From colds to cancer, insomnia to infertility, depression to diaper rash, as well as allergies, asthma, addictions, acne — for all physical and mental maladies — the link between stress and illness has long been recognized, but without effective solutions.
Conventional stress reduction strategies — exercise, relaxation, meditation, hobbies — may bring temporary relief, but they are not capable of identifying or resolving the specific stresses at the root of physical and mental problems. “Talk therapy” is only marginally more successful while being expensive and time-consuming.
Graf Stress Management is a revolutionary advance in managing stress. Its signature Stress Evaluation is capable of quickly and accurately pinpointing and resolving those stresses at the root of physical and mental illness, which makes it possible for clients to achieve healing and peace of mind.
Bottom line: Instead of relying on therapeutic guesswork to determine the “real issues,” Graf Stress Management is structured to “pull” that information out of the client with his/her help.
Graf Stress Management recognizes the following principles:
- Debilitating stress is more complex than the typical understanding of stress. Hectic schedules, long commutes, and other pressures of daily life may indeed be unpleasant, but they are not generally the source of stress-induced illness. Instead, the stresses which undermine us are more subconsciously-rooted and are often connected to guilt feelings, lingering resentments, fear, low self-esteem and troubled relationships.
- In response to stress, we often unwittingly use mental or physical illness to escape from unmanageable situations, to punish ourselves or others, or to fulfill negative feelings, beliefs or fears. When we eliminate the stress, we can eliminate the need for these maladaptations.
- Our memories are often inadequate for determining what’s troubling us. Major stresses can date from any point in our life, not merely the present. Some stresses may be so distant that we no longer think about them yet their negative energy remains lodged in us, adding pain, limitation, and negative drama to our experience of life today.
- Each of us has an “innate intelligence” which runs our body and keeps an accurate record of our life. It is capable of delivering good health when not constrained by stress. It also remembers everything that has happened to us and can supply useful information about the stresses we’ve experienced.
- Graf Stress Managment’s Stress Evaluation draws on the intelligence to identify problem-causing stresses, conscious or subconscious, past or present, as well as to determine how we can best resolve them.
- Medical science has its place. Our challenge, however, is not to fearfully micromanage the body’s function with tests, drugs, supplements, surgery and other ‘brute force’ intervention but to take care of our stresses and enable the intelligence to do what it does best: run a healthy body.
Since 1975, Graf Stress Management has been successfully used by thousands of clients to improve health, well-being, and peace of mind. Mind-Body Stress Management, in Rockville, Maryland, promotes the use of this powerful tool. It is operated by Elizabeth Richardson, a Certified Graf Stress Management Consultant since 1991.
1. Stresses Resolved, Illness Remitted
My first exposure to Graf Stress Management came from a man whose late-stage cancer had remitted after using it. He’d previously exhausted his conventional options (chemo, surgery) plus several alternative therapies (Gerson Clinic and Diet, Dardik Wave Energy, acupuncture, and TM), and had been told that nothing more could be done for him.
So he decided to visit to each member of his family while he could still travel. When he was in St. George, UT, an aunt suggested that he consult Dr. Jan Graf, a local chiropractor with a stress management technique that had helped many overcome serious problems
He scheduled an appointment to be polite, although he expected nothing to come of it because he had a “real” illness that wasn’t caused by stress or negative feelings. He was therefore surprised when the technique identified as major stresses two events that had occurred more than 15 ago. While he readily acknowledged that they’d been traumatic at the time, he given no thought to either one in years. One was an excruciating romantic breakup; the other was a wrong he’d committed which had been far beneath his standards. Could these really be bothering him more than, say, the demands of his career?
And yet he felt instantly lighter, joyful, optimistic and energetic after laying down these and other burdens he hadn’t known he was carrying. He described a tangible sense of “health flowing into him” and an inner knowledge that he would recover. Despite being a sophisticated, highest-caliber professional in a no-nonsense field, he described the session with Jan Graf as “the most amazing experience of my life.”
