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I'm also a child abuse survivor and I can attest to the fact that EMO is the gentlest and most helpful form of dealing with the very real "feelings" one is often overcome by, in real time and in the real world.
Indeed, the fact that you don't have to remember anything, re-live anything, actively forgive anything, and for once you can just go with what your body and your feelings are telling you, and it doesn't matter "if it's real or just imagined," has been a complete godsend to me personally and proven its value and practical helpfulness in many different contexts.
Now child abuse is a wide and varied thing; it's difficult because the memories as to the exact sequences of events, police memories if you will, are often unclear, skewed, seen through a child's eyes and sometimes just not there, at least not at the top conscious level.
You get dreams and nightmares too, weird flashbacks and all sorts of thoughts over the years and in the end you don't known at all what's what - only that you have all these symptoms and you know something went on that was deeply disturbing.
It is true that one of the reasons I was looking for something that did not rely on conscious awareness and the ability to come up with exact and precise opening statements is because of my personal experiences.
To be able to "cut out all the talk" - and with that, all the justifications, the reasons, the possible flaws in the memories and the arguments, the conflicts and the fear of what else might be there - was a positive GODSEND to me. After all these years, I was tired of telling and talking. I was tired of even thinking about how and if and what. I was tired of remembering and trying to remember. It got me nowhere and often, I used to think, "My God that was nearly half a century ago - will it ever be over?!"
EMO works with energy and this explains why time wasn't healing this - the energy system is timeless in essence, all things are here and now, and until and unless something is done to change the conditions of the energy system, things will remain just as they were forever.
At the same time, there is the other side of the coin. All "that" isn't here any longer. It is all gone, long gone and the only place in which these injuries still exist are indeed, in the energy system. That is a wonderfully soothing thought, and when waves of painful emotions hit you, to be able to think, "This is ONLY AN ENERGY now, and there is something I can do about that!" has been a revelation to me and so many others.
To be able to validate my "weird" emotional responses to "perfectly normal" situations was also immensely helpful. In EMO we take the point of view that we were only dealing with energy now and disturbances in the energy system; this allowed me to accept the emotions, feelings and sensations for what they really were: cries for help, the sign posts to direct me straight towards what needed healing and restoring.
For the first time, rather than having to switch off my body sensations, I could finally listen to them, acknowledge them and use them for arrow straight guided self healing.
Starting to actively pay attention to my physical feelings which are what emotions really are got me "back into the body" for the first time in 45 years. The body was no longer the enemy; instead, it had become a system crying out for help, and finally, these cries for help could be heard, and then answered with action. This action starts with a healing intention and all else flows from there.
Further, the act of listening and paying attention to the actual body sensations that we call feelings and emotions is the perfect guideline to your own custom made healing therapy. As each sensation emerges and is dealt with, the healing process unfolds under its own steam, in its own ecology, in the right order and sequence and without fear or any kind of major abreaction, major operations, re-traumatizing flashbacks and entirely in harmony with every individual person and their particular needs.
EMO is amazing in its presuppositions and in how it works.
There's nothing quite like it, and the totally non-judgemental nature of all its workings, which for some people seems strange and even sometimes too logical and systemic, is exactly what the doctor ordered for child abuse survivors, and especially child sex abuse survivors.
Any healing modality that is going to work with child sex abuse survivors has to be absolutely systemic and non-judgemental or else the aspects who hold all that shame and guilt and grief and anger simply cannot benefit from any healing - they are structurally excluded "because they don't deserve to be healed."
And of course, I don't even want to begin to start talking about the aspects who may have identified with the abuser/s, loved them, connected to them or patterned themselves on them in some way - those never get a look in in the standard approaches of psychotherapy and many other doctrines of psychology and spiritual healing.
In EMO, we don't have "good" or "bad" energies. All is only energy. That's just like you can't stand in the rain, watch the raindrops go by and point a finger and say, "Look there goes another bad one!"
This is the concept of "innocent energy" - rain will fall on an abuser and their victims, on the grass and the mountains just the same, it makes no judgement either way. For abuse survivors, this concept can be life saving, for every abuse survivor is both the abuser and the victim in one person.
In EMO, we don't have to struggle for forgiveness or self forgiveness. The whole concept dissolves the moment the pain is gone - once that happens, forgiveness comes into being. It is important to understand that it is structurally impossible to forgive yourself or any other whilst you are still in acute pain. When the pain has ceased, forgiveness arises naturally - and not one moment earlier.
We can call our emotions what we like - shame, guilt, anger, fear, sadness, depression; but in the end, these are all just pain deriving from injuries in the energy system.
Pain we feel in our bodies, pain which shows us where we need to direct our healing intention and our healing energy.
It is true that when I first began to experiment with EMO, I had no idea that it would do so much more than just really heal the worst forms of emotional pain. To even find some minor relief for this everlasting chronic suffering that child abuse survivors have learned to live with somehow would have been akin to a miracle to me.
But EMO goes much, much further than that.
There is another side, something beyond "just not feeling the pain any more".
Once we begin to listen to the body again and end the withdrawal from the physical, to our amazement we find that the body can send us other kinds of feedback about the energy system - the good feelings. When the energy system is working once more as it should, as it was designed to work by the Creative Order, and we have learned to listen again, we become the recipients of wonderful gifts. Feelings of joy, of energies rushing through your body, making you tingle, making you feel alive and powerful, opening your eyes to the beauty of the world and your place within it - it is extraordinary to come home to that at last.
That is the greatest gift of EMO for me - to end my long exile and allow me to come home to Creation itself.
All the re-unification processes of EMO, all the weight on the systemic nature and structure of injuries in the energy system and how they relate firstly to emotion, and from there manifest in thought and behaviour that are at the core of EMO were first of all road tested right there - in the abuse survivor scenarios, in the high end trenches of psychological and energetic disturbance that have lasted a lifetime.
Further still, the "client/practitioner dance" at the heart of the co-joint healing endeavour between two equals, where the "healer" is literally forbidden to tell anyone what is wrong with them, how they should be feeling, and where the healers are only allowed to focus on "putting to right what once went wrong," only follow along with the person's own special unfoldments and even then, only when and if the person in question is ready and willing, all that is patterned directly on the needs of child abuse survivors.
Of course, these "fail safes" build right into the very structure of EMO are of benefit to anyone at all, and it doesn't matter why they are in pain or where they got their disturbances from, we don't judge, we only heal.
EMO is not an instant miracle cure for child abuse survivors; but I can personally attest to the fact that every aspect of its theory, workings, structure and how EMO is conducted is designed to help child abuse survivors finally find relief for their emotions and injuries, and to put them on the road to have all the pleasures of life, all the wonderful experiences of the body, back in their reach when it seemed so impossible before.
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