By Sonia Novinsky

I want to talk about a difficult beginning of a treatment of a "schizophrenic" patient, that nobody imagined could be successful. Psychiatrist and family were skeptical about therapy and only medications were tried.

Victor arrived in my office in a very dramatic situation. He was a boy of 15 years old. His grandmother brought him to my office, as her last hope. Because even medication he was not taking anymore.

He had left school, he stayed on the computer for 16-20 hours a day, he didn't talk with his mother and grandmother, he was not able to eat or take a shower anymore. He was so thin it was as though he was living in a concentration camp as a prisoner.

He was diagnosed first as schizophrenic by many MDs. His mother was adopted by her grandmother, but nobody told anything about this to him. His mother was bi-polar presenting convulsions when angry. His father left the house when he was born. The result was that at home, mother and grandmother had a hard time, fighting a lot everyday, screaming and blaming one another. Talking with these two ladies I understood how much this boy was suffering.

The difficulty was that Victor was completely withdrawn, he couldn't talk, move, even take a seat by himself. It felt as if he couldn't occupy a place in the space of my office.

Since the first session we stayed in silence for many minutes, my invitation to work having no resonance on him. I saw him maybe 4 times, till we could start a real verbal conversation. The only thing he answered me was a yes with his head when I said to him, do you want to come back? Am I helping you?

My experience and my heart told me that I needed to guess what was going on and to trust my intuition, because only after some results were achieved would he be feeling better and would he start a conversation.

After talking with his grandmother and his mother, I understood that this was a boy who had not the opportunity to have a gesture of his own. Living with two disabled women, one physically, the other psychologically, who pressured him all the time to be a good boy, he didn't have space to say no, space to practice to the normal negativity children need to develop to be able to leave their traces in the world they find and trust themselves.

This extreme isolation and withdrawal was a defense Victor had created for having to develop a too early concern about the adults that were supposed to raise and educate him. Having not the chance to really be a child and practice his own creativity, for fear of destroying the fragile environment in which he lived, he started destroying himself, at the same time using isolation as a protection against all demands and invasions he received from the outside world.

I will just make a short version of what we did together in the beginning of this treatment, which was responsible for bringing him back to life again. I must say that he is a lot better now, after one year, and what is interesting is that his MD changed the diagnosis, saying to me "as he responded so well to the treatment maybe my diagnosis was not so accurate, because if he really was schizophrenic he couldn't be so better as he is now". So, as the treatment had success the MD diagnosis changed to schizoid deviation F21 from CID X . This is a strange kind of logic psychiatrists sometimes have.

In the first session I started just tapping on him in silence, opening myself to his feelings, and after some rounds what came up to me, was no hope. Without making any sound, I tapped sometimes on him, sometimes in a surrogate way in myself:

Even though I feel I have no hope of feeling better, I deeply and completely accept myself and forgive me for what I could have done to contribute to this feeling.

He looked at my eyes, as if he felt himself understood.

Then what came up to me was: wish to die. Silently I tap for this, using the same strategy, no sound. Same look from him.

After some tappings of this nature and some sessions like this, where I just tapped in silence for what my intuition said to me to tap, I asked him if he was feeling shame, and for the he first time he said yes. Meanwhile, his grandmother told me he started eating some, taking a shower once in while, and saying some words sometimes. I tried to measure this shame by visual signs, what he did, so not asking him to talk more than he was able at that moment. It was a strong shame.

We tap for shame (even though I am feeling all this shame....)

We could together identify, almost without talking: shame of my body, shame of having this mother and grandmother, shame of not having friends, and the origin of this shame came out: in one day at school he tried to play with some colleagues and they laughed at him, at the class also they laughed at him, he tried to talk with a girl and she laughed at him. In different times they laughed at his clothes, behavior, glasses, his strange mother, etc. Another time he tried to play soccer and they laughed again, always saying cruel words.

These were specific events that helped the installation of this withdrawn quality in his behavior. We tapped for each of them, and after this we could start a verbal conversation.

I always started our sessions doing silent tapping waiting for what comes up to me, sometimes when I felt it could be said, I said what was my intuition about his emotions.

One day when we were more comfortable with each other, I asked him about fear of doing things, going out of the house, and he could verbalize that he felt afraid because his mother used to scream and have nervous breakdowns and convulsions each time he did something wrong since he was a little boy. He said he felt enormous fear, like 10 on the 0-10 intensity scale, of her nervous attacks, because she had to take medications and stay in bed for days. We tapped for some specific events about his mother hitting him and yelling at him for many things she didn't like that he did or said.

We tapped, for example: even though I feel fear of my body vitality and aliveness because when I was a little boy and I behaved myself in a supposed wrong way as that day in the kitchen when my mother had a nervous breakdown and could even have died, I really and completely accept myself. (we tap for fear of my body aliveness and vitality, for belief that if I fully live my mother could die, for if I choose to be vital she won't stand for it).

This was the start of a longer treatment, but he never was so near to death as he was when he arrived to my office. He is doing computer jobs for some clients now, helping other people with their computers, he manages a group discussion in the internet about games, and he is able to say no to his mother and grandmother when he really wants something instead of withdrawing completely.

Sonia Novinsky