The Stress Evaluation had lasted two hours, during which he was asked a series of questions designed to identify the stresses causing problems for him. Each of his responses was checked by means of a muscle test. Graf explained that this technique drew information from the “intelligence,” an innate faculty that knows everything about us including everything we’ve done and felt. As stresses were identified, Graf showed him a forgiveness technique to resolve them. The process continued until the man’s intelligence indicated that there were no remaining stresses causing problems for him.
I was fascinated by the approach, which harmonized with my own concept of the connection between health and the mind. Since I was grappling with infertility at the time, I made the trip to St. George and had a life-changing experience with Dr. Graf myself.
2. Example: Stress Management For Infertility
As my husband and I tried to start a family, we experienced difficulty conceiving. It become an all-consuming focus for me, leaving me bitter, jealous, defensive, and desperate. I decided to try Graf Stress Management after talking to someone who’d used it to clear a terminal illness.
To me, the Graf Technique sounded like the ultimate holistic mind-body approach. I resonated with the idea that we each possess a subconscious “intelligence” which knows everything about us, including the events of our life and the way to run a healthy body. I’d been primed for such a thing during childhood.
My mother had been a very illness-centered person who visited doctors several times a week, every week. She expected to have health problems and sure enough, she did, and she had no sense of the body’s natural ability to manage or heal itself, believing instead that it needed medical expertise to run properly.
She extended this negative thinking in the direction of her children as well, constantly announcing that we were exhibiting symptoms of some malady even though we felt fine. A single cough was the beginning of bronchitis; a sneeze, allergies. In my case, she was given to maddening predictions about health problems I was certain to face in the future because they “ran in the family” : asthma in my teens, phlebitis in my twenties, high blood pressure by thirty, arthritis in my forties, and the kidney trouble was just a question of when. In truth, I was strong, healthy, active and athletic kid, and I resented having these negative expectations planted in my mind.
In response, I resisted not only her incursions but the entire undercurrent of negative health programming so normalized in daily life that few of us consciously recognize it. When someone would say, “Don’t go outside without a coat, you’ll catch a cold,” I would remind myself, “The temperature is NOT the problem; the belief that it will make us sick is.” I was willing to wear a coat if needed for comfort, but I refused to buy into the fear of sickness. Ditto for the bogus rule against swimming after eating (finally debunked). If digestion were truly that risky, there would be actual reports (“Woman Falls to Her Death While Digesting Dinner”) and regulations such as no driving after eating.
I disregarded even “sensible” advice like making sure sick people didn’t sneeze around me. I considered myself well able to fight off the billions of harmful microbes crossing my threshold each day. In fact, I believed they helped make me stronger by building my resistance, not that I purposely sought them out but neither did I feel any fear around illness. For the most part, my strategy worked; I confess that 95% of the times I stayed home ‘sick’ from school, I was brazenly faking it.
Notwithstanding my brilliant mindset, I hadn’t managed to “think my way out” of infertility, and nothing else was helping either. Graf Stress Management sounded like exactly what I needed: a direct linkage 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 an hour and forty minutes. Through a series of questions he pinpointed my stresses and while the specifics are private, the major stress preventing me from conceiving was a subconscious fear that my children would reject me. [Note: This is fairly common. Many of us know someone who’d been unable to conceive until after they’d adopted a child, after which they became pregnant (surprise!) once the feared rejection hadn’t materialized. Incidentally, fear of rejection is an equal-opportunity stress; in my client work, I’ve seen infertility due to the father’s stress as much as to the mothers’s.]
My intelligence had accommodated my fear by making sure I didn’t become pregnant, thereby protecting me from the dreaded rejection. How did my intelligence do this? By preventing ovulation, fertilization, or 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 rather to take care of my stress and let my intelligence run my health. A good division of labor in my opinion.
When my appointment was over, I felt entirely different from when I’d arrived. I was peaceful, excited, and felt as if I were floating. I could not 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. Truthfully, I felt like it was a stretch to expect that something this simple — and pleasant, did I mention? — could have a real impact on conception, but I was wrong. I was delighted to learn less than three weeks afterward that I was pregnant. And the fertility problem never resurfaced.
