It was good to have you there, Walt. I thought that was fascinating, as well. He looked up his symptom in Louise Hay's book You Can Heal Your Life and read her suggestions about the emotions that might be involved. He corrected the situation and the pain disappeared!
A bit far out there for me. Still, my rule is "if it works, take a deeper look".
I have the book so I looked up type II diabetes which appeared very suddenly for me in the mid-1990s. Louise says this may be the result of life having lost its sweetness. Well, it's true that was a very bitter time for me. Usually I would have reacted with plenty of sweet revenge but decided not to because of certain circumstances. The bitterness of those days is, for sure, still inside me.
Doesn't prove anything, of course, but very interesting.
I'd better have a chat with some of my parts, eh? There is an Exile (wounded inner child part) that had a similar experience when my father suddenly stopped being interested in me when I was three or four. I had no idea what to do and life changed from sweet to something quite sad and bitter.
The incident in the 90s was different, of course, but had a similar meaning for me. Loss of something I thought I could trust and rely on. The drive for revenge was, perhaps, a Protector part helping me to feel less powerless. I knew revenge (actually, just making an issue of what happened, exposing it to the light of day) would make me feel better! But I chose not be go there based on another another part's opinion that exposure was not permissible.
Wow. I just realized that the other part wasn't me. It was someone I trusted, a third party to all this, whose advice I took. So the feeling of betrayal goes even deeper. The organization betrayed my trust, my friend's advice felt like a betrayal at the time, I betrayed myself when I rejected my "revenge" protector's solution in favor of a part of me that, perhaps too quickly, accepted my friend's advice and I probably betrayed wiser solutions that I just wasn't ready for.
Now, with IFS process, I could put faces and/or names on all these concerned parts and probably discover more! I definitely had an impulse to forgive and let go of anger but that got betrayed when the bitter, "life is not sweet" part took control.
Now, I (real Self, caring, calm, compassionate, curious) can call a meeting. All my parts, including my friend's part that gave me the advice, are invited. Maybe I could even include the parts of the organization that felt it needed to cover up what happened. Why the heck not? This would work because what we think we see in others is really just a part of our own self!
I have always had a chaotic mind and as I get to know what's going on, I'm less and less surprised that my parts sometimes panic and take over. It's like a pack of dogs in there! If there's no leader, they feel they must fight with each other to restore some kind of order. Real Self is just performing the function that Cesar Milan teaches to human owners: be the pack leader.
To put it another way: real Self needs to become aware-of-itself so it can rise to the challenges of leadership in the otherwise chaotic inner family system.
