By Suzanne Wagner, LMT

Professional psychic, massage therapist, craniosacral healer, author of Integral Tarot and Integral Numerology.

I have known Dr. Stephen Proskauer for over a decade and his clarity and depth of perception never cease to amaze me.  It is with great honor and joy that I write this introduction to Steve’s latest venture, expanding the world of psychiatry and bringing it into balance with the world of spiritual consciousness. 

I find Steve to be the kind of great mind and thinker who can synthesize tools and techniques from his broad spiritual background into a format that is not only enlightening but practical to apply in our daily lives.  A skill like his is a rare thing.  And even though this book is about healing and focuses on one client’s therapy process primarily, know that as you read you will not be able to stop your mind from grabbing onto and integrating the information into your own personal experience. 

I personally worked with Steve’s patient, Ken, for over ten years and found him totally committed to finding a doorway that would lead out of his internal Karmic turmoil and energetically challenging patterns. He was under tremendous physical and psychological stress. I had never worked with someone who had as much mental, emotional and physical trauma as Ken. 

I am a licensed professional massage therapist and craniosacral therapist for the last twenty some odd years.  I had worked in the field for a long time before I met Ken. I must admit I often felt at a loss what to do with him. There were moments when I was tempted to call the Upledger Institute (the school where I was trained in Craniosacral Therapy) and ask advice about how to help him.  I found that the high level of strain on his craniosacral system went beyond what I had encountered before. 

Most clients’ heads have a certain degree of flexibility, as the skull is held together with elastin and collagen fibers. The head is like a giant water balloon that very slowly fills and empties, normally in a balanced and even way.  But Ken’s skull and his entire physical body felt solid and rigid, like a bowling ball.  Through many years of working with his system I did manage to get some movement; the skull did soften and open, but it was years and years of work to get the smallest movement.  I often felt as if I would get one thing to shift and immediately another problem would arise.  This is normal, but somehow everything was connected in a tangled web within Ken’s body, so that any state of balance would never last for very long.

Ken was totally committed to trying all the latest things. He had left no stone unturned, even by the time he reached me. He made some progress but it was slow and frustrating for him. One day, he asked me if I could refer him to a very good psychiatrist or psychologist. I immediately thought of Dr. Proskauer. I knew that he was skilled in many modalities and it was clear to me that one technique was not enough with Ken. Somehow his system needed something that would simultaneously open up multiple patterns so they could be allowed to heal. The only person I could trust with such a complex problem was Dr. Proskauer, so I gave Ken his number.

Over a period of about six months the change in Ken was nothing short of miraculous.  His entire body relaxed and opened, and his internal stress level dropped to almost normal.  His relationships shifted into a healthier mode. Ken began to flower into his true essence self that had been previously buried under genetic programming, traumatic damage and negative beliefs. 

It was truly a miracle to see someone who had worked as long and as hard as Ken finally break through to a place of Karmic balance. It was one of the most precious experiences I have had the opportunity to witness.  It was proof that all of us can heal, even those of us with the most tremendous damage. 

This book is about hope, about the future possibilities of evolving human psychospiritual development. It would serve their patients well if other professionals would integrate these techniques into the mainstream, as the potential implications for mental and emotional healing are profound. 

If you are reading this book for your own self-diagnosis and healing, you are about to become inspired towards an inner awareness that we all can heal. There are tools available if you have the fortitude and willingness to keep seeking. If, like Ken, you have suffered from severe trauma, it is especially important to find a practitioner who understands the multiple dimensions of damage that occur and has learned to work integratively with them. Dr. Proskauer is one of this rare breed. I hope that through his work other healers will be inspired to learn the multidimensional approach. 

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By “Ken”

“I’ll chase you across all time, through hell itself, until you get it right.”  Yup, that was my Karmic vow, my curse on my mother – and myself – before I was born. The story of my healing journey with Dr. Proskauer is told in Part Three of this book, and a big part of it had to do with the process of changing this vow. Without that there would have been no rest, no peace.

From a psychiatric viewpoint, the central theme to my story is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), undiagnosed until age 55 when I saw Dr. Proskauer. I chose to experience PTSD as an essential tool for settling my Karmic issue in this lifetime. It was necessary for me to be extremely troubled in order to find my way into therapy and settle that long held Karmic curse against my mother. Of course I had no idea about the Karmic meaning of my life, so I struggled with crippling fear and paranoia until I found my way to a truly gifted healer who could approach my issues from enough different angles so that the whole picture could finally emerge.       