3. What Do We Mean By “Stress”?
Broadly speaking, stress is the inability to cope with what life presents us. Many people think of stress as the tensions of daily life: too much to do, too little time, grueling commutes, demanding people, etc., yet we generally deal with these things better than we think.
Graf Stress Management’s clinical results reveal that the stresses which undermine us run deeper. Debilitating stress involves failing to live up to our value standards in our behavior; or harboring fear, guilt, anger, resentment or low self-esteem; or persistent negative thoughts, feelings, or expectations.
Graf Stress Management recognizes eight types of stress which are examined elsewhere on this site: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Psychological, Environmental, Fear, Guilt, and Reality Stress.
Common approaches to stress management rely on meditation, relaxation, affirmations, visualization, supplements, yoga, biofeedback, mindfulness, massage, acupuncture, and exercise. While these can help people feel better momentarily, they focus on relief of symptoms and are not optimally productive in eliminating the underlying causes of stress.
By contrast, Graf Stress Management incorporates on a powerful diagnostic and analytical tool, the Stress Evaluation, to uncover and resolve the hidden roots of stress. Over the course of forty-plus years, Graf Stress Management has helped tens of thousands of people to clear out deep-seated personal issues and regain peace of mind, often recovering from mental and physical health problems in the process.
4. Our Intelligence Knows What’s Really Bothering Us: Example
Each of us has a subconscious “intelligence” that keeps a log of our life. From the moment of conception, the intelligence records information acquired from the thoughts and feelings of our parents. All subsequent experiences, positive and negative, are permanently stored by the intelligence.
Graf Stress Management uses the intelligence as a source of valuable information to identify the stresses causing problems for us, and to clarify what we need to do to resolve them. The Stress Evaluation gains access to the intelligence through muscle response testing (applied kinesiology) used in conjunction with questions designed to uncover our stresses. The stresses revealed through this technique are often surprising, such as those which occurred decades ago; we may not have given them a thought in years, yet their effects can linger today as debilitating negative energy.
In addition to pinpointing hidden stresses, the intelligence can clarify how we really feel about things. What we think about something with our logic-driven minds is often very different from what we feel about it in our hearts. We have found through the Graf technique that what we feel is often more important to our health and well-being than what we think; it is vital to distinguish between the two.
I once did a Stress Evaluation for a very overweight man whose intelligence indicated that he was using fat as a defense against receiving affection (i.e., making himself unattractive to avoid it). According to his intelligence, he subconsciously felt that affection was immoral although logically this didn’t make sense to him. He’d grown up in a loving family where appropriate affection was shown. He had affectionate relationships with his children. He didn’t consciously think affection was immoral, but his intelligence indicated that he felt it was.
As we continued working, the reason emerged: he was carrying guilt feelings from an episode several years earlier in which he, a married man, had acted beneath his own standards with a woman who not his wife. Because the transgression involved physical affection and because it resulted in feelings of guilt, he had developed negative feelings about affection. He knew that the woman had pursued him because she found him physically attractive, and since he had chosen the wrong course in the face of temptation, he no longer trusted himself to behave properly. Instead, he subconsciously tried to prevent himself from acting unfaithfully by making himself less attractive through excess weight.
After taking care of these stresses, he no longer felt affection was immoral nor did he mistrusted himself to live up to his standards. With no further subconscious need to control himself via excess weight, the man’s intelligence directed his metabolism to get rid of it. I’m not suggesting that all people become overweight for these reasons, but this man had. Acquiring this information from his intelligence was necessary to help him.
Questioning the intelligence is invaluable in discovering what’s troubling us. It provides information we can’t get anywhere else which enables us to unload yesterday’s baggage and prevent today’s stress from diminishing our peace, health, and productivity.
5. Applied Kinesiology and The Stress Evaluation
Graf Stress Management uses its signature Stress Evaluation with every client. The Stress Evaluation draws individualized information about problem-causing stresses from the client’s intelligence. It consists of a question and answer format used in combination with a muscle response test known as “applied kinesiology.”
Those who have not personally tried applied kinesiology may find it hard to envision, and a verbal description is no substitute for direct experience. However, it appears to operate on the same principle as a polygraph, which registers different physiological responses for true and false answers to questions.
