Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 1 Issue 2, (I August 2016) | Page 3

Obesity and the Mental Field
Like a snowflake, the mind field of every client is unique and every case
distinctive. Even though the presenting issues in a case may appear very
similar, the causative factors can often be vastly different.
Usually the thing that needs resolution at a therapy session presents itself as a
dialogue that unfolds spontaneously in the opening conversation, or a feeling
that begets the client as they enter into the safe space offered by the therapist.
This lady sought assistance to overcome her excess weight. As the dialogue
unfolded, she found herself sharing a recurring experience of irritation with her
in-laws. Intrigued, she asked what the issue with her in laws had to do with her
excess weight. Almost everything, I replied with a reassuring smile on my face,
and we proceeded to delve deeper into her mind field.
We started with her intense dislike for authority figures (in laws), because they
curtailed her freedom (her complaint), and she was compelled to please them,
(where she found herself stuck). Upon magnifying her emotional and somatic
energies, a series of intense experiences unfolded where she had been
sexually abused as a young child.
Interestingly, it wasn't the expected trauma of the abuse that highlighted these
experiences, but rather, a complex entanglement of guilt, (the feeling that she
invited it and brought it upon herself), fear, emanating from the need to be
accepted (I won't be accepted if I don't do as I am told), curiosity & desire (I
want to experience this) and an overriding belief that she simply HAD to do
this. Another interesting facet was the marked absence of pleasure that usually
constitutes the double bind of guilt, shame & pleasure in such cases.
The search for the origin of the belief that she simply had to do this (allow
sexual tresspass), took us into a past life of hers in which she found herself to
be a devdaasi.
She was the King's favoured pleasure provider and she secretly coveted his
love, wanting to have him to herself exclusively, which remained an unfulfilled
desire in that life and she eventually died with the wish that he would pine for
her like she did for him.
As she integrated that experience, she discovered that her desire for the king
was not born out of love, but simply the desire to control him and be superior
to him, so that she could end the suppression of women in a male dominated
society. This again pointed to another complex double bind. The compulsion
to please men on the one hand and the desire for freedom from male
suppression on the other.