he can beat them. Serge tries to loosen the grip a bit and asks the aggressor: “Wanna become friends?” – “Yeah!” answers the bully suddenly. The bully then loosens the grip, they get acquainted and in a minute the jolly crowd decides to walk Serge home so that nobody could bother him. The shocking gesture of the bully masked a clumsy attempt to make friends. Serge helped him to understand this and was rewarded for it.

There is a bright feeling of assertion growing in Serge’s body from his capacity to answer life’s challenges. And in the girl’s mind there is a dark strain.

The goals of this book include presenting a solution for such tension resulting from a trauma. We will begin with fears, as this kind of problem is particularly frequent. All of my observations are based on a large medical practice and are verified by the work done with a number of patients.

Part 1. Work through Phobias and Panic Attacks

1.1. Introduction

Ten minutes

I’d like to point out that in many cases five or ten minutes can be enough to work through the fear and improve the life of the patient.

As an introduction, I’ll tell you a story of a successful recovery from a fear of spiders. This is a story which I personally like to recall from time to time.

One day in Paris

There’s a cafe called “L’Apostrophe” in Paris, on Colonel Fabien Street. Once a month it becomes a rendezvous point for local hypnologists and turns into a “Hypnocafé”. Professionals from the psychotherapy world gather there to learn about foreign specialists’ methods or just have a cup of coffee together.

This time on the second Tuesday of the month it was my turn to present at the meeting. My precursors were Jeffrey Zeig and Betty Erickson so I was in good company. I was invited by Jean Becchio, a brilliant specialist in “nouvelle hypnose”.

I was surrounded by a dozen colleagues, and we stumbled into the cafe a little late, slightly wet from the November rain: it turned out that a taxi in Paris is rather unpredictable, and sometimes it doesn’t arrive even if you call beforehand.

It also was a kind of a stressful test for mental equilibrium, but we managed to pass it. People were expecting us, and after a short presentation we could proceed to work.

Regina

A colleague from France volunteered to talk with me in front of the group. She was about 45 and quite skinny. Such people often describe themselves as being indifferent to life. “I don’t care if I’m free or I’m in captivity,” says the Russian proverb. But Regina turned out to be quite cheerful. The only problem she did have was her fear of spiders. One would wonder if there were any spiders in Paris at all. There are no tarantulas, no dreadful black widows or steppe spiders, no scorpions either.

“Yes, there are!” Regina objected. “They’re everywhere!”

“But you know that you are big, and they are small. They can do you no harm.”

“No, it’s me who is tiny, and they are giant!” Regina said and told me that when spiders are mentioned she freezes, begins to tremble, and her hands become cold.

“Your hands become cold, so where does the heat go?” – I asked. The tension and the heat happened to be in her stomach.

I wondered if she was aware of any ways to counteract spiders. One could use shaving foam, or just throw a towel over the spider and then throw it out of a window. Regina shook her head and made it clear that was not her way. It doesn’t work for her.

The black spider flew away with his web

That’s when we begin the active part of our work.

The first working phase. We try to find out where in the body is the thing that frightens her. Regina closes her eyes: “In my stomach.” What is there? “There is a black spider.” Regina makes a decision to let it go away. Regina is observing the process. The “spider” goes out through the top of her head together with its web.

The second working phase. “Where is the knowledge of how to deal with spiders?” The patient finds it to be somewhere at a distance in shape of a small sun. The decision is to let the sun settle inside the body. The patient is watching it going inside through the top of her head and settling in the solar plexus area.

Regina experiences warmth and peace.

We make a test. The patient imagines that she has a run in with a spider. She keeps calm, she knows several effective ways of action and easily imagines what her behaviour will be like if she actually meets a spider.

Before the session the patient felt cold, and now she feels warm. A phobia which had been haunting her all her life finally disappeared as a bad dream. At the end of the meeting Regina came over to thank me and confirmed that she was still feeling the warmth in her body.

My French colleagues felt puzzled: “We usually need ten years to analyse phobias, and here it takes ten minutes… This seems weird.” “You can spend ten years, but if you wish to have the time to live without phobias, I’d recommend you my method,” I said. I also found the reaction of my German friend interesting; his wife Tatiana told me about it. Uwe Pertz is a wise man so his words are even more valuable: “Why hasn’t it occurred to anyone else to do it? It seems so simple!”

Fast facts about developing phobias

When a person finds him or herself in some unexpected situation and is unsure how to act in order to save themselves or their family, he or she feels lost. This person feels like his or her body has absorbed some toxic substance which poisons everything around it. This substance has penetrated the body and reached the stomach, so there arises an unpleasant tension at every thought of the frightening situation. Let alone the discomfort which affects the head or triggers the feeling of anxiety in the chest. Those layers of disorder are more superficial.

At the moment of confusion, the body was open and defenceless, so the inner vacuum got filled with darkness. This moment has passed, and the body has closed but it is not the same any more: it’s “poisoned” by fear. That’s how a phobia develops.