During the Stress Evaluation, the client is asked questions which he then answers. After each answer, the consultant applies light, steady pressure to a contracted indicator muscle on the client’s body — generally the deltoid muscle of the left shoulder, while the client attempts to resist this pressure. Whether or not the client is able to resist the applied pressure determines the correctness of the clients answer.
When the client’s answer is correct, the client’s energy remains strong as is demonstrated by strength in the indicator muscle, but when the answer is incorrect, there is a momentary loss of energy followed by a corresponding loss of muscle strength. Graf Stress Management uses this question/answer/test sequence to identify 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 use it with skill and confidence. In addition, it is subject to constraints, the foremost being that it can only with willing participants; it cannot force information out of an unwilling party.
In addition, accuracy can be compromised if either party tries to control the outcome to get a desired answer. Both participants must make a good-faith effort to be neutral and truth-focused. However, when both are intent on accuracy, applied kinesiology is a highly reliable diagnostic tool for the purposes of Graf Stress Management.
Many other disciplines used applied kinesiology for diagnostic purposes, and it is also sometimes used by individuals as something of a party trick. However, a basic tenet of Graf Stress Management is that applied kinesiology is to be used only in its proper sphere. This means limiting it to only those questions to which the client legitimately needs answers for the sake of her health and well-being. Whereas some devotees of applied kinesiology claim it can be used to answer virtually any question in the universe (e.g., Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins, M.D.), Graf Stress Management does not support this view. We believe it is not possible to properly, accurately, or righteously use applied kinesiology as a ‘crystal ball’ to pursue private details about another person, or to diagnose car problems, make investment decisions, predict future events, nor is it a parlor trick for entertainment. Above all, it should not be used to circumvent life’s important growth process of learning to use our free agency to make right choices.
I received a memorable lesson along these lines during my second visit as a client of Jan Graf. At the time, I had symptoms which caused me to believe that 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 right.” In other words, the only answer he was willing to give was a personal guess. He was unwilling to muscle test because the baby’s gender was not something I needed to know for health or well-being. I’m aware that muscle testing is used by others to answer this and similar questions–perhaps with accurate answers–but the practice of Graf Stress Management is to use it only on a need-to-know basis.
6. The Eight Basic Types of Stress
Graf Stress Management’s signature tool is the Stress Evaluation, a question and answer procedure which identifies specific stresses causing problems for a client.
Questioning progresses from general (the type of stress) to specific (who, what, when, where, and why) until the precise stress is pinpointed. Currently, eight types of stress are identified by Graf Stress Management:
Physical Stress includes physical traumas such as cuts, burns, sprains, broken bones, surgery, etc. Our intelligence is capable of healing these quite well provided there are no additional stresses interfering with the healing.
Mental Stress is any activity that is excessively taxing mentally with a touch of performance anxiety thrown in, such as studying for the bar exam. Normal school- and work-related thinking are generally not mental stresses because we expect them and are prepared in advance.
Emotional Stress involves concern for a loved one who is experiencing problems and whom we feel unable to help. Interestingly, babies and young children are the most frequently seen sufferers of emotional stress, typically occurring when their parents aren’t dealing well with their own stress. A sick baby or child can often be helped simply by assisting the parents with their stress.
Psychological Stress has to do with the way we feel about ourselves — our self-esteem. It can be about things we don’t like about ourselves or about problems in our relationships with other people. Psychological stress causes more problems that all other types of stress combined.
Environmental Stress concerns our surroundings – where we live, work and spend most of our time. This stress can be 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, some inborn and others acquired, that govern our performance in every aspect of our lives. Some are less important (the way we load the dishwasher or fold our towels) while others are vital to our peace of mind (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, sometimes even to the point of punishing ourselves physically.
Reality Stress can occur when people fail to distinguish between reality and fantasy in their own lives. A person may unwittingly identify with a fictional character (Harry Potter, Cinderella) and go through life responding as if they were that person at the expense of their own authentic growth and development. A variant is the person who imagines herself to be in a relationship with some (e.g., a celebrity or an internet “friend”) whom she doesn’t personally know at all.
