Psychological Reversal:
Assessment and Treatment of Self-Defeating Tendencies
By Susan Heitler, Ph.D.
www.therapyhelp.com
Posted March 2, 2011
Note: Dale Petterson, one of the independent therapy professionals in my office suite, is presently conducting free testing for psychological reversal. To schedule a test, please contact the secretary in our office suite at 303 388-4211. The test generally takes approximately 10 minutes.
What is psychological reversal? How can you find out if you are psychologically reversed? And how can this reversal be turned around?
Psychological reversal is a subconscious condition of self-sabotage.
It could be that you have been functioning in a state of psychological reversal if you have noticed that in your life that sometimes, just as you are in a process of attaining something that you want, you somehow manage to end up spoiling it. If your sub-conscious mind is set on thwarting your successes, you will find success harder to attain and sustain.
For instance, one person who was psychologically reversed easily made good friends, but then would find herself antagonizing them. Another would work hard to attain financial success, and then lose his fortune with bad investments. Yet another would find herself criticizing and picking fights with her husband bringing to a halt each period where they were beginning to enjoy each other’s company. Instead of experiencing positive emotions and situations with self-acceptance, people with psychological reversal experience positive situations as uncomfortable and therefore inadvertently undo them.
The term psychological reversal was coined by Roger Callahan, a psychologist who noticed that some patients seemed to be unable to benefit from the same interventions that most people found very helpful in reducing their psychological stresses.
Callahan explained psychological reversal as a state that blocks positive results from his TFT (Thought Field Therapy) interventions. While most people accept with pleasure the healing impacts of therapy, psychologically reversed individuals have subconscious blocks to feeling happy. They therefore subconsciously resist letting go of their emotional distress symptoms such as fears, depression, addictions or angers.
Dale Petterson, an energy psychology therapist whom I recently invited to work from our office suite of independent therapy professionals, has spent over twenty years amassing expertise in a wide variety of energy psychology interventions. To augment his use of EFT, a streamlined version of Callahan’s original TFT tapping techniques, as well the effectiveness of his multiple other energy-based psychological treatment methods, Dale has developed an exceptionally rapid, potent and long-lasting intervention strategy for treating psychological reversal.
As with any problem, medical or psychological, the first step is assessment. Dale starts therefore by assessing whether or not there is a state of psychological reversal present in the person’s functioning.
How does he ascertain the presence or absence of subconscious state of psychological reversal? Dale uses muscle kinesiology techniques, simple muscle tests that indicate small variances in muscle strength in a person’s outstretched arm. When the subconscious wants to say “Yes,” this positive energy response is reflected in strong muscles which easily hold the outstretched arm aloft in response to slight pressure exerted by Dale on the arm. By contrast, when the subconscious answers Dale’s questions with “No,” the answer is manifest in momentary muscle weakness which causes the client’s outstretched arm to drop.
Using this muscle kinesiology test, Dale uses three questions to test for psychological reversal. One test involves having the client put his hand on his head facing upward, then downward, then upward again. One involves showing the person a blank piece of paper with a large X on it; then a paper with two parallel lines. The third involves muscle testing with the client saying the words “I want to be happy,” and then “I want to be miserable.” Clients who are in a state of psychological reversal consistently test as reversed on all three of these tests.
As to treatment, Dale Petterson’s creative innovation, which I have observed working with consistent success in treating psychological reversal, begins with using muscle testing (muscle kinesiology) to communicate with the client’s unconscious mind to track down the age and incident in a person’s life when he or she first became psychologically reversed.
Clients generally are surprised, and at the same time generally find quite credible, when Dale brings forth a memory, for instance, of a frightening interaction with a parent at age 5, or an upsetting rejection from a valued schoolmate at age 7, that initiated the flip from a positive psychological state to gravitating toward negative emotional states.
Once that originating moment has been clarified, Dale then uses a brief treatment such as running a strong magnet down the governing meridian, (meridians are familiar to users of acupuncture and other Eastern-based medical systems) to reverse or replace the negative energies. As he rebalances the energy system with the intention of eliminating the psychological reversal, the psychological reversal is itself reversed. Now that the reversal at the age of origination has been eliminated, Dale brings the change up to present time so there is no longer psychological reversal present.
The full process of diagnosing and reversing psychological reversal generally takes under an hour. The result? Within a single treatment session people regain the natural state of being able to enjoy positive emotions and to sustain positive situations.
I have been amazed, in working alongside of Dale in treating clients of mine who appear to be therapy-resistant, to see that addressing the psychological reversal then enables both Dale’s energy-based techniques and my more traditional therapy techniques to become effective. Long-standing anxieties, emotional hyper-reactivity, chronic longings or sadness, quickness to anger, and other distressed states now respond positively to our therapeutic interventions.
In sum, psychological reversal indicates a subconscious patterning of self-sabotage because the person’s energies have become oriented to sustaining unhappiness rather than to sustaining happiness. Instead of taking joy in successes, a reversed person feels uncomfortable when certain dimensions of his life that are important to him are going well. Eventually he or she will do something that relieves this discomfort by re-creating self-defeat or a negative emotion of some sort. By contrast, with psychological reversal no longer present, the odds of a person being able to sustain feelings of happiness, joy and lightness of spirit, and sustained successes at home and at work zoom upwards.
