Her husband cheated on her with her best friend. She’d been with him for decades, but she’d known her best friend even longer. They had been friends since they were both young teenage girls.

I asked her to close her eyes and to fully associate with her pain, grief and misery.

“How strong is it? Zero you can’t feel it, ten it’s really strong. Give me a number.”

“It’s a twenty,” she said. There was a slight tremble in her legs.

“Can you make it stronger? The stronger you can make it, the faster it will go away.”

She nodded, and we got to work.

First, I pulled her out of her anger with various directed focus techniques. I then directed her attention on something that brought her peace and relaxation. She liked walking in the woods with her dog, she said.

“You a winter person?” I asked. She said she was. “Make it winter then. The air is cold and crisp. You can smell the fallen leaves turning back to earth. There is a crunch with every step. The world is still.”

We went back into her anger again. “Notice what’s changed. Notice what hasn’t,” I said.

“I gave him the best years of my life!” she quickly said.

Thus began the process again. However, this time, I had her imagine she was curled up on her couch watching her favorite BBC drama a week or two before the holidays. She liked that, but I could tell she was only half way out of her anger, so I told her my favorite Bob Mortimer joke:

“Hey hey hey!” I snapped my fingers to have her open her eyes. “So I was walking in a cemetery this morning to stretch my legs before work, and a man suddenly sat upright on the other side of a tombstone. Just about scared the ever-loving life out of me.”

She looked at me, confused.

“But I straightened up and managed to say ‘Mornin’!’ to him.

“But you know what he said? He looked at me and replied, ‘No, just taking a shit.’”

Her eyes widened and she burst out laughing, realizing the man behind the grave thought I’d said mourning instead of morning.

God bless you Bob Mortimer.

We did some more directed focus techniques and her anger quickly turned to sadness. A good sign. Whenever emotions shift, even if they shift to something negative, it’s a sign things are quickly changing. The brain is unwrapping and letting go of the pain, layer by layer. The neurons are updating.

I grabbed her some tissues and got her brain back to a peaceful state.

However, the next time I had her go back in, the anger returned.

“How’d you do that? What’s going on in there?” I asked.

“They lied to me! For years and years, they both lied to me!”

I smiled at her sympathetically. So much about a person is revealed by their word choice. In my line of work, everything that comes out of a person’s mouth is about them.

I looked her in the eyes before I had her tap, and I asked her: “And you lied to yourself too, didn’t you? You lied to yourself about how happy you were.”

The rage returned to grief, and all she could do was nod as her body silently shook with quiet sobs.

I brought her out of it with a few more rounds and the emotional intensity got down to a one. I then had her look at each and every aspect of the memory to make sure more wasn’t hiding somewhere: When she discovered the text messages between them, what she imagined them doing, the faces they made when they texted each other, what she imagined they thought of her, etc. Her emotions rose a few more times, but quickly returned to zero.

Her brain’s biggest struggle was that she had lied to herself for so long. Everything else was a blip on the radar after that.

When we could no longer bring back any anger or depression, I knew the job was done. The red flush in her body was gone. Her breathing was slow and deep.

For many memories, I have my clients actively change the story so their brain won’t anticipate a similar situation occurring again in the future (memory rewriting isn’t about lying to yourself, it’s about changing what you think will happen again in the future. I’ll talk about why at some point). However, I knew her brain would never accept any changes to this story, but something needed to be done to solidify peace.

So I opted for just a slight reframe.

I had her close her eyes and imagine being relieved when she found out that her husband was leaving her. She no longer had to lie to herself. She no longer had to play any games. She could pursue the men she wanted to be with. She could finally do the things that she wanted to do and travel to the places she wanted to go. Her story was now 100% hers and no one else’s, and it always would be.

Her brain liked that. It liked it a lot.

I ended the session.

She stood up, smiling. Insisted on hugging me. Insisted on tipping me (I declined), and went about her day.

She left feeling lighter, happier, and more at peace than she had ever felt before, and she continues to feel nothing but gratitude for her divorce.

It only took 30 minutes.

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If you’re carrying something heavy within you—be it grief, rage, or betrayal—know that change is possible. You don’t have to carry it forever.

If you haven’t already done so, check out my testimonials page. The process works. You just have to be willing to do the work.

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