Getting Back Your Smile  Workbook 

Creating an AcuDestress Schema (after attending)

While anyone could create their own personal AcuDestress schema from reading this page, our own use of it is that we now (as of September 2018) introduce it on the last day of an AcuDestress session, and to patients returning for a second round of the program. Note that  it is based on, refers to and assumed familiarity with one’s experience of a whole AcuDestress session, including the exercises which have been experienced. First and foremost, it requires knowing if one is RED, BLUE or GOLD/YELLOW.

Attendees (only) will have access to, and should refer to the passworded Getting Back Your Smile Workbook to refresh your memory about exercises which will be referred to here. Our schema assumes prior participation in 16 rounds of Smith’s 5-point ear acupuncture,  the AcuDestress training exercises and access to the publicly-accessible text for aftercare - The Magic of AcuDetox Part Two. It  is a way of organizing one’s path forward to embodiment of gains realized during one’s treatment. AcuDestress  is not complete until one’s whole body and whole brain and one’s connections to the so-called outside world have been integrated together.  For those with a history of trauma at least, it means, in addition to knowing one’s own acquired COLOUR, becoming more familiar with one’s birth COLOURS. To get the most out of the Schema, the reader is directed towards reading The Territory Beyond Talk Therapy .

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

1. •   A history of subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period ( months to years ).  Examples include hostages, prisoners of war, concentration-camp survivors, and survivors of some religious cults.  Examples also include those subjected to domestic battering, childhood physical or sexual abuse, and organized sexual exploitation.
   

2. • Alterations in affect regulation, including
   

1. •Persistent dysphoria
   

2. •Chronic suicidal preoccupation
   

3. •Self-injury
   

4. •Explosive or extremely inhibited anger ( may alternate )
   

5. •Compulsive or extremely inhibited sexuality ( may alternate )
   

3. • Alterations in consciousness, including
   

1. •Amnesia or hyperamnesia for traumatic events
   

2. •Transient dissociative episodes
   

3. •Depersonalization/derealisation
   

4. •Reliving experiences, either in the form of intrusive PTSD symptoms or in the form of ruminative preoccupation.
   

4. • Alterations in self-perception, including
   

1. •Sense of helplessness or paralysis of initiative
   

2. •Shame, guilt, and self-blame
   

3. •Sense of defilement or stigma
   

4. •Sense of complete difference from others ( may include sense of specialness, utter aloneness, belief no other person can understand, or nonhuman identity )
   

5. •Alterations in perception of perpetrator, including
   

1. •Preoccupation with relationship with perpetrator (includes preoccupation with revenge).
   

2. •Acceptance of belief system or rationalizations of perpetrator
   

6. • Alterations in relations with others, including
   

1. •Isolation and withdrawal
   

2. •Disruption in intimate relationships
   

3. •Repeated search for rescuer ( may alternate with isolation and withdrawal)
   

4. •Persistent distrust
   

5. •Repeated failures of self-protection
   

7. • Alterations in systems of meaning
   

1. •Loss of sustaining faith
   

2. •Sense of hopelessness and despair
   

8. 
   

These are the  a multitude of elements of PTSD  which at least 60% of the people who attend AcuDestress  will have to address with the tools we have provided.  While it may not be easy it is doable.  We now accept however that you can’t  isolate one element and deal with it.  dealing with anything on the list about requires dealing with all of it,  and that means all three layers of the brain.

Conventional psychotherapy  was devised to deal with  them balance of two layers of the brain,  not three.  This is understandable because the third brain layer  is only elevated to prominence by methods which, for the most part use neuromodulators  to stimulate the brain where which has been  recessive or “ existing as potential” in most persons.  Andres Lozano’s Deep Brain Stimulation is an example. When we experience this “lying-in-waiting”  brain layer exposed,  it is remarkable,  and our attention is galvanized  in its exposure,  much in the way  the world sat up and listened with rapt attention to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. While we often call it “ rising to the occasion”  those who experience it are mostly changed by it forever.  Such is the nature of experiencing one’s COLOUR.

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So, when the brainstem evolutionary brain layer has been “lying-in-waiting” the person suddenly “knows what to do.” Abraham Lincoln, for instance,  being a Must-Adapt thinking-feeling personality was wishy-washy and non-descript, a bumbling do-nothing individual before his epiphany at Gettysburg when he realized the necessity of taking a stand for the equality of America’s black slave population. He was never colourless or non-descript afterwards, and his focus created the winning conditions for the Union to rise to victory the Civil War.  So the  evidence for the BLUE Resource appearing is an uncharacteristic decisiveness and  centeredness appearing in a person who didn’t  appear to possess it up to that point.

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This is a little early to introduce the RED Resource,  but this chapter is dedicated to RED ERNEST and YELLOW ERNEST,  so  introducing, here, the concept of  resources as “untapped potential”  probably will make the  appearance of the  personalities which are not the withdrawing type we see in the BLUE,  but the other-approaching YELLOW-GOLD type and here, the moving-against-the-stressor RED type  we will see in more  detail below.  Few of remember  the  angry rabble-rouser  Martin Luther King of his early years,  when he was treated for anxiety and depression while  a young man seeking justice for his race.  But in the years we remember of him and his “I have a dream” speech we see someonewho possessed the RED Resource,  which enabled him to “ reach out with  unconditional compassion” which is the quality seen when the RED Resource appears.

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While I have discussed the YELLOW Resource (and other Resources) in detail  in earlier chapters,  as the offshoot of the child who threatened to have or actually had  ambivalent attachment  in his or her early years,  this resource appears in people who have a proclivity to focus their attention on others and not themselves.  In fact they lack an identity,  because their  modus operandi  is always in relation to whom ever they are with at the moment.  They are either helping,  or critiquing,  are trying to escape somebody else in their environment,  or some combination of all three.  Thus they are hard to identify  until they show up as a personality in their own right.  They are dedicated caregivers  to attend to others until they drop (burn out.)  They are hypervigilant,  looking for danger and dysfunction on all sides.  But when they acquire their YELLOW/GOLD Resource they suddenly  are “able to address, with perspective,  what is really important,”  by including themselves in the equation.  The appearance of the YELLOW/GOLD  resource is never so well illustrated as  the video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s  most extraordinary recovery from  a stroke -  which she later called her stroke of insight.

So the first steps to creating your own personal schema, are 1.) having your color in play and available to you,  knowing the experience of it,  hands-on,  and knowing how to access it,  using mindfulness  when you are in a situation  when circumstances have distracted to from  the identity it confers upon you, 2.) having an experience of your at-birth resource colours operating at full tilt. 

So the learning is:

BLUE Resource = knowing what to do (in the moment)

RED Resource = accessing the unconditioned ability to reach out compassionately

YELLOW/GOLD Resource =  accessing the ability to address,  with perspective,  what is really important

Once you know these three, the two you’ve had your entire life and the third one which has suddenly appeared to you,  you’re ready to create a schema.  But make sure you are really aware of  the abilities inherent in these resources,  and then move on to  the following page where you can create a schema from them...

Would you like to print the above page out?

CLICK HERE for a .pdf you can print

                                        ACCESS SCHEMA PAGE 2