As a young adult, I thought that the story of troubled soldiers returning from Vietnam sounded a lot like I was feeling, but I was very lucky to have drawn a high number in the draft lottery in 1970, so I believed I had never experienced wartime combat or life and death situations. Turned out I was mistaken about that. Anyway, I discounted PTSD as a possibility, so I had to look elsewhere for understanding of why I simply was not like anybody else that I knew. I worried about things no one else did. I obsessed about confrontations that never happened: I was always playing out paranoid scenarios in my head about how I should act, what I could do if it did happen. I’ve lived my whole life in a constant state of fear of everything and everyone.

My first meaningful therapy was with Dr. Morris Netherton, starting in my mid-twenties. I spent more than a decade working with him, uncovering the repressed memories of my childhood. I had no idea whatsoever of any problems growing up, it was all just lost, deeply buried. I have almost no childhood memories other than those recovered in therapy. The childhood trauma came up in great detail during Dr. Netherton’s Past Life Therapy sessions. I guess he provided a safe environment for me to open up the buried horrors of my childhood. 

My mother beat me severely. It seemed like as soon as I was well she’d put me in the hospital again. My Dad was a wealthy sex addict and a very intimidating man. He got himself on the Board of Trustees of the hospital so he could quash any inquires into my injuries, repeated injuries. His only concern was to shield his family of sex slaves (his wife and kids) from investigation, so that he could continue to abuse us without interference. I was rushed to the hospital unconscious many times, not expected to live on more than one occasion. I was labeled an accident prone kid and it was left at that.  

When I look back at all the obvious damage done to my physical body, it had to have been very apparent to many other adults. I remember a nanny that tried to intervene, but the police were intimidated by Dad and left. She was fired of course. Mom would flip-flop back and forth between good nannies and mean ones. I believe she had to fire the good ones because they couldn’t stand by and watch her hit me; she was afraid of getting busted. And she let the mean ones go because she didn’t want to see me get hurt by anyone. Consciously, at least, she was behaving like a mother. I realize now that it was the unconscious issue of the vow that made her do crazy abusive things to me. Yes, it was my Karmic vow, with my hands around her throat, lifetime after lifetime, repeating “I’ll chase you across all time, through hell itself, until you get it right.” The story of this vow unfolds in the therapy sessions, but it’s noteworthy how an innocent child in a past lifetime ages ago could have screamed a vengeful vow in rage and terror at the moment of his death, and the impact of that could be felt through at least a dozen lifetimes between our two bound souls.

One night she came into my room to kill me for sure; there was no doubt this time. But miraculously something switched in her and she never hit me again. In therapy with Dr. Proskauer, it was revealed that one of my “protector entities” had spoken through me, saying, “Please don’t kill me.” Somehow that stopped her. It was almost like her turn to abuse me was over now. The horror didn’t stop, though: my Dad and later my stepmother had sexual needs to meet. They were blackout drinkers and when they couldn’t abuse each other they came after the rest of the family. None of us kids escaped this party.

As an adult living on my own, I was always hypervigilant, nervously awaiting a surprise attack to blindside me. The physical beatings and sexual abuse had stopped long ago, but they were still as active as ever in my mind. Every single person I saw was a threat, but I couldn’t hide out in my house; I had to go out into the world and interact with people because I was terrified to be at home alone. With no one else to threaten me, I would berate myself for things I had said or done and deeply regretted. I was so conditioned to being abused that I took over the job myself.

My work with Drs. Netherton and Proskauer wasn’t my whole experience with therapy, therapists, and well-meaning unqualified helpers. I’ll give you a brief overview of some of my other attempts to find a sense of belonging in this world. I went to many other “healers” and workshops, mostly New Age stuff because medical doctors only had pills and they didn’t help.

