1. Stress Resolved, Illness Reversed

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

I first heard about Graf Stress Management from a man whose late-stage terminal illness reversed after using it.  He’d exhausted the conventional treatments (chemotherapy, surgery) in addition to several alternative therapies (Gerson Diet, Dardik Wave Energy, acupuncture, TM).  Finally, his doctor told him there was nothing left to do but manage pain as the disease progressed, at which point he decided to pay a final visit to his family throughout the western United States.

While visiting relatives in St. George, UT, he was referred to Dr. Jan Graf, a local chiropractor who’d developed a technique that had helped many people manage stress and recover from serious physical and mental health problems.  While not expecting much, he nonetheless scheduled an appointment hoping to improve his peace of mind.  To his surprise, Graf’s technique pinpointed and resolved a number of stresses at the root of his health problems and the effects were swift.  This man, a highly educated professional, called it “the most amazing experience of [his] life.”

It was roughly two hours of a question and answer format designed to identify his particular stresses.  Graf asked a battery of questions followed by a muscle test to check the accuracy of the man’s answers according to the intelligence, an innate faculty that knows everything about us.  As specific stresses were identified, a forgiveness technique was used to resolve them.  That was all.  The only tool was the energy of his own body — no devices, drugs, supplements, or equipment of any sort were used.

Although some stresses uncovered were recent, the most debilitating one had occurred two decades earlier.  Through the intervening years, negative energy related to the event had steadily undermined the man.  He felt immediate physical and emotional relief when the stress he’d harbored so long was eliminated.   Afterward, he felt like a new person — peaceful, invigorated, optimistic  — and subsequently experienced rapid improvement in his health.  He’d taken care of his stress, thereby allowing his intelligence to take care of the healing.

I was fascinated.  This approach corresponded to my own views about health and the mind.  At the time, my husband and I were hoping to start a family and grappling with infertility, so I promptly made an appointment and traveled to St. George, where I had a life-changing experience of my own.

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2. Example: Stress Management Overcame Infertility

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

After my husband and I had decided to start a family, we grappled with infertility.   It was hardest on me and became an all-consuming focus.  I felt bitter, embarrassed, jealous, defensive, defective and desperate — a terrible mix.  I tried Graf Stress Management after hearing about it from someone who’d used it to reverse a terminal illness.

To me, it sounded like the ultimate holistic mind-body approach.  I gravitated toward its premise that we each have a subconscious “intelligence” which knows everything about us.  It holds the record of our life’s events and the blueprint for a healthy body.

I’d believed the “blueprint” part since childhood.  As I was growing up, I interacted daily with a very illness-oriented person who visited several doctors each week.  She believed that her body needed close medical supervision to run properly, and she unconsciously tried to convert me to her outlook.  She frequently announced that I was exhibiting symptoms of some malady, even though I felt fine.  She even forecast a series of health problems for my lifetime: allergies in childhood, phlebitis in my twenties, high blood pressure by thirty, arthritis in my forties, and kidney problems were just a question of when.

These predictions annoyed me sometimes to the point of outright anger.  There was no substance to them.  I had excellent health and wasn’t fragile in any sense.  And I resented what felt like an “illness spell” being cast on me by planting negative expectations about my health in my mind, which I suppose I instinctively regarded as bad policy.

Watching this person as I grew, it was evident to me that psychological factors — mainly beliefs and expectations — were a major determinant of our health.  So, in addition to mentally dismissing these particular “plans” for my future, I made a point of actively resisting the negative programming so normalized into daily life that no one even notices it.

Whenever I heard someone say, “Put on a coat or you’ll catch cold,” I’d think to myself, “The temperature isn’t the problem; the belief that it will make us sick is.”  I was willing to wear a coat if I needed it for comfort, but I wasn’t buying into the ‘fear of sickness from cold air’ thing.  I shrugged off the bizarre rule not to swim for 30 minutes after eating.  If digestion were really that risky, we’d be taking other precautions as well like not driving or operating heavy equipment.

Even the “sensible” advice, like avoiding sick people or making sure they didn’t sneeze on me, seemed unnecessary.  I considered myself well able to fight off the harmful microbes that crossed my threshold twenty-four/seven.   For the most part, the strategy worked.  Now that I’m too old to get grounded, I’ll admit that ninety-five percent of the time I stayed home sick from school, I was faking it. (Sorry, Mom.)

But infertility was a tougher challenge.  I wasn’t getting anywhere by “thinking my way out of it,” and nothing else seemed to be helping, either.  When I heard the way Graf Stress Management worked,  it sounded like what I needed: a way to harness the connection between my mind and my body,  as opposed to the vague visualizations and hit-or-miss affirmations I’d tried.

My consultation with Dr. Graf lasted about an hour and a half.  I was asked a series of questions to pinpoint my stresses — and surprisingly, there were many I hadn’t guessed.  The specifics are private but in broad strokes, the main stress preventing conception was my subconscious fear that my own children would reject me.

My intelligence responded by making sure I didn’t become pregnant, protecting me from a situation I feared.  (And the stress can be the father’s just as easily as the mother’s.)  Exactly how did the intelligence do this — by preventing ovulation, fertilization, implantation?  I don’t know, and I don’t need to know… not that I wouldn’t like to.  But ultimately, my job is not to micromanage my body, but to take care of my stress and let my body take care of running itself.

When the appointment was over, I felt entirely different from when I’d walked in:  peaceful, excited, as if floating.  I couldn’t believe the amount of stress I’d released and how wonderful I felt when it was gone.  That alone would have been worth the visit.  But better still, I was delighted to learn very soon afterward that I was pregnant.  I never again had fertility problems.

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3. What Do We Mean By Stress?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

Broadly speaking, stress is the inability to cope with what life hands us.  Many people think of it as the tensions of daily life: too much to do,  too little time, grueling commutes, demanding people, etc.  However, these things, while unpleasant, are fairly superficial and we generally to deal with them better than we think.

Graf Stress Management’s clinical use indicates that the stresses which undermine us run deeper.  They involve things like failing to live up to our value standards; harboring fear, guilt, anger, resentment or low self-esteem; troubled relationships; and negative thoughts, feelings, or expectations.  Graf Stress Management recognizes eight types of stress: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Psychological, Environmental, Fear, Guilt, and Reality Stress.

A range of techniques has traditionally been used to relieve stress: medication, meditation, relaxation, affirmations, visualization, supplements, yoga, biofeedback, mindfulness, massage, acupuncture, and exercise.  These approaches can help some feel better temporarily, but they focus on symptoms only and are not productive at removing the underlying causes of stress.

