Tapping ‘Energy’ to Deal with PTSD

If the practitioners of one method for treating post-traumatic stress disorder are to be believed, the peace-of-mind that has eluded hundreds of thousands of Soldiers and veterans is resting in their own hands.

Well, not just in their hands, but in certain "energy points" in the body and with their minds' own ability to put new distance between it and traumatic experiences.

The therapy is called Energy Psychology and uses physical and mental techniques – called Emotional Freedom Techniques – to produce psychological change. Unlike traditional psychological therapy, Energy Psychology is not about sitting on a couch and talking through past trauma with a shrink.

Instead, the treatment uses visualization, repeated statements intended to "reframe" the experience, and a routine of breathing, tapping or massage to take the emotional charge out of the memory.

George Peters, a former Army captain haunted for nearly 40 years by images of blood and pain he witnessed in Vietnam, isn't really sure how it all works together – and doesn't make much of the energy centers and tapping – but says the techniques eliminated the psychological stress he'd been carrying around with him.

"Somehow it allowed me to deal with memories that I wouldn't touch [before]," Peters told Military.com in a telephone interview. Now a retired school teacher, he learned of EFT through a friend who was practicing it for other kinds of stresses but heard about the techniques being used specifically for war veterans.

If it all sounds just a bit too "out there," one of its leading advocates says he understands why: all the "rubbish" that has been posted about it online.

"Our approach is to treat it as serious science as opposed to the many things you see on YouTube," said Dawson Church, founder of The Soul Medicine Institute, a non-profit organization that has made Energy Psychology a primary focus over the last several years.

Church said his interest in EFT initially was academic. He had been researching and writing about alternative medicine for about 30 years, he said, and just became intrigued by what he had found out about EFT.

"But especially with the Iraq War veterans coming home, I just felt I had to do something … that was my contribution," he said. "I couldn't sit around and write about this and admire [the therapy] from the sidelines. I had to dive in and actually practice it."

Church isn't the only champion of Energy Psychology and EFT, but his California organization set up the Iraq Vets Stress Project in response to the large number of veterans he saw returning from that deployment suffering from PTSD. In July Church took part in a roundtable with Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., that was intended to look at alternative treatments for PTSD.

The institute currently tracks about 730 veterans on a month-to-month basis, he said. Most of them are veterans treated with EFT by various psychologists who work in conjunction with the institute. About 100 of the vets are part of official programs conducted by about a dozen mental health experts certified specifically for conducting human studies.

Church said that his initial findings indicate that veterans treated using EFT showed a 50 percent drop in the level of their PTSD after only six sessions. The study of Iraq and Vietnam veterans was conducted using standards recognized by the American Psychological Association, he said, and showed positive results in as early as 30 days after the last treatment.

Essentially, EFT uses techniques that already seem to have therapeutic results. For example, in times of emotional crisis people might press the bridge of their nose, massaging the outside of their eyes, or rub their hands together. EFT advocates believe these and other points of the body are places where energy can be channeled, and they use those centers in a routine of tapping or massaging them as part of the therapy.

Along with the deliberate tapping or massage, the patient will be guided to saying positive or reassuring things to himself even as he imagines or recalls events connected to his PTSD.

According to Church, the massage and tapping of the energy centers calms that part of the brain that has been imprinted with the traumatic memory. Basically, EFT lets the patient recall the traumatic event while calming that part of the brain, and as the positive statements give him reassurance, he avers.

While vets learn the techniques under the guidance of a therapist, eventually many can go on and use them alone.

In fact, Vietnam vet Peters underwent the therapy by phone in a series of weekly six-hour telephone meetings with a Florida-based therapist, he said. After the phone consultation he was able to perform the techniques at any time, on his own.

"My opinion is that any trooper who has combat experience has traumatic stress," he said. "PTSD is just a question of how you're dealing with it. Everybody needs to be able to clean it out. When I got cleaned out I was not only able to look at memories of bad days, but also remember I had a few good days, too."