Preliminary talk:

12 years ago the client, a doctor’s receptionist of 37 years, was diagnosed as suffering from cervical carcinoma. She already had had 25 operations including removal of scar and prolific tissue. After four unsuccessful chemotherapys the fifth was imminent. She was afraid of the well-known side effects of chemotherapy. Every now and then she also was suffering from gastric ulcers. A blood clot in the brain kept triggering repeated convulsive fits.

Trial Session

Client enters a room in which there is a couch, a cupboard, a bed, a glass table and a piano. She is talking extremely slowly, quietly and hesitantly. Sitting down on the couch she finds herself to be 30 years of age. She is at home, feeling happy, warm and cosy. Someone is knocking on the door. Karl, her former boyfriend is entering the room, looking happy and content. She tells him that she loves him and he reacts affectionately, taking her in his arms. Then he starts crying. Now she’s feeling pain in her belly and spasms coming up.

Client: I’m doubling up waiting for the spasms to pass.

Therapist: suggests transposing this feeling into an image. Now the fear appears in form of a white ghost. The client doesn’t want to deal with it; she’d prefer to send it away. The Therapist however urges her to confront it. She asks it, if it is ready to help her. The ghost doesn’t answer, it just laughs at her.

Client: You make me afraid; you laugh at me and hurt me. I don’t want you. I want calm and peace. I don’t want you to help me. You are against me. The ghost disappears. Client feels pain in her belly. A feeling of deep sadness overcomes her. Then Karl appears again, he sits down at the piano and starts to play Mozart. He has stopped crying.

Client: Karl, you are good to me. You take away my fear and pain.

Therapist: Do the following: Ask Karl if he can help you to find out why you have cancer, now.

Client: (In a feeble voice) He’d like to, but his strength is gone. He hurts so much. He must leave me because he hasn’t got the strength. I’m sorry to do that to him. (Crying) I’m so glad to be able to cry again. But I don’t want to cry because you get sad as well when I’m crying. I feel ashamed.

[Music]

Client caresses Karl. Strong feelings of tenderness, her belly gets warm and feels comfortable. Client wishes it to be like that all the time and tells Karl.

Client: (With relief) I don’t feel alone any more. Karl, you help me, you always help me. He says he loves me ... Yes, this way I can live ... He tells me that he is going to stay with me. I’m no longer alone.

Therapist: Asks her if anything in the room has changed. She says the light is on now and the door is open. She decides next to open the door with the inscription "Karl". At first she can’t open it. She can hear distinctly that Karl is making love with another woman. The client goes back to this real memory.

Client: I don’t want it, I feel hurt. I’m leaving the apartment to buy some flowers – forget-me-nots. Then I’m coming back, they are still together. I can hear it. I put the flowers on the kitchen table and leave.

Therapist: How do you feel now?

Client: Hurt ... I go for a walk ... get thirsty ... have a beer ... talking some bullshit with some asshole who is a stranger to me. I have no more tears.

Therapist: Like you can’t cry anymore and show no emotions?

Client: It’s none of their business. I keep my pain for myself ... After the second beer, I’m cheerful in an unauthentic way.

Therapist: What’s the pain doing inside you? Where is it bothering you now?

Client: In my heart. But there’s another beer for my heart, then maybe it’s getting less ... I don’t want to go home now. I don’t want to hear or see anything anymore.

Therapist: You don’t want to feel anything anymore?

Client: Yes, I don’t want to blame him.

Therapist: Suggests to make Karl appear and to tell him everything. Client tells him that he could do what he wanted to, but that she felt hurt by this, not because he’s doing it, but because she’s not able to do it herself.

Client: That makes me aware of my illness, that’s a blow. It makes me feel so powerless.

The inner imagery shows Karl being ashamed now, he is sorry. He has seen the forget-me-nots in the kitchen and got the message.

Therapist tells the client to return to the corridor. She enters the kitchen door. Now she is 33 years of age, she gets herself a beer from the fridge and starts doing the dishes.

Client: I’m trying to take my mind off my powerlessness. I want to see that I can do something, if only the dishes. I think if I was healthy no one could cause me any heartache.

Therapist: Go to you heartache. What is the first memory to appear now?

Client: I feel bodily hurt. (Crying) I feel left alone.

Therapist: What age are you now?

Client: 8 years old. My mother has lied to me and left me alone. I can’t cry.

Therapist: What has happened?