By contrast, Graf Stress Management relies on a powerful diagnostic and analytical tool, the Stress Evaluation, to help uncover and resolve the hidden roots of stress.   Over the course of thirty five years, tens of thousands of people have successfully used it to clear up deep seated personal issues and as a result, regain peasce of mind as well as recover from serious mental and physical health problems.

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4. Example: Our Intelligence Knows What’s Stressing Us

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

Each of us has a subconscious “intelligence” that keeps a record of our life.  It knows everything that has ever happened to us.  From the moment of conception, the intelligence records information acquired from the thoughts and feelings of our parents.  Subsequent experiences of our lives, positive and negative, are permanently stored by the intelligence.

The intelligence also runs the body.  It maintains the material of our bodies in active organization and directs every aspect of the development and function of our bodies from conception to death.  It knows how to run a perfectly healthy body — it holds the very blueprint.

Graf Stress Management operates by gaining access to the intelligence through muscle response testing (also known as applied kinesiology).  It uses the intelligence as a source of valuable information for identifying and resolving stresses that interfere with peace of mind and well-being.  The stresses that surface this way are often surprising, such as those involving old events we thought were long behind us yet whose effects linger on decades later as negative energy.

In addition to identifying hard to find stresses, the intelligence provides useful insights as to how we really feel.  Often, what we think about something with our logic-driven minds is totally different from what we feel about it in our hearts.  The Graf technique demonstrates that between the two, what we feel is more important to our health and well-being than what we think.

For instance, I once did a Stress Evaluation with an extremely overweight man.  As we questioned his intelligence,he was surprised to learn that he was using fat as a defense against receiving affection, which he subconsciously felt was immoral.  This surprised him.  Of course he didn’t think affection was immoral, but subconsciously he felt so.  Why?  He’d grown up in a loving family where appropriate affection was shown.  He had affectionate relationships with his children.  The finding didn’t make sense to him.

But as we continued to question his intelligence, the reason emerged.  He was carrying guilt feelings from an episode years earlier in which he, a married man, had acted in a manner beneath his value standards with a woman who was not his wife.  Their behavior had involved physical affection, among other things, and as a result he’d unwittingly developed have negative feelings about affection.  Moreover, inasmuch as the woman had initiated the activity because she’d found him attractive (and likely also wanted to escape facing her own marital problems), he subconsciously tried to escape future temptation by using excess weight to make himself less attractive, given that he no longer trusted himself to do the right thing when tempted otherwise.

Now it made sense to him.  Once he took care of his stress, he no longer felt that affection was immoral or distrusted himself to live up to his standards.  With no more need for the excess weight, his intelligence directed his metabolism to get rid of it.   I’m not suggesting that this is the reason all people become overweight, but it was for this man, demonstrating the precision possible with this tool.

Questioning the intelligence is an invaluable key to discovering what’s troubling us.  It gives us information we might not otherwise obtain which we can use to unload yesterday’s negative energy as well as prevent today’s stress from diminishing our peace, health, and productivity.

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5. Applied Kinesiology and The Stress Evaluation

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Elizabeth

Regardless of the reason a client comes in, Graf Stress Management uses the same signature technique with all: the Stress Evaluation, a question/answer /muscle test format which draws information from the client’s intelligence to identify problem-causing stress.

Those who haven’t experienced muscle testing may find it hard to envision the way it works and there’s no substitute for direct experience.  But in brief, it appears to operate on the same principle as the polygraph, which registers different physiological responses for true or false answers to questions.

With muscle testing, the client is asked a question and answers it.  Following the answer, the consultant applies pressure to a contracted indicator muscle on the client’s body while the client tries to resist.  When the answer given by the client is correct, his energy (as demonstrated in his indicator muscle) remains strong.  When the answer is incorrect, the energy field is momentarily weakened and there will be a corresponding loss of muscle strength.  Graf Stress Management uses this muscle test to pinpoint, by process of elimination, the specific stresses causing problems for a client.

Applied kinesiology appears simple but it is an art more difficult than it looks, and it requires a great deal of practice to be used skillfully.  It is also subject to constraints, the foremost being that it works reliably only with willing participants; it cannot be used to force information out of a person with any degree of accuracy.   Its accuracy can be compromised by either party trying to “control” the outcome to get a desired answer.  Both persons should make a sincere effort to be neutral.  That said, when both are intent on accuracy, applied kinesiology is a highly accurate diagnostic tool in stress management.

A third caveat is that applied kinesiology is best used in its proper sphere.  Graf Stress Management limits its use to those things clients legitimately need to know for their health and well-being.  Some devotees claim that applied kinesiology can answer virtually any question in the universe (see Power vs. Force, by David R. Hawkins, M.D.) but we do not share that conclusion.  We don’t believe it’s properly used as a crystal ball to inquire about the private details of another person’s life, diagnose car problems, make investment decisions,  or predict future events.  Nor is it a parlor trick.  Above all, it should not be used to circumvent the important growth process of learning to use our free agency to make right choices.

On my second visit as a client to Jan Graf, I received a memorable lesson about when not to use muscle testing.  I had gone in with some symptoms that made me suspect I was pregnant, and muscle testing confirmed that indeed I was.  Predictably, my next question was: “Is it a boy or a girl?”  Graf smiled, stopped muscle testing and replied, “I could tell you, but I’d have a 50% chance of being wrong.”  What he meant was that he was unwilling to use muscle testing for this sort of question.  The gender of my baby was not something I needed to know for my well-being and therefore, not an appropriate use of muscle testing.  The only answer he’d be willing to give was a guess.  I’m aware that others use muscle testing for this and other similar questions, perhaps even getting accurate answers, but the philosophy of Graf Stress Management is that applied kinesiology is rightly restricted on a need-to-know basis.

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6. The Stress Evaluation Finds Eight Types of Stress

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

Graf Stress Management’s signature technique, the Stress Evaluation, is a question and answer procedure structured to identify specific stresses causing problems for the individual.   It moves from the general (what type of stress?) to the specific (when did it happen, whom does it involve, etc.?) until the precise stress is pinpointed.  Currently, eight types of stress are addressed within this framework:

Physical Stress includes physical traumas such as cuts, burns, sprains, broken bones, surgery, etc.  The intelligence is capable of healing these quite well provided there are no additional stresses preventing healing.

Mental Stress is any activity that is excessively taxing mentally, such as studying for the bar exam.  Normal school- and work-related thinking are generally not problems because we expect them and are prepared in advance.

Emotional Stress involves concern about loved ones who are experiencing problems and whom we feel unable to help.  Interestingly, babies and young children suffer most frequently from emotional stress, usually when parents are not dealing well with their own stress.  Often, a sick baby or child can be helped by assisting parents with their stress.