I tried Transcendental Meditation but it made me very uncomfortable and left me shaking badly. I spent hundreds of hours with the Psych-K technique, a reprogramming system for the unconscious. I went to a Gary Zukav weeklong seminar. I took enough Reiki classes to become a Reiki Master.  Dr. Jacob Lieberman and Ian White, E-RYT, gave me wonderful love and support; their teachings will be with me forever. I sought out many other self-proclaimed healers and gurus, but most aggravated me in a way that left me feeling re-traumatized. I didn’t know where to turn because so many of the workshops and methods that I’d tried left me desperately wishing I would just die.

I finally learned about PTSD on the internet, it gave me a renewed sense of hope. Here finally was a description of me, in all my messed up pain and struggles. I had had no idea that a person could suffer from PTSD as a result of childhood trauma. It prompted me to seek help again from a professional. I saw on the TV news that Propranolol was being prescribed for PTSD symptoms, and I desperately needed to try something, but I had to find the right combination of therapist and doctor. I’m extremely sensitive to drugs and I knew that they alone wouldn’t help me. My trusted friend Suzanne Wagner recommended Dr. Proskauer, and my whole life changed. Dr. Proskauer helped me understand how much of the so-called help I’d received was dangerously wrong for my PTSD mind. I knew I had a rough time as a child, but I thought my previous therapy had taken care of it. I just knew I was still miserable, still searching for peace, and wondering if I could ever feel like I’d actually survived my childhood.

As far back as I can recall, I always felt that I was a victim. Even after I discovering and working on my Karmic vow with Dr. Netherton over 25 years ago, I was surprised to find I wasn’t done with it yet. I still felt like a victim. Dr. Proskauer never treated me that way, never went along with my self-image as a victim. His methods of therapy guided me towards a resolution of my need for a victim identity as no one else had been able to do.

A lot of healers tried to save me, but I see now that being rescued really wouldn’t have resolved anything. The rescuer always needs to save someone. To save me would have meant rescuing me from my “awful parents,” but the whole scenario was chosen by me for a very specific purpose. I needed to suffer as much trauma as it would take to ensure that I would be mentally damaged and receive enough therapy to reach that deeply buried Karmic vow. It would have been wonderful if I could have set up an easier lesson for myself, but in Past Life Therapy. I think the most important lesson I take away from my experience is not to judge another person’s life by what I perceive it to be. I can’t save someone, and very importantly, should not try to. I could be interfering with their life’s meaning and purpose in a harmful way, even though my intent would be to help them. Helping someone, from my old familiar headspace, meant to save them, something my human mind wishes could have happened for me. I wanted saving because I had set myself up to be a victim, with parents, my supposed protectors, as the perpetrators. I wouldn’t wish this on any other person, to go through what I’ve faced. But I had chosen it all; it had to be exactly the way it was, or I’d have to have come back and try it all again until I cleared my Karmic vow.

Life is amazing, very complex, often its most important aspects are hidden from our human minds. I’m learning the difference between feeling compassion for others whom I see struggling in pain and wanting to rescue them. It’s an important difference.

Dr. Proskauer and I crossed paths at exactly the right time for my development, and I believe that I met him when he was ready to share his lifetime of knowledge and experience. He just needed the spark. If my therapy sessions galvanized his vision, then in some way I am his muse. While our work together was stimulating him, his experience and methods guided me to a much better place, a new state of integration.

I’m too close to my story to see any value in anyone else’s hearing it in gruesome detail. We have all had painful experiences in our lives; why would you want to read about mine? Dr. Proskauer says my story can serve as inspiration for others still seeking their healing path. If he’s correct, then that would be great. I’ve learned to trust him, so my story goes out for you. I hope it helps you find your path too. 

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By Paul Thielking, M.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Dr. Stephen Proskauer is an intrepid explorer and student of life.  He has traveled many paths in his life journey, applying himself fully to diverse areas of contemplation and study including psychiatry, shamanic healing, and Zen. Each of these disciplines requires many years of dedication and commitment, and each addresses distinct realms of human experience. Dr. Proskauer’s ongoing efforts to understand and experience the full range of being human have placed him in a unique position to help others on their own healing journeys. What he offers us in this volume is the culmination of four decades of medical and spiritual training, work on himself, and treatment of patients. 

In this inspiring book, Dr. Proskauer develops a multidimensional integrative healing model that offers tremendous potential benefit for healing practitioners and the patients they see. He shares with us a map of the territory we may encounter on our own journeys towards wholeness and as we facilitate the healing process of others. He shares remarkable stories of healing that illustrate the value of a comprehensive multidimensional approach. 

