She had refused school for 2 months. Nobody knew what to do anymore.

Finally in, she completely refused to speak with me. She just sat there motionless and ignored me.

The only thing I got her to do was scribble on a piece of paper that she didn’t want to be here with me.

That doesn’t deter me. Been there, done that. There is always a way to break through to a child.

In her case I eventually found it. The key was a boy she liked. I asked her whether he would think it was cool that she was afraid of school and wasn’t showing up. That softened her up a bit. She said no.

Our second session began completely differently. She arrived and said:

“I am ready. Let’s work.”

I hadn’t forced her to do anything. She felt the respect and genuine interest I had in her.

I had her visualize herself walking to school. As she got closer, her fear intensified. She said it was a black shadow in her left thigh. Her breathing quickened. Noise, children everywhere, narrow corridors. The classroom door closing behind her. Now she could barely breathe.

Everyone had been treating school refusal. Nobody found the real cause. This was a form of claustrophobia. In the crowded corridors and closed classroom, surrounded by all those stimuli, Leah felt physically trapped. The school wasn’t the problem. The walls were the problem.

I had her visualize pushing the walls further apart.

We also visualized turning down dials for her sensitivity to noise and movement.

And I had her experience a strong feeling of being loved.

What sounds like a childish gimmick was in reality a direct intervention in Leah’s nervous system.

The Walls: To Leah’s nervous system, walls ten feet away felt like they were pressing against her skin. By “pushing” them back in her mind, she reset her internal sensors and told her brain to stop reporting a collision.

The Dials: Leah was suffering from sensory flooding. Using the dials was a form of biofeedback. It gave her a way to manually tell her nervous system to filter out the noise and movement of the classroom.

The Love: Oxytocin is the biological off-switch. By flooding her body with that feeling, she physically prevented her brain from firing the “Trap” alarm.

Nothing in the school changed. But she changed the signals her brain was receiving.

That week she went back to school.

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A single painful bathroom experience can be enough to seed fear and start the issue of refusing to use the toilet. His parents had tried various remedies, osteopathy, and a full year with a child psychologist, but Max still refused.

Younger children have limited attention spans, so I had to keep it short. In our first session I used a concept called the Tummy Slide. Max visualized a slide inside his body. At the top, a PooPoo Ferrari wearing a red helmet, ready to zoom down.

I asked Max whether sliding was fun when you kept getting stopped.

He paused. Something shifted in how he was looking at it.

In the second session we worked on the fear of pain itself. He said it was a red, white and brown lump in his stomach. But when we tried to remove it, Max blocked. He wasn’t ready.

I tried a different approach.

He always came to sessions with his favorite action figures: Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America and Thor.

I turned to Spiderman and asked him directly whether he had any fear of going to the toilet.

Of course not, said Spiderman. He wasn’t afraid of anything.

Max went quiet. His pride had been activated.

He allowed Spiderman to help him remove the lump in his tummy. Eyes closed, he watched Spiderman shoot webs at it, pull it out, and crush it.

His mother reported that Max had gone to the toilet voluntarily for the first time in months.

We were making progress but weren’t quite there yet.

In our next session Max described a stuck door. In his bottom. Jammed shut.

His fear of pain was still too strong and he blocked again. This time he didn’t really want to participate.

So I turned to his action figures again. I took Hulk. He whispered something in my ear.

Max was intrigued.

I told him that Hulk had told me a secret. That he also had a stuck door. That he had been holding back going to the toilet so long that he had turned green.

I remember how this four-year-old leapt out of his chair. He grabbed Hulk, held him up to his face, and said:

“Hulk! But you’re so strong and brave!”

We spent several minutes encouraging Hulk. Telling him he could do it. That he was strong enough. Hulk opened his door. He said he felt much better.

Then Hulk offered to help Max in return.

Max closed his eyes. He watched Hulk use his full strength to open the door in his bottom.

This was the breakthrough.

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Celine (7) had developed a fear of all kinds of animals.

Eyes closed, I asked her to describe her inner world to me. The second she arrived, she gasped.

“There is blood on the ground.”

Together we investigated this scene further. Celine saw herself in a forest during a kindergarten trip. The group came across a bloodstain with some fur. Her teacher told the kids it may have been a fox that ate a rabbit.

A simple sentence that landed hard in a seven-year-old’s mind.

From that moment on, Celine was afraid the fox might come back for her.

We visualized returning to the forest, protected inside a bubble, floating above the trees. Celine landed near the fox’s den.

She called out to him. He came out.

She asked him if he had killed the rabbit.

He admitted it.
But also explained why.

He explained to Celine that unlike her, he couldn’t just go to the grocery store to buy food. And he said he had been very hungry on that day after many days of not finding anything to eat. He also shared with her that he had a family back in his den that relied on him to find food.