Psychological Stress is tied to how we feel about ourselves — our self-esteem. It can relate to things we don’t like about ourselves or problems in our relationships with other people.  Psychological stress causes more problems that all other stresses combined.

Environmental Stress concerns our surroundings – where we live, work and so forth.  This stress is triggered by abrupt, unfavorable changes in our environment, such as natural disasters.

Fear Stress comes from harboring fear.  Fear is a destructive emotion that curtails productive living and should be avoided at all costs.  Examples include fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of disease, fear of the dark and other phobias, as well as a generalized sense of helplessness.

Guilt Stress stems from living beneath our value standards.  Each of us has standards, innate as well as learned, for every aspect of our lives.  Some are less important (the way we load the dishwasher or style our hair) while others are vitally important (integrity, morality, parenting).  When we live up to our standards, we feel at peace with ourselves but when we fall short of them, we feel guilt stress and may even punish ourselves physically.

Reality Stress occurs when people fail to distinguish between reality and fantasy in their own lives.  For example, a woman may identify with Cinderella, waiting for Prince Charming to rescue her from slaving for people who mistreat or don’t appreciate her.

After establishing the types of stress troubling a client, the Stress Evaluation progresses to greater detail.  Is the stress in the present or the past?  If the past, specifically when?  Does it involve a particular person?  Is it related to work, family, religion, etc.?  Questioning proceeds until the the stress is identified and resolved as indicated by the client’s intelligence.  The final question I usually ask in a session is, “Is there anything else we can do for you today?”  When the answer is “no,” we’re done.

Does this mean that the client has no remaining stress whatsoever?  Perhaps, but not necessarily.  Clients usually come in looking for help with a particular problem.  The first thing I ask people is, “What brings you in today?” so as to focus our work on that issue.  As we proceed, other interrelated stresses may surface, but on the whole it’s not a scatter-shot, “deal-with-every-stress-that’s-ever-happened-in-your-life” approach.  Therefore, it’s possible that stresses with no bearing on the matter of interest will not emerge.  In that sense, a client could still have “some stress,” but it’s either not related to the issue at hand or it may be a stress that the client is unable or unwilling to face.  Our individual agency is paramount such that this latter category, stresses we are unable/ unwilling to face, will not surface in the Stress Evaluation until we so choose.

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7. Example: Clear Direction from the Stress Evaluation

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Elizabeth

I don’t know of a more powerful tool than the Stress Evaluation for quickly and accurately pinpointing stress, as the following example illustrates.  Although the presenting problem, abnormal hair loss, is a stereotypical symptom of stress, the underlying issue was unique to the client.  Would conventional approaches have uncovered the problem?  In the twenty minutes this took?

A former client came to see me because her hair had suddenly begun to fall out.  When we questioned her intelligence in the Stress Evaluation, we found psychological and guilt stresses.  She assumed they were related to her ongoing divorce, but to her surprise, they weren’t.  Instead, the stress related to years-old business matter that she subconsciously felt was a test of her integrity – a test she was failing.    After all that time, it had suddenly begun bothering her because a recent event in her life had triggered the stress.

Several years earlier, she’d been engaged in selling an expensive line of cosmetics that included a shampoo.  She had some of the shampoo inventory left over and had been using it on her own hair until it got packed up when she moved recently to a new home.  In the new place, she’d been using whatever bottle she unpacked first, which happened to be a different brand.  That was the problem.  It wasn’t that the second shampoo was inferior.  Rather, it was that she subconsciously felt honor-bound to use up all of the product, the one she used to sell, before moving on to another brand.

Why?  Because customers had purchased this very expensive shampoo on the basis of her word that it was superior and worth the high cost.  For her to use a cheaper brand while she still had some of the other on hand was beneath her standards for honesty, hence the guilt stress .  Interestingly, we found that her sense of integrity did not require her to continue buying the high-priced shampoo once she finished her supply.  Presumably, the financial strain of the divorce constituted a legitimate reason within her value system to switch to a cheaper brand.

When the Stress Evaluation was done, she felt at peace with herself.  She stood taller, having reaffirmed her high value standards.  And true to our findings, as soon as she went back to the expensive shampoo, her hair stopped falling out.  She’s long since used it up and her hair has remained intact because she is living up to her value standards.  We shared a laugh when she called to tell me this because it was funny, but it was also sweet to me.  I love the fact that integrity matters to all of us at the core — even the most seemingly hard-bitten folks.  Some people think they’re ‘getting ahead’ by short-cutting integrity, but all that really does is create stress, diminish self-esteem, and possibly make them ‘pay for it later’ with self-inflicted illness.

The Stress Evaluation provides information that can guide targeted corrective action, as opposed to hit-or-miss solutions based on conjecture.  For instance, the most obvious stress in this woman’s life was her acrimonious divorce, but that turned out not to be a factor at all in her hair loss.  The real stress was an integrity concern related to an old business situation.  Without drawing on the intelligence for this information, what would a physician, a psychologist, or a nutritionist have suggested to correct the problem?  How many tests would have been run and how quickly, at what expense, yielding what findings?  Would a solution even have been found?

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8. It’s Not Just Headaches and Ulcers — Any Illness Can Stem from Stress

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Elizabeth

For the most part, we deal with stress ineffectively and destructively.  We try to escape it with food, alcohol, drugs, sex, or possessions.  We distract ourselves with television, gaming, internet browsing, or even people and relationships.  We hide from it with denial.  We overeat or starve ourselves.  We make ourselves sick.   We are embarrassed by stress and our avoidance tactics are endless.

Becoming overwhelmed by stress is an individualized process, but the results are common to all: we become less engaged in healthy, productive living. Our thinking and behavior degenerate from constructive to destructive, from creative to self-sabotaging.  We procrastinate.  We lose motivation, curiosity, enthusiasm.  We feel confusion, fatigue, depression, anxiety, or hopelessness.  There are serious second-order effects as well — many of the problems we have in life are the result of poor decisions made under the influence of overwhelming stress.

Medical research has concluded that many diseases and chronic illnesses are directly related to the inability to cope with stress — and not just minor, transitory complaints like headaches and colds.  From over 35 years of clinical use on thousands of people, Graf Stress Management has found stress at the root of all types of physical and mental illnesses, from chronic conditions like infertility, fibromyalgia, and addiction, to debilitating or terminal illnesses like cancer, lupus, AIDS, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In our experience, health problems generally fill one or more of three stress-related needs:

  • An escape from a situation we feel we can’t cope with;
  • A punishment of our self or someone else;
  • A justification of negative feelings, such as fear.

