‘Catherine’ is a delightful woman in her late 50s, with whom I’ve been working for quite some time. She is a breast cancer survivor, and like many people who’ve been on the cancer roller coaster, she took her illness as an indicator that it was time to change her life direction, and do what she really wanted to do – for the first time in her life!
One of the obstacles she hit along the way was her tendency to give her power away – to back down in the face of other people’s rudeness, bossiness or dominance. Then she would kick herself afterward, wishing she had stood up for herself. But she had been raised to be polite and considerate of others, and just didn’t know how to be both strong and ‘good’.
During a recent consultation, I asked Catherine what made her angry. This gentle, polite lady replied that other drivers’ behaviour on the road made her FURIOUS!!
She recounted an incident that had occurred the previous year, but was still playing on her mind. She had been driving in heavy traffic, which had ground to a standstill. A young guy in a black hotted-up car drove up the gravel verge, past all the drivers patiently waiting for the cars in front of them to start moving, and started to push in, in front of her. Catherine, seeing red at the unfairness of the situation, and feeling like he’d seen her from miles off and decided she would be an easy victim, tried to keep him from butting in. They battled wills for a few moments, but in the end he intimidated her into letting him in.
Once the traffic started moving again, he dropped back behind her car, and began to tail-gate her aggressively while yelling abuse at the top of his lungs. She was desperately frightened that he was going to harm her, but eventually he got tired of his game and roared off in his revved-up hoonmobile. Catherine was shaking with fear, and had to pull over until she had calmed down enough to drive again.
Just sitting in my office and telling me the story still made her tremble. We decided to do Matrix Reimprinting on this incident, as it had made such an impact on her sense of personal power.
In situations like this, where the level of psychological trauma is very high, Matrix Reimprinting practitioners often start at the end of the incident, in order to calm the ECHO (‘past self’) down and equip it with resources to take back into the incident, so it can be handled the way the ECHO would have preferred.
We tapped on Catherine’s ECHO for her terror, and equipped her with a shield that one of Catherine’s other ECHOs from a previous Matrix Reimprinting session had chosen, to defend herself with. She also decided that she wanted to have a big wolf in the back seat of her car, to be her back-up.
Thus resourced, we returned to the start of the incident, and tapped on Catherine’s ECHO’s anger; how unfair it was that she – and the other drivers – were all doing the right thing and this guy thought he was entitled to break the rules; and the sense that she was trapped between not wanting to ‘roll over’ and play victim, versus the fear of what might happen if she stood up to him and stopped him from getting in front of her.
Then she sent the wolf out to jump on the bonnet of Mr Hoon’s car, stare him down, and order him to be more polite and considerate. At that point, in her imagination, Catherine saw the young man get out of his car, stomping and raging. At first she was afraid of his anger, but as we tapped, she began to see has behaviour as a bit pathetic – he was just like a toddler having a big dummy-spit.
She was ready for what we call a ‘reframe’ – a new perspective on this person whom she had seen as victimising her because he was more powerful than her. I suggested that he might have been the victim of someone else, and may feel he needs his big black car, and the bullying behaviour that it facilitates for him, in order to feel powerful.
She felt a big energy shift as she took in this perspective. Suddenly the young man was a human being, like her, rather than just a faceless, all-powerful aggressor.
The other issue we had to deal with was that of being ‘good’. Catherine felt stuck between being forced to be ‘good’ even if it compromised her, and feeling like she was being ‘bad’ if she asserted herself (because it wasn’t nice, or considerate of others). Neither option was comfortable, and neither served her.
I suggested, while tapping, that she might have a third option available: being and doing good from a position of unshakeable personal power – just like Gandhi, who led India to independence by espousing a nonviolence that emanated from his conviction that he was on the right side.
Catherine was visibly transformed by the end of the session, and intrigued by the possibility of being powerfully good – rather than automatically being a bad person if she exercised power – which had opened up for her.
As a post-script, next time I saw her she reported that she was no longer upset by other drivers’ behaviour!
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