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Nothing ever happens to us in life but happens for us to learn some lesson,
so that we’re better prepared to face that same situation tomorrow.

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Brent Baum, an internationally recognized lecturer and trauma resolution specialist, has worked with over 11,000 trauma survivors, including the officers and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing and September 11 terrorist attacks.

The Monthly Aspectarian: How did you start out in this work; how did you get to where you are now?

Brent Baum: As a child, I wanted to be an archeologist. I’m from Louisiana, however, and I discovered that at deeper than three feet into the ground you hit water. It turned out to be somewhat of an impractical occupation locally, but I spent a summer with an uncle traveling and doing amateur archeology in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. I loved the kinesthetics, loved touching the soil and finding the objects. I found out later that Freud used archeology as a metaphor for uncovering our history if we are to understand who we are in the present. That’s kind of what I ended up doing for a living. Between archeology and becoming a therapist, I studied for ministry and was a Catholic priest. I started studying very young and was active in ministry for some years. I was trained to write and teach, but had a little political conflagration in which I got frustrated with not being able to teach for a period of time. So I took a leave of absence and thought about joining the Jesuits, who specialize in teaching. Within a few months, I started spontaneously healing people, which I thought was pretty amusing. As a priest, I was anointed to heal and never really felt very much with my hands. I took a leave of absence, and three months later I was spontaneously healing myself and family members.

TMA: How did you notice that starting?

BB: With skin-related things—warts, fever blisters, things of that sort. I could touch them and make them go away. I did it on myself. Accidentally did it on a friend when I was doing some body work and healed him, and then my family noticed and started asking me about it. So I started touching things, and sure enough, even though I couldn’t feel the energy at the time, skin ailments and migraines and so on would go away. I did it sort of as an avocation, as a favor for family and friends. At the same time, I decided not to be an itinerant teacher and be traveling around all the time, and got certified as an addictions counselor and then as a hypnotherapist. I started doing therapy with the trauma issues of family members of the chemically dependent. One day, a woman came in who had a migraine. She was a friend of my sister and said, “Can you just zap the migraine and do that energy thing you do with your family, and then we can do the talk therapy?” I had developed kind of a color reframing technique for memory which seemed to be working. I said, “Well, I don’t normally do energy techniques, plus we’re in a Catholic treatment center and they get a little tense sometimes when I do the energy work,” although they now have protocols for such in their hospitals. She said, “If you don’t get rid of my migraine, I’m going to have to leave because I’m light and sound sensitive.” So I put my hands near her head and felt the pain of her migraine. It started to subside from the energy work and then came back even worse. I said, “This isn’t letting me in.” Then she said, “I was afraid of that, I’ve been having a flashback for three days.”

TMA: What did she mean by flashback?

BB: It’s when a person begins to recall a traumatic memory. So I began the verbal technique with her, but I forgot to put my hands down after I started the energy technique, and as she went into the memory, I could feel the pain of her memory in my hands. As she began to access the memory, the pain got considerably worse, and as she released it, I felt the moment that it released with the verbal technique, so I knew that the verbal technique I had developed was effective.

My mother was a person who, if we were in car accidents or injured, she would feel a physical pain in her body and knew which child was injured.

TMA: So, a sensitivity runs in your family.

BB: When my mother died, I sat bolt upright in bed in Rome, Italy. I was on another continent and I felt the moment she transitioned. My great uncle on my mother’s side could actually send energy with his hands, and I didn’t know that until five years ago when I’d been doing this for fourteen years. He could heal warts and skin ailments and was doing this long before I ever did. So there’s a little jump start in the family, but I now train people to do this. Anyone can learn to reframe their memories and to do some energy work, if only for their own kids and partners. That’s pretty much what happened. Since then, I’ve done the work on about 11,000 people including the first officer from Oklahoma City and TWA flight 800 out of New York, fire chiefs, medical examiners, joggers from September 11th. It’s kept me busy. We seem to be in the millennium of trauma, or an age of awareness, where we are wanting to learn to master our states of consciousness, and this kind of work is very effective at learning to do that.

TMA: As I was looking through your material, I was reminded of some of the conversations I’ve had with Brian Weiss. He’s regressing people hypnotically into past lives and they’re remembering traumas. It seems like just the remembering of them often effects healing.