Dr. Proskauer demonstrates that all healing models, methods and techniques have specific benefits and also specific limitations. His integrative model provides a way to transcend these limitations and offers guidance for understanding more clearly how and where people become stuck in their healing process. He provides a multidimensional framework for integrative diagnosis that gives us a basis for choosing the best focus at each stage of treatment. 

Those of us that are healers may benefit from this integrative model by recognizing the limitations of our own particular discipline or practice. In order to truly facilitate others on their healing journeys, we need to have an honest appraisal of our skills, and to recognize when we are out of our element. In areas where we find ourselves lacking, we may need to develop new techniques or referral networks with other providers in order to best serve our patients or clients. Dr. Proskauer challenges us all to broaden our conceptual models for understanding the full spectrum of human experience.and offers us a guide to integrative multidimensional treatment. Based on a lifetime of healing practice, this book is a generous gift to all of us.

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Associate Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Utah Medical Center, Salt Lake City, Utah and President, Society for Shamanic Practitioners.

This book is Dr. Proskauer’s latest foray into the vast realm of integrative healing and the most ambitious yet.  There are many in the medical field and even in shamanism today who would prefer that the artificial compartments in our culture separating the material from the spiritual, the scientific from the inexplicable, and the seen from the unseen would remain sealed. To his credit, Dr. Proskauer is not one of them.  He has been swimming for decades against the current that has increasingly confined the practice of clinical psychiatry, once the most humanistic and holistic of the medical specialties, to neurobiology and psychopharmacology.  Though he takes these two exciting research frontiers into account and makes use of their findings in his practice and in this book, Dr. Proskauer has a far broader vision of what healing is all about, a vision that I applaud and share in my own field of medicine.

The inclusive six dimensional model of integrative healing that Dr. Proskauer proposes, so elegantly demonstrated in the fascinating case study around which the book is organized, challenges integrative healers to consider the entire spectrum of human experience when they work with their patients. His language is simple and straightforward, free enough of technical jargon to be understood by interested readers of diverse backgrounds, not just mental health professionals, provided only that they expand their consciousness enough to go there.  

As a medical colleague and fellow shamanic practitioner who knows him well, I can attest to the integrity of Dr. Proskauer’s work in both fields and to his mastery of the principles and practices of core shamanism.  I believe his six dimensional model may have potential beyond integrative psychiatry to provide a language by which healers can communicate with each other across disciplinary lines. If so, it will fill an important need and open up new possibilities for collaboration among practitioners as the barriers between mainstream medicine and alternative healing continue to crumble.

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As a psychiatrist as well as a student of Zen and shamanism, Dr. Proskauer is concerned with helping patients who have been emotionally and physically wounded much more deeply than most people in order to aid them in making the shift of perspective into the Transcendent realm and to utilize it to promote healing and integration of the whole person. Unlike my work, his task does not lend itself well to a large group format, for it demands considerable time and careful attention to the nuances of each patient’s process over a long period. He is attending to the special needs of people who might never have the sensitive support they need to overcome their identification with fear and pain so that they can rest in the vastness of Big Mind or in the healing compassion of Big Heart.

We live in an era of accelerating change and transformation that calls for using the best tools available to free ourselves and others from bondage to our small conditioned minds, to liberate all human beings from a narrowness of view that brings endless suffering and now threatens the possible destruction of the human species and even imperils the delicate balance of all life on Earth. I have responded to this challenge by combining what I have learned from my teachers so that I can offer whoever is willing an opportunity to make the simple shift in perspective from small mind to Big Mind. 

My long-time student and friend, Stephen Proskauer, is also responding to this challenge using all the talents and teachings he has been given. At a time when psychiatry is becoming narrowly biological in its perspective, he has courageously chosen to adapt for the benefit of his psychiatric patients the Zen training and instruction in the Voice Dialogue method he received from me, finding new ways to apply the wisdom of Big Mind and the compassion of Big Heart. I respect the lifetime of ceaseless exploration that has brought him to a point where he could create a comprehensive model for integrative healing that includes these Transcendent voices so effectively.  I hope that other psychiatrists, therapists and healers will be encouraged by this book to experience the Big Mind approach for themselves and to follow Stephen’s example of integrating Big Mind and Big Heart into their work. 

