Beverly, a single mother, and schoolteacher was referred to Rapid Eye Technology by one of her students. She called, stating that she knew nothing about Rapid Eye Technology but was so depressed from her son’s death that she was unable to teach school. Her fifth-grade student related a story about his mother and her experiences with Rapid Eye Technology (RET) and the difference it made in their family.

In Beverly’s first session, she explained that her 16-year-old son had been killed in a car accident during the holidays. She dreaded the upcoming holiday season as that triggered her back into deep grief and depression. Beverly was on several medications and still feeling depression and post-traumatic stress.

Thousands of clients are diagnosed with Clinical Depression each year. Many times, clients are prescribed medications like Paxil and Prozac, etc., for their depression. In some cases, medications are necessary to assist the client in stabilizing or correcting chemical imbalances.

However, some clients will simply numb out problems while on medication and do not have any desire to resolve issues causing the depression, further perpetuating the cycle. For forty years, it has been known that depressed people have excessive REM sleep. They dream far more than healthy people. What has been realized and proven is that the negative introspection or talking a lot about problems that depressed people engage in actually causes the excessive dreaming. This causes the depression to be generated on a 24-hour cycle.  RET can make a difference in how a person feels within one cycle of REM sleep.

Our REM sleep does a great housekeeping job for us. Each night it processes all of the emotions that we had during the day. Dreams are translations of our waking hours and the emotions that we don’t act on while awake. Once triggered, our brain has to complete that cycle of experience. If we don’t complete it in our external or awake world, we do so in our sleep. The patterns of our triggers are metaphorically acted out in our dreams and therefore deactivated.

Depressed people do so much worrying and feel so stuck that they get into an overload that uses up energy in the brain. They can’t sleep, and they wake up tired. RET releases all of this unfinished business and lets the brain rest – influencing their motivation to get on with life.

In Beverly’s first session, she accessed a feeling of peace and felt, for the first time, a real connection with her departed son. It took about four Rapid Eye sessions for the grief to lift. She reported that she experienced her depression less, but she was still worrying about her future and feeling stuck. The stress factor itself is less important than is our relationship to it; how we react to situations, events, feelings, and difficulties is what causes the effect of stress in the body. To feel less stress, new skills for living are needed to respond instead of reacting to life.

This is a powerful tool for personal growth and expanded mental awareness. It gives you a full light spectrum in every cell of your body, as well as tone therapy. We use it in many ways with Rapid Eye for learning, energy, relaxation, creativity, and to release depression, cravings, and addictions.

With Beverly, we concentrated on how she felt about the death instead of recreating the story. Once the emotional charge was released, missing her son could be managed. An emotion is simply a box in which the brain initially codes incoming stimuli. So, each perception is tagged in the depression box, anxiety box, or the sadness box that we call neural pathways in the brain.

Depression is usually caused by worry over needs not being met – needs for control, for security, for meaning, for intimacy, for survival, for connection to the broader community, etc. – and by misusing some of our innate resources, such as imagination. People are used to hearing stories and anecdotes. An appropriate metaphor contained in a story can bypass the defensiveness of the conscious mind and go in as a seed to that part of the brain that understands patterns.

Later on, when the client thinks about the therapy or visualization, the pattern will fire off and make connections, and they will have an experience or an insight. Many times, this happens in the middle of a RET session or during an imagery or journey.  In Beverly’s sessions, we used imagery to assist her in seeing past being stuck in her depression and to create what she would rather experience.

In Beverly’s case, she had been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as well as suffering from depression. RET was able to release both her PTSD from the death of her son and her depression that developed from missing her son. Not everyone develops post-traumatic stress from trauma. Those who have very active imaginations can bypass a life-threatening or traumatic event. However, many people with less active imaginations stay in a frozen state and tend to get stuck in the inner child stage of whatever happened to them, and other symptoms are continually and automatically triggered.

Beverly experienced this freeze-frame. In her imagination, she was in a frozen state, going over and over different things she and her son had done together; how she depended on him to be the man of the family and her support system. She could not imagine surviving without him.

We did lots of RET on the trauma pattern of going over and over her son’s death. Rapid Eye Technology pulls the trauma pattern out from the ‘file’ where it is stored in the brain into narrative memory. This ‘file’ is then encouraged to replay and reframe while the body/mind is relaxed in the alpha brain wave state, where the REM state is simulated. This process sends a revised message back to the storage area that says, “This event isn’t dangerous anymore.”

Beverly knew that she had healed her trauma when one of her students died in a car accident.  She was able to assist the parents in a compassionate way without going back into her depression. Beverly is a symbol of courage and strength to all who know her. She attributes this to her experiences with Rapid Eye Technology and has sent many others to have Rapid Eye sessions and get training.

Beverly does a maintenance session with Rapid Eye periodically. She has been successful at resolving many other personal issues in her life and is now happily married.

By Dr. Ranae Johnson, Rapid Eye Institute Founder

For Rapid Eye sessions call Martha Ballesteros at (407) 917-0070