Multi-level healing (examples from Anxiety and Bipolar Disorder)

How are you finding selfgrowth.com? There’s a huge wealth of information on site. I could browse it for hours. Have you come across two difference experts with two different approaches to the same thing?

If you’re now confused as to where to start to achieve your goal or solve your problem, here’s my advice… go for whichever approach you feel most attracted to and give it a go. Then see what progress you’ve made and decide what to do next. You may want to add another approach, for instance.

You may also like to consider my concept called “Multi-level healing” (though depending on what you’re working on “multi-level goal achievement” or “…. Problem solving” may be more appropriate.

I’m going to give you some examples of how this work using bipolar disorder (a condition characterized by extreme mood swings) and anxiety. I have personal experience of both.

Multi-level healing (MHL) is loosely based on insights from Robert Dilts but this commentary is very much my own.

One level of healing is environmental. How can you change your environment to reduce anxiety and mood swing? This generally comes down to reducing stress, and assumes stress is outside of us. At this level we could consider how to reduce noise in the environment, how to keep light out at night, and some tactics to boost job security.

Another level of healing might be medication (some would disagree). Medication is claimed to correct biochemical imbalances leading to better functioning. The benzodiazepines do seem to treat anxiety directly (at a cost of potential addiction).

Some of the anti-psychotic medication (used in bipolar disorder) arguable works by temporarily chemically-restraining patients. That was my experience with haloperidol years ago.

Another excellent level of healing, which is greatly underrated in medical circles, is natural biochemical correction, primarily by nutritional therapy. It is through this that I achieved my most dramatic recovery from mental illness.

It was by taking a large dose of B vitamins that I went from being so manic I couldn’t sleep to sleeping to returning to near normal the next day. The medical notes show it happens. They have no idea how it occurred. They thought B vitamins were dangerous.

No wonder the first therapy I trained in was nutritional therapy.

I should mention that B vitamins are not the generalized cure for mania, and I’ve added a lot to my nutritional program since then. I’m also wiser. I know the challenges many of my clients (and sometimes me) have with nutritional programs. Making changes can be challenging.

I also struggled with making an income as a Nutrition Consultant and I asked myself what made some people thrive financially and some people not. This is what lead me to NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming).

NLP (usually known by its initials) is a series of therapeutic approached based on the approaches used by the “best therapists” of the 1970s. These were days when psychotherapy could take years. The therapists they chose got great results in weeks. They were all “talking therapists” that they chose so NLP is a “talking therapy”.

At least one of the therapists seems to have prevented a suicide by using the perceived flaws of an in individual to her advantage. She felt suicidal, looked like a disheveled mess, and thought no-one would love her because of the gap between her teeth.

Milton H. Erickson (the therapist) got her commit to do what he told her without telling her what he had in mind. She cautiously agreed. So he told her to go to water fountain at work where her colleagues gathered and fire water through her teeth at the man she fancied. His response was to declare that was so cheeky he was going to kiss her for that. They got married two months later. All thoughts of suicide were gone. (Source: “Phoenix” by Gordon & Meyers-Anderson)

NLP uses the power of storytelling and metaphor to produce results. Starting where a client is at and then leading them to a new empowering belief system is common. NLP works at the level of thoughts.

So also does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) but in a rather different way. A lot of CBT is logical reasoning which doesn’t always penetrate the mind as effectively as metaphor and storytelling. However, CBT has been very successful with getting some form of talking therapies into the mainstream.

Another level of healing is “letting go”. This is theme in the energy therapies (up another level) but there are transformation approaches that only focus on this. The most famous being the Sedona Method. It was discovered by Lester Levenson, who used it to heal his body after a second heart attack after he was given just weeks to live. He was also suffering from depression when he started.

You’ve accidentally practiced the “Sedona Method” in your life. Remember a time when lost something (say, your car keys, but it could be anything). You searched and searched and searched. You couldn’t find it. So you gave up, decided you didn’t need it and relaxed. Next thing you know there are the keys right in front of you. Everyone I know has had that experience.

Your determination to find the keys blocked your ability to see them. When you relaxed, you let go, and the solution presented itself. It’s a very effective way to find keys, let go of emotions, solve problems, heal stress in the body (and therefore diseases). It can make a huge difference.

Next level up are the energy therapies. These work on the energy field of the body. You have both an energy field round you and there is energetic communication happening in the body. The energy therapies have been around for thousands of years. The most famous being acupuncture. They were thought by the scientific community to be nonsense for years, and many in the medical profession still take that view.

However, as already revealed the medical profession only works on limited levels of healing. And much of why it does that is that it looks to “Newtonian Physics” which is, basically, the physics of large objects. This physics teaches us that it’s easiest to open a door as far away from its hinges as possible.

Whereas another form of physics, called “Quantum Physics” looks at very, very small objects and energies and gets a very different results.

Much of your body and brain are working at the quantum physics level. We need something to address it.

And those of us who observe a world where Newtonian Physics makes sense find it very hard to understand the weird quantum world. The evidence is that time travel is possible. We appear to all be interconnected, and if you have a strong relationship with someone you’ll be even more interconnected. It’s possible to energetically read people at a distance.

I practice a couple of these energy therapies – Energetic NLP (eNLP) and the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). All of these approaches have some method of moving energy. EFT does so primarily by tapping the energy points used in acupuncture and is often used to shift emotions but can also work in the physical world. I find it useful to shift very particular problems.

Energetic NLP uses thoughts and metaphors to help shift energy. That thought can move energy is a finding of Quantum Physics. The ability of metaphor to change the way we think is a finding of NLP.

The results I have achieved with eNLP have been remarkable. My first encounters with Art Giser (its creator) lead me to save £500 (then about $1000 USD) in the next 48 hours. Remarkably I wasn’t aware that I was doing it – the changes in my thinking had been so seamless.

On other occasions my eNLP friends have helped take me out of anxiety in about 15 minutes. Though a few other things have triggered me to feel anxious again they helped removed much of the tendency and make me more aware on relapse.

Bipolar is a condition where issues need to pulled away piece by piece (at least for me). My friends and I have made good progress with it. I’m clearly a far more relaxed person than I was thanks to eNLP.

In summary, don’t stop with just one level of healing (unless you are totally sure you are cured.) There are many more things to explore that can add to your life. I’m grateful that I didn’t stop just with nutrition because my relationships are far better than they would have been if nutrition had just magically removed bipolar. I’m now far more relaxed far more forward looking with the help of Energetic NLP, and many of the other techniques I’ve mentioned.