Excerpted, with permission, from Volume I, Issue 2 (July 2001) of:

In preparing this article I interviewed Sandi and viewed videotapes of her therapy sessions with Aaron, an autistic boy for whom Sandi has been using EFT in her energy detoxification work. I also worked extensively with the mother of this boy whom I was counseling for the problems that typically beset parents of autistic children. Being a social worker, she had also consulted me for supervision in EFT. In fact it was I who referred the family to Sandi for Aaron — and so an interesting saga began.

Sandi had been using non-invasive energy-based treatments for food and environmental sensitivities since 1995. These methods work by having the patient focus on, or be in contact with, the reactive substance. Once the substance is in the person’s energy field, close to their body or touching it, Sandi muscle tests to identify whether it is causing an imbalance in the body’s energy system. If it is, she then stimulates various acupoints using her Spinal Release method of tapping on the back, EFT, and Laser Spray. This can eliminate the energy imbalance in relation to that substance and thereby stop the body’s negative reaction. The body has been reprogrammed to accept the substance.

It is easy to see how this treatment for allergy-like reactions is clearly analogous to the EFT treatment for negative emotions. The offending substance causes changes in the body’s energy system similar to the disruption in the energy field caused by a negative emotion, thought or scene. The energy system is then put in balance once more by stimulating specific acupoints.

Sandi uses several energy techniques which she finds particularly easy to administer. Among them is EFT, which she considers to be one of the most effective methods available and especially desirable because it is so simply used by clients and their parents at home.

When her first autistic child patient was referred to her for allergy elimination, Sandi discovered that after treatment there was not only a correction of the allergy-like reactions to offending substances, but that this child seemed to calm down remarkably after the tapping procedure.

Sandi soon began to work with other autistic children — word of mouth had spread among parents about her treatment. While it is not successful in every case, the results of this energy treatment approach have often been remarkable. Two of her autistic patients who formerly required a great amount of teacher attention in special classes are now functioning appropriately in normal school classrooms. Two others whose behavior was so out of control after ingesting certain substances that they had to be restricted to gluten-free and cassein-free diets, can now eat whatever they want without adverse effects. Similar marked improvements have occurred in other children she has worked with.

With the autistic children it became increasingly obvious that the treatment needed to be done at home as well as in the office and EFT was an easy way of doing this. When the parents learned the process, they began to notice that EFT was effective in more ways than just allergy elimination— it was calming these children down. Sandi then wondered if the autism itself might be stemming from severe allergy-like reactions to substances in the environment and therefore might be treatable by using an energy approach. She has proceeded to work on this premise. At the present time she has had to limit her case load to 10 autistic youngsters, however, because of the extreme demands this work places upon her.

Sandi and I have regularly brainstormed about ways to use EFT as homework for these children and their parents, a protocol she has pioneered. I want to emphasize however that the work with autistic children which I’m reporting today is preliminary and experimental in nature. This treatment is constantly evolving, and you should view this as a report from the cutting edge of energy-toxin and energy psychology work. It cannot at this point be cited as proving anything, but merely suggests some highly promising uses for EFT.

Aaron is 17 years old. He is 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighs 270 lbs, and is never free from the affliction of autism, which he has had since he was two years old and which severely disables a growing number of youngsters.

Aaron whimpers and screams, growls and roars, and often seems to produce sounds produce sounds which are almost like speech. But he cannot speak. only communicates meaningfully with the help of his mother who assists him in pointing to letters on a Letter-Board, or else he laboriously types out his communications with one finger that often slides off the keyboard keys because he also suffers from autism’s serious disturbance of motor coordination.

When agitated, Aaron flails his arms and feet wildly and bangs his head repeatedly with his fists. Like many autistic youngsters, he is unable to locate specific places on his own body or point to them no matter how carefully he is instructed to do this, which of course means that he cannot apply EFT to himself and is heavily dependent upon his single-parent, his mother, for this as well as many other things.

He also has the autistic person’s hypersensitivity to any sort of stimulation. Touch, sound, sight — all can be unbearably intense for him unless these are carefully modulated. Over-stimulation of any kind, either a loud noise, an upsetting event or even positive excitement over something (such as typing which he loves) can result in episodes of "stimming", a state in which autistic children or adults can become wild and almost uncontrollable.

In Sandi’s office, when he is in a state of stimming (it can come on quite suddenly) Aaron will frequently run from the room across the hall to where her husband, Bob Radomski, conducts his chiropractic practice, barge into that office and grab all the candy he sees (Bob keeps some on hand for certain testing purposes) and then cram that into his mouth, wrappers and all, and try to swallow it. On one occasion he grabbed his own bottle of pills, which was being tested for toxic effects on him, and tried to swallow all of them at once.

This is Aaron’s sickness. It is not, however, the person who resides beneath the distressing symptoms. That person is the subject of this article and the recipient of the energy work currently being done with Aaron. As you will see, he is actually a bright and sensitive youngster who struggles to cross the seemingly impenetrable barrier of his disease to communicate his feelings and thoughts, and interpret his unique state of mind to the world.

This is not surprising when we look at Aaron’s history. Since very early in life he has loved words. Before he suddenly developed autism as a toddler, he was an engaging, precocious child who had already learned both the English and Hebrew alphabets (except for two letters) by the time he was two years old. Even after his illness developed, he taught himself to read unbeknownst to anyone, and at seven years of age, with the help of a dedicated speech teacher, he found he could spell out words and sentences on a Letter-Board, something in which he took intense delight.

