Towards an Explanatory Paradigm for CAM - the Sub-Trauma Theory

First a bit of explanation. I'm a health dowser and mixture of healer and therapist who has fun crossing swords with "skeptics" on sundry computer conferences and chatlines. When you know there is such a thing as a cup of coffee, to meet people whose whole principle in life is that there is no such thing as a cup of coffee and that people who say they drink cups of coffee are engaging in delusion, you are made aware of the essential comedy of life. "Skeptics", who always spell themselves the American way with a K, are essentially inverse believers: there is no "psi", there is no "chi", there is no healing effect from transpersonal thought, the only medicine is chemicals and (grudgingly) manipulation.

To skeptics, the thousands of people, some 85% of those quizzed, who told the Consumers Association in 1997 they had been "satisfied" with their CAM treatment, are deluded to a man or woman. They have been persuaded they are well when they are not. I am sure that if the CA had engaged specialists and examined all those people, the skeptics would dismiss the entire exercise as the piper calling the tune.

Such folk are rendered apoplectic when I suggest that orthodox medicine is a slight case of emperor less clothes. It possesses no global paradigm of health and illness. When skeptics claim that drugs are "scientifically" chosen, it is plain to ordinary folk that what is meant is that vast trial-and-error exercises are involved which are rigorously controlled in a scientific manner. After a century of this activity, medical science has still not connected pharmacology to the essential question of why did Mrs Jones contract such and such an infection and not Mrs Smith who lived in the same house ? When this point is made, there is precisely the same vague waving of hands which the skeptics accuse CAM of when it comes to rationales and explanations of action. "Mrs Smith is more susceptible." That's an escape from explaining ! "It's in the genes !" A plain guess.

Now, I'm a CAM practitioner and rationales strike me as a snare and a delusion anyway. I'm a true sceptic, with a C, which means someone who doubts all theory in principle. Once this cast of mind is applied to the whole biofeedback/energy sensing/dowsing/clairvoyance/ visualisation business which so distinguishes CAM from OM, the terms of reference we use don't stand up any better than the ones OM uses. We don't have a theory of health and illness either. "Balance" ? What of ? "Energies" ? That's an escape from explaining !

If you study sceptical philosophy, as I have been forced to since tackling the skeptics, you realise that the problem of knowledge is infinitely recursive. You just never know you are looking at truth, because there is always more to be known about anything, ignorance of which prevents you from so doing. Worse than that, there is no proof that you are ever thinking in the right terms to recognise truth should you ever stumble over it.

But even a sceptic must eat breakfast. Some things must be assumed just to keep the show on the road. In practice, if there is no hope of recognising "truth", there can be recognition of what it is useful to assume just for the time being. What works well ? What does it serve us to suppose for now ?

It is in this spirit that I offer a life paradigm which "explains" a great many puzzling things about health and illness and which, while it is ideally configured for use with the information-gathering systems familiar in CAM and especially the energy medicines, could even be useful in OM as well.

This is the sub-trauma theory. It's so labelled after Sigmund Freud's ground-breaking concept of the "trauma" - a suppressed memory of earlier shock in life which influences our behaviour in later life. I respect Freud for this piece of mental pioneering even if he's been shown not to have been a very effective therapist after all, but what he didn't include in his theory was anything about why some people maltreated in childhood come to harbour traumas and some sail through maltreatment without repercussions. If you're a dowser and you wonder about this, you very soon understand why - there are preconditions to trauma: and if you examine a family, they tend to share them. What we turn out to have are deeper traumas, traumas handed down from forebears. Since these underlie Freud's present-life traumas and need to be distinguished from them, the name "sub-traumas" (STs for short) seems natural and appropriate.

Once aware of the idea, a dowser can count anyone's STs. This gives a figure which immediately tells how stressed in their life anyone is. Typically, in my system a healthy person may have 4000 STs at age 20 and 7000 at age 40. By this time some STs will always be grating against events and they are rarely out of stress. By 80 they'll have 11,000 and life will be getting hard to bear at over 12,000. In a type of clairvoyant visualisation I use, if the subject is cast as a transparent statue, STs appear as black furry ropes within, thickening with age (downwards from the top of the head). Dowsers divide the ropes differently, so numbering systems are individual.

How does this multiplication occur ?

Possession of, shall we say, a severe ST relating to large cats (ancestor came off worst in an encounter with one, perhaps) may not trouble anyone who keeps away from tigers, but if they also have a mild ST relating to heights and happen to walk along a landing where a balustrade is missing and there is a large picture of a tiger, the stress of the two STs combined thereafter attaches by mental association to either circumstance. This combinational ST and its multiplication throughout life accounts for worsening health, ageing and death. The reason we have offspring is to wash combinational STs away and start with simple root ones again - which in a different life may never be stimulated into combinations by events.

There is not room here to develop the whole idea, but basically it's all about ongoing organismal learning. Very slowly we unconsciously learn that pictures of tigers - or radio masts, or tomatoes - are not dangerous after all and our group mind - what Rupert Sheldrake calls the morphic field, for our family, humans, mammals, vertebrates, etc in a seamless continuum typical of all mystic perception where semantics (word-spinning) runs out of road - incrementally resets its rules and we acclimatise to former threats. So in the end harmful STs have to be renamed Stressful Sub-Traumas, because we have beneficial rules as well, which keep us on the narrow path of being human and not, for example, birds.

There is a guilt element in it too. Huge traumas are generated in anyone's life if they feel reponsible for someone else's death. A moralistic blame culture magnifies this tendency. The late Dr Aubrey Westlake, an eminent and pious dowser of the 1930s, remarked that these guilts were what Jesus clairvoyantly identified as "sins". Sin is a matter of culture.

In healing, STs are erased wholesale by affirmation. Healers always share some basic STs with their subjects, so unless forewarned, certain negative traits in subjects will be invisible to them and "not there", so will be left alone. If healers work in groups, some of these blind spots will not be shared throughout and will be removed by within-group healing, accounting for the greater power of groups. This cleansing can be vastly improved again by a number of mental strategies, typically using therapies, talismans, sounds, colours, numbers to provide mental linkages to great healing events in the past appropriate to the present situation.

There is probably a whole book in this, but I must leave it there. Out of ST theory we get a very good explanation of what "discarnate entities" are (apparent negative intelligences resisting a restoration to good health) and what is happening in cases of divided personality.

Sub-traumas may be a fantasy, but like the Jedi knight's "light sword", for something that may not really be there, in the right hands they're a mighty powerful tool.

Dan Wilson stumbled into CAM in 1977 as a telephone trunk equipment engineer wanting to learn dowsing for identifying distant faults. His mentor was the healer and teacher Major Bruce MacManaway who ran a crusading school Westbank for combining healing techniques with therapies chosen clairsentiently to suit the practitioner. 26 years on, he is proprietor of the Acorn Centre for Natural Health in East Grinstead where he uses intuitive acupressure and orthobionomy and specialises in the resolution of mental problems, place-related disturbance and hauntings.

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