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HOME PAGE email school Articles & Resources Index North American Institute This article appeared in the Seattle Gay News, September, 1999 NEURO-THERAPY Partner Network offers services through scholarships By Matthew McQuilikin |
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The North American Institute of NEURO-THERAPY is currently offering scholarships, offered through Northwest AIDS Foundation, for couples to participate in training for their program called NEURO-THERAPY Partner Network. According to Administrator Marilyn Michael, the program is "for people facing the challenge of cancer or AIDS and a caring partner that actually puts therapeutic tools in their hands enabling them to actually help each other on a partnership basis." The NWAF scholarships are for AIDS cases, only, however. The money for the scholarships was donated by a private organization called the Manders Foundation with the intent of building bridges between organizations like NWAF and the North American Institute of NEURO-THERAPY. The only requirements for qualification is that one of the couple must be living with AIDS and either get or have a caseworker assigned through Northwest AIDS Foundation. This would cover a four-hour workshop which usually costs around $400. When Michael spoke with SGN, there were five scholarships left available. "We use a signature technique called Subverbal Shifting," said Michael. It involves putting the subject into a "deep state of concentration" and then using a sound stimulus to put the brain into the fight-or-flight mode often experienced in life-threatening situations, such as a car accident, when a very brief amount of time seems to go in slow motion. "Changes happen," said Michael, and "it dissipates the physical residue of conscious emotion." It helps people lose the physical anxieties caused by their life situations. The process works similarly to the drug model of psychotherapy, only in a non-invasive way. The participants can then take a kit home and continue using the techniques on each other on a daily basis. The process helps the participants work with each other to manage new eruptions of emotion, "in a new way to effectively help boost immune processes, and help the body lessen or fight viral activity," she said. "Fear anger and depression muck up the immune system. Subverbal Shifting teaches how to daily shake the screen of the Etch-A-Sketch." She offered the analogy of "anger chemicals" landing on the cells of the immune system. This technique effectively wipes them clean. The seminar is offered to couples because in most cases "the partner wants to do more than hold his hand" in the fight against the terminal illness he is afflicted with. Michael said that things like meditation and hypnosis alone are not as effective. "This works with managing the physiology of emotion," she said, "not what triggers the physiology," or rather, what triggers fear, anger and depression. The intent is for people to go to a trainer to learn how to use their mind more effectively in the healing process. "You are going to train your mind to effectively reduce stress," she said, "and dissipate the physical, chemical reactions that underlie your emotion." "This is important for people living with cancer or AIDS," she went on. "[They] don't have the luxury of time for traditional models. They can't work through the issues." Stressing again that the neurological model of psychotherapy is focused on the physiology of emotion, Michael said it effectively makes a person his or her own therapist. "It gives very quick and effective control" over a person's emotions. She said that all of the older models of psychotherapy focus on the triggers of these emotions, and this is the first to focus on the physiology of the emotion itself. Michael and her partner Henry Snyder have worked for twenty years in the areas of AIDS and cancer in this sort of context. "In the late seventies and early eighties," she said, "working with the mind and disease was new, but we know now everything we do can be explained sceintifically." She added that "we have always worked free with AIDS and cancer patients," and they have never taken federal grants, always wanting to find ways to fund themselves through private means. The Manders Foundation approached them on their own. Michael said they have had a state licensed vocation school for 13 years, along with a nationwide correspondence program that trains NeuroTherapy Specialists. Most of them, she said, practice in the same way, so that people with cancer and AIDS have never been charged. The Institute recently decided to sell products in retail stores that benefit the money that goes toward these scholarships, which Michael said they want to be ongoing. They have one product out now, called MEOWEE WOWEE, actually a half oz. container of organic catnip and a cat toy, which is "in the most darling packaging." The product itself will have a website within the next couple weeks, which can also be found by following a link from the NEURO-THERAPY Partner Network web site. The product will sell for $4.95 (retailers will purchase them in buckets of ten for $30) and the web site will eventually offer other items such as T-shirts and bumper stickers. They plan on offering other products in the future, but as for now, said Michael, "MEOWEE WOWEE has been hilariously received." "We really feel strongly about the tools being put in the hands of people facing the challenge of cancer and AIDS for free," she said. "Of all the people needing psychological services, people facing the challenge of disease need them the most...They need their brain mechanism to work as well as 0possible, and how the brain works affects the immune system." Michael said their mission is "putting partners together, helping them help themselves and others if they want." For more information or to find out how to apply for a scholarship call (206) 322-0633, email NeuroTher@aol.com or visit www.TherapyoftheFuture.com.
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