BB: Sometimes. There’s a percentage of memory that we possess that, unless you go back and send a specific corrective signal to the moment of encoding to that state of consciousness, it will not acknowledge that it’s safe. So sometimes just recalling it will release it. But in a high percentage of cases we’re finding that unless you dialogue with that part of your mind that froze to protect you, that the pain will be held static until you do so.

TMA: It has seemed to me that it would be possible that the remembering of a trauma that had not been remembered could aggravate it.

BB: Yes. That does happen. We remember, and remember and remember and keep reliving. This is the flashback phenomenon that we touched on earlier. In fact, I developed this technique partly out of frustration that I had a number of clients coming in who kept reliving the same memory every few weeks, and didn’t even remember that they had told me. But they had the same emotional reaction. I was charging them as a therapist and they were repeating the same trauma. Nowadays we believe that the conscious, rational mind is about 7% and that the subconscious, which stores the memory, is about 93%. That’s based on studies about how children encode languages and so on. And if that’s the case, then we can talk about a memory indefinitely from the 7%, but if the charge is encoded in the 93% ... even most psychiatrists now will agree that you have to talk to the part of the mind that encoded the memory. You have to talk to the trance. Freud, we found out, did bodywork and massage on some of the clients that were amnesic in order to help them break through the barrier and remember the traumatic event. So we’re kind of integrating traditional psychology and energy psychology. The work we’re doing is client centered, body centered, and the body is the key. The body seems to remember everything. So if you trust and learn how to dialogue with the body correctly, then memory access and release is fairly simple. It’s not that complicated.

TMA: Talk about the actual mechanism.

BB: The technique has two parts. One is simply a verbal tracking technique based on the idea that a trauma hypnotizes you. A trauma overwhelms your nervous system, either physically or emotionally, and causes your flight/fight/freeze response to react. When that system kicks in, consciousness is actually paused a millisecond prior to being overwhelmed. So every trauma essentially creates a millisecond pause of consciousness. When that occurs, it is stored as a hologram, a three-dimensional image. When that is encoded, we kind of emotionally numb out as the scene goes on. Then adrenaline hits our system. We’re physically stronger. We make it through the event. But essentially we’ve been hypnotized by a moment of “overwhelm.” So it’s a little tricky, but you don’t really need to be hypnotized. What most of us need is to be de-hypnotized. The trauma hypnotizes us and causes an automatic encoding of an altered state.

So the technique is really simple. I help you focus on the holographic fragment long enough for it to take you back to the scene that you stored. We then visualize a solution to that story, create safety, and we frame the picture of safety in whatever colors the mind chooses. Color is the language of the nervous system, a brain wave of frequencies. When you move a feeling of safety, specific to your trauma, through your body, you can’t be in the trauma at the same time. The body says, oh, look, she’s moving a safe scene through, we must no longer be in the T-1, or the trauma moment. At that moment, the body releases its hold on the physical or emotional pain. That’s when my hands usually feel it leaving the system.

If you have a little child draw a picture of her physical or sexual abuse, she’ll always go to the black and the red crayons. If you have her redraw it, she’ll go to her bright nurturing colors. If you have her close her eyes and move her personal nurturing colors through her body, she’ll calm down immediately. The reason being that she just demonstrated that she knows how to create safety and can move a safe feeling through her body, which negates the possibility of being with the abuser at that moment that it sends safety through the body. Essentially, we do the same thing with adults. We don’t have to relive our entire trauma scenes anymore, and in fact, I never believed we were designed to spend the second half of our lives in therapy for the first half. We apparently encode the millisecond. If we can master that millisecond and reclaim it, then a lot of times we can move on and we are no longer statically held.

TMA: How are you isolating that millisecond?

BB: The client tells you. It’s personal to your sensitivity, your nervous system, but the client usually identifies it as a feeling statement. David Grove, a psychologist from New Zealand, pioneered what is called the “T Minus 1” concept, which says every trauma encodes as a quantifiable millisecond of consciousness. After that adrenaline hits, we biochemically are protected, we numb out, we’re physically strengthened, and we make it through these traumas. The problem is the part that was stored in the subconscious.

TMA: The part you carry with you afterward.

BB: Exactly. It’s stored as a hologram. One of the features of a hologram is that a smell, sound, feeling, sensation or anything even remotely similar will trigger it and you’re back in the scene again. After years of living with this trigger, eventually it drains us of energy rather than protects us.

TMA: I’ve always been struck by how powerfully the sense of smell triggers memory.

BB: That’s probably the strongest from what I’ve seen. Olfactory is huge.

