Amanda, an attractive 19-year-old college student, was brought to me by her mother because of PTSD as a result of a severe automobile accident. A drunk driver had crossed the median strip and struck Amanda's car head-on, killing himself and his two passengers. Amanda was pinned under the dashboard for more than three hours while a rescue team applied the "jaws of life" to cut her out of the wreck. She was flown to a hospital and spent several months in a rehabilitation center and in a wheel chair. She suffered broken ankles, a broken arm and shoulder, back injuries, and facial lacerations. When she came to me, eleven months after the accident, she had been experiencing frequent nightmares, flashbacks, panic episodes, generalized anxiety, guilt feelings, and anger related to the traumatic event.

At the initial session with Amanda and her mother, I took a detailed history and chatted with them to establish rapport, as I always do. History-taking is for thoroughness—to unveil aspects that need treatment and get a sense of the client’s personality and concerns. Rapport, of course, is an essential aspect of all good therapy. When unusual therapeutic procedures are being used, rapport is even more important, since it increases compliance and reduces the chance of dropout before the therapy has had an opportunity to work. Additionally, I find that rapport establishes an energetic resonance that’s synergistic with the energy techniques.

Toward the end of the initial interview, I told Amanda that I had ways to help people overcome painful memories, and that these methods often work quickly and painlessly. I indicated that, since we only had about ten minutes left in the session, I didn't know if this would help, but I wanted to introduce her to the kind of work we would be doing in future sessions. Because I’ve found that some clients are taken aback and may not return for treatment, I usually wait until the second session to introduce energy techniques. Laying the groundwork is important. But in this case, Amanda's mother had brought her to me specifically for this treatment approach, and I reasoned that if the method did not work this time, she would not be discouraged. Also I was really hoping to offer immediate relief, if possible.

I asked Amanda to bring to mind an aspect of the accident that still bothered her. She chose to focus on being pinned under the dashboard, and she rated her subjective units of distress (SUD) on a zero-to-ten scale as a nine at the time of our session. I then asked her to imitate me as I tapped with my fingers at specific locations on my body: the third-eye point (on the forehead) and points under the nose on the upper lip, between the chin and bottom lip, and on the upper section of the sternum, near the thymus gland. I chose these points because of their longtime importance in acupuncture and applied kinesiology (the brainchild of chiropractor George Goodheart). Other points, including a range of meridian acupoints, the Bennett Reflexes on the skull, and chakras, can also be effective. Why one set of points works with some clients while another set benefits others is hard to say, and finding the right points can be a process of trial and error.

In most forms of therapy, I would have asked Amanda to call her trauma to mind as she was doing her tapping. However, I did not do this for two reasons. The first is that abreactions are common when people recall distressing events. We clinicians used to think that abreaction was beneficial and necessary for therapeutic results, and some therapists may still view it in this way, but I find that there's a downside, since abreaction can retraumatize the client and lead to panic attacks, depression, and other effects. Second, I’ve found that having the client focus on the trauma is unnecessary.

Rather than asking Amanda to hold the traumatic memory in mind and risk abreaction, I asked her to dismiss it from her mind and to assume a body posture known as a leg lock or a pause lock, so during the treatment process she could maintain information about the trauma at a subconscious, more comfortable, level. The leg lock involves standing or sitting with legs abducted, similar to the second position in ballet. The idea of "locking in" an emotion is suggested by the work of Alan Beardall, a chiropractor protégé of Goodheart's, who discovered that this technique could be used to assist in the diagnosis of physical problems. I have found that this method can be used to lock in information at a subtle level, so the client need not consciously process memories and other issues needing treatment.

Though this and other locking procedures have many advantages, they're frequently unnecessary, since the trauma tends to resonate at a subtle level--like the lingering vibration of a tuning fork--after it has been brought to mind. After one round of NAEM, I asked Amanda not to bring the trauma to mind, but simply to guess what the level of distress would be if she were to recall it vividly. At this point, she said she didn't think it would be different. "Still a nine," she said. I told her that was fine, and suggested we give it another try. Again I guided her through NAEM--third-eye point, under nose, under bottom lip, thymus point--after which I asked her to estimate the level of distress if she were to think about the event. This time she said, ""I feel more relaxed. I think it might be a six."