On a website which his Mother and Uncle have recently put up to archive some of his writings — an event which excites Aaron deeply — is posted a short autobiography (one paragraph) which he has written. It describes the dilemma which his disability presents to him far better than I could. He writes:

However, since he has been working with Sandi and her energy-toxin interventions, prominent among which is EFT, many things have changed for the better for Aaron. His mother now reports that since he commenced this treatment, Aaron is less inclined to engage in "stimming" during the day, and has longer periods when he is relatively at ease or even can be quiet. His school, which used to call her frequently to demand that she come and get him immediately because he was completely out of control, has not called her once for the past several months to complain– a major sign of improvement. Once when Sandi was working with him, after he had just been desensitized to B vitamins, he even spoke a phrase "Go car", indicating his readiness to go home, and his mother reports that his sounds now more often approximate coherent speech, much as the babblings of an infant about to break into speech does.

Recently Sandi has had him type in her office while she watches, and then has used EFT with him to help him avoid getting over-excited about the typing.

In a recent session, Aaron asked her via his typewriter to, "Please kill my nerves so I can type.". When she read this, Sandi requested that his mother lead him through a sequence of EFT.

When his mother sat down next to Aaron on the couch and tapped him through several rounds of EFT, Sandi saw Aaron undergo what she describes as a dramatic change. He became amazingly quiet and peaceful, his head banging and flailing stopped entirely except for an occasional involuntary movement, and when the treatment was over he lay against the couch with his head back, his mouth slightly open, barely moving, and he was breathing easily. He remained quiet for a long time, and left the office in a surprisingly peaceful state.

When he came to his next session, Sandi had set up a video camera to photograph it. Aaron was excited by the appearance of the camera and this made difficulty for him as he tried to type. It was evident that his over-excitement was moving him toward stimming.

Sandi quickly suggested he move to the couch where his mother could gently repeat EFT set-up and reminder phrases as she tapped the sequence, addressing his over-excitement about the situation. Watching this videotape at a later date, I could see him become visibly calmer and then become totally quiet as the EFT progressed. It was clear how receptive he is to the method.

This second time however the treatment didn’t "hold" in the same way — par for the course when one is dealing with autism. Aaron jumped to his feet and began shouting and flailing around, greatly agitated, when it was over. Perhaps his agitation afterwards was a form of protest at having had the EFT stopped, taken away from him as it were. This could be ascertained by judicious experimentation.

To help retain the benefits of the in-office sessions, Sandi suggested to his mother that she use EFT with Aaron at home, and she has began to do this. She finds that if she continues tapping long enough, usually from five to ten minutes, his breathing will calm down and he will stop sweating profusely, and he clearly appreciates the intervention.

She did not initially use any words along with the EFT, just tapped in the manner that most of the other parents of autistic children were doing at that time — silently. However she has begun to use certain carefully formulated set-up and reminder phrases with him. Since it required a lot of exploratory work with her, and Aaron’s input as well, to create the most effective EFT phrases to use with him, I will describe this process in the next issue where I can share it with you in detail. For now, I want to give you an idea of the flow of the EFT process as it occurred.

Here is how Aaron views his treatment:

Aaron sees real hope in his present treatment, an optimism he has never shown before. He has a vision of eventually being able to help others with similar handicaps by expressing what he feels so deeply inside.

He describes his sense of hope as he writes:

Recently, when his mother took him with her to a community meeting on understanding the handicapped where she was speaking, she announced the founding of a small foundation, the Aaron Bar David Foundation for Understanding the Handicapped. Aaron was intensely excited when he heard this and spelled out the following message to her on his Letter-Pad as they prepared to leave the auditorium:

After arriving home, he continued as follows:

Aaron is dedicated to his future. Sandi is dedicated to helping him. His mother, family, concerned friends and colleagues, and myself, are all trying to help in whatever way we can. There is a way that you can help too.

For a short time when he was about 14 years old, Aaron’s speech teacher obtained for him the loan of a device designed primarily for cerebral palsy patients. It enabled him to "talk" by converting typed words and sentences into electronic speech. He was elated with it. It allowed him to hear his own "voice" (his thoughts, feelings, etc.) projected out into the world for the first time – the silence was broken.

Unfortunately, however, the organization who had lent him this device then needed it for someone else, leaving Aaron once again voiceless. His family could not purchase one of these machines for him because they cost too much. Ten thousand dollars was way out of reach of their very modest income.

After establishing the nonprofit "Aaron Bar David Foundation", however, his mother now hopes to raise enough money to acquire a communication device for Aaron, as well as to support the work he hopes eventually to do in his chosen field. Raising this money becomes theoretically possible because donations toward such a purchase are tax deductible.

What I have figured out (in my own hopeful way) is that if everyone, or almost everyone who subscribes to this newsletter were to donate $10 — or more or less according to what they could afford — to the Foundation, because there are presently more than 1,200 of you that would enable the purchase of this device for Aaron and it could not again be taken from him. This could open new vistas for him and his eventual work in this field.

If you would like to help with this project, please make a check payable to the "Aaron Bar David Foundation" and mail to:

REQUEST: If you do so please include your email address so that we can acknowledge your contribution!