Letting It Go

As a long-time practitioner of psychotherapy, a large part of my job used to be to keep my clients safe while they explored those scary places. When I was just starting to use Logosynthesis in my practice a young woman was referred to me because she had recently revealed a history of sexual abuse to her school counselor. I estimated that her treatment would take about six months.

The abuse had occurred from the time she was five years old until she was eleven. A teenage uncle, part of a large, close, extended family, had been her babysitter and often forced her to engage in inappropriate sexual contact. When I asked why she had not told anyone about the abuse, she said she had kept it secret because telling would have destroyed the family.

I asked if she had an image of what the destroyed family would look like and she had a very vivid image of all the members of the family sitting around a holiday dinner table and shouting angrily at each other. The image was very distressing to her even now, sitting in my office as a 17-year-old high school senior.

In our very first session I asked her to say the Logosynthesis sentences using that image as a target. She reported that the image slowly dissolved and turned into dust, which she swept away. That session ended. A week later she felt much more peaceful and was doing better in school, which was the reason she had originally seen her school counselor.

The next week I asked if she wanted to work with a specific instance of abuse that she remembered vividly. We used the sentences again and that image crumbled to dust as well. We spent the next couple of sessions working on other relatively normal challenges faced by a 17-year-old and then I asked if she wanted to continue working with the sexual abuse problems.

She was thoughtful for a few minutes and then said that nothing she could think of had any emotional charge on it. “It all seems to have gone away.” I saw her for a total of 6 sessions in less than 2 months, only focused on the pain of the sexual abuse trauma for a few minutes—long enough to identify the vivid, painful images and the entire problem was resolved!!!

This was an extremely traumatic series of events that she was able to process without needing to re-experience the pain of releasing her frozen energy from all those years and reclaiming her life energy from her past.