While these scenes are playing in her mind, Celine began to understand that the fox never had any intention of harming her.

The fox apologised.
She forgave him.

I had Celine return from the forest back to her inner world.

The bloodstain on the ground was gone.

This session lasted just 35 minutes. The fear was gone. And it didn’t come back.

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I worked with him twice. Things improved quickly. His self-confidence grew, school became easier, and he even started helping other kids by sharing some of the things he had learned himself.

Two years later, he was back.

Math had become a source of constant stress.

One day he could do it fine. The next, it was completely gone, as if everything he had learned had vanished overnight.

Dyscalculia was suspected, never confirmed. Teachers had changed multiple times. The anxiety had started spreading into other subjects.

But math was where it concentrated.

I had him visualize math as a person.

He described a somewhat intimidating figure with weird skin. But kind.

They had a conversation. The figure was enthusiastic about numbers and shared some of that with Melvin.

The goal wasn’t to teach math.

It was to change how math felt.

Melvin also sensed that some of his “hardware” wasn’t working properly.

He visualized his body and brain. We checked for cables, wires, memory cards, processors.

Of course we don’t literally “fix the brain.” But we do give a child a way to experience competence again.

Melvin replaced outdated parts. Installed faster connections. Upgraded his “thinking system.”

All in his imagination. But very real in how it felt.

His mother later told me the shift had been immediate.

Math was no longer just stress.
It had settled. Become manageable.

He also fell asleep more easily.

And something else happened that was remarkable:

In the weeks after, Melvin grew by about 3 cm.

There are several plausible reasons for this.

Children under stress often carry a surprising amount of physical tension.
When that releases, posture changes—more upright, more open. That alone can account for part of it.

He was also sleeping better. Growth happens during sleep.

And children don’t grow in a straight line. They grow in bursts.
It’s possible this simply coincided with one.

Still, I’ve seen this pattern a few times. Especially with boys.

When internal pressure drops, the body sometimes follows.

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Anna (8) came to me because of nightmares and fears. It had started a few months around the time her mother had gone into hospital for the birth her sister.

Eyes closed, we visualized that moment roughly two hours after falling asleep and uncovered two fears:

First: aliens abducting her. She described them precisely. Ten of them. One eye each. Two snail-like antennae. They wanted to take her on their spaceship for slave labor. Lazy creatures, these aliens, she noted.

Second: a feeling of being alone and unprotected. Her father at work. Her mother gone to hospital.

Then I told Anna something important:

Aliens can’t stand laughter. They are allergic to it. They shrink immediately when someone laughs at them.

It was time to chase them away permanently.

Anna went quiet. She prepared.

Then she started laughing. Loudly and for a long time.

I joined in of course.

Anna described how the aliens grew smaller and smaller, making squeaking sounds, scrambling frantically back toward their spaceship. Because she had laughed so hard and so long, even the spaceship had shrunk. Smaller and smaller, until it completely vanished with a final poof.

We checked her room and all her dreams. Not an alien anywhere.

The aliens were gone. But underneath was still the feeling of loneliness.

I had her visualize a remote control and a TV screen. When she turned on the TV, she could see her mother in the hospital. She waved to her and told Anna she was thinking about her. She would be back soon. Anna said she could feel her love and warmth in her belly.

That image, her mother present, safe, and thinking of her, was what she needed. Once she could hold this image vividly, her mother safe and thinking of her, the loneliness lost its grip.

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This time was different.

Conflicts at home and school. Lying about homework. Provoking classmates.
A restlessness that hadn’t been there before.

He arrived at my practice with no interest in being there. It took a while to get him on side.

I wanted to understand what was happening inside him. More specifically, which parts of his personality had pushed their way to the front, and why. So, I took him to a theater.

Eyes closed, I had him visualize himself in the front row of a theatre. The best seat in the house, right in front of the stage.

I asked him to think about his behavior over the past weeks.

The curtain went up.

I asked him who was standing on the stage.

He described five versions of himself.

Louie who causes trouble.
Louie who lies.
Louie who doesn’t listen.
Louie who is scared.
Louie who is annoyed and angry.

Children know exactly which sides have taken over if you give them the right stage.

We went through each one systematically. Touch him, feel where he lives in the body, ask why he’s there, find out what he needs before he’ll leave.

The angry Louie needed a place to cool down. We gave him a one-year pass to the swimming pool.

The Louie who didn’t listen wanted 100 packets of crisps.

Scared Louie didn’t just want a holiday. He wanted to relocate permanently to Spain. We arranged it.

Lying Louie drove the hardest bargain. We started with one bar of dark chocolate, but he held out. And eventually walked away with one thousand bars of white chocolate and the promise that he’d be busy for a very long time.

The troublemaker requested a huge bag of cookies. Louie had to help carry it because it was so heavy.

