Touch for Health Conferentie 2014

The Netherlands

Ontvouwen in overvloed

Reveal in Abundance

The liver; The two stories it tells

Author: Wayne Topping


The Liver: The two stories it tells

Dr. Wayne W Topping

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has associated the Wood Element (Gall Bladder and Liver) with the emotion anger. However, in Biokinesiology we have emotions such as hopeless, helpless and despair associated with the Liver. Is TCM correct, or Biokinesiology, or both? We’ll build a case for both being correct.

Key Words: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Biokinesiology, anger, cigarette addiction, liver, cancer, despair.

The Anger / Liver Connection

In 1985 psychologist, Roger Callahan, PhD, published a book, the Five Minute Phobia Cure, where he showed that about 90 % of the time a phobia is associated with over energy in the stomach meridian and could be eliminated by tapping on the end of the stomach meridian together with a number of other modifications.

Marge Murray in 1989 at a Touch for Health Conference in the United States showed how Callahan’s method could be understood in terms of the Five Elements. There is under energy in the Water Element and excess energy in the yang meridian in the element of control (Earth). Tapping on the end of the stomach meridian removes the blockage and allows energy to flow along the Ko cycle into the Water Element to balance it out. This same explanation can be expanded onto the rest of the Five Element model and allows us to predict for other stuck emotional states where the energy is most likely to be blocked.

The Anger / Cigarette Smoking Connection

When working with cigarette smokers, I need to address all the positive reasons keeping the habit in place. One of these is that it gives them a way to handle anger. How can we explain this?

Major symptoms experienced upon beginning to smoke include dizziness, light-headedness, nausea, etc. TCM relates this to the liver becoming hyperactive because of the stimulatory effects of the tobacco. However, if you persist in smoking, those symptoms disappear. Very likely the liver has gone underactive but is now dependent upon the chemicals in the tobacco to bring it up to a balanced state. The smoker will now crave cigarettes at times when liver energy is low as a way to boost it back to normalcy – e.g. first thing in the morning.

Incidentally, when a person quits smoking cigarettes many of the withdrawal symptoms – being very irritable, easily angered, etc. - will be related to the hypoactive liver. These are like low blood sugar symptoms and will push the smoker towards cigarettes or sweets to help raise liver energy.


Acupressure points can help boost liver function so that the absence of cigarettes is not triggering all of these unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.

Now let’s consider our ex-smoker. Everything has been going relatively smoothly then a crisis erupts during which he or she suddenly feels very angry. The under-energised liver then pushes the ex-smoker towards cigarettes which has always worked in the past to boost liver energy. Therefore, to help my client remain cigarette-free in their future I need to give them a number of techniques that will allow them to address their anger. A natural extension of the Callahan approach works really well here.

The model outlined earlier allows us to predict that when the client is feeling very angry, if we go backwards along the Ko cycle we should expect to find that the excess energy is bottled up in the Large Intestine meridian most of the time, and in the Lung meridian a small minority of the time. The client thinks about how angry they are. The indicator muscle unlocks because of their distress and relocks when the therapist (or client) circuit locates the Large Intestine alarm point about five centimetres lateral to the navel confirming the model. After checking for psychological reversal in terms of letting go of this anger, and correcting if necessary, the client or therapist then taps on the beginning or end point of the Large Intestine meridian as the major means of eliminating the anger. Note that energetically tapping on the end of the meridian with excess energy unblocks that meridian allowing the energy to flow down the Ko cycle into the Wood Element to balance out the Liver under energy.

What I have outlined is a model to explain how the Callahan method works and how, by extrapolation, other stuck emotional states can be eliminated by tapping on the end of the meridian where the energy is blocked. This model is based upon the premise that anger is an emotion associated with the liver when it is under energy. And the proof is in the pudding. It works. My clients who would normally go for a cigarette whenever they feel angry don’t respond the same way when they can tap away their anger. Yes, anger definitely seems to be associated with the liver, just as TCM has been telling us for thousands of years.

The Liver / Cancer Connection

Over the years I have noted many experts that saw a liver / cancer connection. I’ll summarise some of them here.

Kasper Blond, former senior surgeon in Vienna, Austria wrote a book in 1955 entitled The Liver and Cancer.

Dr. Jesse P. Greenstein, former chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute, wrote a book – Biochemistry of Cancer – in 1947 in which he wrote (page 509): “There seems to be little doubt that hepatic insufficiency is a concomitant phenomenon with cancer...” If he was addressing a lay audience he probably would have said, “People with cancer usually have liver problems.”

Dr. John Christopher, the late master herbalist in the United States, said: “Show me a cancer patient, and I’ll show you a person with liver problems.”

Max Gerson, MD, developed a way to reverse tuberculosis and found that it eliminated cancer so it became a cancer cure. With the Gerson Therapy cancer patients can rebuild their liver function over a period of 18 months even if the liver has been 80 % destroyed. Patients are generally then cancer-free. Incidentally, talking to such patients I have found that they have to stay on a very strict diet otherwise the cancer can return. However, the Gerson Therapy does show a liver / cancer connection.

Leo Roy, MD, is another medical doctor who recognised a correlation between the liver and cancer. In his book The Liver: the Laboratory of Life, he states “If a person has cancer, the probability they have a liver problem is 100 %.” And what is it that causes most damage to the liver? Most would think alcohol. However, Dr. Roy believes that emotions are the most detrimental to liver function. He claims that emotional shock will knock out a person’s liver within 24 hours.