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A Multidimensional Approach to Trauma and Abuse

Once we have committed to healing ourselves, out woundedness becomes our greatest gift to the world. We have every reason to celebrate our humanness, our vulnerability to pain and fear and joy, our spiritual dept, for without opening to the full range of human experience we cannot sit with others and appreciate their vulnerability, their pain and fear and joy their spiritual depth.

Beyond method or technique the outcome ultimately depends on the healer’s state of consciousness. The boundless compassion of Big Hear is the vast space where healing happens in every dimension.

Dr. Proskauer hopes this book will generate benefits for traumatized people all over the world. He has recently initiated a non-profit organization, SITTA, Society for Integrative Treatment of Trauma and Abuse, to foster a training program for practitioners and develop public clinics devoted to integrative diagnosis and treatment of emotional trauma and childhood abuse. Select the button for SITTA on the sidebar of the home page for more information.

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BIG HEART HEALING:

A MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO TRAUMA AND ABUSE

.

This fascinating book by Integrative Psychiatrist Stephen Proskauer MD, is a study of how to coordinate psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual methods of healing the severe anxiety and splintering of the self caused by trauma and abuse in order to promote harmony, wholeness, integration and fulfillment.

Dr. Proskauer’s book is unique in its multidimensional approach to understanding and treating PTSD, a complex psychiatric disorder that has become tragically prevalent in our time. His theoretical model and practical guidelines for the practitioner are drawn from broad clinical experience and are relevant to the work of all healers, regardless of the methods they use.

His model brings together the Physical, Psychological, Relational, Karmic, Energetic, and Transcendent dimensions of experience into a coherent framework that is described in clear simple language free of jargon. The core of the book is a detailed account of his ground-breaking integrative healing work in a case of unusually severe childhood abuse, a fascinating page-turner with constantly expanding vistas of understanding opening up all the way through.

Big Heart Healing explores the interweaving of psychological and spiritual forms of intervention, including the Voice Dialogue method and shamanic energy healing as well as his Karmic Therapy technique that is discussed in detail in the author’s first book. The psychospiritual centerpiece of the book, however, is the Big Mind Big Heart Process developed by Zen Master Genpo Merzel Roshi, a powerful means of bringing people quickly into the experience of enlightened mind. With appropriate alterations of technique, described and demonstrated with Dr. Proskauer’s rich case material, the Big Mind Big Heart Process also produces remarkable healing of PTSD anxiety and integration of the dissociated elements of the self after severe abuse.

Big Heart Healing will fascinate psychiatrists, psychotherapists, shamanic practitioners, spiritual healers and all those interested in the interface between body, mind and spirit – between the individual ego and the mysterious Oneness that embraces everything in the universe, and beyond. This is a read that will appeal to the adventurer in all of us who thrills at each new twist and turn along an unknown path.

Stephen Proskauer has written a remarkable book! He combines depth of clinical experience with an uncommonly wide range of medical, psychotherapeutic and spiritual knowledge. Big Heart Healing provides numerous examples of the richness that is possible when we use a multidimensional approach.

-         Sandra Ingerman, renowned healer and shamanic teacher, author of Soul Retrieval and Medicine for the Earth

Dr. Proskauer hopes this book will generate benefits for traumatized people all over the world. He has recently initiated a non-profit organization, SITTA, Society for Integrative Treatment of Trauma and Abuse, to foster a training program for practitioners and develop public clinics devoted to integrative diagnosis and treatment of emotional trauma and childhood abuse. Select the button for SITTA on the sidebar of the home page for more information.

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This post is from the book

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

Chapter 11 Karmic Therapy and Spiritual Psychology

Get Your Copy of 

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

by Stephen Proskauer, M.D.

http://www.karmashrink.com/get-the-book/

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This post is from the book

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

Chapter 11 Karmic Therapy and Spiritual Psychology

Get Your Copy of 

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

by Stephen Proskauer, M.D.

http://www.karmashrink.com/get-the-book/

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This post is from the book

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

Chapter 11 Karmic Therapy and Spiritual Psychology

Get Your Copy of 

Karmic Therapy Healing the Split Psyche

by Stephen Proskauer, M.D.

http://www.karmashrink.com/get-the-book/

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