TMA: It will just put you right back into a particular scene.

BB: Mention cedar chests, cabinets, the smell of whiskey on someone’s breath or a particular kind of alcohol, and a huge number of people go into memory right away.

TMA: Burning leaves, whatever it is.

BB: That’s true. Even 9/11, with the smell of smoke and dust and debris and so on, a lot of people have had difficulty with that. Those are olfactory triggers and the fact is that triggers will bring up anything similar from your history, other traumas. 9/11 was huge, not just because of what it was as a physical trauma, but also because it was a visual invasive act and a huge boundary violation. Millions of people not only were triggered by that event, but it triggered any invasive acts in their earlier history.

TMA: So what you’re doing works extensively with PTSD.

BB: Yes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yes, trauma and stress cause this same kind of pausing and encoding. The tricky part is that as trauma or trance is triggered and the adrenaline I mentioned goes up, your flight/fight or freeze response kicks in, and your T cell production and your immune system functioning go down. So when you’re frequently in stress or trauma triggered states, you have overproduction of adrenaline and decreased T cell production. I believe that is a huge contributor to what we’re seeing as auto immune disorders right now. You can’t indefinitely continue to produce adrenaline and have that super human strength to lift a car off your child without eventually burning out. The problem is as you come down. In order to produce the adrenaline, the thymus cell production decreases, the t-cell production drops and, in a sense, it’s supposed to tell you that you can’t keep doing this to yourself. You can’t stay in trance this long.

TMA: So that’s why there’s the price.

BB: Exactly. It warns you. If you leave the trance unaddressed for too long, it’s going to make you sick. It produces a physiological consequence in the immune system. In a sense it is a system of checks and balances. This shows us that we as a culture are going to have to pay a lot of attention to what we visualize, what we observe and what we see.

Quantum physics is telling us that the act of observation is not at all passive, it’s actually creative. What we observe, we co-create. The act of observation collapses the quantum probability wave into reality. If that’s the case, then what you and I saw on 9/11 we actually experienced as a creative act within our own inner projector or hologram projector. Science doesn’t know exactly how we do that. They just know that we create our own inner reality through our perception, and maybe outer reality, too, as far as that goes. If that’s the case, then what we observe is not really occurring out there, it’s actually being experienced within consciousness, within our projector. This is why, when we watch violent images or movies, it has an effect on the body and it has an effect on our immune system.

TMA: You call your technique HMR. What are the initials for and how did you arrive at it?

BB: It’s called Holographic Memory Resolution. The energy part of the technique that I have not mentioned until this point very much is one hand is placed along the spine and another hand over the front of the body where the main memory fragment was stored in the trauma. The lump in the throat, the knot in the stomach, the butterflies, the weight on the chest, the tightness in the throat—wherever we’re feeling the physiological restriction from the moment of encode is where we usually store a fragment in the front of the body. We know that the mind and the nervous system function in a hologram-like manner. The technical term is holonomic, it follows the law or rule of a hologram. We now believe that all memory is stored in a holonomic manner, meaning it acts like a hologram. But in the physical body not every memory we store is stored equally in every part of the system. We’d probably explode or be overwhelmed. Because of the density of the physical body, we’re able to reduce an entire traumatic event to a lump in the throat. If it’s really overwhelming, we may even go amnesic and not remember anything but the tightness in our throat.

I called it Holographic Memory Resolution because in physics, to create a hologram, you need a reference beam and an object beam. When I discovered the energy part of the technique, I discovered that the facilitator can amplify access to memory in a client by placing a hand on the back and sending energy into the spine, and a hand over the knot or the fragment, the object in the front of the body, and sending energy into that site. When the energies link in the nervous system of the client, the client goes into an alpha-theta brainwave state. Often they get rapid eye movement and memory access is instantaneous. I’ve never seen anything documented on the subject. To my knowledge, I’m the first to describe this particular phenomenon. When I work with a client, I basically send energy like my uncle used to do, at a point near C7, the seventh cervical vertebra along the spine. The first time I did it was because a client said she had a pain in the back of her head, and when I scanned, I felt that pain, but I felt another pain lower in her back. When I actually placed my hand on the site and started doing that with my clients, about 50% of them went into rapid eye movement almost immediately.

TMA: In a waking state?