Which specific emotions are likely to be disruptive of liver function?

The Despair / Cancer Connection

The Roman physician and anatomist Galen was one of the two most important physicians and medical scientists of all antiquity. His influence was such that his views held sway over Western medicine for almost 1400 years – from the time he lived (AD 130-200) until AD 1700. Galen observed that women who suffered from melancholy – sadness and depression – had a greater tendency to develop breast cancers than did women of more positive disposition and outlook.

In 1970, the famous British physician and surgeon to Queen Victoria, Sir James Paget stated: “...the cases are so frequent in which deep anxiety, deferred hope and disappointment are quickly followed by the growth and increase of cancer that we can hardly doubt that mental depression is a weighty additive to the other influences favouring the development of a cancerous constitution.”

While the medical profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries could see a correlation between emotional states and cancer, the development of general anaesthesia, new surgical procedures, and radiation therapy led to the generally held belief that physical problems required physical treatments. Thus medicine forgot about the connection between emotional states and cancer.

A number of researchers have revived interest in this connection between emotions and cancer. One of the biggest contributions has been from psychologist Lawrence LeShan, PhD, author of You Can Fight for your Life and Cancer as a Turning Point. LeShan has recognised a basic emotional pattern for the cancer patient that consists of three major stages.

The first phase involves a childhood or adolescence marked by feelings of isolation. Usually doing the first seven years the individual learns that intense and meaningful relationships are dangerous and bring pain and rejection.

The second part of the pattern is centred upon the period during which a meaningful relationship is discovered, allowing the individual to enjoy a sense of acceptance by others (at least in one particular role) and to find a meaning to his life.

The third part of the pattern occurs when that central relationship is lost. Now the person experiences a sense of utter despair, connected to but going beyond the childhood sense of isolation. Now that the relationship has ended, the conviction that life holds no more hope becomes paramount. Within six months to eight years, the person is diagnosed as having terminal cancer. Their fatal disease is seen as just “one more example” of the hopelessness of life for them.

This basic emotional life history was found to prevail in 76 % of the cancer patients studied by LeShan. Among the non-cancer control patients, this emotional pattern was found among only 10 %.

LeShan found that a basic element in the emotional life of cancer patients was what he termed “despair”. It was observed in 68 out of the 71 therapy patients studied, yet it was found in only three of the control group of 88 persons.

A slightly modified version of LeShan’s emotional life history has been used with cancer patients by O. Carl Simonton, radiologist and oncologist, and Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, psychotherapist, and is described in their book Getting Well Again. Their work with terminal cancer patients led them to recognise a five-step psychological process that they found to precede the cancer.

1. Experiences in childhood result in decisions to be a certain kind of person.

2. The individual is rocked by a cluster of stressful life events.

3. These stresses create a problem with which the individual does not know how to deal.

4. The individual sees no way of changing the rules about how he or she must act and so feels trapped and helpless to resolve the problem.

Most of the Simontons’ patients acknowledged that before their illness became apparent, they had felt helpless, unable to solve or control problems in their lives, and found themselves “giving up”. The fact that they had become fatally ill merely confirmed what they already believed about themselves – that their situation had never afforded any hope and that they were powerless to do anything about it.

5. The individual puts distance between himself or herself and the problem, becoming static, unchanging, rigid.

The Simontons believe that this pattern creates a climate that is ideal for the development of cancer.

The Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr. Elida Evans in her 1926 book, A Psychological Study of Cancer says the “The inability to reach your most cherished goal in life, can lead to the onset of cancer...” and “...In the cancer patient, I have found always a renunciation, a GIVING UP OF HOPE of the dearest wish through force of circumstances.”

Thus we see a clear correlation between emotional states such as feeling despair, helpless, hopeless and powerless; and cancer.

Then one day “the penny dropped” and I discovered the connection. In Biokinesiology we have the following pairs of emotions correlated with liver function:

DISTRESSED CONTENT (umbrella emotions)

Hopeless Trusting

Despair Faith

Helpless Powerful

Incapable Understandable

These emotions disrupt liver function which then allows the cancer to develop quite rapidly. Thus we have the correlation between these emotions and cancer and the correlation between the liver and cancer. This body of research shows a clear correlation between certain emotions such as despair, hopelessness and helplessness and the liver.

We began this lecture asking whether the TCM correlation between anger and liver was correct. My work with cigarette addicts clearly supports that correlation.

I have just outlined how the Biokinesiology emotions of despair, hopeless, helpless, etc., are also related to liver function. That is also correct in my experience.

There is the story of three blind men. One describes the elephant as being like a tree trunk, another like a snake, the other like a broom. Each was correct but none knew that what they were describing included the other two parts also. Today I have described two quite different emotional stories that the liver can tell us.


Bibliography

Callahan, Roger J. Five Minute Phobia Cure. Wilmington, Delaware: Enterprise

Publishing, 1985.

LeShan, Lawrence. Cancer as a Turning Point: A Handbook for people with Cancer,

Their Families, and Health professionals. New York: Plume Books, 1990.

LeShan, Lawrence. You Can Fight for Your Life. New York: Evans, 1977.

Murray, Marge. “Emotional Tapping: The Depression Connection”. Touch for Health