One by one, each negative Louie left the theatre.

The key here wasn’t just sending them away.

It was that each one was fine where it went.

They had what they needed.
They weren’t being ignored or suppressed.

And parts that feel taken care of don’t keep forcing their way back to the front.

Then the curtain opened again.

Five different versions of Louis stepped onto the stage.

Kind Louie.
Listening Louie.
Brave Louie.
Truthful Louie.
Calm Louie.

He chose them himself. These were the sides of him that had been crowded out.

He stepped onto the stage and touched each one, holding the feeling until it was strong and clear in his body.

His entire body language was noticeably different. Calm. Settled.
Satisfied with himself in a way that hadn’t been there at the start.

His mother later described it as a switch flipping.

Not everything changed at once.
But she could feel the difference.

The Louie she knew was back and starting to take the lead again.

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Aggression, boundary violations, tyrannizing her siblings, sometimes running away and sending her mother into a panic. Her parents felt it wasn’t malicious. But relentless.

Finding the cause in this case turned out to be simple.

It had started the day Julia’s younger sister was born. Against this baby, tiny, irresistible, in need of attention, Julia couldn’t compete. So she fought for attention the only way she could find.

Sibling rivalry often has components of jealousy from the older sibling toward the younger. I worked with a combination of multiple visualization strategies I’ve developed over the years.

Eyes closed, I had her look at photos of herself in her mind. Every single one showed her sad or angry. She shot new ones from happy moments and replaced them.

Then, she visualized herself in the womb. As the baby of the family. And a number 2 on her forehead representing the age when that role should be passed on.

We travelled to the hospital, to the day her sister was born.

There she took the number 2 from her own forehead and placed it on her sister’s.

She passed the role of “baby of the family” to her younger sibling. On her own terms.

Next, we talked about what it meant to be the older sister. I had her focus especially on the benefits and privileges.

Who got to ride a bike first?
Who gets to go stay up a bit later?
Who gets to watch a movie for bigger kids first?

She realized being the older sibling had its perks.

With a magnifying glass I had Julia closely examine her parents’ hearts.

Both hearts, she said, contained exactly the same amount of love for her and for her sister. Precisely equal. She checked this through each year of her life. The same equal love, all the way through.

Julia sat with that for a moment. The jealousy had been unnecessary the whole time.

I could see by her expression that something shifted.

The days after our first session were uneven. That’s normal. There was a brief relapse before the second session.

After the second session her parents reported something they hadn’t seen in years: Julia being caring, taking responsibility for her little sister, looking out for her.

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Nino was twelve when he became a target of bullying.

Stomachache in the morning before going to school.
Then grades dropped.
His confidence collapsed.

By the time he came to me he was caught in the spiral that swallows bullied children: the more insecure he became, the easier target he became.

Eyes closed, we went looking for what was happening inside.

Nino found his mind full of circling thoughts.

Will something happen to me today?
Will they hurt me?
Why me?
What did I do?

He visualized pulling them out like a rope made of words and set them aside. This simple but powerful exercise did him good. I could see him visibly quiet down.

Then I asked him to describe all the feelings the bullying had left in his body.

• The threats the boys had made showed up as a poison-green knife in his back.

• The fear of being physically hurt locked his legs in place. Nino said it felt like being stuck to the ground, unable to run away.

• The dread of walking into the classroom sat on his right shoulder like a heavy iron plate.

I witnessed a fascinating physical reaction:
as he described this, his right arm began to tremble.

Together we worked through each of these feelings.

The most significant moment came when I asked him to visualize facing his bullies and asking them directly why they were doing this.

He got answers.

One was disappointed because he had left the football team. One admitted he was jealous of his superior skills. Another, a boy who had once hit him with a stick, told Nino he had done it to impress the other boys.

I pointed out that none of those answers were about him. Not one.

That realization landed.

Nino mentioned seeing cables. Sixteen he counted.

Invisible connections running between him and the boys who had been bullying him. This made sense. When you are negatively connected to someone in this way, they retain power over you — over how you think, how you feel, and how much energy you have available for your own life. It is a slow drain. A poison drip fed in small, regular doses.

He visualized pulling out all sixteen cables.

His head came up. His shoulders went back. The change in his posture was immediate and visible. I watched it happen right in front of me.

Before wrapping up the session I had him face each of the boys one more time with his new confidence. He told them calmly, that what they said or did no longer mattered to him. He would remain confident regardless.

This was the moment they lost their power over him now.

Nino’s mom had realistic expectations. Her biggest wish was simply that the remaining years in school would be more bearable.

What actually happened: he went back to school motivated, engaged, and proud of himself. Just one week later Nino got an A in German and an A+ in French. Best in class.

And the boys who had bullied him later became friends.

