EmoTrance & The Harmony Program
The following is an excerpt from an annotated transcript of
the first time EmoTrance was presented to an audience of MET
peers at the European Energy Therapies Conference, August 4th,
2002, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University by Dr Silvia
Hartmann.
This lecture outlines the developmental history of
EmoTrance and how the underlying principles and
pre-suppositions were arrived at.
It is included here to show how the understandings from the
Harmony Program underlie EmoTrance at the presupposition level,
and how the Harmony Program was instrumental in developing
EmoTrance.
An Introduction To EmoTrance
You might have
heard a few things about EmoTrance by now, and so what I want to
do is to make you familiar with the theoretical underpinnings
and the developmental history of the therapy form I have called
EmoTrance or ET for short.
In order to
understand what ET is, what it is for and how it works, we have
to back up to 1988. Now it is important to understand that I am
not a teacher or a healer, but my mission is to learn and find
out more about the universe. I see things and if I find them
fascinating, I will explore them with single-minded intention.
When I understand something new, I might write about it.
EmoTrance is a
completed segment of a jig-saw puzzle I have been working on for
as long as I know. It’s a fantastic healing tool, a superb
intuition trainer and a lot more besides, depending on how you
want to use it or what you want to use it for.
In 1988, I was
working with the patterns of animal behaviour. We were studying
the drivers for attention seeking behaviour disorders in social
mammals at that time and I certainly wasn’t swimming with the
dolphins back then. We were studying things like the effects of
certain food colorants on the behaviour of Cocker Spaniels,
doing statistics and actual research, collecting data and such.
But our story
begins as we started researching the Attention Seeking Behaviour
Disorder (ASBD) patterns – and I must point out that this
particular disorder spans a vast range of problem behaviours and
can manifest in extreme and bizarre problems. Attention seeking
behaviour can escalate into aggression, withdrawal, self
mutilation, autism and rage attacks, trance behaviours, in fact
all the really serious behaviour problems in social animal
behaviour not directly caused by environmental circumstance is
attention seeking behaviour related.
Now, this was
the very first time that I personally came across the idea that
there was something invisible at work, that there was something
a social creature needs, and if they don’t get this invisible
and un-measurable something, the creature will get sick. First,
it gets stressed out, then it gets psychotic, gets skin
diseases, the body breaks down and in the end, it will die.
We tried to find
what this might be, find alternatives – pheromones, chemicals,
practical, hard causative reasons for this but in the end, we
just had to throw up our hands in horror and admit that there
was, indeed, something invisible at work – a kind of energy
exchange that happens when one social creature requests
attention from another and if it doesn’t receive it, there is a
of shortfall in their systems and they are reacting to
this with panic.
There are old
studies that prove that babies will die if they don’t receive
social attention, even though their physical bodies were being
cared for. It is true that variants on the old “attention
seeking disorders” probably account for 85% of all human
illness, mental and physical alike. That’s why people die in old
people’s homes and women whose children leave home become
depressed or hysterical as a result.
But be this as
it may, what we have here is that energy is being requested from
another creature, usually of the same species. This energy needs
to be sent, and then it needs to be received by the one who
requested it. Lastly, they need to be able to process it. There
is something beneficial, nutritious about this energy which
social creatures need to function and actually, even to survive.
This was my
first ever contact with the “energetic nutrition system”, and it
was profound. Now when the energetic nutrition system breaks
down, as is the case in autism for example, when the creature
will seek attention but when it is given – sent – but they
cannot receive or process it, very serious problems arise.
In 1993 I
published my research findings and the resulting conclusions I
drew from it in a paper called The Harmony Program which
explains and deals with the problems relating to this systemic
energy exchange that is absolutely structural and just the same
in people as it is in dolphins, monkeys or poodles.
So, as I said,
this was my first brush with the energy system and the
understanding that we as people have energetic nutritional
requirements. From then on, I began to tentatively investigate
these invisible occurrences that had such amazing impacts on the
physical well-being and an individuals abilities to deal with
life at all.
In 1993 I began
the study of General Semantics after coming into contact with
this most extraordinary of fields through NLP, and for the next
years I would continue to work on my “universal map” every day,
and in many different ways. Always I was careful and kept myself
strictly focussed on directly observable, provable
behavioural results as the final test for any of the very
many modalities, approaches and disciplines I explored during
this time.
In 1998, I
discovered EFT. I found it deeply fascinating and took the leap
of faith and ordered the tapes. And when I started to look into
it, I began to see that there was something special going on –
this was not just hypnosis, not just a pattern interrupt, not
just some weird ritual. There was an extra component that
fascinated me and the effects of the basic EFT sequence on
people’s minds and bodies. And still, I was not thinking or
talking about “energy bodies” or any such thing, for what, pray
tell, is energy?
When asked for a
scientific explanation, these days I shrug my shoulders and say,
“Energy is something invisible that we can’t see and can’t
measure, but that must be there or else certain things wouldn’t be
happening at all.”
Like a hologram
or a pebble you throw into the pond and you can’t see the pebble
anymore, but the ripples are there and clearly visible, and ergo
there must have been something to have caused these
ripples even though I can’t see it now.
Therefore, and
still to this day, I don’t seek to find or look at energy. What
I do is to look at the results.
And the first
question I always ask is, “Could this result have been caused by
something else? Something that might seem like energy but it
isn’t?” Low level pheromones, hearing things at the far edge of
your perception and you’re not even consciously aware that you
might have heard it at all, substances in the environment, other
factors explicable by current science, and so on.
See if you take
all of that away, then you are left with the real magic. I want
to be absolutely ruthless about that, strip it right back and
always check and test, not fall into delusion at the first
opportunity. Strip it right down and there it is – real magic,
and boy do I want to find this.
