Karen gave me a call after her friend who is a psychiatrist had given her my name. When she called she explained to me Kevin, her husband of 12 years had lost every one of his eight clients in a matter of six months and had ramped up his marketing but it was to no avail.
On the other hand, Karen’s practice continued to do well and she was even talking about having to bring someone in to help her with the over load. She made no effort to market her business whatsoever.
At first it wasn’t a major issue, but after a couple of months had passed Kevin began to act sullen, then angry, then made passive aggressive statements and eventually began to demean Karen’s business telling her how it wasn’t a real business.
Of course as an observer, almost every would recognize the signals. Kevin was threatened by Karen’s success and felt guilty for not being able to keep up with what he felt was his responsibility in taking care of them financially.
We talked on the phone about the NESTing process and she agreed if she were to save her marriage, she’d have to do something drastic and to do it rapidly. She was loosing sleep over the stress and beginning to suffer heath symptoms that were related to the stress.
I asked to meet with Kevin alone to obtain a baseline from his perspective. Once we began to talk, he relaxed and told me how frustrated he was with not being able to bring any clients.
When I asked him what he thought about being abusive with Karen he looked at me as though I was talking a foreign language.
I asked if he would mind telling me about his conversations with Karen over the previous two days. As he recited the abbreviated versions he started to sit up more straight. After a few minutes he stopped, looked down at his hands on his lap and shook his head.
“I never realized . . .” he broke off and was obviously chocking on the emotions which were welling up from the realization he was facing.
I asked if he was ready to change his reactions he just nodded.
First I had showed him the finger rubbing process and how he could identify his “yes” from his “no”.
I began to ask him a list of questions about whether the primary issue had happened from the age of one to five, five to ten and by using Applied Kinesiology or muscle testing (more details in the Tool Box chapter).
His arm weakened when I asked him if it was from five to ten. I asked if he knew what the incident was. At first he didn’t remember what it could have been.
Then when I asked if it was a woman he remembered as though he was living though the experience all over again.
He was nine years old and his teacher asked him to stand in front of the class and read his homework assignment. He hadn’t finished the assignment so when he got to the end of what he had written he began to improvise.
It was obvious to the teacher he was reading and she told him so. He had been so nervous he urinated in his pants in front of the whole class.
Of course he was mortified. He couldn’t make himself go back to school for over a week and only then because his mother walked him in and stayed in the class room with him all morning.
He never actually dealt with how he felt. He learned early on how to stuff his feelings so he wouldn’t feel the pain. By the time he married his first wife; he was completely shut down and found the means to go through the motions of being in the relationship without risking any emotions being revealed.
We checked to see the ranking of the event by rubbing his fingers and it was a nine. We first worked on the logic of how he responded to the incident at school.
It took about twenty minutes and five rounds to get the indication to reduce to a one.
Then we worked on the emotional response and brought it from an eight to a zero in six rounds and thirty minutes.
We talked for a few minutes about how he was feeling without the event being present in his body. He felt light headed and tired.
We talked again a week later and he said he continued to feel calm and had been going out and prospecting for new clients.
About three weeks he called to tell me he had just signed a new client. He called again nearly every week for two months to tell me he had signed another new client.
A year later Kevin and Karen bought a new house and she called to tell me they were acting like a couple of teenagers and falling in love all over again.