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Stress in new situations.
Fear of making mistakes.
Explosive anger.
Teeth grinding.

Behind the list was a child of striking contradictions. Deeply empathetic, honest, full of humor.

But also quick to explode, hard on herself, convinced she never did anything right.

Session 1

Eyes closed, we moved through her life from the very beginning. Looking for different feelings and where they had originated.

There were several feelings stored in her body. Anger, sadness, a fear of not being protected.

What we found at the centre was a protective shell. A sphere made of armored glass. Sina had built it around herself over the years. It was mostly intact. But cracked in places. A gap at the feet. A hole near the heart.

We found and reframed the moments where the cracks had formed. We repaired what could be repaired and replaced what needed replacing.

She left with a rainbow necklace and one homework assignment: Look at the drawing you made, hold your hands together, and feel that you are protected.

Session 2

The first few days after our first session Sina had been much calmer. Then the anger returned.

In session two we followed a thread that needed its own attention.

Mealtimes had always been a battleground. If the meal wasn’t to her liking or she had to wait, Sina became disproportionately distressed. We traced it back.

To the first hours of her life.

She had nearly starved in those hours. In her desperation she had sucked so hard on her father’s arm that she left marks. Then she refused the breast. Oddly only taking it only at night, when the world had quieted. The hunger had been real. The rage at waiting had been real. And somewhere in those first hours, hunger and anger had fused together in her nervous system. Every difficult mealtime since had been running on that template.

We worked with her lizard directly. The part of her that had decided waiting for food was a survival emergency. We helped it understand that the emergency was over.

Since she loved horses, I left her with an image to end the session. Sina visualized a stable. Then it was mealtime. No horse made any drama. No horse got upset or angry. Each and every horse patiently waited for Sina to give them each their portion of hay.

She drew herself absorbing patience and calm from a horse. Her lizard was in the drawing too.

What came after.

A few weeks later I got an email from Sina’s mom:

I wanted to thank you once more for what you did. Sina seems so happy and carefree in a way I have not seen before. This change is incredible. She can now take criticism calmly without taking everything so much to heart. She talks to her friends and teachers about her experiences and feelings and receives a lot of positive feedback. The harshness and being strict with herself and others is practically gone. She can finally enjoy her life. I am so grateful to you. THANK YOU.

And a fantastic picture. Sina had built a house for her lizard.

I almost always give kids a small plush lizard.

It sounds simple. But for a child who has just spent an hour getting to know their own protection mechanism, having something tangible to hold matters a lot.

Giving it a name, having a conversation with it, helping it understand.

This becomes so much more than a toy. It’s a reminder that the part of them that reacts, that protects, that sometimes overreacts is not the enemy. It’s a true friend that has their best interest at heart.

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This wasn’t just a kid resisting books. In his case it was a genuine struggle. Years of letters behaving wrongly, words coming out strange, classmates laughing.

The first thing he told me:

I can’t read. I am stupid.

Eyes closed, we took a closer look inside his body.

The pathways from his eyes looked completely twisted to him.

He wondered whether that might be why he confused certain letters. It might well be, I told him.

We followed the reading pathway inward. The place where letters should arrive and be processed, his Letter Room. This definitely wasn’t where it was supposed to be. He felt it lower down, somewhere in his throat.

This is something I see regularly in children with learning difficulties. The processing feels displaced, as if the signal is taking a longer route than necessary.

He imagined moving the letter room up to its correct position, the upper left part of his head. It immediately felt right, Jonas said.

Inside the letter room, we found the machine.

In the center was a letter wheel. Letters fell in, were sorted, and travelled by cables — some to the mouth for speaking, some to the writing hand. The whole system, explained by a ten-year-old with the precision of an engineer.

The wheel had stopped turning. The letters p, g, and n had fallen out and jammed it. He immediately understood why those three were the ones he consistently dropped or mispronounced.

He fixed the wheel himself. Decided the cables were too thin and installed thicker ones so the words could travel more reliably to his mouth and hand.

Then he found the hole in the ceiling of his Letter Room. Information was being stored and immediately leaking back out. He repaired that too.

We tested the machine. Words with p, g and n specifically. Penguin. Garden. Napkin.

He said each one, watching in his imagination as the letters sorted themselves correctly through the wheel and into words.

No trace of I can’t or I feel stupid.

His perspective had shifted completely. The machine had been broken. He had fixed it. Of course the letters weren’t working — it wasn’t him, it was the machine.

I spoke to his mother afterwards. Even when a blockage is resolved, the skill itself still needs practice. Reading fluently takes time and practice. The machine being repaired doesn’t replace the hours of reading required.

Jonas understood. He went home and chose his first book to read that evening.

Harry Potter.

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Eyes closed, she found herself in her inner world facing a herd of horses. Her favorite was black and white. She named it Lena. Lena stayed with her for the entire session.