Now, I have a
very, very low boredom threshold and a very short attention span
– unless I’m really interested. Do you know, I spent 4 years
doing EFT. Four years! 20 hours a day, doing it, teaching it,
researching it, thinking about it, talking about it. And not
variants of EFT either, in the vein of, “Let’s tap all the
points backwards and hey look! I have a new therapy!” but the
classic protocol exactly as it comes.
I wanted to
really learn about EFT, so I stuck firmly with Gary Craig’s
original design and did that, and nothing else, over and over
and over, so many people, so many opening statements, so many
problems, so many different circumstances. Until after 4 years
of this, I finally got to the point where I thought, I’m
beginning to get a hang of what this might be and what this
might mean.
It was only
after this had happened that I allowed myself to learn about the
other Meridian Energy Therapies like BSFF, TAT, TFT and so
forth, because that basic EFT sequence, as simple as it might
appear, has so much depth to it and represents such an
extraordinary opportunity to learn about how people really work,
it is simply fascinating. And I won’t begin to say that I know
everything about it now, I think you could spend a lifetime with
it, just enough so I feel I have some appreciation of what EFT
can teach us about people.
Amongst the most
important things that EFT taught me was about the relationship
between the energy system and emotions. The EFT discovery
statement says that a negative emotion is caused by a disruption
in the energy system. Everyone knows this, everyone reads this
but few people actually sit right down and really think about
what that actually means.
And if you were to take it to it’s final degree, what it does
mean is
that emotions are to the energy body as pain is to the
physical body.
Emotions
Feelings
-----------------
=
--------------------
Energy
Body Physical Body
Now in physical
medicine and care, it’s been a while since people only tried to
treat pain and make it disappear – “Oh the pain is gone, that
must mean the problem’s over.” Sure, some horse trainers still
do it. The horse tears a ligament and you numb the whole leg
with a powerful painkiller so it can still run the race. Ok, so
you have to shoot it afterwards but at least you’ve got that one
last trophy.
Medicine used to
be liked that, but isn’t anymore. When you come with a pain,
they won’t just give you a painkiller but instead they ask you,
what could that be a symptom of?
Thus is the deal
with emotions and the energy body just as well.
But we’ll come
back to that in a little while.
During my time
with EFT, I was developing various therapeutic patterns based on
the insights derived from working with energy, emotions,
memories and people’s various manifestations of their totality.
One of the
breakthrough patterns was what would eventually become a paper
called Guiding Stars.
EFT treatments
showed me how limited the existing psychological models were we
were dealing with prior to the advent of energy psychology as a
whole, and they were limited because they were basically all
trauma based. The idea was that we get born more or less
alright, then something horrible happens that messes us up.
This, however, isn’t true all by itself because there is this
whole other realm of outstanding emotions which are non-trauma
in nature, positive if you want to call it, numinous experiences
that mess us up just as well. Because it’s not the pain of an
experience that causes the changes, the cascading neurological
shifts at all but instead, what does it is the intensity of the
emotions, and this is regardless of whether they are “good” or
“bad”.
If the emotional
intensity is high enough, it causes cascading shifts in the
neurology. It creates new life patterns and overwrites what went
before and from then, new patterns of behaviours are established
and these are entirely regardless of whether they end up being
damaging or have any shred of sanity about them at all.
As an example
you might like to consider a grown woman who has been in
terrible relationships all her life. Is she a deranged masochist
with low self esteem? Actually, probably not. It’s far more
likely that in a childhood devoid of loving attention and joy,
there was this one moment when her father (who also abuses her
on a regular basis) stumbled home, reeling drunk and smelling of
alcohol, sat her on his lap and called her “My little princess.”
And she felt loved for the first time. And it was such an
amazing moment of joy, of transpersonal happiness that she
patterned unconsciously all her relationships from thereon on
that one moment – the lesson the neurology has learned is
that if you want to feel loved, you need to find a man who
structurally and practically resembles that one man who made you
feel like that before, right down to the smell of alcohol on his
breath as he said the magic words. That’s Guiding Stars,
originally from 2000.
The reason I
never released this pattern properly was because when you
uncovered Guiding Stars, people had such appalling abreactions,
it was truly frightening.
Imagine
something has gone on for 50, 60 years and find out just why it
was that they have put their children into a position of being
abused by one horrible man after the next, and they’re now in
asylums or have committed suicide for example, and they got how
it was and what it was and what they had been doing with
their lives the abreactions were so horrendous, I’ve never
seen anything like it.
The loss of life
for the sake of this one moment of happiness – I have ruined my
entire life.
Especially with
women who can’t have children anymore, but also all over, you
can’t turn the clock back, can’t do it differently. Whoa. It’s
horrendous. And the pain they had caused by following this route
towards the Guiding Star to themselves and everyone around them
– it was so horrendous that I didn’t dare release the thing.
But now here we
are getting into interesting things.
Guiding Stars
made me stop and understand that it isn’t the emotion that’s the
problem, but the energy behind the emotions and the intensity of
that energy – the concept of Significant Emotional Experiences
or SEEs. However, these are usually only applied to
trauma – negative emotions, thus leaving a whole heap of drivers
for people’s behaviours like addictions and staying in unhappy
marriages and a huge range of bizarre choices and behaviours
that make no sense at all, not even to the person themselves,
come into consideration. And this is when I really had to do
something. For it is when someone comes to you and talks about
joy and they talk about pain, we are so entrained to want to
keep the joy and get rid of the pain, it is really difficult to
keep a clear and scientific mind on these issues. But that is
exactly what we need to do to take the next step in this
progression. I need to re-name this. I can’t think allow myself
to think in terms of “good and bad” emotions here because it
will totally compromise the whole investigation.
So I started to
simply think in terms of energy.
Hence, the
slogan – Energy, NOT Emotions.
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