On their first visit, Dawson Church and David Feinstein went, with a Second Lieutenant, to attempt to get Congress to set up hearings to plead the case that Energy Psychology is superior to conventional treatments for soldiers and veterans suffering with PTSD. Here is what Dr. Feinstein writes after finally getting in front of Congresswomen Lynn Woolsey.
Our presentation was brief but effective, centering around the Second Lieutenant telling of his story. While serving as a guard and medic in Iraq, he was able to psychologically mobilize himself to perform his duties like a model soldier. He had enlisted in the Army and was deployed to the “Triangle of Death” in Baghdad, where he served in 2006 and 2007. He attended to mass casualties and encountered many bloodied, burned, and dead bodies. The first casualty he witnessed was a member of his unit who had half his head blown off. It was a time when fellow soldiers were being kidnapped and beheaded. At night, lying in his tent, in an area being heavily bombed, he explained what goes on in the mind: “When the sound of a whizzing rocket fills the air, if you hear an explosion three seconds later, you are alive. If you don’t, you are dead.”
Upon returning to the U.S., safety did not provide comfort. In a classroom or other public setting, he would be calculating his response should there be an attack. Sirens were now the screams of approaching rockets. An ebullient personality before the war, his inner life had become dry and restricted. He no longer found himself laughing. He realized in retrospect that he had become dissociated from his body. He gradually came to accept that his undiagnosed PTSD was his new way of life. Having become an officer, and in training now to become a physician, he knew that reporting a psychological difficulty of this magnitude could have a devastating impact on his career.
About a year after returning from Iraq, a friend commented on how he had changed. She offered to try a technique that she thought might be helpful. This led to a three-hour session of EFT (a form of Energy Psychology) where he made a list of every trauma he experienced during the war. Giving a 0-to-10 “subjective units of distress” rating to the first item on his list, he reported that it was a 0. He felt no distress in his (dissociated) body. His friend had him tap on the memory anyway. Within minutes he was sobbing, feeling the full impact of the memory, as high a 10 as could be imagined. For three hours they went through and, by tapping on acupuncture points, emotionally neutralized every memory on his list. He described how one of the first things he noticed as the session progressed was a return of sensation in his hands. He said it was like he was back in his body. By the end of that single session (followed by a brief follow-up session the next day), he was cured of all his symptoms of PTSD. Now nearly two years later, although his friend would be happy to provide follow-up at any point, he has been his joyful self again, no longer hypervigilant, and in no need of further help.
Dawson followed with a brief description of the research he has conducted demonstrating that the poignant story just told was not an isolated incident but rather an example of a reliable and unusually effective treatment for PTSD. He described the Iraq Vets Stress Project, which has offered free Energy Psychology treatment to hundreds of veterans through an international network of more than 100 providers, with many VA therapists referring veterans for treatment.
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