In sessions I sometimes introduce a companion. An animal, a figure, whatever the child’s imagination comes up with. For some children, especially those afraid of being alone, having a companion for the journey makes a noticeable difference.

We went looking for the feelings driving her anxiety. She found several: sadness, nervousness, missing her family.

The fear of being alone stood out as the strongest. Emma described it as a red triangle in her stomach. She also said with certainty it had been with her since birth.

Children can’t consciously remember being born. But the body stores that experience as a feeling. A difficult birth with chaos, urgency, medical intervention can land as threat. A sense that the world is unsafe.

Together we reframed the situation. The chaos wasn’t a threat. It was a room full of people fighting for her. Every urgent voice, every intervention, every rushed decision was someone making sure she arrived safely.

We discovered a second significant event. She was three years old and lost her favorite plush toy.

Again we reframed the experience. As the eight-year-old today she visualized herself going back and comforting herself at three years old.

After the session, her surprised mother confirmed both events.

The moments around birth had been hectic and stressful. Her daughter experienced oxygen deprivation and birth had to be induced by the doctors.

Long forgotten was their family holiday where they forgot her teddy at a rest area along the highway. Drama and tears, but no idea this could have such a deep effect.

A seemingly small loss at three years old is not small to that three-year-old. It can land as abandonment or lack of safety and security.

I’ve seen this more times than I can count. Children carry feelings they can’t describe in words. And experiences they have no conscious, detailed memory of. But we can work this out with shapes, colors, sensations in specific parts of their body.

We can’t change what happened, but we can change how a memory lives in the body.

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Before every exam, she experienced what she described as lightning strikes through her heart. Not just nerves or butterflies. Physical pain. Sharp, electric, strong enough to make her nauseous.

Her parents had tried, tutors, preparation and reassurance. But her fear was bigger than logic could reach.

Eyes closed we went into exam situations together. This triggered her feelings immediately. Anxiety, pressure.

Then, as I always do, we went looking for where and when it had started. I follow the feeling backwards through a child’s life, looking for the moment it began. Often we find something from early childhood. Sometimes from birth. Occasionally even from the time in the womb.

Anita however said it went back even further. And she was very clear about this.

She began describing, in vivid detail, a completely different life. She was a woman named Lina. In Spain. The year was 1822. She was twenty-two years old, studying to become a doctor.

In her medical program there was a fellow student named Marco. He was struggling. His poor grades left him at risk of being removed from the university. This would mean losing his big dream of becoming a doctor. The pressure he felt was immense.

Lina was sensitive. Deeply so. She absorbed Marco’s panic without meaning to, without being able to stop it. It settled and lived in her heart. Exactly where she felt those lightning strikes.

I don’t know if what Anita experienced was a memory, a construction, a dream, a metaphor her mind assembled from books or movies.

What I know is this: she described it with no hesitation, no performance, no searching for words. It came out of her the way real stories come out, naturally, completely, without effort.

And I know what happened next.

We worked with what she visualized. We processed the moment in 1822. Lina absorbing Marco’s panic, carrying it in her heart for two centuries, passing it on to Anita without either of them knowing.

At a deep level, this allowed Anita to understand that this fear had never been hers.

Then we tested it by having her visualize exam situations. Math, written, oral, unexpected. She went through each one. The lightning was gone.

When I saw her a few weeks later for a follow-up, she proudly told me how calm and concentrated she had sat through real exams.

The physical pain, the panic, the nausea were no longer an issue for her.

There is something important this case illustrates:

I take what a child brings to me seriously. Whatever images, stories, or feelings they produce, for that child they are real. It is not my responsibility to judge and evaluate whether something actually happened. My job is to work with the perceived reality of the child.

Some would claim this is a past life. A skeptic on the other hand would point out that in 1822 women could not study medicine in Spain.

She described it. We worked through it. The lightning stopped.

For me, that’s what matters most.

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Liam was eight years old. A few weeks earlier his older sister had shown him a trailer for a movie called Venom.

The scene that stuck was towards the end.

Every evening the same thing. Liam would lie down, close his eyes, and there were those images.

He couldn’t sleep in his own room anymore. And rarely fell asleep before 11pm. This carried over into school where he seemed tired, unmotivated and struggled with concentration.

Eyes closed, I took Liam to a loud, busy film set. Cameras and lights everywhere. Crew moving around with clipboards and coffee. A director in a chair. Many people going about their work, completely unbothered, completely calm.

Nobody was afraid. Nobody running.

In a chair at the center of it all sat the main actor. Ready to have a costume put on.

Then the work began.

A makeup artist approached. Started applying something to his face. A costume technician brought pieces. One by one, layer by layer.