Clearly, people don’t consciously choose to become ill from stress.  No one decides, for instance, “I’d better get a headache so I don’t have to go to school today.” However, if we are unprepared for a test, our intelligence, which runs the body, can bring one on to keep us out of school legitimately instead of us compromising our value standards by simply skipping class.  Likewise with more serious maladies.

Denying we have stress only hurts us.  It is nothing to be embarrassed about but rather, the symptom of a problem to be addressed.

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9. The Roles of Illness: Escape, Justification, and Punishment

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Elizabeth

If the intelligence is capable of running a perfectly healthy body, why do we ever get sick?  We find with Graf Stress Management that health problems don’t generally just “happen.”  Rather, they are the result of the intelligence giving us what we subconsciously feel we need.

Many health problems fall into one of three categories according to the need they fill in our lives:

  1. Escapes from unmanageable situations;
  2. Justifications and manifestations of fears, expectations or negative feelings;
  3. Punishments of self or others.

Escapes   There are times we feel that we can’t cope with a situation.  If we see no graceful way out, we may create a physical health problem to save face and justify our escape.  Whether it’s minor like the stomachache that gets us out of school, or extreme like the terminal illness to get out of a bad marriage, there are thousands of reasons people escape and thousands of ways to do it.  Our intelligence can give us whatever we need to make it happen.  We’ve all used escapes at one point or another without even realizing it.

Justifications   Have you ever heard someone say, ”I was afraid that would happen, and sure enough, it did”?  We frequently justify our fears or negative expectations by turning them into reality.  We fear “catching” a cold from someone, and we do.  Is it because our immune system can’t kill the virus, or because our expectation is so strong that our intelligence complies by directing the immune system not to attack?  Have we given the virus the upper hand by virtue of fears and expectations?  Why is it that some people never seem to have cold symptoms?  Could it be that they don’t expect to catch a cold if sneezed on, and therefore don’t need to justify the fear and expectation?

We live in a world filled with microorganisms, many of which have been linked to various diseases.  Billions pass through our body every day, kept in check by our immune system.  But when situations trigger our fears or negative expectations of becoming sick, our intelligence responds by delivering the illness we feared, expected, or felt we deserved.  It would be interesting to observe the disposition of these same microorganisms in the body of a person with no need to justify fears or expectations, escape from a situation, or punish himself.

Justifications of negative feelings can also appear as “hereditary” weaknesses or diseases, in which a problem occurring in the parent also occurs in the child.  We may think of these as genetic imperatives but in Graf Stress Management we frequently find that children, including adult children, often subconsciously feel the need to exhibit the same malady as a parent to “justify” being accepted by that parent.  It’s as if to say, “See, I’m your son /daughter.  I have the same problem as you.”  This is especially true when a child has felt rejected by that same parent.

Justifications can also help us save face, as in the overweight young woman I saw who subconsciously used excess weight to justify never being married.  She had carried feelings of rejection throughout her life and feared she would ultimately be rejected by any suitors.  In the Stress Evaluation we found that it was less painful for her to think that a man wouldn’t marry her because she was overweight than to think that a man wouldn’t marry her because she was her.

Punishments    Each of us has value standards associated with our performance in every aspect of life, from the mundane, like how we organize our drawers, to the important, such as integrity, morality, financial success, educational achievement, and family relationships.  When we live up to our value standards, we like ourselves and enjoy high self-esteem.

But when our behavior falls short of our standards, we don’t like ourselves and have low self-esteem.  Often, our first response is to justify the behavior by blaming someone else for what we did, but when this isn’t possible, we may internalize the stress and develop physical symptoms to punish ourselves for it.  We may also use our symptoms to punish others for what they’ve done to us.

Viewing health problems as escapes, justifications, and punishments, rather than things that “just happen” because of microorganisms, genes, and other forces beyond our control, may be a new idea to many but it is the essential paradigm that has worked at the center of Graf Stress Management for over thirty-five years.

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10. The Vital Role of Value Standards

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

Each of us has value standards governing our performance in every aspect of life, from non-essentials like how we load the dishwasher to vital matters like integrity and morality.  When we live up to our value standards, we like ourselves and enjoy high self-esteem.  But when our behavior falls short, we don’t like ourselves, have low self-esteem and may experience guilt stress.

Graf Stress Management has discovered three interesting facts about our value standards:

1) Value standards can be raised, but not lowered.   As we gain new insight, our standards may rise.  In other words, once we recognize a higher standard than the one we’ve previously held, we unconsciously make the higher behavior our new baseline.  Having done so, we cannot move back to the lower standard.  We are always free to live beneath our standards, but we will experience the shortfall as guilt stress.  Like it or not, it appears that we’re hard-wired to follow an upward path.

2) Certain key value standards are inborn, not learned.   The standards that appear to be most important to us, such as honesty, morality, forgiveness and so forth, are already in place at birth.  I have yet to work with a single person who, during the course of the Stress Evaluation, was not found to have been born with high moral value standards.  Instruction and example received in the home or elsewhere can reinforce or undermine the choice to live up to these standards, but the values themselves seem to be in place at birth.

3) Failure to live up to key standards can be devastating to our health and well-being.   Many of the problems I see in people are found, in the Stress Evaluation, to be serving as either 1) subconscious self-punishments for violating these standards, or 2) escapes from situations where they feel at risk of violating them.  I recall a client who left college for a psychiatric hospital following a psychotic breakdown and suffered a recurrence several years later as he prepared to re-enroll.  A psychiatrist had worked for years to ‘stabilize’ him on anti-psychotic drugs, never addressing the cause of the episodes, perhaps assuming it was ‘genetic’ and triggered by the pressure of college.

During the Stress Evaluation we found that at the time of the initial breakdown, the young man had felt devastated after violating a value standard that was very important to him, one he’d made an outright pledge to uphold.  He was fearful that the college environment posed a high-risk situation for him to repeat the offense and he no longer trusted himself to withstand the temptation.  Plus, he felt he didn’t deserve the privilege of college after what he’d done.  The breakdown had given him an escape from the risk of temptation while also punishing him for his behavior.

The finding that we’re born with high value standards is at odds with today’s moral relativism, which treats values as cultural by-products or personal choices.  Popular culture promotes ever-lower standards, particularly for sexual morality, in the drive to be ‘progressive’ and ‘non-judgmental.’  It treats the guilt we feel (or suppress) from wrongdoing as an oppressive inhibition getting in the way of real happiness.

But according to the intelligence, just the opposite is true.  Our high moral standards are innate and we are not capable lowering them.  We feel peace and satisfaction when we live up to them, and we experience stress, not happiness, when we live beneath them.  And rather than being a nuisance, guilt feelings in their proper context are useful signals that we have ‘missed the mark’ and need to correct our behavior.  It is important, however, to deal with guilt swiftly and positively through corrective action.  Torturing ourselves with guilt feelings after the fact is not only painful and unproductive, it is itself beneath our value standards.

