Eve has suffered from chronic spinal pain for many years. It had started at age 15 after several sports accidents, and had become worse after three car accidents, especially after the last one, which was 6-7 years ago. Since then she had lived with chronic pain. Also in this session she reported a pain in the heart region, with an intensity of 8 and a degree of emotional distress of 6 on a scale of 0-10. She had also a pain around her torso, with an intensity of 4.

After the last car accident Eve had been on an odyssey though the medical world and alternative health care, trying everything from morphine treatment to craniosacral therapy. Impressed by her story, I asked what she expected from this demonstration, and she answered: 'a change.' This sounded like a realistic goal; Eve had been disappointed often enough to be firmly rooted in reality.

I asked her if she had ever worked on the trauma of the accidents. She said she hadn't, and later she told me that this was the deeper reason she had applied for the course. Here a direction for the work became clear: We could at least work on the trauma of the last car accident, as this was the moment where the pain had become stronger.

I asked Eve to describe the circumstances of the accident. She was riding in the car with her husband, full of energy, enjoying the day and preparing to buy a kitchen for their newly built home. After a right turn, they bumped suddenly into a row of cars that had slowed down behind a tractor. I asked her about the connection between the collision and the pain, and she said that she had felt the crash there in her breast, and that it also seemed to her that the shock had been stored there in some way.

 
I instructed Eve to re-experience the moment of the accident, and she reported how her breath stopped. Then she said something strange: "I see myself being shot out of the window of the car." I gave her three sentences for this image and – lo and behold – the intensity of the pain reduced to 2 and the emotional distress to zero. She stood up and walked through the room, enjoying her body, telling me she felt 2 inches taller.

I asked Eve to again enter the memory of the crash, and this time she felt her body leaving the car before the crash. I gave her the first sentence for this imagined experience, and then she said: "I'm leaving this hurt, wounded, violated body. That's not the real me." In the last sequence I gave her the sentences for the energy bound up in the perception of her body and of the environment at the time of the accident.

After this, a slight pain was left in her shoulder, which she can continue to treat herself. The pain in the heart region had gone. Eve was happy.