1822
What this unusual case taught me about working within children’s perceived reality.
Anita (12) came to me for test anxiety.
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 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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