Dear EFT Community,
Working with a patient who cannot give coherent feedback requires patience, which Debra Lohri displays in this report. Even modest progress in Alzeimer’s disease is most welcome and Debra tells how she achieved it with EFT.
– EFT Universe
By Dr. Debra Lohri, DCH, LMT
I recently had the opportunity to work with a patient with hereditary Alzheimer’s disease. His father had it when he died, and a brother and sister are currently living with this condition. I didn’t know quite what to expect since this was the first time in my 6 years of using EFT that anyone with Alzheimer’s disease had ever asked me for a session. I told the client, we will call him Donny, that I didn’t know if it would help him, but I was willing to try.
I sat with Donny and asked him a few questions about if he remembered his childhood and he said no, and I asked if there had been any traumas or accidents or anything else that may have contributed to the disease. He said he didn’t remember. I asked his wife, who told me that there were in fact some traumatic childhood experiences. I knew that from reading material in Louise Hay’s book that Alzheimer’s patients may be trying to block out an unsafe world and refusing to deal with it as it is, so that is where I began. As I wasn’t able to take a SUD test, I decided to just tap on phrases that came to me about not being safe, not trusting the world.
I asked his wife if she had been aware of any painful memories that she believed were too mentally consuming and if she thought he had tried to block them out. She went on to explain to me a horrible generational story that started with his father. Apparently, his father was from a family where his father was not in the picture and the mother was raising several children on her own.
Financial burdens were so overwhelming on the single mother that she decided to prostitute not only herself, but also her older children. She believed the only way to keep custody of her children, be able to raise them on her own, and keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs was by selling them sexually for money.
So Donny’s father, being the oldest, was sent out to women, as well as to many men. He in turn grew up and started sexually abusing his own children. Although Donny was never part of the horrendous acts his father perpetrated on his older siblings, he was aware of what the five older children were going through and he would be tortured the rest of his life with those cries for help.
The father eventually went to jail for his violent offenses where he died, leaving the older children to help with raising the younger children. This gave me a starting point to get tapping on. We started with “Even though these bad things happened to my brothers and sisters…” Remember, I couldn’t ask him for a SUD level as he didn’t even remember how to tie his shoes. In his 50s, he had already had this condition for 3 years. Five years is the average lifespan after official diagnosis and I understand that is with medication.
We then worked on:
Even though I don’t remember how to sign my name…
Even though my childhood is too painful to remember…
Even though my dad abandoned me and I never got to know him…
Even though mother didn’t know what Dad was doing to the other kids…
Even though I don’t want to remember those bad memories…
Even though I am angry at my father for what he did…
Even though I feel angry at my mother for not protecting us…
Even though I feel ashamed at what happened to them…
Even though I feel sorry for them…
Nothing else came to mind as I worked with Donny. I wasn’t sure whether we had made any progress at all. It was hard to tell with someone who couldn’t think clearly and answer questions. So I blindly did the best I could. I really didn’t expect much without his SUD ratings and given his inability to communicate.
That was on a Sunday morning in April 2009. I received a call from his wife on Monday morning with excitement and happiness. She told me that she’d had to talk to his doctor about some medicines he was taking and they told her that they couldn’t discuss his medical treatments with her since she had not sent a power of attorney to the office for them to keep on file. She was really frustrated, as she already knew he would not be able to answer questions from the doctor or nurse on his own. His typical answer in our sessions was “I don’t know.” But his wife, not knowing what else to do, went ahead and put him on the phone to his doctor. They wanted to start by verifying his age and date of birth. She said he looked at her while talking to the doctor and answered, “August 15, 1956” and he then he said “I’m 53.” She said she couldn’t believe he knew those answers. She said, “Donny, did you just tell them your age and birth date? She was convinced it was the EFT, as all the medicines he had been taking gave him severe headaches, as well as made him seem a little “out of it” most of the time. For someone who couldn’t even sign his name, this was astounding!
I was really excited with his small amount of progress. However temporary or permanent the changes, we didn’t know. She didn’t think to ask him again over a period of hours or days to see if he could still remember this information, but we can be sure that EFT did make some difference to his memory, even if it was short-lived.
I believe this is promising. I believe that the more people experiment with EFT on Alzheimer’s patients, the more we can all learn and improve and take what we know works, and tweak it until the results we get are more deliberate and typical results than the hit-and-miss we get with trying to rely on these clients for communication.
I would love to spend more time with Donny, but distance is a problem as he lives far away. I don’t believe you can be as effective over the phone as you can in person with this type of client. If anyone else has had results with Alzheimer’s, I’d be very interested to hear your experiences. We could still see significant results in the future with Alzheimer’s patients as we expand the ever growing opportunities to use EFT.