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11. Forgiveness: The Most Effective Way to Handle Stress

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

Graf Stress Management’s thirty-five years of clinical use has yielded one definitive insight: Forgiveness is the key to eliminating stress and enjoying healthy, peaceful, productive living.

We are each born with high value standards, one of which is the need to forgive when we take offense.  The failure to forgive constitutes a tremendous stress on us which can result in very real health problems.  Other methods of coping with stress such as relaxation, hobbies, and exercise overlook this fundamental truth.  While they may help us feel better on a temporary, limited basis, any approach which neglects forgiveness cannot be fully effective at eliminating stress and is at best a distraction or cover-up.

I confess that when I first heard this, it bothered me.  I had been a grudge-holder most of my life.  The concept of ‘unearned forgiveness’ went against my grain.  It felt like I was doing something nice for people who didn’t deserve it — as if I was saying, “It doesn’t matter what you did to me or whether you’ll do it again.  Let’s be friends.”  But that’s not what forgiveness is.  Here’s how I explain it to clients:

When something offends us – when it hurts our feelings or make us angry – we have the choice whether or not to take offense.  It happens so fast, so reflexively, that we may not even realize we have a choice but we do.  And most often we choose to take offense.

Once we’ve taken offense, our first response is usually to retaliate or ‘get even.’  We tell the other person off, we get physical, exclude them socially, sue them, gossip about them, and so forth.  We think it will make us feel better to see “justice” done, but surprisingly, retaliation makes us feel worse.  The reason is that it’s beneath our innate value standards to return evil for evil, and living beneath our value standards is always stressful.

Some people are not retaliators  by nature.  Instead, when they get offended, they “swallow it” and do nothing outwardly.  But instead of forgiving and forgetting, they think about it over and over again and it festers inside them,  sometimes to the point of causing very serious physical health problems.

There’s a third option for dealing with offense that few of us even consider: forgiveness.  We have a lot of trouble with forgiveness because we don’t understand what it means.  We think it means letting someone get away with something as opposed to justice being done. or condoning wrongdoing, or giving a free pass to hurt us again.  This is NOT what forgiveness is.

Forgiveness is not a justice process. It is simply the act of allowing the offender the free agency to be less than perfect and letting the Lord be the judge.   It’s letting go and not internalizing the negativity.

Often we hold onto our anger or hurt because we think it somehow punishes the offender, as if our negative feelings had any impact at all on him at all.   The truth is, we’re the ones hurt by those feelings, not him, which is why we benefit from forgiving.  As discussed above, we are born with a value standard that requires us to forgive when offense is taken.  We cannot discard or lower that standard; our only two choices are to live up to it and feel at peace, or live beneath it and feel stress.  Forgiveness enables us to put the issue to rest and prevent the negativity from causing problems for us.

Forgiveness does not change the fact that the offender will stand accountable for his actions in the final analysis, just as we will for ours.   Justice will inevitably be served, but not necessarily by us or on our timetable.

Forgiveness does not mean we have to like the people who’ve hurt us, or choose to socialize with them.  Nor does it require us to put ourselves in the position of letting them hurt us again.  It doesn’t mean that we can’t hold them responsible to remedy the damage they’ve done, when appropriate.  It doesn’t mean we can’t pursue justice through appropriate channels, even legal means if the situation warrants it.  Suing for revenge, however, as opposed to for justice, or  pursuing revenge in any other fashion would be inconsistent with forgiveness.

Often, the person we find it hardest to forgive is our self.  In fact, when the need to forgive oneself shows up during the Stress Evaluation, it often come as a surprise to the client.  Subconsciously, we seem to feel that if we make ourselves suffer enough, we can “pay” for our wrongdoing, which is impossible.  In any case, the same principle applies to offenses we commit against our self as to those committed by others: the failure to forgive is stressful to us.

One of the most useful aspects of Graf Stress Management its clarification of whom we need to forgive and exactly what for, which are not always clear to our rational minds.  In particular, when a lot of time has elapsed since the offense, we may not even realize that stress remains and needs to be resolved.  Even in the case of recent events, what we think offended us may not be what actually offended us, according to our intelligence.

Again and again we see that nothing brings more peace of mind and relief from overwhelming, debilitating stress than the simple, humble tool of forgiveness.   When properly applied where needed, it can result in dramatic physical and mental healing as well as peace of mind and increased energy levels.

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12. The Technical Steps of Forgiveness

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

“I’ll never forgive her.”  “It’s going to take a lot before I forgive him.”  “It’s too soon for me to forgive.”  Statements such as these are evidence of the widespread misunderstanding about forgiveness — a misunderstanding that hurts us.  A common misconception is that forgiveness requires enough time to pass for us to become “ok” with what happened.  Or that amends must be made by the offender before forgiveness has been earned.  We mistakenly regard forgiveness as a justice process where accounts get settled between the offender and the offended.

But insights from the clinical practice of Graf Stress Management provide an altogether different view of the nature, process, and purpose of forgiveness.  First and foremost is the recognition that forgiveness benefits us.  We generally think of it as being the other way around, that it’s something we do for the sake of those who have wronged us.  There is some truth to that inasmuch as most people want to be forgiven for their wrongdoing.  But from the standpoint of taking care of stress, the main benefit is for us.

Because the fact is, the grudges we hold have no impact whatsoever on those against whom we hold them.  Nor do they remedy the original hurt that offended us, despite the illusion that we are “getting even” by thinking ill of the offender.  Moreover, the Stress Evaluation consistently demonstrates that failure to forgive is a more significant stress than the offense itself, sometimes with devastating results.  (Additional discussion of forgiveness is found in 11. Forgiveness: The Most Effective Way to Handle Stress.)

The biggest obstacle to effective forgiveness is that we don’t know how to do it properly.  One common mistake is conditional forgiveness:  “I’ll forgive if she apologizes,” “I’ll forgive if he changes,” “I’ll forgive this time, but not if it happens again.”  Yet these conditions prevent true forgiveness from taking place.  Remember, we’re the ones who benefit from forgiveness.  Let’s make sure it happens!

