Polly married someone who was unfaithful and mean.  After leaving him, she fell in love with and married a second and equally hurtful partner.

Pamela easily made good friends, but then would find herself antagonizing them.

Jonathan would work hard to attain financial success, and then lose his fortune with bad investments.

Elizabeth would find herself criticizing and picking fights with her husband, bringing to a halt each period where they were beginning to enjoy each other's company.

Peter gradually built a warm and loving marriage, and then went on a drunken orgy that almost convinced his wife to leave him.  A few years later, about to take over a highly successful business, he totaled his car and almost lost his life when he fell asleep at the wheel driving on a country road at night.

Psychological reversal works subconsciously like an undertow that drags people into the waters of "bad luck."

Psychologically reversed people feel uncomfortable when an important dimension of their life such as work, love or financial situation is going well. They therefore eventually do something that relieves this discomfort with happiness. Self-sabotage enables them to fulfill a subconscious expectation that they will be miserable.  

Even for folks who are mostly happy and successful in life, if they are psychologically reversed a return to an underlying state of unhappiness or bad luck in some uncanny way feels to them more normal.  

By contrast, with psychological reversal no longer present, the person becomes "lucky."  The odds of that person being able to sustain feelings of happiness, lightness of spirit, and successes at home and at work zoom upwards.

Where did the term psychological reversal originate?

Roger Callahan, a psychologist who created a treatment called "thought field therapy" noticed that some patients seemed to be unable to benefit from his treatment techniques.  The same interventions that most people found helpful in reducing their psychological stresses seemed to have little or only short-lasting impacts on reversed individuals.  He began to study this phenomenon, coined the term "psychological reversal," and searched for ways to bypass it so that his treatments could still be effective.

Callahan hypothesized that psychologically reversed individuals have subconscious blocks to feeling happy. They therefore subconsciously resist letting go of their emotional distress symptoms such as fears, depression, addictions or angers.

What can be done to remove psychological reversal?

Dale Petterson, an energy therapist who is an independent therapy professional in my office suite, has spent over twenty years amassing expertise in a wide variety of energy psychology interventions. Dale has developed a remarkably rapid and long-lasting energy-therapy intervention strategy for treating psychological reversal.

Psychological reversal is reversible.

As with treating any medical or psychological disorder, the first step is assessment.

Dale's assessment procedure utilizes applied muscle kinesiology, a treatment technique broadly used by chiropractors and by many types of alternative medicine practitioners.  He asks the client to hold out one arm parallel to the floor.   He then presses lightly on the client's wrist while asking the client to hold the arm locked in its outstretched position. 

When the client's subconscious wants to say "Yes" to simple questions like "Is your name George?" this positive response is reflected in strong muscles which easily hold the outstretched arm aloft.  By contrast, when the subconscious answers Dale's questions with "No," the answer is manifest in momentary muscle weakness which causes the client's outstretched arm to drop or even flop down next to his side.

Muscle kinesiology works a lot like how a lie detector test works. 

Theclient's arm serves as a lever that amplifies the slight physical changes that indicate a stress response.

Using this muscle kinesiology phenomenon, Dale tests for psychological reversal in three ways. One test involves having the client put his non-extended hand on his head facing upward, then downward, then upward again. One test involves showing the person a blank piece of paper with a large X on it; then a paper with two parallel lines. The third involves muscle testing with the client saying the words "I want to be happy," and then "I want to be miserable." Clients who are in a state of psychological reversal consistently test as reversed on all three of these tests.  Their strong arm muscles in response to the statement "I want to be miserable," and loss of muscle strength when they say "I want to be happy" are particularly striking.

Dale has been innovative with regard to how to eliminate psychological reversal.  He figured out that he could utilize a treatment strategy for removing intense negative emotions that was devised by Bradley Nelson, techniques Nelson terms The Emotion Code.  Dale uses Nelson's Emotion Code methodology to enable therapy clients to access the age and incidents in their life when they first became psychologically reversed.

Clients generally are surprised, and at the same time generally find quite credible, the pivotal memories that Emotion Code techniques bring forth. The memory is usually one in which there was sudden unexpected event that yielded a surge of negative emotion. 

A frightening anger explosion of a parent, an upsetting rejection from a valued elementary school friend, an accident in which a cherished pet was suddenly killed all are the kinds of event that can initiate a flip into gravitating toward negative emotions.  Most often the event is one that the young person did not have an opportunity to discuss and digest with a trusted elder.

Once that originating moment has been clarified, Dale then releases the negative energy associated with the relevant early memory.  Running a magnet three times down a person's back, the locus of the governing meridian (meridians are familiar to users of acupuncture and other Eastern-based medical systems) removes the negative emotional tone from the memory and  flips the psychological reversal.  Now when the client says "I want to be happy," his arm remains strongly outstretched, indicating "Yes!"

The client then becomes oriented to enjoying happiness and good fortune instead of undermining it.  Subsequent retests for psychological reversal show that the condition has been removed. 

In all the cases I have observed the removal has been permanent.  It is possible that a future undigested traumatic incident could return the reversed state, but I have not yet seen that happen.

The full process of diagnosing and eliminating psychological reversal generally takes under an hour. The result?  People regain the ability to sustain positive emotions and situations.  They become "lucky." 

Removing psychological reversal is a treatment technique, not a miracle.  With no psychological reversal dragging them down "lucky" people still need to make good choices.  They still need to handle interpersonal situations with mature cooperative communication skills.  They also need to go out and about, not just stay home, to increase their odds of being at the right place at the right time a huge factor in "good luck."

I look forward to the time when techniques for neutralizing psychological reversal will be a standard part of the core competencies all therapists are expected to be able to offer for their clients.