The following is a brief description of some of the people who have been helped by this therapy. If I were to give it a name, it probably would be the Get Real Therapy. Through confronting the very emotions people do not want to feel, I help people get real with their past, thereby gaining freedom. I do not even need to know your stories. Unlike conventional therapies, I can work content free. Some of the clients worked through their issues without me even knowing what they went through. These are some of the stories that will hopefully touch you and encourage you to gain freedom too.

Fear of flying

A man with fear of flying came to see me just a few days before he had to fly interstate to his mother’s funeral. When he sat down, I asked him to close his eyes and imagine himself being 30,000 ft high in a plane, whereupon he got very anxious and started hyperventilating, telling me he had heart palpitations and said that he was going to have a panic attack. I told him to open his eyes and in the next five minutes I learned of an original event which I believed to be the root cause. I got him to confront and release his original fear. The entire process took less than ten minutes, twenty seconds of which were extremely intense. Four days later, he called me from interstate and said that not only did he have no problem on the flight, he was able to stand by a tall bridge and look down without throwing up or running away.

Sexual Dysfunction 1

A woman who had had a string of failed relationships came to see me because she had met the man of her dream but knew that unless she fixed her sexual problem, he would just be another ex in due time. She knew she had been molested at the age of five because she remembered her stepfather going to jail and talking to the police and the counsellor, but she did not remember the molestation. Despite this, I helped her work through her current problem of fear of imminent death whenever she had sex (unconsciously retained from the original trauma, when, presumably she had been threatened with death, hence the lack of recalled memory). She scheduled another session the following week but called me the next Monday to cancel it as she had had sex over the weekend without feeling like she was going to die, for the first time in her life!

Sexual Dysfunction 2

A woman came to see me for her inability to achieve an orgasm. She was (as often is the case) sexually assaulted in her teens. However, she told me that she had had years of counselling and felt that she truly had dealt with the past, had forgiven her aggressors and had moved on. Yet in therapy, she was still able to feel the emotions of the assault. In this case, what had happened was that she had ‘dealt with’ the past on a rational, conscious level, but not on an unconscious level. After just one session, she sent me an email telling me she had the ‘icing on the cake’, that is, an orgasm.

Sexual Dysfunction 3

A woman came to see me for self-esteem issues. In therapy, she told me that she and her husband had been in sexual therapy for over eighteen months but their sex was still non-existent, not that it bothered her, except for the guilt, hence the low self-esteem. She saw me for one session and referred her husband to see me. Even before her husband came, she told me that her sex life was not only happening but was actually ‘good’. Her issue was an unconscious association between sex and guilt, having grown up in a strict Catholic home. She also commented to me that sexual therapy with husband and wife together hindered her from being real with her emotions, which was possible with the one-on-one session that I had with her.

Sexual Dysfunction 4

A man came to see me for his inability to maintain an erection. Ironically, as in most cases, it was the very fear and worry that he was not able to maintain an erection that caused his problem. In therapy, I got him to confront and release the fear and at the end of the session, he was no longer able to feel the fear again. He had gained confidence of his sexuality. His confidence led him to enjoy a better sex life.

OCD 1

A woman came to see me for clinically diagnosed OCD which she had had for years and had not gained any results after years of psychotherapy. She had to get out of bed a certain way, pack her children’s lunch a certain way and had many other similar obsessive compulsive behaviours. She had even driven back to her children’s school, crawled under the classroom window, opened her daughter’s school bag, tipped the lunch out and repack the lunch in a particular way, because she would otherwise have had anxiety all day! After one session, she called to book her sister in (for bulimia) and told me that she had been deliberately doing things the ‘wrong’ way and it had not bothered her one bit.

OCD 2

A young man came to see me for always taking fifteen to twenty minutes to get out of the house by repeatedly going back to check the taps, the stove, the fridge door, the lock and so on. After just one session, he was totally free of the problem.

Relationship 1

A man came to see me originally to make sure he was doing the right thing by leaving his wife, so he would not feel any guilt. He told me that he had had an affair and had moved out of the family home but was wrecked with guilt because he still loved his wife of over twenty years, who had an illness that could take her life any moment, but that could also see her into old age. He had moved back home, having made a commitment to his wife a few months back, but the intimacy was not happening and he felt it would never improve, so he wanted to move out again, once and for all, but without guilt. I was able to ascertain that had the sex been restored, he felt his marriage would have been restored. Though he did not think it possible for that to happen, for they had already been to see a counsellor and had worked on the sexual issue, to no avail, I was able to help him, and then his wife, in separate sessions, to release each person’s own anguish and tensions, with a view of scheduling a joint session. Before the joint session was scheduled, the wife called me on Sunday (the individual sessions were on Wednesday and Friday) and told me that they now felt like they did when they first met! I had helped them to release their tensions and re-establish positive associations. Two years later, I bumped into the husband in a car park and he told me that they were still happily married.

Relationship 2

A woman came to see me for depression because her husband had left her for another woman. It transpired that she had had a car accident eighteen months earlier and was in hospital on and off for six months, with much pain in many parts of her body. Throughout this time, of course, the husband had given her comfort. But unbeknown to them both, these physical touches had become associated with negativity, so that even though she had not felt pain for over a year, her husband had by then stopped wanting to touch her. This is a common problem of negative ‘anchoring’. I helped her deal with her emotions and explained the unconscious dynamics in touch, voice and demeanour. Three years later, I bumped into her in a shop and she told me that she applied all the anchoring techniques I taught her and her husband was now back with her and that their sex was great again.

Relationship 3

A mother called to book her seventeen year old son in for anger management. I explained that I could only work with what the boy wanted to work with and that client confidentiality precluded me from discussing our sessions with her. She agreed. The young man came in with an unfriendly attitude, slouching on the chair. I asked him if he knew why he was sent to me, he replied, “yeah, mum thinks I have an anger problem”. I asked him if he thought he did. He said, “nope, mum has an anger problem. She should be here instead of me.” I told him that since mum had paid for the session, he may as well use it for whatever he wanted to improve on. He thought about it and told me he would like to have more confidence with girls and maybe more focus on his studies as well. I worked with him on those issues. Three days later, the mother called and said, “Sophie, I don’t know what you’ve done with him but he’s been an angel these last few days.” What did I do? I helped the young man deal with his own inner frustrations, fears and worries and his anger was only a symptom of his inner struggles.