Forgiveness doesn’t need to be a dramatic, emotionally wrenching, drawn-out experience.  It can simply be a gentle “letting go.”  Graf Stress Management relies on five basic principles to guide effective forgiveness:

  1. Say it out loud. There is real power and effect in feeling ourselves say the actual words.
  2. Be specific. State exactly whom you’re forgiving and what for.  Generalized statements like, “I forgive everyone for everything that’s ever happened to me” don’t work.  Forgiveness needs to be directed toward actual offenses.  And even if the person who offended us didn’t actually do something wrong, the fact that we took offense means we need to forgive.  For example, “I forgive Pat for causing me to feel rejected by not inviting me to sit with her at lunch.”  (Of course, that would likely be paired with, “I forgive myself for feeling rejected when Pat didn’t ask me to sit with her.”)
  3. Use the present tense: “I forgive,” not, ”I need to forgive,” or, “I will forgive.”  Make it happen now.
  4. Do it as many times as it takes. Each time you even remember an offense, it offends you all over again, so forgive again.
  5. Do it immediately. Don’t let it fester for even a minute.  Make it a reflex.

These simple steps have been shown in thousands of clients to have extraordinary effect in managing stress and securing peace of mind, health, and well-being.

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13. Example: Forgiveness Can Remove Barriers to Healing

Posted on September 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

Many people think forgiveness has no concrete impact; it’s merely a polite social gesture to keeps things running smoothly, akin to saying “please” and “thank-you.”  Others regard it as the cowardly choice of those too timid to take real action.  Both views are wrong.  Forgiveness is a tool with literal power, and far from being an easy cop-out, it can require a lot of courage to do.

Time and again, Graf Stress Management clients have demonstrated that true forgiveness is unparalleled at eliminating stress and opening the door to power that can actually heal minds and bodies.  Forgiveness can remove our subconscious need to use illness to punish ourselves, escape from situations, or justify negative feelings.  This, in turn, can free our intelligence to do what it does best: run a healthy body.

The following story illustrates the peace and recovery that come from forgiveness.

Years ago, a client came to see Jan Graf with a life-threatening disease for which he had received the recommended medical treatment without improvement.  The Stress Evaluation revealed that someone had deeply offended this man fifteen years earlier and he needed to forgive this person.

Graf asked, “ Can you think of anyone who offended you fifteen years ago?”

At first the man couldn’t.  Then it dawned on him.  “Oh yes, how could I forget him?” Graf informed his client that he needed to forgive this man, but the client, “I sure do, and someday I might, but I’m not about to forgive him today.”  [Note the mistaken belief that forgiveness is an act of kindness extended on behalf of someone else.  In this case, it was the client who would have benefited by forgiving but believed that he was "getting even" with the offender by hanging onto his resentment.  Meanwhile, the offender was completely unaffected by the hard feelings.]

Graf reminded the man that he didn’t have a lot of ‘somedays’ left at the rate his health was deteriorating.  The client countered that given the way he felt about this man, forgiveness would be nothing more than lip service.  Then he told the story of this “friend” who had talked him into investing in a sure deal which would yield a fantastic return in a matter of a few months.  So the client borrowed several hundred thousand dollars, all the money that he could produce on his signature, and then mortgaged his home and business against his wife’s better judgment.

When it came time for the fantastic return to materialize, the friend informed him that the deal hadn’t worked out and he’d lost all the money.  The friend felt bad about it but said that was the way the investment business worked: you win some, you lose some.

Subsequently, the bank foreclosed on the client’s home and business.  His wife was so upset that she took the children and went to live with her parents.  In his desperation, he got inappropriately involved with another woman, thus losing his membership in his church.  Thanks to this “friend,”  he ended up declaring bankruptcy and losing everything of value to him, including his family.

“And you ask me to forgive him?,” he questioned Graf.

Graf told him to go ahead anyway.  It would be a start.  He finally agreed to give the lip service.  He stammered out, “I forgive…” but with his bottled up anger, he struggled for about three minutes, unable to get the words out.  “I can’t do it,” he said.  “I can’t even say it!”

“Try it from the heart now, “ Graf suggested.

The man began to sob.  For almost ten minutes he cried, then finally said, “I forgive [friend's name] for causing me to lose my family, my home, my business, my membership in my church, my money, and his friendship.”

Graf reminded him that he also needed to forgive himself for his own contribution to these problems, which the man did.  As he finished, he remarked that he felt a tremendous weight lifted from his body.  He had no idea what a heavy burden he’d been carrying.  Graf suggested that he ask his family to forgive him, and if possible, it would be good for him to ask the friend to forgive him for carrying the bitterness toward him all these years.

Another suggestion Graf gave him was to consider going back to his church after all these years and finding the Lord, whom he also needed to forgive since he blamed Him for allowing this terrible thing to happen in the first place.

After working through many other stresses in his life, he left the office.  The receptionist asked Graf whether or not he thought the man would overcome the life-threatening illness.  He responded that he didn’t know, it was up to the man, but even if he didn’t he’d be much more at peace when he met his maker than he was before forgiving.

Three years went by. and one day the receptionist informed Graf that this same man was returning in to see him.  Graf had visions of a man being wheeled in on a gurney, barely alive.  Instead, he was shocked at the healthy man walking into the office.  He informed Graf that he’d made a complete recovery within six months of the visit and was only returning to thank him and to find out whom he needed to forgive because his shoulder had been sore for a month or so.

This client has returned several times over the years, each time marveling about how good life is and that he is still alive to enjoy it, all because of forgiveness.  Graf said, “I do not share this story to give the idea that I can heal any health problem, for I certainly cannot.  However, this man was able to heal himself when he no longer needed the disease to [manifest] his anger or punish himself.”

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14. Example: The Transformative Power of Forgiveness

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

One of the most intriguing books I’ve read is Return from Tomorrow by the psychiatrist George Ritchie, MD.  It contains yet another story confirming the transformative effects of forgiveness.  This account is from Ritchie’s post-WWII Army service during which he became acquainted with a man who’d spent six years incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp.

“When the war in Europe ended in May 1945…I was part of a group assigned to a concentration camp near Wuppertal, charged with getting medical help to the newly liberated prisoners, many of them Jews from Holland, France, and eastern Europe.  This was the most shattering experience I had yet had; I had been exposed many times by then to sudden death and injury, but to see the effects of slow starvation, to walk through those barracks where thousands of men had died a little bit at a time over a period of years, was a new kind of horror.  For many it was an irreversible process: we lost scores each day in spite of all the medicine and food we could rush to them.

And that’s how I came to know Wild Bill Cody…His real name was seven unpronounceable syllables in Polish, but he had a long drooping handlebar mustache like pictures of the old western hero, so the American soldiers called him Wild Bill.  He was one of the inmates of the concentration camp, but obviously he hadn’t been there long.  His posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable.  Since he was fluent in English, French, German, and Russian, as well as Polish, he became a kind of unofficial camp translator.