Liam visualized the whole process. The prosthetics. The black material stretching over skin. The teeth fitted into place.

By the time Venom was fully assembled and stood up from that chair, Liam had a new understanding and wasn’t afraid of the monster.

I encouraged him to walk over and have a conversation with the actor.

Will you hurt me?
Does Venom really exist?
Does he crawl into human bodies?

Tom reassured him there was nothing to be afraid of. And patiently answered the many more questions Liam had.

Why make films like this? Because making them is fun and they look cool on big screens.

Are you afraid during filming? No. Because we actors know all of this isn’t real.

Tom Hardy even apologized for scaring him with his Venom costume.

As I guide children through conversations like this, you can see their body language change. Shoulders drop. Breathing slows. In a child’s vivid inner world, these moments are experienced and felt as if they were real. Which is precisely why they work.

The images that had been scaring him every evening had lost their power.

Liam slept in his own room that night.

Six weeks later he was back.

New nightmares. This time because of Granny.

This is something no session can fully protect against. Every child lives inside a family, a school, a group of older siblings with phones and no filters. The work we do together can sometimes be undone in just a few minutes by someone else.

Unlike the movie set this time I shared a trick with Liam. I told him that laughter shrinks Granny. We both laughed out loud and Liam visualize her getting smaller and smaller. So small, he could pick her up and hold her in his hand.

The roles were reversed. She was now terrified of him.

And because he no longer wanted her around, he flicked her off his hand into space.

Children don’t need logic to overcome fear. They need a different experience of the thing that frightened them.

That’s what we built. Twice.

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This wasn’t just a phase.

Eyes closed, we went looking for where this was coming from.

As is often the case, her feelings were red. Ramona found them everywhere. In her arms, her hands, her legs, her feet.

Dozens of little angry faces, like masks, covering her from the inside.

She peeled them off one by one and threw them in the bin.

Then she visualized a pressure washer and blasted away everything that was left. She loved this.

She laughed loudly.

That laugh - we used it. She laughed into her hands, caught the laughter, and pressed it into her body. We did this over and over until she was full of it. Laughter and joy, packed into every corner.

Then I asked her:

Where is your kindness switch?

She didn’t hesitate for a second.

She lifted her foot in the air, pointed at her heel, and said:

“Here. Right here in my heel. That’s the kindness switch.”

It was on now, she confirmed.

She skipped out of the session. Literally skipped.

She chose a necklace with a white stone as a gift on the way out. White, she explained to her mother, means being kind like an angel.

I’ve worked with hundreds of children. I still think about that heel.

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Even minor sensations, such as scratching or slight difficulty opening her eyes, would immediately trigger panic.

Her mother mentioned three significant events:

Two separate accounts of eye inflammation. The ones where you wake up in the morning with eyes stuck together by a crusty discharge.

And an event in the forest. Yara’s dad was chopping wood. A splinter flew into her eye and had to be removed by doctors.

By the time her mother brought Yara to me, even just the thought of wind or water near her face could trigger a panic response.

The fear had spread from actual danger to the mere possibility of danger to anything that moved through the air near her face.

She was basically on permanent alert.

Eyes closed, I had Yara describe her inner world. It was full of animals. No people.

And there was a dark forest that triggered feelings of insecurity and fear.

She located that fear physically in different parts of her upper body. Black slime and long objects that looked like rulers, she described.

We began exploring where it had come from. One might think in this case that it’s obvious. Interestingly however, Yara said this fear was not hers. She was very clear about this.

I asked her to look at the people closest to her and tell me what she saw.

Her mother carried the same black slime. Her grandmother too. And also on the father’s side.

I only found out later from her mother there was a strong presence of fear within the family system. Obsessive anxious thoughts, hypochondriac tendencies, anxiety, and panic attacks were a theme for quite a few of the family members.

I explained it to Yara like this:

Feelings can live inside us quietly for years, dormant, waiting. Like a dog asleep in a corner. It isn’t causing problems. You barely know it’s there.

Then something wakes it up. And it barks.

In Yara’s case the pattern of developing fears was already there. Getting a splinter in her eye was the incident that woke up the sleeping dog.

I asked her a question.

“This panic you feel, do you understand that it didn’t start with you? That it was never really yours.”

She was quiet.

“Do you want to keep it?”

She shook her head.

“Then let’s give it back.”

We traced it to its origin: her great-grandfather on her father’s side. She spoke to him in her inner world. He hadn’t known he had passed it on to her. He apologized and she gave it back to him.

Before we finished the first session, I introduced Yara to her lizard.

This is what I call the primitive part of our brain. The part whose entire job is to protect us. It triggers our fight, flight and freeze response. It doesn’t think. It reacts. And once it decides something is dangerous, it stays on guard.

Yara’s lizard had decided anything near her eyes was a threat. It was doing its job perfectly. The problem was it had been given the wrong information.

