Why Energy Work is so Effective in Psychotherapy

I have been a therapist for over 35 years and have been doing energetic healing as part of my practice for just as long. I started learning it back in the 1980’s when the only available modality was Therapeutic Touch, and it was mostly practiced by nurses. 

I was living in Massachusetts at the time and happened to find probably the only person in New England who was offering a different form of energy work. I think it was called Rohun. And she, a nurse, had traveled to North Carolina to train with the woman who had created it. I worked with her as a client for several years.

 I also ended up in a therapy group that was led by a psychic who was also an addictions counselor and psychotherapist. That group was wild - we met every week and would do everything from learning how to enhance our psychic ability to doing down and dirty Gestalt and Psychosynthesis work.

 I did therapy work with both these women, plus a traditional psychotherapist, while I was going through flashbacks, reliving early life trauma from sexual abuse, and while I was going through a divorce. I was in my late 20’s.

I did learn Therapeutic Touch, but I also started opening up psychically and took to these trainings like a duck to water. It was a language I understood innately.

I also started to see that I was moving through my own therapeutic process much quicker doing the energy work. It was astounding how much trauma I was clearing in a shorter time frame by combining all those modalities.

In time I started practicing energy healing on friends, and eventually met an MD homeopath who heard what I was doing. We got to be friends and she started referring some of her patients to me. And that was the start of my life work, and my practice.

In time I came to create my own version of energetic healing which included using the energy body as a diagnostic tool for where and how psychological issues were held.

Right about then Barbara Brennan came out with her Hands of Light book, and then opened her school. Her method was pretty much what I had been doing on my own - both of us having had the practices “downloaded” to us as we were working. Her ability to refine what energy work could be, and then bring it out to the world, was pretty much when energy healing became more widely accepted and practiced.

The energy work I’m describing is different than Reiki, or any modalities similar to it. While they can enhance psycho-emotional healing in their own way, they are not usually integrated into the therapeutic process within a therapy session.

The energy work I do, for example, is used as a diagnostic tool to get to what is often not easy to describe, or even not consciously apparent to the client. It completely bypasses the mental body so there’s no chance of the therapist getting blocked because the client is in avoidance.

It must be mentioned here that I never move into a persons energy body without their permission. And if they truly are not ready to address something I won’t be able to access it. In that way I trust the inner wisdom of the client to only offer to me what they are truly ready to know and work with.

Energy work completely opens up the possibilities for enhancing a client’s process by allowing a deeper view of what’s at the core of whatever issue they’re working on. It also provides more tools for clearing and healing dysfunctional patterns, belief systems, trauma, self esteem issues, and more.

A session with me also includes healing work after the cognitive work. All thoughts, emotions, and memories are energy. That is their origin - you can’t touch them but you can feel them. They can get stored in the body and create disease and dysfunction, but they’re still energy originally. So it makes sense that energy healing would be a powerful antidote to suffering.

All those things - patterns, belief systems, trauma - have an energetic signature and each person creates their own version of that signature. If you can read the energy body you can see how each individual has dealt with their life and how it’s affected them. When they’ve created energy systems that are blocking their own well being you can see clearly how to help them release and heal, according to their specific way of creating those blocks.

The healing work is about providing the alternative energetic structures and signatures that will fill in, or clear, or move, in ways that bring them back into whole and balanced states of being.

I have found that this process can help client’s progress more quickly through their healing journey. That’s not to say that it can’t still be a few years of work with someone when you’re addressing deeply embedded patterns and belief systems. That’s especially if they haven’t had previous experiences in therapy. But energy healing can go deep, right to the core of the wounds, and offer truly magnificent love and support right where it’s most needed, but rarely reached.

This work is not always appropriate as a therapeutic tool. I wouldn’t work with obvious personality disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar, or even borderline personality disorder. I’d also be careful in working with someone with more extreme attachment styles, or in late stage addictions where they are not in recovery. Going deep in the ways I’ve described can trigger or disregulate them more easily, which isn’t going to have a good outcome.

It’s also not always effective with clients that aren’t really ready for deep and comprehensive change. I’ve done the most exquisite healing sessions on certain clients and it seems to just bounce off them - they don’t feel the changes offered to them. These clients typically don’t really do the work or show up in the sessions fully present either.

But when this work is offered to someone so ready, so ripe, so open to transformation, it is beautiful and fulfilling to witness their healing journey. And such an honor to facilitate and bring through the light, universal love, and multidimensional support that they deserve. 

So for this, and for many other reasons, if you can find someone who works in the ways I’ve described, I fully recommend energetic healing work as part of the therapy process.