We came to him with all sorts of problems; the paperwork alone was staggering in attempting to relocate people whose families, even whole hometowns, might have disappeared.  But though Wild Bill worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness.  While the rest of us were drooping with fatigue, he seemed to gain strength.  ‘We have time for this old fellow,’ he’d say.  ‘He’s been waiting to see us all day.’  His compassion for his fellow prisoners glowed on his face, and it was to this glow that I came when my own spirits were low.  So I was astonished to learn when Wild Bill’s own papers came before us one day that he had been in Wuppertal since 1939!  For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, but without the least physical or mental deterioration.

Perhaps even more amazing, every group in the camp looked on him as a friend.  He was the one to whom quarrels between inmates were brought for arbitration.  Only after I’d been at Wuppertal a number of weeks did I realize what a rarity this was in a compound where the different nationalities of prisoners hated each other almost as much as they did the Germans.

As for Germans, feelings against them ran so high that in some of the camps liberated earlier, former prisoners had seized guns, run into the nearest village, and simply shot the first Germans they saw.  Part of our instructions were to prevent this kind of thing and again, Wild Bill was our greatest asset, reasoning with the different groups, counseling forgiveness.

‘It’s not easy for some of them to forgive,’ I commented to him one day as we sat over mugs of tea in the processing center.  ‘So many of them have lost members of their families.’

Wild Bill leaned back in the upright chair and sipped at his drink.  ‘We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw,’ he began slowly, the first words I had heard him speak about himself, ‘my wife, our two daughters, and our three little boys.  When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone up with machine guns.  I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group.’

He paused, perhaps seeing again his wife and five children.  ‘I had to decide right then,’ he continued, ‘whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this.  It was an easy decision, really.  I was a lawyer.  In my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies.  Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world.  I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life – whether it was a few days or many years – loving every person I came in contact with.’

Loving every person…this was the power that had kept a man well in the face of every privation.”

This story dramatically illustrates the powerful physical and psychological benefits of forgiveness.  Despite the slaughter of his family, despite sharing the same unspeakable living conditions as his fellow prisoners, he had not suffered the ravages or emaciation of the others.  His ability to forgive – NOT condone, NOT “swallow”, NOT retaliate – but to endure without internalizing the negativity, had made all the difference in the world to his body and mind.  Surely we are capable of the same in our lives.

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15. Do I Have to Believe In It To Make It Work?

Posted on July 24, 2010 by Elizabeth

One drawback of many mind-body therapies is that they require the user to believe, without doubting, that the technique will work.  In other words, there is purported to be a direct correlation between the strength of the client’s belief or ‘expectation’ in the method, and the success of its outcome.  Unfortunately, this can be an insurmountable obstacle for those unable to fully buy into a given technique.  Certainly they hope it will work and are indeed willing to try, but they feel frustrated that perhaps it isn’t able to work because they lack sufficient conviction — which, in turn, they can’t muster without first seeing convincing results.  Vicious circle.

I had a similar concern when I was a client using Graf Stress Management for the first time.  It sounded too simple to be effective, and I found myself going through the motions of the Stress Evaluation without the real expectation of success.  Fortunately, it didn’t matter whether or not I believed in the technique — it mattered only that I was willing to be helped by dealing with the stresses that were causing problems for me and that I could accept that my intelligence knew how to run a healthy body.  That much, I could do.

In Graf Stress Management, when a stress is found, corrective action is taken to resolve it which typically involves the client making a statement aloud.  The first time I did this, I doubted it would help at all.  I mean, just saying something?  It seemed too effortless to be effective, not to mention that I felt little conviction about the words I was saying, although I had confidence in the muscle testing that had identified the stress I was attempting to purge.  But the words I was saying were literally just lip service  me, which caused me to worry that my doubts and low expectations would counteract the process.  Thus, I was extremely surprised by my successful outcome.

Initially, I sought Jan Graf’s help for infertility and obtained the desired result.  Within a few weeks after my appointment, I was pregnant.  But with that pregnancy came extreme nausea, day and night.  I  went back a second time to see Graf, who did a Stress Evaluation and found the nausea was due to psychological stress: my subconscious need to justify being considered a ‘normal’ woman by exhibiting a ‘normal’ symptom of pregnancy, nausea.

And I could accept that; the muscle testing had proven to be  a reliable diagnostic tool for me.  But it was a stretch when Graf suggested I take care of the problem by making the following statement aloud: “I release the need to be sick to justify being accepted as a woman.”  It was easy enough to say, but I didn’t have a shred of confidence that saying it was going to change anything.  I had zero emotional investment in the words.  There was no feeling of, “Aha, just what I thought,” as I’d had with many of the stresses we’d uncovered in the first session.

Nonetheless, I said it.  And I meant it.  That is, I was totally on board with letting go of the need to be nauseated just to prove to the world that I was a normal woman with normal symptoms of pregnancy, or whatever it was I was supposedly trying to do.  Fine with me.  I just didn’t think it was going to help any.  Yet, to my surprise, about half an hour later I realized that the nausea had left — never to come back.

That experience cemented the validity of Graf Stress Management for me.  Frankly, I’d doubted stress had anything to do with my nausea.  I’d reasoned, in the theory of the day, that it was caused by HGC in my bloodstream from the pregnancy and as such, it was inevitable.  But as soon as I’d taken care of my stress — even a stress with which I did not strongly identify — the nausea ended, regardless of what I’d believed to be the cause and notwithstanding that there was still HCG in my bloodstream.

I learned from this experience that just because there was HCG in my bloodstream did not mean I had to respond to it with nausea — a lesson that can be broadly generalized to other health matters.  I also learned that stress management worked, whether or not I believed in Graf’s paradigm of stress-caused illness.  I mean, I had no trouble believing in it as far as the infertility was concerned, namely, that my fear of being rejected by my children had kept me from conceiving.  But I was pretty sure the nausea was a chemical imperative of pregnancy, not a “head problem.”  Yet the fact remained that whether or not I believed stress was responsible, as soon as I’d taken care of mine, my body took care of the nausea. The empirical evidence was undeniable.

It was clear to me that Graf Stress Management was a major advance over other mind-body strategies I’d tried which relied on techniques like affirmation and visualization.  For me, the problem with them was that they required conviction about the thing being proclaimed (such as, “I am now easily becoming pregnant”), which was intellectually impossible for me since I was having an opposite experience.  I was neither now, nor easily, becoming pregnant.  Affirmations had to be believable, not just hopes that I was trying to brute-force into realities.

The unique contribution and power of Graf Stress Management lies in incisively finding and eliminating the specific stresses burdening an individual — stresses that may be working insurmountably against the very thing visualized and affirmed.  For example, in my own case, without taking care of my fear that any children I bore were going to reject me, I doubt I would ever have conceived.