She chose green for hers. I placed a small plush lizard on her hand. We had a conversation with it. Told it what we had discovered and that this fear wasn’t Yara‘s.

Most importantly, that it no longer needed to sound the alarm.

Her lizard listened.

That concluded our first session.

That same week Yara stopped putting on goggles for showers and baths at home.

Very encouraging first signs of major progress.

In the second session I had her try something new: contact lenses filled with feelings of safety, love and calm. She loved the idea. And said they had a faint rainbow shimmer.

With eyes closed she visualized placing the first lens into her right eye. Then her left.

No negative reaction.

Her lizard also stayed calm.

This was a key moment. She had something in her eye and yet there was no alarm.

We tested our way rigorously through all kinds of scenarios.

An eyelash in her eye. Take it out. Fine.

Shampoo in her eye during a shower. Rinse it out. Fine.

Ride a bike fast with lots of wind in her face. Fine.

She moved through each scene without fear, without panic, without the automatic response that had been running her life.

Here is what makes this intervention so powerful and worth understanding:

The lizard doesn’t need something to be real to react to it. A vivid enough signal is enough to trigger the alarm. Or in this case, to stand down.

When Yara imagined putting in those lenses, calmly and safely, her protection system got a new signal. Something in the eye, and no danger followed.

The lenses didn’t trick her rational mind. They reset her starting point.

Before, anything near her eye began from alarm. The lizard was already running by the time she could think about it.

The lenses didn’t trick her rational mind. They reset her starting point.

Before, anything near her eye began from alarm. The lizard was already running by the time she could think about it.

After, the baseline had shifted. Something in her eye was no longer automatically dangerous. It was just “something in her eye”.

After our two sessions together, the fear did not come back once. Not a hint.

Yara went to Spain shortly after for summer holiday. And played in the ocean without her goggles.

She never even really mentioned it again. It went from a dominating, restricting part of life to a non-topic.

A major breakthrough.

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Giulia was eight years old when she came to me.

Her mother brought her to me for what looked, on the surface, like behavioral problems. Anger outbursts several times a week. Thumb-sucking whenever she felt sad or disappointed. Separation anxiety. Fear of the dark. She couldn’t sleep without her mother.

None of it was a mystery once you understand what she was carrying.

Her father had died three years earlier. Suddenly and unexpectedly.

The first session was slow. Giulia answered quietly, sometimes not at all. She took a long time with everything. These are clear signs that a child’s experiences have left a deep mark and impact how they move through the world.

We worked carefully through some of the things we found inside.

In the second session we went looking for her dad.

Eyes closed, I took her hand and we flew to wherever she believed her father was. She said heaven. Children almost always say heaven. The concept is so deeply engraved it arrives without prompting.

We went through gates and found him there.

Grief is rarely just sadness. It is also anger. And often, underneath the anger, an unfinished conversation.

The parent is gone. But in a child’s inner world, the conversation can still happen. Not with a memory. With a presence the child constructs themselves, eyes closed, from everything they knew and loved about that person.

First, we let the child get rid of anything negative still there. Anger, disappointment, hate sometimes.

When I notice the child is dealing with a heavy negative load, I have the deceased parent say something along these lines:

Here where I am those emotions don’t matter. Things are calm and peaceful here. Give them all to me. Let me take over. Give me anything that is weighing you down.

She gave him everything.

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Martin was ten years old. His life started with a separation from his mother right after birth. He spent two weeks with a foster family before finding a home with the parents who would raise him.

By the time he came to me, he had been in child psychology for over a year. The presenting issues were anger, provocation, and difficulty connecting with other children.

He was also being bullied at school. The other kids had learned which buttons to press.

The most painful button: jokes about his adoption.

His parents mentioned something else that stood out. Every time they told him no, he exploded. Full detonation. As if the word itself was an attack.

His lizard brain had been running that program ever since.

No equals rejection.
No equals abandonment.

Every boundary his parents set, every limit, every refusal landed in the same place as that very first no.

He wasn’t being defiant. His lizard was protecting him from what it believed no always meant.

Eyes closed I began asking him questions.

What’s easier for a parent, saying yes or saying no?

He thought about it. Yes, he said. Yes is easier.

I asked him why.

Because then there’s no argument.

And when parents say no?

There’s a fight. It takes energy. It causes stress.

So why would a parent bother saying no if yes is so much easier?

He was quiet for a moment.

I kept going. Think about sweets. Too many sweets damage your teeth. A parent who lets you eat sweets all day, are they working hard for you or taking the easy road?

Taking the easy road, he said.

And a parent who says no to to a third packet of sweets, who sits through the argument, who sticks to their no even when you’re furious at them?

“Because they love me.”

That was the moment. And Martin got there himself.

