According to Dimensions Therapy, the main reason for the increase in the number of people suffering from anxiety is that, today, all of us are in fact post-traumatic in one form or another. That is, we have all experienced a lot of events that have left scars on us, which we call ‘mental charges’, and these have turned into residues of terror and anxiety. Some of us who served in the army saw dead bodies, some of us experienced life-threatening events, some of us saw these events happening to someone close to us. At some point, as in the material world, the residues accumulate into a critical mass, and this mass gets bigger and heavier until it must ultimately erupt in a certain way – and it erupts first of all, as symptoms of anxiety.
If we live in the south of the country or in the north, with its history of Kiryat Shmona and Hezbollah. If we are stressed during the day and, at night, we have to run to the protected room when the warning siren sounds. If, in 2020, more tensions related to our livelihood and existence were added. Such situations stimulate the kidneys, which are connected to stability and confidence in our everyday lives.
The situation is getting worse mainly because we are subject to brainwashing as a result of television channels constantly broadcasting “bad news” dramatically and evoking in us even more stress. For them, it’s all about ratings but, for the viewers, it adds stress and creates uncertainty and fear. This is the main reason why people are suffering more and more from symptoms of anxiety. It can be simply put: in 2020-21, we are all post-traumatic in one form or another, some more than others.
There are also secondary causes of our stress. Compared to the past and to the period of Rambam, except for personal and general events and crises, there is a general phenomenon of weakening of the human being’s resilience: We eat food contaminated with about 80,000 different types of substances. The food we eat today is not what we used to eat, the air we breathe now is not the same air we used to breathe, so even our physical resilience is no longer the same resilience the generation of pioneers who came to Israel from Russia had – and this is only one of the secondary causes.
Another secondary cause is what is called ‘anomie’ in sociology. Anomie is the weakening of the support mechanisms within a society causing an “uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow” (Wikipedia). Among the Jews in the Diaspora, the community provided mutual support when someone within that community had a problem. The first settlers in Israel tried to establish kibbutzim but the ideology has collapsed because the politics of socialism and communism and everything it entails, got involved. The level of social cohesion that allows supporting someone suffering from different types of stress or crises is much lower than it was in the past, even in a country like Israel, which is relatively community-oriented. Actually, the state itself is not worth anything but the people themselves are community-oriented. In the state itself, when someone needs social security – they can forget about it! Other countries are even less community-oriented, except maybe among Muslim-Arab people, who have remained more community-oriented and therefore their resilience mechanisms are probably stronger.
Physiologically, when an event is perceived as being dangerous, it triggers a chain of physiological responses in the body called the “Fight or Flight (FF) response”, which is the logical response to the evolutionary dangers we have experienced over thousands of years of human existence. In this state, instead of the blood flowing to the brain, it flows towards the muscles so in dangerous situations, we either have the urge to run away or to attack the person threatening to harm us.
Say I have a math test, for which blood flow to the brain is absolutely essential, but my body senses it as an existential threat and responds according to evolutionary software: my respiration rate goes up and increases the flow of oxygen, my breathing accelerates, my heart pumps more blood, I experience palpitations and discomfort, and my liver excretes a lot of sugar. Thus my body creates a condition that does not help me pass the math test and when I visit the doctor, I’ll be diagnosed as having had an anxiety attack.
If these physical reactions go on for a long time, they could harm the physical body. The digestive system transfers its energy to the muscles so we could have digestive problems if it does not stop. There are other reactions which, in the past, comprised evolutionary reactions to a life-threatening situation, for example, coming face to face with a tiger in the desert or, today, when the challenges are marriage, divorce, a math matriculation test, a car test, this kind of reaction is, of course, less effective.
In Dimensions Therapy, we distinguish between nine different dimensions, we base ourselves on Kabbalah and ancient Chinese medicine, and therefore we refine the concepts of what is the spirit, what is the soul, and what is the consciousness. We treat the consciousness. In the realm of consciousness, we have done very accurate mathematical mapping – we are not talking about charges in general or about residue in general as psychology does, and we don’t confuse the concepts but rather we refer to them as accurately as possible.
For example, for the first three dimensions, we distinguish between the third dimension –thoughts, the second dimension – emotions, and the first dimension – feelings. And we precisely differentiate between anxiety and, for example, phobia. Anxiety is a feeling because when someone is anxious, it means that adrenaline has been secreted from their adrenal glands and this adrenaline produces the sensations experienced in Fight or Flight. Fear is simply energy that causes us to freeze and lowers our vitality, our chi, and is formed as a response to threat. When the threat is existential, we immediately experience it as existential fear or, more literarily, as terror. ‘Phobia’ is a term that psychologists use to describe a condition where someone has an inordinate, out of proportion, irrational fear of something that should not theoretically evoke this level of terror since it is not an existential threat per se. For example, someone who has a fear of elevators and avoids getting into one or someone who has a fear of taking a blood test because he cannot bear to look at blood. As soon as he sees blood, he becomes terror-stricken and may collapse or faint out of fear. This same person has no problem getting on a plane, has no problem serving in the Armored Corps for three years and in the military reserves but the moment he sees blood, it’s a whole different story. This is the definition of phobia. It sounds illogical and disproportionate until Dimensions Therapy discovers its root cause.
I had a patient who had been a tanker in the army and one of his friends from the tank was injured. His friend’s blood splattered onto him and he thought he was injured or going to die. At that precise moment, his consciousness made the connection between blood and death and afterwards, whenever he saw even a drop of blood, he was sure he was going to die at any moment. He reconstructed this picture in his subconscious. We treated him – and the phobia disappeared. Today, he is able to look at blood and even take a blood test, but all the time you don’t get to the root of the cause, it sounds illogical. A 1.9-meter-tall guy who served in the army with me was a bully and not afraid of anything but on seeing just one drop of blood, he would faint. That is the definition of phobia.
The Dimensions Therapy method treats the residue and the cellular memories that have imprinted the existential state of survival when facing danger among humans and therefore, when we defuse those charges, the person can go back to living a normal life, with a sense of security and because he is protected, the automatic survival mechanism that is activated in irrational situations is automatically balanced.
