Lessons from my Hypnotist – Part 2: Clearing Emotional Blockage & Retained Grief

Guest post by Abigail Caress, hypnosis client

I was just 21 years old when my father died from cancer in a drawn-out fashion in our living room, ostensibly under “home hospice care”, but actually under snowed-in, ‘round-the-clock care provided by our family in January of 2009. Ever since, January has always been a difficult month for me.

The scent of dying tissue, the sounds of unconscious moans and death rattles—and ALL the feelings­­—the helpless feeling of being simultaneously on edge and also terribly stuck, the mighty grief, even real anger and disappointment at how it all had ended and how other adults around me acted or failed to act—have ruptured my peace and even extended relationships for far too long. Some of it carried a double-burden, since some of the adults on my father’s side were pastors or church leadership by vocation, and their presence carried with them a history of church hurt, unresolved tension, and religious estrangement from my fundamentalist roots.

And the other part—the timing of his death in my own life –deprived me of my father’s confident presence and sage advice at a pivotal time in my life.

It’s been 15 years, and I still have a chronic case of self-doubt at age 36: Would he have approved of this decision, that choice? Impossible to know. We had not enjoyed the time in my early adulthood when I could test my wings and co-navigate with his approval over my shoulder.

Can I trust myself? I hope so.

That’s been my tentative mindset ever since.

Enter my second session with Wally Post (see my reflection on our first session here). Wally started by asking me about some of my biggest sore points that I mentioned above, calling it my “personal list”, and he took an emotional battery of my mindset at this time to try and identify what emotional state he was starting from.

And then we worked towards freedom from all that weight.

The visualization of hypnosis is a powerful thing. Once my body was sufficiently relaxed and I was in a place, internally, of safety in a warm mountain meadow under the guidance of Wally’s voice, we got to work on that list.

“Pull up that feeling of helplessness. Pull up the images, make the feeling as strong as you can. Where do you feel it?”

Welling behind my eyes.

“I’m going to pull it away and out, ready?”

Ready.

He counted down, he mimed pulling, even though I wasn’t looking, as he guided me to visualize it lifting out, up, away.

Next.

“Now the grief – visualize it, feel it again, as strong as you can.”

I could picture my father’s shrunken face, his mouth parted in raspy breath, the sense of him being here but not here, then the sense, later that night, of him being finally, completely, gone. The empty shell. And myself, also a shell, leaning on the floor against a kitchen cabinet as I reported his death to the authorities and the hospice. The opening and shutting of the garage door as my elder brother went out for the snow shovel to clear a path. The long wait in the cold night for them to come and collect—

The body—

Smaller than mine, seemingly, so very thin and wrapped up for warmth (now cooling rapidly) with my own cat still hovering on his chest, where she had tried to keep him warm in the night under her eight-pounds of fluff. The cat leapt down, her vigil over.

Over.

My lonely journey onward without Dad was just starting.

I nodded to Wally. I have it.

“Where is that feeling?”

”Low in my gut, a gut punch.” A hollowed-out vampire-like sucked-dry-hollowness.

Wally drew it out, up, through my chest, and out, out above my head, a dark cloud. He yanked it away.

I breathed. It hurt and yet it didn’t – this was all in my mindscape.

“Where is your sorrow?”

Here. Here behind my heart.

We did it again.

Next thing – next thing – all the things, including the church hurt, the anger, the resentment, the feeling of being stuck, stuck there. In the past and the hurt—pulled away, one by one.

I was calm but energized by the time we were through.

Then we took a break (the bathroom called, folks, okay?), and got right back to a hypnotic inventory of trapped feelings, this time looking for resonance in body spaces to the tones aligned with each of the seven chakras, affiliated with their own emotional and physical spaces. It was strange, to stare through colored lenses and using the tuning fork to feel a pitch somewhere in my body, but still, there were spots.

Wally was thorough.

Some of the last things we cleared were the things tied to my own self-doubts or were old knots of lingering resentment or anxiety. The things keeping me stuck in a space now 15 years outgrown.

I thanked him when we were through and drove off. My head less busy, my heart more at peace.

And I was thinking – at last, at last, I know where I’m going.

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Abigail Caress is a published writer and freelance marketing consultant specializing in nonprofits, ministries, and small businesses. Check out her website and blog at www.abigailcommunicates.com.