Progress with Parkinson’s disease

By Eros Biasiolo

I met Daniel at one of my seminars.  I noticed him because when we were having lunch, he would always finish last.  He was eating, walking, and acting slowly and his voice was low and corrupted. At the time, however, I didn’t feel right approaching him to offer him some 1-on-1 sessions.  Six months later, I decided to call him, telling him that I would be pleased to have him as one of my case studies.  He was surprised and welcomed the idea, but parts of him felt he didn’t deserve it.

So we arranged for a first meeting, a 1-on-1 session of two and a half hours.  Until then I didn’t know, nor I could have imagined that his condition was Parkinson’s disease.  He told me his story.

Seven years previously he had a car accident, where another vehicle hit his car.  His 6th and 7th vertebrae were affected.  He immediately started having difficulties with movement; his shoulders also shifted position, particularly the right one which was now leaning visibly forward. He was visited by numerous doctors after the accident with no diagnosis until five years later when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  

I asked him to find a limiting movement on which we could test our results.  This is what he called the “screw/unscrew” movement, a rapid twisting of the wrist clockwise and counterclockwise - the same action you would do when inserting or removing a light bulb.  

The first time we tested this, there were just one or two twists and the hand would first freeze, and then tremble.  It was clear that there was a lot of psychological reversal, starting from the fact that his mind believed in the diagnosis, but his heart didn’t.  This conflict was clear for him as well - his intelligence did not agree with his emotions.  Some EFT’ers would call this a “part” of him thinks something, another “part” thinks otherwise.

He admitted that the more he thought about controlling the movement, the more this blocked his body.  It worsened if he was being observed.  He said that if the mind coordinated the movement, then the movement was not fluid.  He also saw an “overflow” of information from the brain to the body.  We tapped on all of this using the setup phrases:

Even though it worsens when I am observed…

Even though the body is overflowing with information…

I asked him just to imagine that he was doing the screw/unscrew movement.  He said that it felt exactly the same, even if the arm was not moving!  After some rounds of tapping, he was now able to control his screw/unscrew movement for about 20 seconds.  So we tapped on his belief of not being able to do the movement for longer than 20 seconds.  This brought him to do it a bit longer - about 30 seconds.  I asked him what made the movement stop.  He said, “My mind went there.”

After another round of tapping, I asked him to rate how true the following sentence felt to him: “I CANNOT do anything without my mind.”  It was still very true, so we tapped down this limiting belief to 0 on a scale of 0 to 10.  Now the new belief was, “I CAN do everything without my mind.”

We tried the screw/unscrew movement and it worked fine for a while - about 40 seconds, then it stopped as before.  So this time he feared he could lose control over the body and the mind stopped the movement as a habit.  We tapped on Even though my mind has this f---ing habit…  A bit of swearing does the trick in EFT sometimes!  He said he still needed to be in control of everything, including how many objects there were in my room … and we tapped on this.

I then finally moved into early memories, which I had been postponing in the attempt to be more gentle.  I asked him who might have influenced this need of control in his life.  The answer was - his father.  All of his traumas are related to his father, who used to control everything, and never listened to his heart.  Notice how these were the same things that Daniel was doing due to his condition.  These same things, he was criticizing his father for having done.  

We tapped on an event in which he felt a number of negative emotions - rejection, anger, guilt, shame.  In this childhood event he stood still in front of a statue because he was absorbed by its beauty and he was told off by his father because he was delaying them, and because he ended up in the middle of the street.  This and other events made the following true in his life:

• He didn’t deserve anything beautiful
• No one could have a positive emotion towards him
• He was repeatedly being told he was clumsy … sleepy … not able to do anything.  So that was the vision he had about himself.

When we ended the first session, I asked him to try the screw/unscrew movement and that was moving freely and continuously.  But he still could not bear to receive a compliment.  According to him no one could have a positive feeling by looking at him.  We closed the session and we scheduled another for the following week.  I gave him some homework tapping.

Second session

I saw a major improvement during the first session.  This second session will be the real breakthrough though. He did not do any tapping in between the sessions.

The last sentence from him in the first session was that he was probably aware of what his blocks are, but he is afraid to remove them.  I asked him to elaborate on this sentence - what his blocks are and why he is afraid to remove them.  He said, “I am not sure whether my block is my will not to move forward.  Moving means pain.”  

He also saw this overflow of information from the brain as blocking him.  So to him the following sentence was very true, “Too much energy blocks you.”  He also said that words were too important for him and he never really listened to himself.  We tapped on all of this with acceptable results.  He then felt he could channel this overflow somehow in other directions.

We tapped on moving forward and on the fear of doing so.  We then went to another key sentence from the first session, “A perfect me … never taken into consideration”.  This was influenced by his father and a "statue event" came up.  It involved feeling misunderstood, in which the father didn’t want to see that his observing the statue was a positive quality rather than a defect.  We tapped this to 0 on a scale of 0 to 10.  This same event contained guilt, as he had put himself in danger during the event.  We tapped this down to 0 out of 10 as well.

We then moved to other events in which he was “not loving himself enough” and there were quite a few.  I used the Tell the Story Technique and my adapted “splitting the voices” technique to be thorough on every one of them.  Daniel’s father died recently and did not want to say sorry, not even before dying.  That had been a devastating blow to Daniel.

At the end of the second session, his screw/unscrew movement was free and continuous, his voice was noticeably changed, and his mood … big genuine smiles for the first time.  And his handshake … before I felt I was afraid of squeezing his hand but this time he squeezed mine before going home.

We had a number of sessions over the phone after this.  We moved back to his body to verify the fluidity of the movements.  He was feeling pain in the right side, particularly in the legs.  This time the emotion was fear.  We brought up another event on the past, and again we tapped on it. There was both anger and fear in this event, which we tapped on.

Then we headed for the body and we tapped to change his posture.  When I asked him to move into his new posture, he said he couldn’t so we tapped even more, until he finally could.  I asked him to rate how unfamiliar the new posture seemed to him on a scale of 0 to 10 and he said it was 10 out of 10.  We tapped this down to 0 out of 10.  This new body posture helped him welcome feelings of joy and courage.

We closed the 6th and seemingly the last session and we are both very happy with the results. Serious diseases are a rewarding path.  They might take longer, but they give the same feeling of achievement of reaching the top of a mountain.  Daniel will now go on with the Personal Peace Procedure, calling me fortnightly or monthly.

Love and Peace.

Eros Biasiolo