By Daniel J. Benor, MD

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that whatever you really, really, really want, you will get. The bad news is that whatever you really, really, really don’t want, you will also get because that is what you are thinking about all the time.
                    – Wayne Dyer

Looking back on my medical school experiences, I can see that I suffered from tensions and generalized anxieties under the stresses of the heavy academic and clinical pressures created by a very demanding program of studies. There was nothing I could do to relieve these stresses. I had no skills at that time to deal with my worries over memorizing massive amounts of facts and figures; over frequent written exams and oral quizzes by my medical mentors on the wards; over the heavy responsibilities for making decisions that could affect the illness, health and even the continuation of life of the people under my care.

One of my more stressful memories is of standing nearly twelve hours in my scrub suit, for much of that time holding a person’s chest open with a retractor so that the surgeon could do the cardiac surgery. The patient was ‘Ken,’ a 25 year-old young man who had rheumatoid disease that destroyed several of his heart valves and enlarged his aorta. While my role was a minor one in that drama, the seriousness of the consequences of this operation was a dramatic lesson in standing on the leading edge of medical advances – when cardiac surgery was in its early days of development.

I had spoken with Ken on his admission to the hospital. He was hopeful that these newly developed procedures could save his life, because it was clear from his flagging stamina under even the mildest of physical exertions that he could not survive much longer without the surgery.

Ken never woke up from the surgery. His heart gave out under the stress of the prolonged surgery and anesthesia. There was no one to help me with the distress and grief I felt over a person a year older than myself who had died as I watched, unable to do anything whatsoever to help.

It was no wonder that under these major general stresses I focalized my anxieties on the stomachache, the headache and the freckle (described in Part 1 of this article)! At least I could do something about these problems… So the worrying over problems I was capable of addressing helped me relieve some of my anxieties and gave me a small sense of being able to do something in a world where I was going to be expected to deal with problems that no one could solve… least of all myself…

How lucky we are today, just a few decades later, to have the extraordinary benefits of TWR for dealing with any and all of these sorts of stresses! Today, I am able to release any and all anticipatory anxieties within minutes. Worries are no longer burdens. They are challenges – to see how quickly they can be cleared, and how they point to other related issues that sit in the same file drawer – where they may have been languishing for years, just waiting for my attention and clearing.

Lessons learned:

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