Medicine Buddha Toronto

by Brad Hunter

“Non-validated therapies are not necessarily invalid therapies.” ~ Irvin Yalom

This article could well be entitled Confessions Of A Reluctant Practitioner. I use a variety of so-called energy healing practices in conjunction with hypnotherapy, mindfulness and felt sense work, and I honestly do find them effective. The problem is, I don’t believe that these techniques necessarily ‘work’ for the reasons that some of the most evangelical proponents believe. I have the same ambivalence about combining meditation and mindfulness with therapy. Even though I am fully supportive of any client incorporating a mindfulness practice into their daily life, I am left with two concerns that make me somewhat uneasy: On the one hand there is the regret that the full depth and potential of meditation is lost if we limit our focus to a therapeutic technique, forgetting that meditation is fundamentally a spiritual undertaking. On the other hand, meditation can be so powerful and effective that it is possible to continually direct one’s attention away from the very problems one should be confronting. This is known as ‘spiritual by-pass’ (see Welwood and Kornfield), and many experienced meditators have discovered the emotional price for this by-pass-myself included! As the British psychologist Robyn Skynner notes, “the more powerful a technique is, the more dangerous it can be in preventing real change…”

If we turn our attention to some of the energy therapies and try to see what exactly is going on, we find ourselves in a very dark wood indeed. If we look for example at EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), an acupressure-based ‘tapping’ practice to provide relief of both physical and emotional distress, each individual practitioner’s procedures and recommendations can be quite different from the original standard. And EFT itself is a distant departure from its roots in TFT, Thought Field Therapy. However, each practitioner of widely varied techniques and procedures claims great success in relieving distressing symptoms. Sometimes these claims are couched in terms of meridians, energy fields, electromagnetic fields, chakras and auras.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”~Yalom

It is not that I don’t believe in energy fields and so on, because I most certainly do. But I also believe that what actually takes place when a positive emotional shift or catharsis occurs with a client has less to do with the exact points on a meridian, or how the eyes are fixed or moving, and more to do with matters simple and fundamental in the field of consciousness itself. If we look at the wide spectrum of energy healing practices we must admit that there are many inconsistencies and contradictions. One school of thought or practice claims that acupressure points a, b, and c must be tapped in precisely this sequence for precisely x number of rounds for y to occur. Another school of thought or technique claims y-success using much different procedures. So how can similar or identical results arise from such different, and sometimes contradictory, procedures and practices?

Most of these techniques require the client to first of all bring the problem and the emotional affect of the problem into consciousness in a focused manner, experiencing it directly as a felt sense. The client then rates their SUD level (subjective unit of distress) between 1 and 10, trying to experience, in the present, the maximum discomfort that they can without getting overwhelmingly flooded. While holding both the mental image of the problem and the bodily sensations of the affect, the client then actively engages in whatever the particular practice calls for: tapping (EFT & TFT), rapid eye movement (EMDR), controlled breath work and so on. As the procedure unfolds, the client usually experiences different degrees of relief. If relief is not forthcoming, the procedures are adjusted in some way until the reported SUD is zero or close to it. (This final state of release is one in which the client is deeply relaxed and freed, even if only temporarily, of the distressing negative charge of the emotions. This state of relaxed, focused attention has some of the elements of hypnotic trance and meditative states.)

“Something is doing we know not what.” ~ Schroedinger’s law of quantum physics

In the field of consciousness, a number of things are occurring that can facilitate growth, insight and healing. The client enters a non-ordinary state of consciousness simply through the act of focusing on the felt sense of the problem. (See Gendlin) To some extent they are taken out of their intellectual rumination over the problem and right into the somatic affect. The client is actively engaged in their own healing process, which in itself can be very empowering. They are brought into the present where there is the opportunity to see that much of our suffering results from our own thinking about past or future. The client learns that they have some control over entering into the uncomfortable feelings and clearing or containerizing and bracketing these feelings. They begin to learn some practices that can help to reduce and control hyper-arousal.