BB: Yes. Technically, it’s not REM if you’re awake. Biofeedback people call it reverie. It’s an alpha-theta brain wave state. We discovered that with the energy on the back and the front, the conscious mind drops from a beta state into alpha and the subconscious mind surfaces from delta into theta, and you get a conscious/subconscious bridge or interaction as an alpha-theta state. This alpha-theta state has a lot of research behind it. We’ve discovered, for instance, that alcoholics are often missing alpha-theta and therefore can’t release the pain of memory ... which is why they probably end up drinking more, to try to medicate the pain. I developed this technique in a chemical dependency treatment center where, of course, inducing an alpha-theta state then allowed them to begin releasing the pain of their memories, which then reduced the triggers and made them less likely to have to drink again.

The reason it was called Holographic Memory Resolution is because somehow we’ve discovered a principle that amplifies your own internal image projector. I did a lecture for eighty surgeons in Reno, Nevada, this past year and what I told them was that, with all of our knowledge of the brain, they couldn’t tell me why they were seeing me at that moment as a hologram inside their mind. We don’t know if it’s right brain, left brain, front brain, back brain or parallel processing systems. It appears to be that imagery is created inside the mind through a right/left brain process that comes out front/back as a kind of hologram projection system. This would make sense. The reference beam is the dorsal horn of the spine that handles all the pain neurotransmitters, and the front of the body functions as the object beam which usually encodes the object fragment. Most memories are reduced to a simple geometric object like a lump, a knot, a tightness, a circle, a vise, a line, a ray, an arrow, a knife, a geometric description in the language of the client, of the trauma survivor. If you focus on the fragment, the fragment of the hologram takes you to the memory. Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to reframe. That’s what we’ve pretty much been discovering is the nature of the technique. The facilitator sends energy into the spine and to the front of the body. When we do that, for some reason memory access is greatly enhanced. That’s why I called it Holographic Memory Resolution. If you read Michael Talbot’s book, The Holographic Universe, he gives you the physics and says the entire universe seems to be a holographic projection of light from some ultimate light source. Therefore, consciousness and a creative reality is, in a sense, holographic.

TMA: Talk a little bit about what you do in your workshops.

BB: I started teaching HMR in 1995, and Chicago is the only city in the country right now where, within a twelve-month period, we’re doing all three levels of training in the technique. I train parents, educators, physicians, naturopathic physicians, bodyworkers, chiropractors, you name it. Whoever is interested in learning the technique, I’ll train them to do it. I would like to see couples do HMR with each other and parents learn to do it with their children. If we could resolve the pain in the nerve centers of the body before the age of fourteen, a lot of drug and alcohol exploration would not be very appealing because there would be no pain to medicate. We have a very huge goal. We started a new charity based in Chicago called Michael’s Gift, whose goal is to reduce the occurrence and impact of trauma in our world, particularly starting with reducing the trauma in children.

TMA: How long do you work with an individual?

BB: One session is enough for some simple memory reframes of practical things. Other people have worked with me weekly for months and even a couple years, if there’s extensive trauma in the history. I work with everything from individual trauma to patterns of trauma to people with what I call level three trauma, which is Disassociative Identity Disorder or multiple personalities, which is always a severe trauma history.

TMA: Let’s hook up when you’re in town, maybe you can straighten me out.

BB: Good. You know, I’ve had some producers and people that want to take the technique into television, but we’re trying to get some research done first and line up which clients we want to have talk about it. I’d like to have people from each field, one with success with migraines, another with chronic pain. We’ve been very successful in a wide variety of areas with HMR. We’re also developing a software program that will actually track the memories sequences, summarize each memory, and show the sites in the body where the memories are occurring. Our goal is to see what traumas at what sites are generating what illnesses. That is one of our long term research goals. We know there are patterns—we’ve already seen them in 11,000 people. To affect traditional medicine, we’re going to have to demonstrate it. That’s our goal.

Brent Baum is the developer of Holographic Memory Resolution® and the author of The Healing Dimensions, Resolving Trauma in Body, Mind and Spirit. A certified addictions counselor and clinical hypnotherapist, he resides in Arizona and travels internationally lecturing and teaching his healing approach.

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Brent will address “Spirituality and Trauma: An Invitation to a Mystical Awakening” on Tuesday, July 20, in Highland Park, Illinois, on behalf of the non-profit organization Michael’s Gift. He will also present and hold workshops at Infinity Foundation in Highland Park, and in Vernon Hills, July 22–25, 2004. For more information, please see the advertisement in this issue on page 00, and the Pulse Calendar listings for these dates.

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