We have a great many manifestations that come out of a very few basic mechanisms. Valence is the ability of a person to shift over and be someone else. In Dianetics we can undo the aberrative factors in valence.

Valence is a subject which the auditor uses very easily and handily in processing, and one which is very important. By an auditor I mean a person who applies Dianetics. The certified auditor trained at the Foundation knows these things very well.

One of the first ways an auditor can recognize valence is when he asks a person to go back to yesterday or do something he was doing yesterday. Let’s say the person goes back to eating dinner. He will taste the food and see who is at the table, and so on. If the person can’t do this it is perhaps because he is out of valence.

If the auditor can get this person to the earliest moment of unconsciousness, the very first time the person was injured, he will go into his own valence automatically. He will be able to sense things as he did then.

The main thing that keeps a person out of valence is charge. The word charge is used because it is a sort of electrical potential. It makes the mind overcharged. A person is very tense or anxious. That is caused by charge. A person has a lot of grief in his life. It may be that this person in all his days has never wept, but he still has accumulated a lot of grief. In Dianetics we take all the pain out of a lifetime. You remove all the pain and a person reverts to considerably better than normal. “Normal” today is not a very good shape to be in.

Reduction of grief in a lifetime will permit the person to get back into valence. He will think and feel better. He will be able to solve his problems. Grief is laid on top of physical pain. Very much earlier in his lifetime he was in pain, and perhaps somebody was talking about death around him. He was a little boy and someone said, “I am sure he is going to die.” Later somebody does die and this keys it in.

Some people go into a state of coma over the receipt of news of death. In Dianetics we can pick up these charges of grief and actually by processing make it as though the person had never experienced the incident. The person knows all about it, but it no longer has charge. This is a very simple thing to do.

One day a young girl whose husband had been lost in the war came to see us at the Foundation. She was not in very good shape physically. She looked older than she was. She said that she had been in analysis for two years and the psychoanalyst had been able to talk her out of her grief. She said it was not necessary for her to go into Dianetics. They asked her if she got a release of affect.’ The auditor asked her to go back. She went back to prove that she was okay, but it was all there complete. The wire from the War Department was still there, and his parents coming and sobbing. It took only an hour and a half to get rid of it. She had recounted it from beginning to end. At the second recounting she started to weep. She reread the telegram. She found how the room smelled at the time. When her tears abated she talked about it cheerfully; everything was all right. She was brought up to present time again. A very severe sinusitis she had had disappeared.

She had been frozen into her father’s valence at his death. Her husband’s death completed the job. Her father had had the sinusitis.A person can be shifted out of valence by a grief charge. These grief charges cause a lot of trouble. If a person could get all the intense grief off his case, the person would be a very thorough release — a person who can perform better than normal. A release is a very desirable case. If he discharged all the grief he would be able to function much better.

One case comes to mind in a city in the Midwest where I was visiting. A young lady about twenty-six had lost her husband, a doctor who was about forty-six. She had just finished going through his death and his funeral. She looked like a woman at least forty-five. She was sad, bedraggled and somber. When done, she looked like a girl of twenty, and stayed that way.