Client: My tonsils have been removed. I’m the oldest sister of three and have to look after my sisters. Their tonsils have been removed, too. We are lying in one room. Claudia has been operated first, then Susanne and Mum was sitting at the their bedside afterwards. When I came back home she was gone. Claudia is crying and I’m comforting her. I’d like to cry myself, but it hurts so much. I won’t believe this woman any longer. She promised me to be here, and now I have to be a caretaker myself. I don’t want to leave my sisters alone. I want to be comforted too.

Therapist: Get your mum here and tell her.

Client: I don’t want her. She can go to hell.

Therapist: Exactly! Tell her.

Client: Leave me alone! I don’t want you. I never wanted you. Now I’m grown up and I tell you: Get out of here! She’s weeping, like she always does. She says: What did I do to deserve this? I say: You don’t want to hurt me intentionally, it just happens because I don’t know how to deal with you.

Back in the corridor the client is standing in front of a door, which she doesn’t want to enter, because inside is a terrible mess. It’s her real-life room, it reminds her of her feelings of hopelessness. Then the moment appears when she first gets to know about her cancer.

Client: I ask my friend to open my letters and she reads them to me. There is a letter of referral to the hospital; I’m to go there immediately.

Therapist: How do you feel after receiving this message?

Client: Fear. I don’t know what awaits me.

The client talks about her stay in hospital. As she didn’t tell the anaesthetist the exact amount of her alcohol intake, the narcosis doesn’t work properly and she wakes up during the operation.

Client: Waking up after the operation, I feel terribly cold and everything is changed. Anaesthesia diminishing, there is a terrible pain in my belly, I’m getting morphine. It hurts less now, but I’m sick. They have to give me morphine for 5 days, that’s how long it takes. On the tenth day, the results were out: cervical cancer. But they didn’t cut out all of it, which means: after the wound is healed they have to cut again. I’m afraid of losing my job. My friend Martin doesn’t want to visit me in hospital because of the strange smell there. His daughter brings me 20DM from him to buy some flowers. I’m terribly disappointed. But it has always been like this. I loved him too much to be able to defend myself against him. And because his daughter had just recovered from her divorce, I didn’t want her to suffer another loss. That’s why I stayed with him.

Therapist: Let Martin appear and look at what feelings you have towards him.

Client: I still love him. I just can’t hate him. It seems awful to me to be unforgiving for a long time, it takes so much energy.

Therapist: Just imagine to go back in your memory – maybe a few months, maybe half a year, maybe a year. Does anything come to mind, something very important? Any event whatever, anything that just pops up without you having to think of it? What has happened before?

The client says that Martin had made love to her best friend. Both of them lied to her, everyone knew about it except her. She had trusted them blindly.

Client: I stayed with him in spite of it. I was glad to have Christine (Martin’s daughter), because I’ve always wanted many, many children. At that time it became clear that I couldn’t have children. [Cruel abortion when she was 13, in a catholic environment, miscarriage at the age of 16]

Therapist: When you think of that, what happens in your body?

Client: Everything happening afterwards seemed to me like a punishment. But I think that’s because of my deep catholic upbringing. First I was unable to see children of the appropriate age without crying. Today I can deal better with it.

Therapist: I want to know if something is happening in your body as you remember these things. Is there tension, pressure or anything? There must be a lot still going on. As this session is just a trial session we first take a look at what’s there. There must be a lot of energy behind all of those issues, with which we’ll be dealing later on. One thing: could it be that about a year before the cancer was diagnosed, there had been an event relating to that? There must have been something, even something seemingly unimportant, which triggered that event.

The client doesn’t remember at first.

Therapist suggests to visualise a door behind which she can find the event.

Client: I don’t have to imagine that door; it’s there already. The door is opening all by itself, and there are these songs: "Heart of Gold" and "Lets Dance". Every time I hear those songs I’m thinking back to the good times with him. Dieter was a heroin addict but he has died. Hearing those songs I always have to think of that, too.

Therapist: When did that happen?

Client: Two years before the cancer.

Therapist: How did you feel when you got to know about his death? Did you listen to those old songs?

Client: Yes, permanently.

Follow Up:

Therapist asks client to bring these songs to her next session.

Therapist: My assessment is the following. Possibly the abortion and all the feelings connected to it are anchored to those songs. And by listening to them time and again after Dieter’s death, your subconscious remembers everything. Just by listening to those songs there was constant reactivation of your subconscious mind, which in turn responded by developing cancer.

Cancer is a disease of the soul, unable to be deciphered by any machine. Reactivating the old garbage leads to ‚toppling‘ of the system: a possible outcome is cancer. To get well again the patient has to look within and to work on this garbage synergetically.