"Dynamic Energetic Healing® is a new psychotherapy model that fits under the umbrella of energy psychology. Mary Hammond-Newman and I, the co-founders of Dynamic Energetic Healing®, drew on over forty years of combined clinical ex p e rience to develop the initial conception of this new approach. These methods included Thought Field Therapy, emotional freedom techniques, and healing from the body level up, among others. Mary and I created a series of unique protocols and a comprehensive training program for those interested in applying these methods. After further developing and expanding on some of these ideas in my own clinical practice, I have decided to share my findings and experiences by writing this book."

......................

"Because traumatic experience is so overwhelming, psychological integration of the self is very difficult for PTSD victims. A great deal has been written about dissociation as a response to trauma, which was first described by Pierre Janet in 1889. In fact, if there has not been a brain injury, then it is predictable that the dissociation is a response to a trauma.

What exactly is dissociation? When specific memories and feeling states associated with a traumatic event are split off from your core personality (i.e., your normal self), they return as various symptoms that seem bizarre and out of your control. Most often, these symptoms become intrusive, persistent and uninvited. They may include panic attacks (overwhelming anxiety for no apparent reason), which are experienced physically; visual images, which may include flashbacks and nightmares; experiences of depersonalization (perceiving that you are outside your physical body watching yourself go through your day in a robot-like fashion); and an inability to stop thinking about something obsessively. Repeating or reenacting any part of the traumatic event is also an aspect that can become out of your control and therefore intrusive. One of the most perplexing aspects of the dissociation experience is that the parts of you that split off carry the memories with them. This means that the memories and feelings connected with the trauma are frequently forgotten because they can no longer be accessed — they are hidden from conscious awareness, protected by the dissociated parts that harbor them. When people start reenacting aspects of the trauma that are out of their conscious awareness, their relationships suffer terribly because of interpersonal communication patterns that don’t make sense. Indeed, the victims of trauma end up feeling tremendous shame for continually acting out behaviors that run counter to their goal of having a mutually respectful, cooperative, loving relationship. This is because traumatized individuals often experience the same emotional intensity of the original trauma but without a proper historical context or understanding of why the emotional eruption occurs. Thus, PTSD victims tend to react to a stimulus in much the same way as they originally did; that is, with a fight or flight response completely out of proportion to the current event.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is aptly named as a syndrome that includes a variety of responses to trauma that occur after the fact. It is the human organism’s adaptive response to an overwhelming traumatic life event that, at the time, is generated to support survival. It is because we have no control over the particular constellation of responses to a traumatic event that PTSD has become so confounding."