After identifying which types of stress are troubling a client, the Stress Evaluation works to establish greater detail. Is the stress present, or when in the past? Does it involve a particular person? And so forth, until the stress is identified and resolved in a manner indicated by the client’s intelligence.
7. Example: Clear Answers from the Stress Evaluation
I don’t know of a more powerful tool for quickly and accurately pinpointing stress than Graf Stress Management’s Stress Evaluation, as the following example illustrates.
Although the client’s presenting problem was abnormal hair loss, often joked about as a cliche symptom of stress, the underlying causes were not “cliche” at all but unique to the client.
A client I hadn’t seen in several years returned because her hair had suddenly begun to fall out. When we questioned her intelligence during the Stress Evaluation, we found psychological and guilt stresses. She naturally assumed they were related to the contentious divorce she was going through, but to her surprise they were not. (We found that she was actually dealing with the divorce’s stress fairly well.)
Instead, the stress behind her hair loss was related to a several years-old business matter that she subconsciously considered a test of her integrity – a test she was failing. A few years earlier, she’d been selling an expensive line of cosmetics that included a shampoo. While she no longer sold these products, she had continued to use some of the leftover shampoo inventory on her hair — that is, until recently when it had gotten packed away during her move to a new house. In the new home, she’d been washing her hair with whatever shampoo she unpacked first, which happened to be a different brand. And THAT was the problem.
No, it wasn’t because one shampoo was better than the other. Instead, it was strictly a matter of integrity. The Stress Evaluation revealed that she subconsciously felt honor-bound to use up all of the expensive shampoo she’d formerly sold before she could legitimately start using another brand.
She felt this way because her customers had purchased the expensive shampoo on the basis of her word that it was superior and well worth the very high cost. For her to use another brand while she still had some of the high-priced product on hand was beneath the standards of her integrity, hence the guilt stress. It was as if she’d lied to her customers about the worth of the shampoo.
Interestingly, we found that her sense of integrity did not require her to continue buying the high-priced shampoo when she used up her supply. Presumably, her changed financial circumstances due to the divorce constituted a legitimate reason to switch to a less expensive brand.
After the Stress Evaluation, she felt at peace with herself and stood taller from reaffirming the fact that she had high standards. True to our findings, as soon as she returned to the shampoo she formerly sold her hair immediately stopped falling out because she no longer needed to punish herself. These days, she’s long since exhausted her supply and yet her hair remains intact because she is living up to her value standards.
We shared a laugh when she called later to report back to me because it was funny in the ridiculous way that life often is. And yet it was also a sweet moment to me. I love the fact that integrity and morality matter to all of us at our core — even to people who see themselves as hard-bitten expedient types, not given to pondering the morality of their actions. Oftentimes people think they’re getting ahead by short-cutting integrity but in truth they’re creating their own stress, diminishing self-esteem, and possibly setting themselves up to pay for it later with self-inflicted illness.
The Stress Evaluation provides information possibly not obtainable anywhere else to guide targeted corrective action, as opposed to the hit-or-miss conjectural solutions that can emerge from conventional talk therapy. In this client’s case, the most obvious stress in her life, even to her, was her ongoing divorce. Indeed, it was the only thing she mentioned when I asked for background at the start of the session. As such, the divorce would likely have been the focus of psychotherapy, yet we were able to dismiss it from consideration immediately because the Stress Evaluation revealed that it was not a factor in her hair loss.
Instead, the relevant stress was an integrity concern connected to an old business matter. Without being able to draw on the intelligence for this information, what would a physician, psychologist, or nutritionist have suggested to correct the problem? How many tests would have been run and at what expense? With what findings? How long would it have taken to find a solution, if ever? (This Stress Evaluation took about twenty minutes.) In conclusion, when a client is willing and able to face their stress, the Stress Evaluation can provide a valuable wealth of information about problems and solutions.
8. Any Illness Can Come from Stress
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 serious diseases and chronic illnesses are directly related to the inability to cope with stress — in other words, stress is not responsible for just minor, transitory complaints like headaches and colds. In over 40 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.
Denying we have stress only hurts us. It is nothing to be embarrassed about but rather, the symptom of a problem to be addressed.