By Annette Vaillancourt, PhD
On March 5, 2015, Carol sent an urgent email with the subject line “Hands Need a Miracle.” She’s been fighting psoriasis over the past 4 to 6 years. Lately, it’s the worst it’s ever been. It’s only on the palms of her hands. She’s been unable to sleep or get comfortable. She sent me the picture below and said, “This has been my life for the past 5 years!”
We were going to California in a month and she didn’t know if she could get on the plane, carry her suitcases, or participate in the workshop we were to attend. Certainly, in this condition she couldn’t help drive down the coast highway, as we had planned.
When I saw her email and these photos, my first thought was “I’ll be damned if she’s going to get out of this trip because of this!” I went into high gear. I’d used Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to heal myself of plantar fasciitis and pain from sports injuries before, so why wouldn’t it work for this? After all, as is often said in EFT, “Try it on everything.”
Carol and I are first cousins. She turned 64 in 2015. We’ve known each other since we were children. Despite this, I had no idea how much she suffered as a child, growing up in a home surrounded by sickness and death, then in her abusive first marriage, and with the chronic illnesses of her beloved second husband, Glenn. She thought it was “normal” and “just the way life is.”
After a quick assessment, we did our first tapping and Matrix Reimprinting session on the pain contained in this statement:
“The pain of my soul is coming out the palms of my hands.”
We decided to start with that issue, as it had the most emotional intensity for her in the moment. We went right into a Matrix Reimprinting session, going back to the earliest time she felt the “pain of my soul.”
Synopsis of Session #1, March 6, 2015
This session went all the way back to when she was a 3-year-old helpless, forgotten child–the same year she first developed a rash. It was important for her to realize that she was not alone and invisible. All she needed was reassurance from her mom that the pain in her family was “not her fault.”
Three days later, she sent me this picture of her hands:
Synopsis of Session #2, March 7, 2015
Again using Matrix Reimprinting to search for events related to “what’s going on with her hands,” we were taken back to “little Carol,” who at the age of 5 had a high fever and blisters in her mouth that landed her in intensive care. She didn’t think she was “going to have a life.”
After this was fixed, she went to another event–a time about 10 years ago, when her son was going through his divorce. She spontaneously made the connection between her intense and enduring anger at her former daughter-in-law and her anger at her abusive ex-husband. In her unconscious, they were linked. Once she resolved that, she felt completely free of the anger.
Synopsis of Session #3, March 8, 2015
Carol and I did another Matrix Reimprinting session dealing with a repressed memory in which she nearly gave herself alcohol poisoning. The event took place over 20 years ago during what should have been a happy time–her wedding anniversary. Instead she felt “like a lion in a cage.” This was something she didn’t even know she had buried.
Even though this was almost a surreal dream sequence (most of which took place in silence), it didn’t matter. She still found great relief and release.
I called her five days later. She said her hands were 85% better. She thought the anger work really helped her turn the corner.
The photos below are of her hands 10 days after our first session.
We did a final EFT session on April 22, 2015. In that session, she released a lot of anger over the circumstances surrounding the death of her husband.
“I’m angry Glenn went so fast.”
This statement caused an immediate explosion of anger and anguish. Boy, can a “good Catholic girl” swear like a sailor!
We used conventional EFT to get the intensity down from a “20” to a 0. When we looked at her hands 10 minutes later, they were noticeably improved. I couldn’t believe my eyes!
Here’s a picture of her hands dated April 30, 2015.
Carol calls this her “Miracle in Slow Motion.” We have audio recordings of all but one of the sessions.
