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Walking Your Blues Away Is a Simple, Effective Therapy

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He'd come to an intellectual understanding of how toxic his relationship was, but he hadn't been able to translate that into an emotional resolution. As a result, he spent hours every day obsessively thinking about this disintegrating relationship, to the point where it was interfering with virtually every other aspect of his life.

I told the client about my discovery of this simple Walking Your Blues Away system and suggested that he try it, asking him to report back to me how many minutes or miles it took him to resolve things, if that happened. He called me two days later to say it had taken him exactly seventeen minutes of steady walking, and that he could now pronounce himself "cured."

Emboldened by this success, I began recommending this system to all of my consulting clients. Because my practice is based almost entirely on doing short-term telephone consultations, mostly teaching NeuroLinguistic Programming techniques, with psychology-industry professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, teachers, and coaches, I fortunately had a group of people who could easily understand the concept I was suggesting. And while my consulting is positioned as teaching and problem solving, at least half of the professionals who contact me for consultation are looking for techniques and ideas to resolve problems in their own lives as much as for their clients' lives and situations.

Every person I've shared this technique with, and who did it correctly (as opposed to listening to music while you walk or stopping to browse store windows, both of which interrupt the process), got resolution of his or her problem in less than a half hour. A few had to repeat the process for a few days in a row to wipe clear the final traces of emotional charge around an incident. It has not yet failed to work.

One of the mental health professionals who'd been in a class I taught on this technique about six months after 9/11 wrote to me about her personal use of it. Her husband travels frequently on business, and she'd been so severely traumatized by watching the video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center buildings over and over again that she was having regular nightmares and daily panic attacks whenever her husband was traveling by plane.

"I took the walk you suggested," she emailed me."The walk did produce the hoped-for 'flattening' of the trauma of 9/11 and the resultant terror. Total time was about 20 minutes. I walked comfortably and observed nature around me, and drew in joy from the sights--and sounds--I encountered: a chipmunk staring back at me, the incredible call of an eagle overhead (I even spotted him!), the gentle 'moo' of the cows I passed."

She added that she'd still get anxiety "twinges" sometimes when Bush administration officials went on TV to talk about how "in danger" we all are. But she had anchored the "healing" experience of the walk with the music she played in her headset when she took the initial walk to deal with her daily anxiety attacks. The result was that, as she reported, "There have been tiny zaps of recurrence of the fear. When they pop up I hum the music, and the fear leaves. I believe that the recurrences have more to do with the fact that my husband is again traveling extensively than being spurred by the original trauma, and he and I are developing strategies to cope [with that separation anxiety]."

Upon further questioning, I learned that the fear this woman was describing around her husband's travels now have more to do with the normal and generalized concern for a loved one who is away--and the normal feelings of missing one's lover and friend. They no longer were rooted in 9/11 anxiety at all. The walking experience had "healed" the 9/11 anxiety.

She added, "Thank you so very much for planting this [knowledge]! I'm now also using it in other such situations!"

Another professional in the mental health field for whom I'd done consulting work sent me a note that he was planning to try the Walking Your Blues Away technique after reading a rough first draft of this book.

"As you know," wrote Bob, "I have a big PTSD issue over the treatment I received from my uncle after my father died, and his cheating and stealing from the estate over a million dollars, which left me financially insecure."

He mentioned that he had done EMDR when his father died, and it helped him tremendously with the grieving process, "but the real trauma came when I couldn't stop, but only delay, my uncle from ripping me off!" His uncle had not only failed to notify Bob of the impending death of his father, but had actively been taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the family business as well.

"This has taken the life and energy out of me," Bob wrote. "While the anger rants walking around the house and most of the nightmares about it have decreased from several times a week to very occasional, I can get worked up about it in a few seconds if I think about it.

"I just don't have the energy or spirit to continue [living with] this level of PTSD. I'm literally worn out from worry and regrets about it. I'm hoping this walking process will help me to put the feelings that suck the life and energy out of me into the past, and allow me to go forward without the drain on my energy and motivation."

A week later Bob wrote to me again, after having tried the technique.

"I found that I was able to keep the issue floating in my head about 10 to 12 minutes of the entire walk to various degrees," he wrote. "I then 'felt' it under the surface as I looked at the new houses with for sale signs in front of them or people out in their yard in the evening. ... Compared to what happened when I worked on this problem when I first became aware of it with EMDR in 1993, the difference was pronounced.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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