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Eugene's Story - From Hells Kitchen to Hollywood ending |
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A Current Affair Story - TFT on National Television |
From Hell's Kitchen to Hollywood Ending. THERE CAN BE A HOLLYWOOD ENDING
Imagine what you could do in your life if you had control over your body and your mind. In this moving personal story Eugene Piccinotti shares with us how he transformed his traumatic life with the daily use of Thought Field Therapy. We all have some familiarity with anxious and unhappy times in our lives, but very few people have experienced the sort of pain that Eugene has. It is not surprising therefore that he is so passionate about sharing the modality that 'saved' him
I was born in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, in New York City. If you ever have saw the film Sleepers, or on a much softer note, West Side Story, you will know why it had this name. I thought I was one of the lucky ones who got away. I wasn't. That was 30 years ago. I know now that anxiety follows you everywhere. Hell can be living in your own skin and with the thoughts in your head. My first memory of childhood was at about five years old, waking up and wondering where I was. I certainly did not know who I was. Until I left home at 16, nobody told me anything.
I remember that most of the other kids had a mother or father. Even though most of the fathers and mothers yelled at their kids, I was still kind of jealous. I had a grandfather and an aunt who had a baby girl who seemed to get all the attention. For most of my life I was not quite certain what a mother or a father was supposed to be like. I soon realised that I was being brought up by a woman (my aunt) who had a younger child (my cousin) and that she had no husband and was extremely anxious. To this day she is still in a mental institution. In those days, that's all there was for anxious and frightened people. At least there was something. Now hospitals and prisons are overcrowded. Anxious and depressed people have little support. Now people kill themselves. Why? I will explain why later.
There was also another man in the house (my grandfather) whom I hardly saw as he worked night shift. We all lived in four rooms on the fifth floor of a tenement house. At the front of the house was the Catholic primary school, and at the back were hundreds of clothes lines and the bus ramps where I could see the scores of buses filled with thousands of people who came to visit NYC from all over the world. I found friends in Jesus, Mary and Joseph - after all they seemed to be the perfect family. I soon became an altar boy and at 6:30am on a freezing New York morning you would find me serving mass with only the nuns as company. Everything felt really good and safe.
I was certain that my father and mother would appear one day and be just like that. I loved to read about Jesus and wanted to be just like him. I was interested in becoming a brother. I was the only person in school ever to get 100 % on my religious exam. I was even considering becoming a priest. That was until my first carer, a nun named Sister Roberta, smacked me around the head, beat me with a cane and dragged me around the room by my sideburns. In return for defending myself I was sent down to see the head priest who punched me to the floor and beat me harder with a bigger cane. After a few years of physical, emotional and finally sexual abuse, life became meaningless.
I began to fear and distrust everyone. Going to school was like being in a concentration camp. By the age of 12, I was secretly sniffing glue, and drinking. By 14, I was on drugs. How did I earn the money to pay for the cheap wine, cigarettes, marijuana, and by the age of 17, cocaine? I started shining shoes on the corner of 42nd street and 8th avenue. Around the corner were the porno movies, the pimps, their prostitutes and the sexual abusers scavenging the streets for easy prey. Eventually I turned to gambling. My first bet was at 12 years old, on the first fight that Cassius Clay had with Sonny Liston. I bet $50 with the father of one of my girlfriends, at odds of 7-1. The fight was over in a minute and I had won $350. In 1961 that was a lot of money. I promptly spent it all on drinking and drugs. I remember I did not know then exactly what I was doing, but I know now that all this self-abuse was about keeping my anxiety down, down, down. Shortly after I won the bet on Mohammad Ali (Cassius Clay), as I was walking down the street, I was knocked to the ground by a complete stranger. I found out later that this was because I did not tip the bookie who placed the bet. A short while later I got involved in a card game with a man who would not let me quit when I was ahead. When I tried to, he promptly broke my nose and bashed me nearly unconscious. I found out later that he was a crazed Vietnam War vet who regularly beat people up. Not long after that, I welcomed the news (how sad) that he had been shot by the police while robbing a bar.
My first year in high school - called Power Memorial Academy - was a nightmare. It was a school where children with high IQ scores went. Despite all the trauma I was experiencing in my life, I still got good marks. The next step for me was West Point Academy and a possible career in the military. But things were becoming all too hard, and the abuse I was getting at home was just too much for me to handle. I started to skip school, getting someone to call and say I was sick. The truth was that I was extremely anxious. I could hardly ask a question. When I was asked to speak in front of the class, I became very nervous and often held my breath while I experienced internal panic attacks.
When I was 16, I rebelled against my physical and emotional abuse. I was given the choice of going to a boarding school for difficult boys or to go to live with my father who suddenly appeared out of nowhere after 11 years. I remember seeing my mother only once, when I was about ten. I remember watching her put on "Ponds" skin cream before she went to bed. I remember sleeping in her arms and looking into her beautiful face. It was like a fairy story. Later I learned that she had been mentally ill and had spent most of her life in and out of hospitals. The result of the move to live with my father was a change of school. At my new high school the kids carried guns and knives. I spent a couple of years with my father and his women. He was an ex-world war two veteran who still suffered from malaria and foamed at the mouth when he got angry. His idea of reminding me I was late for school was to lift me off the bed and hit me in the chest. We ended up fighting with each other. One day I came home from school and he and his new wife were gone. For about two years, I worked part-time to pay the rent, and went to school about two days a week. During this time I started the day with drugs and ended the day with drugs. I wanted to graduate from high school. Why? Because I remember my aunt saying: "You will be a bum just like your father." I also remember my father saying: "You will never finish high school." I was determined to do everything I could to get that diploma!
