Energy Psychology is a set of therapies that work directly on the body to produce psychological change. They bypass the process of talking extensively about past traumas, which often simply reinforces the negative experience. Instead, they make use of visualization or verbal statements to reframe problems, accompanied by very specific routines employing breathing, tapping, or massage. This combination of recall of past traumas, coupled with physical stimulation, has been found by thousands of ordinary people, as well as physicians, therapists, coaches, and psychiatrists, to produce startling and permanent relief of the emotional charge associated with traumatic events.

Extensive research has demonstrated a strong correlation between unprocessed emotional trauma and disease. People with unprocessed emotional wounds are thirty times more likely to attempt suicide, as well as having higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and depression. Energy Psychology assists healing by releasing the charge around emotional distress.

There are several established forms of Energy Psychology. These include Thought Field Therapy (TFT), Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), and the Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT). Each of these routines takes just a few minutes to perform. Psychologists and doctors accustomed to long healing time for their clients are often startled at how quickly long-standing traumas can be resolved by Energy Psychology techniques.

Call 205.822.5962 or email Don Milton at Growth By Design today and discover the power of a decision and the freedom this ground breaking process provides. It’s time for positive action. Your new world awaits you!

Can ancient Chinese healing rites help Iraq war veterans cope with combat trauma?

A Tucson-area therapist believes they can, and is offering free treatments for local Iraq vets to test an approach that involves tapping on the acupuncture points used in Chinese medicine.

The Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, relatively little known and not widely embraced in traditional therapy circles, has been used to successfully treat crime victims, disaster responders and witnesses to the World Trade
Center attacks, according to recent articles in psychology and traumatology journals.

It also is being used to treat troops for combat stress at a handful of veterans’ hospitals around the country, though not in Tucson.

Mary Stafford of Oro Valley is one of a dozen or so therapists nationwide taking part in a clinical trial of the method to assess its effectiveness on returning veterans. Stafford, who has used the technique for a decade, is approved by the National Board for Certified Counselors to teach it to other therapists.

“This is a counselor’s dream because of how quickly it works and how much you can help people,” Stafford said. She and other practitioners say the technique takes the sting out of trauma memories, in some cases after years of traditional therapy could not.

Stafford started using the method in 1996 when she worked as a crisis counselor at a state welfare office in Tucson. At the time, hundreds of people were being forced off government benefits during welfare reform. The office was packed daily with people in various stages of panic, she recalled.

Some were phobic about taking employment tests. Some had self-esteem issues or talked of suicide. Crisis counselors had just one hour to spend with each client before moving on to the next. “I used to go home at night and worry about these clients,” Stafford said. “Nothing I knew how to do could help them quickly enough to make a difference.”

After hearing about the technique and taking a training class, Stafford began teaching welfare clients how to calm themselves by focusing on their fears while tapping on their hands, faces and other acupuncture points. Many found near-immediate relief, she said.

“I was overwhelmed by how much more effective it is than the standard counseling-talking approaches,” Stafford said. Since then, she said, she has used the technique to treat dozens of clients with various types of trauma. Stafford and many other advocates believe the method works by re-balancing psychic energy in the ancient “energy meridians” identified in acupuncture — a premise that tends to raise eyebrows in the Western psychology world.

Other advocates of the method couldn’t care less about the claim to ancient origins. The important thing, they said,
is that it works.

Talk of Chinese meridians “doesn’t matter,” said Charles Figley, a psychologist and expert in disaster mental health who founded the Green Cross Academy of Traumatology in response to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The Minnesota-based humanitarian group responds to natural and human-caused disasters, providing emotional help to traumatized survivors and emergency responders.

Green Cross teams successfully used the technique on survivors of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11, he said. “As a scientist, I am interested in the simplest explanation for this,” Figley said. He said the points tapped on during sessions — around the eyes and temples, and at the top of the rib cage — are the same places people instinctively reach for to soothe themselves, for example, by rubbing their temples after a stressful day.

Some advocates think the technique works because the tapping interrupts the brain during the recall of traumatic events, dampening the emotional charge such memories carry.

Lynn Garland, a clinical social worker who specializes in trauma therapy at the Boston VA Health Care System — one of the few Veterans Affairs medical centers that use the technique — said she’s treated 100 or so clients since 2000 with overwhelmingly positive results.

Some are veterans of the Korean or Vietnam wars who had suffered for decades and hadn’t found much relief from traditional therapy, she said.

The technique stopped their flashbacks and panic symptoms almost instantly, said Garland, who predicts the method will one day be widely used.

“The veterans are surprised and thrilled with the results,” Garland said. The method doesn’t replace traditional therapy in severe cases, she said, but when used in conjunction, patients make rapid progress, instead of limping along for years in emotional despair.

Dr. Stephen Ezeji-Okoye, head of the VA Field Advisory Committee on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which looks at non-traditional treatments that might benefit veterans, said the clinical trial of the Emotional Freedom Technique is a first step toward possible wider use of the method in the VA system.

If the study is well-designed and shows the technique is effective, “that’s exactly the sort of thing we want to take a look at,” he said.

Call 205.822.5962 or email Don Milton at Growth By Design today and discover the power of a decision and the freedom this ground breaking process provides. It’s time for positive action. Your new world awaits you!

Pam’s experience with Matrix Re-imprinting

Matrix Reimprinting is a way to use EFT for an even deep level of healing from emotional distresses.  The basic concept is that energy consciousness holograms (ECHOes) exist from any experience that we have had in the past and that these ECHOes can hold negative feelings that we may not experience in the present when we remember such a situation.

So, for example, suppose you are currently 45 years old and when you think about something that happened when you were 10 then you either have some negative feelings about it or not.  If you do, we use EFT to get your negative feelings down to a level of 3 or less (on a SUD scale from 0 to 10).  If you don’t then we can go right to the next step.  In the next step, I ask you to either visualize or sense the event and once you have a clear sense of it then I ask the current you to “step into the Matrix” of this event.  Once you are in there then you make connection with the 10 year old ECHO and I take you through a process of using EFT on the ECHO until it is released of all negative charges and then we create a new memory that feels really good and I guide you through a process to reimprint this memory.

This is the simplified explanation and things may come up in the Matrix with younger Echoes of yourself or others involved that we may need to deal with to clear the entire issue for you.  There is also a way to test our results once we are done.  This may sound weird or hard to imagine or believe and it really does work rather well and is one of those things that you just have to experience for yourself.  You can listen to the two short video here from a couple of clients who experienced this for the first time and maybe get a better sense of what it is about.

Call 205.822.5962 or email Don Milton at Growth By Design today and discover the power of a decision and the freedom this ground breaking process provides. It’s time for positive action. Your new world awaits you!