The impetus for this Innovations in Healing Trauma handbook was born with my first Energetic Therapy client many years ago when the mistakes that I made, especially in her first session, caused me to realize that my training in the medical model of psychotherapy which prevailed at that time, was deeply flawed. These mistakes literally set me on a new and unexpected trauma healing therapy course right from the beginning of my career as an energetic therapist. This insight into what was wrong with the medical model of psychotherapy eventually led me to forge a new Client-centered Energetic Therapy approach using the Spontaneous Movement Protocol to help clients self-direct their trauma healing therapy. Because movement is connected to every part of the human brain, it allowed clients to tap into buried and hidden childhood and adult trauma memories, feelings, and emotions and follow the innate wisdom of their body-mind to heal themselves.
My first client taught me some very critical lessons about how to help her heal. After competing my certification training at the Michigan Society for Bioenergetics, she came to me complaining about her abusive husband. During my intake interview with her, it was clear to me that she was unable to stand up to her husband of several years and his controlling behavior toward her. In my first Energetic Therapy session with her, I told her this and explained that I wanted to help her learn to stand her ground with him. After doing some Energetic Grounding with her, I handed her a tennis racket, put a pillow in a chair, and told her to hit the pillow with the racket. She handed the tennis racket back to me and said that she did not know how to do what I asked. I replied that I would show her how to hit the pillow with the the racket. I then asked her to stand behind me while I stood in front of the chair, raised the tennis racket over my head, and slammed it down on the pillow making a loud cracking noise. A second after hitting the pillow, I turned to see her sprawled, unconscious on the floor.
Needless to say, I was very surprised by her passing out as I hit the pillow with the racket. She regained consciousness very quickly but I spent the rest of the session trying to get her energetically grounded so that she could leave the session in a present state that would not put her at risk while driving back home in her car. However, none of my standard Energetic Grounding Protocols that I had learned in my Energetic training worked with her. I was finally able to get her energetically grounded by having her lay on her back, raise her legs up at a 90 degree angle to her torso, and push the heels of her feet toward the ceiling. Given her childhood history of sexual abuse, which I only learned about much later as did she, having her lay on her back on the floor in such a vulnerable position should not in theory have gotten her energetically grounded but it did, which taught me not to make assumptions about what will and will not work to help trauma victims heal.
After she left my office, I reviewed the session and had to admit that I had no idea why she had passed out. Subsequently, I learned that she had been sexually abused by her grandfather as a young girl. In fact, she only became aware of this during a flash back much later in her trauma recovery. As I looked back on the incident I could only surmise that the shock of the tennis racket’s loud cracking noise as it hit the pillow had overwhelmed her fragile energetic system causing her to faint much like the shock of her grandfather sexually molesting her as a child had overwhelmed her and caused her to repress that memory and trauma. Why do I tell this story?
I tell this story because I failed to allow my first client in her first session with me to be in charge of her own trauma healing therapy. Rather, as a new psychotherapist trained in the medical model of the very popular body therapy at the time, Bioenergetics, I thought that I knew best how to diagnose and prescribe an intervention to help her stand up to her husband; the intervention was to hit a pillow with a tennis racket to mobilize her aggression. Instead, my intervention backfired and sent her into a freeze-faint response. It nearly cost me dearly; I could have lost this woman as a client, but more importantly for me, it could have cost me the loss of my confidence as a beginning therapist.
Fortunately, I immediately gave up my medical model training and replaced my Bio energetic trainers’ diagnostic-prescriptive methods with simply listening to my clients and assisting them to move forward with their therapy in the direction that they wanted and chose to go in. With this new client-centered approach I was able to redeem myself with her. From then on, she and I became a team, with her in charge of directing her therapy and me assisting by suggesting therapeutic intervention and guiding her trauma healing work. This did not mean that I was passively involved in her therapy; I was, in fact, very active in this new approach, however, I kept at the forefront that my job was to consult her and get agreement on the direction of her therapy. In doing so, I was able over the next couple of years, to help her successfully meet her trauma healing goals. In fact, our trauma healing work together was so successful that she still calls me once or twice a year, and has done so over the past 25 plus years, to check in and tell me how much I helped save her life. I have to remind her that it was a team effort and that she did the real heroic trauma healing work, but it is gratifying to know that my enormous mistake in that first session did not end her therapy right there and then.