I did eventually graduate. By this time I had no money and suffered from what the doctors call a social phobia. I slept with a knife under my pillow and a hammer under the bed. I was fired from my job for stealing groceries and evicted from my apartment. I was now on the streets. During this time, I was shot - by a man who wanted money to buy drugs. He would not believe I only had a couple of dollars in my pocket. The bullet went into my neck near a main artery and I would have bled to death but for a passing cab driver who stopped to take me to the hospital. When I got out I was desperately trying to find a home. Then an acquaintance introduced me to a woman entertainer who gave me a room to stay as long as I wanted. A few weeks later this same acquaintance took me to a club where I met a young woman whom I eventually married, at the age of 18, moving to England together.
Over the years from 18 to 41, I spent most of my time trying to deal with the enormous anxieties and fear that followed me everywhere. My relationship was highly dysfunctional and I continued to use drugs and alcohol to keep my anxiety down. When I was 26 we had a son. My goal was to be a good father. I never wanted for my son what happened to me. What in fact happened was that I became a workaholic. I climbed the ladder of success in sales and marketing, and was appointed to senior positions of a number of financial institutions because I achieved "the bottom line". What was happening at home was a nightmare. I did not know what love was. I did not know how to deal with a woman who also had an unhappy childhood. There were many arguments that came about due to massive anxiety and an inability to express my feelings. Then, after a head-on collision with a truck where my six-year-old son and I were severely injured, we finally decided to make a new start, and moved to Australia with a financial institution who wanted my services.
The anxiety came with us. Five years later, I had my first divorce and shortly after entered another relationship. I lost my job, and, much more devastating, my relationship and the trust of my son. I hated myself. That was the beginning of my second nervous breakdown. I ended, a year later, in complete seclusion in a mud brick house in Eltham, Victoria, with the "C.A.T. Team" from a psychiatric hospital visiting me daily to keep me from killing myself. I held the record for calling crisis line and lifeline - I often talked to them until I fell asleep. Every day was a living hell. I eventually committed myself into a hospital where they pumped me up with drugs until I was pacing the floor with another patient who had been a train driver. Sixteen weeks later, I got out - with no friends, no job, and on the dole. By chance I met a fellow American who introduced me to meditation and a spiritual path. He also introduced me to a woman who worked at a prominent natural birthing centre in Hawthorn as a counsellor, helping women who were anxious giving birth. She was using a method called Thought Field Therapy or TFT. We became friends, and one day she applied the technique to me. To my astonishment I felt my anxiety vanishing within minutes. I commenced the study of psychology and psychotherapy at various institutions and subsequently worked as a volunteer counsellor and trainer for Personal Emergency Service Victoria. I found nothing worked anywhere near as successfully as this simple-to-use tapping technique. I decided to go to the US to study with Dr. Roger Callahan, the clinical psychologist who discovered the technique. By the end of my training, I felt the best I had ever felt in my life. I have not had more than two glasses of wine or smoked one cigarette or drugs for over 12 years.
When I returned to my home, Australia, I worked on my family, my clients, and myself for two solid years with Thought Field Therapy, with astonishing results. In 1998 I started the Australian Centre for the Rapid Relief of Anxiety Addiction and Trauma. Since that time I have seen and treated the most severe cases of anxiety and trauma where everything (both natural and main stream medicines) failed. I have successfully worked with, and in my workshops trained to heal themselves, celebrities and doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, mothers, fathers, young people and children who could hardly move, they were so traumatised. I am committed to not only teach people how to heal themselves but to prevent chronic anxiety, depression, serious illness, addiction and even death.
Most people are tired of processing the past for hour upon hour of self-examination. 80% of people get relief for serious traumas and phobias with Thought Field Therapy in five minutes. Thought Field Therapy achieves this because it eliminates the fundamental cause of these symptoms which is a disturbance and block in the energy field. You can compare these disturbances and blockages to a virus in a computer. In the same way a programmer has been taught various programs to remove viruses, Thought Field Therapy teaches you programs in the form of tapping sequences on acupressure points. I want to get this therapy into the fingers of children, teachers, mothers and fathers. Unless we teach people how to stop the symptoms of anxiety, people will continue to find ways that are destructive. That is the message I am writing about in my forthcoming book, "Before It's Too Late. We only have one life in this lifetime.
What of my life now? In comparison to my past, my life now is bliss. I have a beautiful relationship with my wife Karen, the woman who first introduced me to Thought Field Therapy. My son, now 28 years old, tells me he loves me every time he talks to me and gives me a kiss and a hug. Just a week before September 11, I went back to NYC. I had the biggest family reunion ever. My father and I went there together. He met with the rest of his family that he had not seen for 50 years, including his sister. I also reunited with my mother, who is now out of the mental institution.
Eugene PiccinottiTFTdx is a director and founder of Thought Field Therapy Australia, The Centre for Extraordinary Living and Thought Field Technology International. He teaches Thought Field Therapy weekend workshops throughout most of Australia.