Her progress was encouraging, but I knew that such gains can be fleeting. Goodheart found that chiropractic adjustments could come undone if patients moved their eyes in certain directions, counted, hummed, or chewed. This effect can result from any number of factors, but the important thing is that a problem can return under circumstances other than those present at the time the correction has been made in the doctor’s office. Thus, redoing the adjustment while the patient engages in such an activity can help the adjustment to hold. The same principle applies to psychological issues.

Since the goal of treatment is to eliminate all the psychological distress, I took Amanda through two more rounds of NAEM until the distress was down to a one. After this I used a vertical eye-movement technique combined with tapping on the back of her hand between and above the little finger and ring finger knuckles to reduce the distress further. At this point, Amanda said she didn't think it would bother her if she were to think intensely about being pinned under the dashboard, so I asked her to try. After reviewing the scene for a couple seconds, she laughed and enthusiastically responded, "Wow! It doesn't bother me now! How does that work?"

I told her that while I would be happy to explain this to her, I wasn't sure she had given this a fair test yet. So I asked her to review the memory in more detail to be sure that it didn’t bother her. After about ten seconds, she shook her head, laughed, and reported that it still didn't bother her.

Next, I asked Amanda to do one more test. I set a timer for one minute and asked her to try to bother herself about the memory while her mother and I talked over a few things. I pointed out that if she could feel distress about any aspect of the event, that would mean that we needed to do some more treatment on that memory. To test it out, I asked her to picture the event as it was--the way her body was positioned in the car, the front seat cramping her in, the sounds of rescuers cutting her out of the car, and so on. To no avail, Amanda tried her hardest to become upset about this vivid memory. She was able to review the event calmly in detail. Her comment was, "It’s amazing! No big deal now! How does that work?" I told her why I thought it worked, and we reviewed how she could repeat the treatment if it became necessary between sessions.

The speed of improvement that Amanda showed is typically the case in the treatment of trauma with this approach. In most cases, repeating the treatment between sessions is unnecessary. However, some traumas are complex, with many facets and interconnecting traumas; in such cases, a single session will usually not be sufficient. Therefore, I like to prepare the client to do self-treatment if necessary.

Follow-up sessions at one week, two weeks, and two months revealed that after that initial treatment, Amanda no longer experienced nightmares or flashbacks about that trauma. During the course of therapy, other aspects of the trauma, including survivor guilt and anger, were treated in a similar manner. At each session, we would enjoy a conversation about her activities and interests, check on progress, and determine other issues that needed to be addressed in treatment. These issues were also relieved efficiently by using either NAEM or, when necessary, an EDxTM diagnostic-treatment protocol that involves manual muscle-testing, more precisely to diagnose the acupoints needed to relieve her distress.

I acknowledge the limitations of anecdotal reports and accept that experimental studies are needed before the scientific and therapeutic communities will embrace energy psychology; however, these treatment results have become quite common, and we should not forget that experimental studies are actually anecdotal reports, systematically gathered according to statistical guidelines. Also, my colleagues and I have similarly treated thousands of clients suffering from intense traumas. Most of the results are achieved efficiently and without the client’s having to reexperience distress. You might say that therapists’ enthusiasm is another active ingredient, to which we should extend a hearty welcome; however, I’ve never found enthusiasm to be the sufficient condition for therapeutic success.

Like any specialty, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Before adopting this approach, ethical therapists should undergo thorough training. Numerous books and manuals offer a good start by detailing the theory and propounding specific methods of energy psychotherapy, but there’s no substitute for hands-on supervision, and therapists are wise to integrate energy psychology with good therapeutic practice and traditional modalities that they find helpful.

Though I primarily practice energy psychology and increasingly more clients come to me and others for it, I don't practice it on an exclusively tap-here-tap-there basis, and I wouldn’t encourage others to approach it that way either. As technical as it is, energy therapy should be integrated with solid psychotherapeutic understandings. I enjoy communicating with my clients, and I like to help them achieve higher levels of consciousness in addition to tapping away a trauma or a distressing feeling. To approach therapy as a mere desensitizing and reprogramming exercise is too dehumanizing for me. Therapy ought to help clients develop a deeper understanding about their lives.