EFT Tapping Success Stories with Veterans

EFT Tapping Success Stories with Veterans: Constance Louie-Handelman, Ph.D, a former captain in the US Army Reserve shares how after just one round of EFT tapping, soldiers were noticeably changed.

photo by Lance Cpl. Jason T. Guiliano

By Constance Louie-Handelman, Ph.D CPT, USAR, MS

I began investigating Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) when a friend told me about “tapping.”

Although I have a Ph.D. degree in clinical psychology, I was continually searching for other effective techniques that could help clients. I studied EMDR, Neuro-linguistic Programming and hypnotherapy.

However, after studying and practicing EFT, I found it worked quickly in eliminating fears, limiting beliefs, pain, and releasing traumatic events. Every opportunity I had, I used EFT with family, friends, and clients and achieved excellent long lasting results. I was so confident in EFT that I felt I had something to offer when I read about the high rate of suicide among U.S. soldiers.

I was commissioned as a captain in the US Army Reserve on March 2010, and was deployed to Afghanistan from July 2011 to May 2012. As a psychologist, I was in charge of a forward operating base in Kandahar Province and officially saw 199 individual soldiers (574 sessions).

Once I established rapport, understood their problems and needs, I used EFT primarily for anger, sleep, depression, and stress.

After just one round of tapping, soldiers were noticeably more relieved and calmer. Soon thereafter, soldiers added more details about their problems, or expressed issues that they had kept to themselves for years. Feeling the positive profound result, it was then easy to encourage soldiers to learn how to tap, something they could do themselves in a matter of minutes, in order to release past, current, anticipated problems or “pre-emptive tapping,” as one soldier called it.

The ease to learn and to apply the tapping was an important element of EFT since I often saw a solider just for one session.

I realized the success of EFT when soldiers were able to return to full duty, wanting to learn more about EFT, or having referred other soldiers into my office. Since returning home, I am disheartened to learn that EFT is not an accepted technique in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Fortunately, there is the Veterans Stress Project (www.stressproject.org) that offers free EFT sessions for returning vets

I can only hope that the VA’s powers-to-be will soon realize the effectiveness of EFT in order to help thousands of suffering vets, thus making a dramatic dent in the suicide rate. 

Parents-soldiers will need your help!

Time Magazine reports-

"For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines."

This is what one combat sergent discovered after some heavy missions...

"LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."

... any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the "dwell time" at home before they go back to war — it's possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. "

These kids coming back will have several issues to deal with. May of them simply won't be able to coop on their own. Much less to try and get their lives back to normal. Adding drugs to the mix may effectively hide symptoms, but don't be fooled. They will need extra time, care, attention and love to aid healing. (At a time when they may accept it from you least.)

Take care of yourself first, so that you can be your best, calmest, most loving self, in order to start to help them find a way out of the downward spiral they may find themselves in. To help both you and them-look into complementary health alternatives as a way to assist the mental and physical healing. Reiki, aromatherapy, cranial sacral, reflexology, EMDR, Quantum Touch, the list goes on and on. And though the healing stories may be largely antidoctal-the vast quantity of them is to large to ignore!

Our favorite is EFT www.emofree.com. It's inexpensive, it can be done over the telephone, can be done in groups or alone, with or without the help of a professional, (although at first we recommend finding an expert practitioner) and has no side effects. Once you learn how, the whole family can use it.

Illustration by Lon Tweeten and D.W. Pine for TIME

The government is spending 4$ million to look at alternative healing for Vets.

Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy'

By Noah Shachtman

The military is scrambling for new ways to treat the brain injuries and post-traumatic stress of troops returning home from war. And every kind of therapy -- no matter how far outside the accepted medical form -- is being considered. The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from "spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga" to "bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing" to mend the psyches of wounded troops.

As many as 17 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, one congressional study estimates. Nearly 3,300 troops have suffered traumatic brain injury, or TBI, according to statistics assembled last summer. And the lifetime costs of treating these ailments could pile up to as much as $35 billion, a Columbia University report guesses.

Small wonder, then, that the government is looking for alternate means to treat these injuries. The Defense Department "is dedicated to supporting evidence-based approaches to medical treatment and wants to support the use of alternative therapies if they are proven efficacious," notes a recently-issued request for proposals.

"Music, animal-facilitated therapy, art, dance/movement, massage therapy, EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] program evaluation, virtual reality, acupuncture, spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga," might all be considered worth of the military's largess. So would "biologically-based treatments, botanicals, and nutritional supplements for enhancing cognitive function and mood in patients with trauma spectrum disorders, including TBI and/or PTSD, depression, anxiety, and/or substance dependence/abuse." Even proposals for wild-sounding "therapies using bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, distant healing and acupuncture" would be accepted.