And that’s my objection to other mind-body approaches: without resolving the countervailing stresses, I see little possibility of them accomplishing the desired end.  I do not believe the mind can “brute force” the body into doing something the intelligence opposes, simply by affirming or visualizing it — even if done with sincerest conviction.  Affirmations can be helpful, but only if they’re yours, tailored to the psychological particulars of your situation, as opposed to blanket statements invoking a desired result.

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16. Does Graf Stress Management Work for Everyone?

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Elizabeth

In theory, the principles behind Graf Stress Management apply to everyone, but in practice not everyone’s temperament is suited to it.  It can work properly only if people participate of their own free will and choice.  And some prefer not to participate at all because they find the technique unappealing, or they participate halfheartedly, going through the motions but without real intent, which limits the results.

Although the Stress Evaluation operates on a principle similar to the polygraph, it is not police interrogation.  Information cannot be forced out of a person.  Delinquent teenagers, hostile spouses, and malingering employees cannot be dragged in to be “fixed.”

Even clients who participate willingly sometimes have stresses they’re unwilling or unable to face.  When this happens, stresses will not surface in the Stress Evaluation.  Consistent with the bedrock principle of life, free agency, the intelligence will protect a person even to the point of death from dealing with an issue she is unwilling or unable to face.

I recall such an experience in 1991 soon after I had completed my training.  I worked with a man who had a terminal illness for which he had exhausted all medical treatment.  But he was borderline uncooperative: from the start of the Stress Evaluation, I was clearly doing all the work while he remained unengaged.  Still, earnestly hoping to help him and zealous about the technique, I pressed on.  As we continued to make little progress, I changed my tack in frustration and questioned his intelligence as to when the disease had actually started growing in his body (as opposed to when it had been discovered).  Once we learned the month and year, I asked him what had been going on in his life at that point, looking for clues about the stress.  “Nothing I can think of,” he insisted.  But his wife, who’d been silent up to that point, blurted out, “It was the accident!  The accident!”

In an instant, this aloof, reserved man dissolved in tears.  Sobbing heavily, he explained that his youngest son had nearly died in a car accident.  In the aftermath, he was consumed by guilt at the thought that he favored this child over the others because of his intellectual superiority.  In addition, he blamed himself that the others were “dullards” by comparison because he’d been too career-focused when they were young to parent them properly.

We stopped work at this point, but had we continued questioning, I doubt his perceived favoritism would have proven to be true.  My sense is that he only thought he felt that way.  Nonetheless, because he believed it was true it was very stressful.

At any rate, he wanted to regain his composure before going further and asked if we could break until the following morning, which was fine with me.  I was frankly tired at that point, but I was also elated that we’d finally hit ‘pay dirt.’  I felt that we’d really get somewhere the next day, but to my surprise, I never heard from the man again.  For whatever reason, he was not able or willing to deal with his stress.

Another impediment to successful stress management is the loss of will to live — a sense of wanting to be done with life, often following prolonged suffering or discouragement.  Surprisingly, this can exist even in people who are actively pursuing medical treatment for a given malady.  The will to live can sometimes, but not always, be regained.  And finally, it is sometimes a person’s ‘time to go’ and nothing will induce recovery, although Stress Management can still be beneficial to help them be at peace while preparing to meet their maker.

Experience persuades me that the mechanics of Graf Stress Management apply to everyone, but that not all are good candidates to use it.  The willingness to let oneself be helped is the key driver.  It is usually clear within the first few minutes whether or not it’s a good match.  When it is, Graf Stress Management is an effective, efficient, and satisfying approach to promoting health and well-being.

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17. The Good News About Stress and Illness

Posted on June 4, 2010 by Elizabeth

Most people believe the connection between stress and illness works roughly as follows:  Stress physically wears us down, diminishing our resistance to disease-causing microorganisms or causing us pain, such as headaches, from muscle tension.

Graf Stress Management takes a more comprehensive view both of stress and the mechanism by which it causes illness.  First of all, the Graf framework sees problem-causing stress as more than the pressures of daily life.  Rather, the most debilitating stress is related to negative thoughts and feelings– guilt, hurt, resentment, low self-esteem, and so forth — conscious as well as unconscious, from both past and present events.  Indeed, it’s quite common to find today’s problems rooted in stress lingering from an earlier point in our life.

As to the manner in which stress creates illness, Graf Stress Management’s paradigm is that illness is generally initiated by the intelligence to fulfill our subconscious needs in response to stress.  These needs fall into three categories: 1) escapes from situations we can’t cope with; 2) justifications or manifestations of negative beliefs and feelings, and 3) punishments of ourselves or others.

Stress-induced illnesses can range from minor bugs to life-threatening ailments.  Indeed, it appears that the entire range of physical, mental, and emotional maladies can result from stress.

It’s tempting to dismiss this paradigm as simplistic or unscientific.  I don’t blame anyone without first-hand experience in Graf Stress Management for feeling this way.  But our experience has shown these principles to work in thousands of clients over a thirty-five year span — even if we don’t know precisely how.

Uncertainty about how things work is accepted in medicine.  I remember one woman who was incredulous when I described my view of the mechanism between stress and illness.  “You don’t really believe that!” she exclaimed.  But only minutes later she told me she’d just started a blood pressure medication which her doctor hoped could help even though “no one knows how it works.”

Some people take offense at the idea that we use illness for punishment, escape, or justification.  They think I’m saying that it’s people’s own fault if they get sick; they could get well if they really wanted to.

Let me be clear: I have great compassion for people struggling with health problems and I don’t believe anyone would consciously choose to do so.  Nor do I think they could they bring on real symptoms simply by choosing to.  However, this is a subconscious process, and our subconscious dynamics are altogether different.

In any case, I’m not making a value judgment.  Whether or not people use illnesses to escape, justify, or punish is either true or false.  I find it true and therefore, helpful knowledge.

Using illness for escape, justification, or punishment is far more common than we suppose.  I believe we’ve all done it at times without even knowing it.  And lest anyone think I sound superior, please know that I am as vulnerable to stress-induced problems as anyone else, although at this point I usually take care of things before they mushroom into physical symptoms.  It’s fair to say that I’m my own most frequent client and I’m glad to report that you get better at it with time and practice.

In the final analysis, a clearer understanding of the dynamic between stress and illness is liberating.  I’m grateful to know a quick, painless, and effective method for identifying and resolving stress rather than relying on slower, generalized approaches like medication, psychotherapy, exercise, or relaxation.  Graf Stress Management is a revolution that shifts our minds and bodies from being at the mercy of germs, genes, and other forces outside our control, to having the ability to discover and resolve what’s really troubling us — from the inside, out.

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