Chance Survivors of Cold-Blooded Slaughter
Reported by Carl Johnson, Ph.D., ABPP
A small village in Kosovo was well-known for having been the site of the one of the worst atrocities during the entire war. But a small miracle was also embedded in the story. The Serbs came in, rounded up all the men, and herded them into three buildings that were built for having meetings. One building at a time, they shot the men down, and then burned the bodies. Remarkably, in each of the three meeting halls, one man survived. In each case, the survivor had been in the center of the group so was not shot, and then wound up at the bottom of the pile of bodies, and was somehow spared from the flames.
In June of 2000, about a year after this nightmare, one of the doctors I was working with took me to see if I could provide some relief to the survivors. While this was not the doctor’s village, after various inquiries, we found our way to the home of one of the men. When he saw us coming, he literally ran into the corn field behind his house. The doctor yelled after him and was able to assure him that everything was going to be fine. It turned out that another therapy team had come in some time earlier and reactivated his traumas, and he had astutely sensed that we were also coming to offer help.
He finally agreed to talk with us. We sat in his backyard and shared tea and fruit while he told the long story and even went into his house to bring out photos and news clippings. I don’t usually listen to long renditions of a person’s story. They are often painful for the person to tell, and they aren’t necessary for the treatment to proceed. But he seemed to need to tell his story before he was going to say “yes” to the treatment.
As the treatment finally began, we identified seven aspects of his experience to focus upon: 1) being herded into the building, 2) being mowed down by guns, 3) the burning of the bodies as he lay trapped beneath them, 4) the death of a family member, 5) the death of neighbors and friends, 6) the death of a house guest who happened to have the bad fortune of visiting him at the time, and 7) his feelings about having survived when no one else did.
He did not take particularly well to the 0-10 SUD (Subjective Units of Distress) Scale. For him, either there was distress, or “It is good.” Each of the seven issues started with distress, and after several rounds of tapping and related procedures, got to the point where he would report “It is good.” For each area of focus that involved the loss of a loved one, a multi-tiered procedure was used (see “When a Loved One Has Been Lost”). After the seventh issue, the man stated that he was healed. At this point, the man requested that I teach him the methods I had used with him.
He took us out of the house, got into the car, and navigated us to another of the three survivors. He explained the treatment to him, and we returned that evening to work with the second survivor, again with apparent success. The third survivor could not be located.
Sixteen months later, Kosovo’s chief medical officer brought me to the village to interview both men, probably because the case had achieved international notoriety. Both men indicated that there had been no relapse, along with their willingness for their improvement to be shared with others who are in a position to help survivors. Eight months later-in June 2002, two years following the treatments-my colleague Paul Oas, Ph.D., and I visited the men and learned that the treatments for both were still holding strong.
Carl Johnson, Ph.D., ABBP, is a clinical psychologist, founder and director of The Global Institute of Thought Field Therapy, and a retired PTSD specialist with the Veteran’s Administration. He lives in Winchester, Virginia, and may be contacted via [email protected].