His strong reaction to no’s made complete sense. On the first day of Martin’s life, the one who was supposed to love him said no. Not in words. But in the most absolute way possible. By deciding not to keep him.

With that understanding in place, he turned to his lizard. And told it the same thing.

Two weeks later his mother reported that the boy who had made adoption jokes at his expense was now his friend.

Nobody had intervened in that relationship. Something had shifted in Martin. And that allowed for other dynamics to shift with it.

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I find cases like this highly interesting. When there is no obvious cause and no reason for behavior. That means the answer lies deep inside a child. And it requires detective work to find it.

Eyes closed, I asked him what his sadness looked like.

“My whole heart is just one giant tear.”

We spent a long time in there together. Finding things. Moving things. The session was intense — and at moments genuinely moving.

Towards the end of our session I asked him again, what his heart looks like now.

This is what he drew:

Notice that he left some sadness at the bottom of the heart.

When I asked if he wanted to remove that too, he shook his head.

So we left it.

Not every child is ready to let everything go in one session. And that’s not a failure — it’s information. He knew something I didn’t yet know. He knew he wasn’t ready.

Over time I’ve learned when to push and when to ease up.

This was a moment to ease up.

He’ll get there.

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Compulsively, constantly, for no apparent reason. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Her parents initially hoped it was just a phase.
But it got a lot worse.

Ana started saying sentences that had no place in the mind (and mouth) of a nine year old.

One example: they were walking together when a car had to brake suddenly for someone crossing the road. Out of nowhere Ana said:

“I hope he gets run over.”

Her parents froze.

There were other words. Sexual, crude, completely out of character.

At school she held it together. At home, where she felt safe enough to lose control, she couldn’t anymore.

The parents weren’t just worried anymore. They were mortified. These kinds of statements in public, by their nine-year-old daughter, carry a weight that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

The looks. The silence. The question of what this means about their child, their family, themselves.

Three sessions. That’s what it took. But the path to the answer wasn’t straight forward.

In the first session I mapped out patterns. Investigated what she felt before the compulsion arrived, and what she felt after.

Before it was: pressure, a feeling of I need to, I must. After: huge relief. Now it’s okay again. Temporary, but still real.

It was an intense session, long for a child her age. She was exhausted afterwards. She almost fell asleep during the debrief with her mother.

The first week had been slightly better. Then the compulsions came back. We were making progress but hadn’t found the true cause yet.

In our second session more feelings emerged: shame and guilt. We visualized different memories and events of her life.

There was a common thread:
feelings of not getting enough love and attention.

Before our third session Ana’s father said it was already sixty percent better.

Meaningfully improved. But the core trigger was still a mystery.

I tried another strategy. I asked Ana:

“If your compulsion had a human form, what would it look like?”

She went quiet. Then the breakthrough moment:

“It’s my little brother.”

For a moment I was speechless. Then I remembered her father had mentioned Ana was sometimes jealous of her younger brother.

This case suddenly made sense.

A felt sense of not receiving enough love and attention that got amplified when her younger sibling arrived. She now had to share what already felt insufficient. The compulsions were the pressure valve.

This is something I’ve observed more than once with siblings. A child can carry a felt sense of love-shortage from very early. This is almost never because the parents failed, but because the child stored an emotional deficit that wasn’t objectively real. When a younger brother or sister arrives, that deficit feels like it’s being divided further. Competition begins. Resentment builds.

And it can express itself in ways that look nothing like jealousy on the surface.

Several weeks later my phone rang. A child’s voice said:

Mrs. Mosimann. I am not doing it anymore!

At first I had no idea who I was talking to. Only after she told me her name did it click.

She was so proud as she shared how those thoughts and compulsions had stopped. Her mother later hopped on the call and told me Ana wanted to tell me personally.

A nine year old who had been saying unspeakable things in public, calling me weeks later to say she’s not doing it anymore. It was one of my most memorable moments.

And one of the many reasons why I Iove this work.

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In our first session, eyes closed, Milo built himself a filter helmet. Designed to shield him from any bad words said to him. He left my practice feeling equipped.

Two weeks later I saw him for the follow-up. His helmet hadn’t held up. One of the boys had said he was dumb in the corridor, and it had gone straight through.

We went back to work. And this time Milo got creative.

He redesigned the filter helmet from scratch. Added extra layers of protection. New colors. New features. And then, to top it all off, he decided it needed a special deterrent.

A skunk.

Living inside the helmet, with its own bed and its own stuffed animal.

He laughed out loud several times describing what happened when the skunk’s smell activated.

The two boys turned and ran.

We can’t make bullies kinder. But a nine-year-old who has spent an hour building an internal fortress — complete with a skunk — carries himself differently going into that corridor.

And a child who carries himself differently is no longer an easy target.

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