Are there not changes to energy fields, brain waves and the nervous system taking place then? Of course there probably are, but I don’t feel that is of primary importance here. Could it be that the changes in energy flow have as much to do with ‘coming to presence’ and focusing on the felt sense, as it does on the particulars of each technique? Could it be that whatever energetic and physiological changes take place are the result of the shift in consciousness and not the other way around? I don’t know how one would or could measure such things, or whether it is even advisable to try to quantify that which is essentially qualitative (objective conclusions about subjective experience are sticky and approximate, at best); I am simply putting this out there as a possibility.

Over the past few decades we have seen countless therapists and counsellors trained in one particular practice, branch off and come up with their own trademarked version of that practice. This has happened with hypnotherapy, NLP, EMDR, TFT, Voice Dialogue, CBT, Gestalt, Bioenergetics etc. etc.; we have even seen the terms ‘mindfulness’ and ‘meditation’ conjoined and hyphenated, followed by a registered trade mark!
“To be restored, our sickness must grow worse…” T.S. Elliot

So here we have some potentially powerful aids for mental stability and emotional healing, but we should be erecting a number of Caution signs along the way. Let’s not take ourselves so seriously that we become dogmatic and entrenched, believing that our practice, our therapy, our methods, our techniques are the One and Only way. Let’s not discount the value of a wide variety of approaches for a wide variety of persons. These powerful tools can also retraumatize clients if the therapist is lacking in skill, empathy, training and grounding. We cannot underestimate the importance of the therapist’s own quality of presence and intention, and their ability to respond appropriately to the unpredictable surges of strong emotion. Guiding a client to the verge of panic and then not being able to re-ground them is a blatant violation of first do no harm.

Whatever our practice is, I think we do the public and ourselves a grave disservice by making claims of quick ‘cures’. Regrettably, we do hear such things quite often, especially from the energy-healing community: “One twenty minute round of EFT cured my client of acute grief!” I actually saw this claim recently and was appalled for a number of reasons. Since much of my work is around death, dying and bereavement I must point out first of all that grief is not a disease to be cured. Secondly, if indeed all of the painful emotion around this client’s loss was dispelled in one sitting (which I don’t for a minute believe) the client received harm rather than growth and healing, and will likely suffer a serious delayed grief reaction at some point in the future.

Whatever our philosophical bent, making these sorts of outrageous claims can expose all of us who work in the field of emotional and mental health to ridicule. It also brings back Skynner’s warning about powerful techniques. I have had the experience of teaching clients certain techniques to relieve some of their discomfort only to have them quit therapy and then use those very tools as a way of avoiding dealing with deeper issues-parallel to the way meditation can be used to try to ignore or trivialize psychological material. Sometimes, finding symptom relief is good enough for people; going to the root of the problem that brings us to counselling or therapy in the first place is a much scarier journey.

Perhaps it’s our culture of consumerism that makes us prone to looking for instant gratification. But, if we allow ourselves to be co-opted into a no-muss, no-fuss, quick-fix world view, do we not run the risk of nourishing some of the very roots of anxiety, depression and alienation instead of holding out hope for continuous positive growth? Do we not then indirectly become supporters of the modern malaise itself? If our sole concern becomes quick symptom relief, haven’t we simply created a new kind of medical model wherein we overlook the wholeness and integrity of The Person? If we truly believed in a narrow medical model for mental health we would be pharmacists, not counsellors and therapists.

We can be on the cutting edge without moving into the Twilight Zone. Receptive open-mindedness can be tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism. We live in a world where Newtonian physics still applies and gravity still works and matter is still solid (apparently). But we must recognize that simultaneously we live in a world of quantum and chaos theory, of formless energy, and incomprehensible complexity. There is lots of room for the unfolding of many different therapeutic approaches, all of them being valid and valuable in certain circumstances, assuming that no harm is being done. Considering that the species has survived for millennia without the benefit of therapy per se, maybe we could humbly admit that our profession is still in its infancy and no one has registered ‘the final word’ on any subject. Given the incredible rate of change, which in itself seems to be growing exponentially, we may be called upon to paradigm shift on a dime.

As Nietzsche put it, “it is not the courage of our convictions that matters but the courage to change our convictions.”

 Copyright by Brad Hunter 2007