Someone designing a graduate program in Somatic Psychology, emphasizing hands-on trauma touch therapy, asks BR to suggest interventions that combine imagery with mind-body energy/touch work, to be included in the curriculum.. Dear BR,
I am currently designing a graduate program in Somatic Psychology emphasizing hands on Trauma Touch Therapy. I attended your workshop in Missoula last year and am fascinated with the use of "imagery" [multisensory] as opposed to just "visualization". I am a certified TTT and would like to delve more into body/mind touch work using imagery. Could you please give me any resources you might know of that deal with hands on "touch" therapy and imagery. Thank you and blessings to you BR. Jan



Dear Jan,
As you probably already know, there are scores of acupoint tapping techniques that constitute a kind of body/mind touch work that use imagery at its core. Emotional Freedom Technique, Thought Field Therapy and Tapas Acupressure Technique are some of the better known iterations of this sort of energy tapping approach.

You can find excellent explanations and opportunities for training in these methods at the ACEP website and at Gary Craig’s EFT pages, which generously highlight, not just his technique, but those of many of his fellow practitioners at www.emofree.com. In addition there is an excellent website for TFT posted by the BDB Group at http://www.tftworldwide.com/meetbdb.html, and Tapas Fleming’s page is at http://www.tat-intl.com .

There is also Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing technique, which is entirely body-based and loaded with kinesthetic imagery, although a purist would probably not be willing to call it energy work per se. That website can be found at http://www.traumahealing.com/ and a spinoff site that applies this technique to motor vehicle accidents is at http://www.traumasolutions.com/about.shtml .

However, I suspect you are asking about something more aligned with traditional, hands-on energy healing, and I am aware of one technique - Trauma Pattern Release - which fills that bill and which I can recommend it enthusiastically. Jim Kepner PhD and Carol DeSanto MSW have designed a protocol that is a very sophisticated synthesis of several methods: the Energy Healing methods of the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere; the tenets of Gestalt therapy; Robert Scaer’s understanding of the nervous system’s response to trauma; and the sequencing of behavioral techniques used by EMDR, EFT and Somatic Experiencing. It is gentle yet effective and I was so impressed with it, I included it in my book, Invisible Heroes, along with several other of these approaches. Fortunately they have regular training programs, and you can learn more about it at www.pathwaysforhealing.com .

I hope this helps. Good luck to you with this effort.
All best,