Noreen, at the time a 39-year-old single woman living in upstate New York, was on a business trip working in an office building two blocks from the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. She and her co-workers fled from their building and, like thousands of New Yorkers, began to run from the scene when the second plane struck. Noreen witnessed people jumping out of the buildings, experienced the fear and sounds in the streets, and felt the absolute terror of not knowing if the entire country was under attack.

After returning home in upstate New York, she tried to resume her work. However, the horrible images from 9-11 were regularly intruding into her awareness. She was also having nightmares and panic reactions to loud sounds. She reported having "faceless dreams" and waking in terror. One of her co-workers, whom I had treated using Thought Field Therapy, referred her to me.

My first visit with Noreen was three days after the attack (September 14). I did an initial intake and, based on that assessment, felt that Noreen was an appropriate candidate for TFT. We videotaped her sessions. The video vividly shows her tension as she begins to access the images, body sensations, and other aspects of the trapped trauma. As the TFT treatment is applied, you can visibly see her body calm. She relates how the images are losing their vividness and their power over her. She leaves the office reporting that she feels as if September 11 is over.

The following April, I received another call from Noreen. She told me that although she had been faring much better following our session, she was still having trouble with planes flying overhead and with the sound of fire engines. Our second meeting, April 8, 2002, was also videotaped. In this session, she addresses the terror of believing the country was under attack, and her fear of planes appears to be completely eliminated during the session, which also focuses on her survivor guilt as she begins to explore in new ways the personal meaning of having been so closely involved in the devastation.

Noreen’s final session with me was on June 25, 2002. We scheduled this session as a follow-up for the purpose of videotaping her report of the complete elimination of all the sequela of the trauma, including nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety about planes and other noises, anxiety in crowds, anger, and survivor guilt. She expresses her gratitude for the technique and, in giving permission for the videotape to be produced and distributed, says she wants to "share it with all the world."

When she learned shortly thereafter that the international trauma expert, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., was speaking in Albany, she asked if she could share her experience, and she was ultimately invited to address the entire audience. She described her PTSD and its treatment to several hundred professionals, answered questions, and strongly advocated for increased public awareness that people suffering from PTSD and other effects of trauma can be treated and healed.

A small village in Kosovo was well-known for having been the site of the one of the worst atrocities during the entire war. But a small miracle was also embedded in the story. The Serbs came in, rounded up all the men, and herded them into three buildings that were built for having meetings. One building at a time, they shot the men down, and then burned the bodies. Remarkably, in each of the three meeting halls, one man survived. In each case, the survivor had been in the center of the group so was not shot, and then wound up at the bottom of the pile of bodies, and was somehow spared from the flames.

In June of 2000, about a year after this nightmare, one of the doctors I was working with took me to see if I could provide some relief to the survivors. While this was not the doctor’s village, after various inquiries, we found our way to the home of one of the men. When he saw us coming, he literally ran into the corn field behind his house. The doctor yelled after him and was able to assure him that everything was going to be fine. It turned out that another therapy team had come in some time earlier and reactivated his traumas, and he had astutely sensed that we were also coming to offer help.

He finally agreed to talk with us. We sat in his backyard and shared tea and fruit while he told the long story and even went into his house to bring out photos and news clippings. I don’t usually listen to long renditions of a person’s story. They are often painful for the person to tell, and they aren’t necessary for the treatment to proceed. But he seemed to need to tell his story before he was going to say "yes" to the treatment.

As the treatment finally began, we identified seven aspects of his experience to focus upon: 1) being herded into the building, 2) being mowed down by guns, 3) the burning of the bodies as he lay trapped beneath them, 4) the death of a family member, 5) the death of neighbors and friends, 6) the death of a house guest who happened to have the bad fortune of visiting him at the time, and 7) his feelings about having survived when no one else did.

He did not take particularly well to the 0-10 SUD (Subjective Units of Distress) Scale. For him, either there was distress, or "It is good." Each of the seven issues started with distress, and after several rounds of tapping and related procedures, got to the point where he would report "It is good." For each area of focus that involved the loss of a loved one, a multi-tiered procedure was used (see "When a Loved One Has Been Lost"). After the seventh issue, the man stated that he was healed. At this point, the man requested that I teach him the methods I had used with him.

He took us out of the house, got into the car, and navigated us to another of the three survivors. He explained the treatment to him, and we returned that evening to work with the second survivor, again with apparent success. The third survivor could not be located.

Sixteen months later, Kosovo’s chief medical officer brought me to the village to interview both men, probably because the case had achieved international notoriety. Both men indicated that there had been no relapse, along with their willingness for their improvement to be shared with others who are in a position to help survivors. Eight months later—in June 2002, two years following the treatments–my colleague Paul Oas, Ph.D., and I visited the men and learned that the treatments for both were still holding strong.

When I first heard about Thought Field Therapy, I knew I wanted to learn it for my work in Africa, where I teach seminars sponsored by the Carmelite Community in Nairobi. I thought the people there would benefit from learning a simple way to eliminate trauma, physical pain, anxiety, addictions, phobias, and the many other symptoms that Thought Field Therapy successfully addresses. A year later, August of 1998, I was in Nairobi conducting a two-week seminar with priests, nuns, brothers, counselors, social workers, and educators. Along with the requested curriculum, I had decided to include a small section on Thought Field Therapy.

The bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi occurred on a Friday, while we were in the seminar, about a half hour from downtown Nairobi. I had just begun teaching TFT prior to the point that we became aware of the extent of the destruction. By Monday, the students were questioning whether TFT was powerful enough to help people with traumas as severe as those caused by the bombing. I had pre-arranged to go with the Sisters on their hospital rounds after the training that day. As we went through police roadblocks and arrived at the hospital, going directly to the wards, doubts began to surface. I knew that TFT worked – but these people had been in a bombing! I followed the Sisters from ward to ward, wondering whether TFT could help with such devastation. People’s faces were filled with stitches, often with their eyes bandaged. It was unthinkable to ask them to tap on the various face and eye points (I have since learned that equivalent points on the feet can be used when necessary).

We finally came to a woman who had mostly lower body injuries. She was lying on her bed staring into space, clearly in a great deal of pain. Her shoes had been blown off by the bombing, and among other injuries, she had a lot of glass in her feet. Though she was on pain medication, the doctors had not been around to see her yet, and she rated her pain at a "10." Since her injuries were less severe than others, I offered to "Try something that might help." "I’ll do anything," she said. "I’m in so much pain. I keep thinking a bomb will explode any minute in the hospital. I know it’s probably not going to happen, but I can’t get it out of my mind!"

I worked on the pain first, using the TFT pain algorithm, and her pain came down from a "10" to a "5." But then it wouldn’t budge. It occurred to me we needed to tap for the trauma in order for the pain to go any lower. She rated the trauma as a "10," and using the TFT complex trauma algorithm, it came down to a "0" immediately. After that, we tapped again for the pain, and it went down to a "0." She looked at me a little bewildered: "I’ve played the pictures of the bombing over and over in my mind, almost without stopping, since Friday. It’s really strange. Now I’m not doing that any more. I think that I’ll be able to sleep tonight."

The Sister then came over asking me to assist another woman who had watched the first treatment and "wanted to be healed, too." She was bandaged and her hand was hanging limp and too painful to move. She was a "10" on both trauma and pain. I decided to work on the trauma first this time, and it came down fairly quickly to a "0." Then we worked on the pain, which was already down to an "8" from clearing the trauma. Soon her pain too was down to a "0." She began moving her hand around and the color came back to her face. Then she was smiling and laughing. Her husband, who had been watching everything, asked the Sister if TFT might help his neck pain. She said, "Of course!" By now the first woman was sitting up for the first time since the bombing, eating dinner, and also smiling and laughing with her husband. Later on, her husband reported to the Sister that since the bombing, his wife had panicked whenever he had to leave, for fear of another bombing. On this evening, however, she was fine when he left.

Back in the seminar, I started doing demonstrations with traumas my students were experiencing related to the bombing. They were amazed by the results and began sending me friends and family, including some extremely difficult cases. I then received an invitation to introduce TFT to therapists at a local counseling center. Though I had for a year felt called to share TFT in my seminar in Nairobi, I had no idea how timely it would be, or how effective.

Jenny Edwards, Ph.D., is a Board Member of the Association for Thought Field Therapy Foundation. She has taught TFT in ten countries, including Canada, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. She is a certified NLP Master Practitioner and a Clinical Hypnotherapist. She may be contacted at jedwards@fielding.edu.

Civil bodies charged with disaster relief are increasingly developing more sophisticated psychological impact response capacities. Jim McAninch is the Industrial Coordinator for Pittsburgh's Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) team. While most CISM programs are explicitly not meant to provide psychotherapy or to substitute for psychotherapy, their stated goals nonetheless often include therapeutic components. The Pittsburg team’s goals, for instance, are:

The calls McAninch receives generally involve fatal disasters in the workplace.  McAninch, who is a member of the TFT Trauma Relief Team, has found TFT to be a powerful tool in working with individuals suffering in the aftermath of sudden trauma.

The head of Pittsburgh’s CISM Team was at first highly skeptical about having McAninch utilize TFT as part of the CISM disaster response.  However, enough instances have now been logged in which TFT clearly brought about rapid and striking results in facilitating the emotional recovery of survivors of events involving fatalities that McAninch has been asked to provide TFT training to the entire Pittsburg CISM Team.  Three of McAninch’s documented cases follow.

Industrial Crisis Response Case # 1

McAninch was called to a site where an employee of a small company had been electrocuted. A worker had instructed his co-worker to push a panel button, and the co-worker was electrocuted on the spot. The survivor and six others watching had to deal with the horrible scene and their unsuccessful attempts to save the man’s life. They were all traumatized by the horrific death. The intense odor of burning flesh remained vivid in each of their memories. For two of the witnesses, the death also caused past traumas to resurface. One recalled the gruesome car crash fatalities he’d witnessed as a tow truck operator for twenty years. The worker who had instructed that the button be pushed had years earlier found his wife dead in a snow bank. In the current disaster, after the electricity was no longer passing through his co-worker’s body, he had unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate the burned man, adding to his trauma and guilt. And, as a morbid reminder, he couldn’t get rid of the smell or taste of the vomit that had come into his mouth during the resuscitation effort. McAninch treated him first as the group watched. Using a TFT complex trauma algorithm, he assisted the man with his anger and guilt until the distress levels were down to "0." McAninch then had the others get into pairs and copy the treatment on themselves and on each other, until all the trauma-related emotions were all down to "0." A week later, when he returned to do follow-up, each of the survivors was able to recall and talk about the tragedy without experiencing retraumatization.

Industrial Crisis Response Case #2

A man had fallen to his death at a construction site. The entire construction team had been through an interview and defusing process, but the foremen was concerned about the well-being of one of the workers. He called McAninch to the jobsite. The worker had directly witnessed the event and couldn’t sleep. He rated his anxiety level as a "10." It was soon revealed that the man had had a near-fatal fall himself a number of years earlier, and the trauma of that experience was reactivated while watching his co-worker fall to his death. Witnessing the event had left him with visible and ongoing anxiety and agitation. Using the TFT Complex Trauma Algorithm, McAninch was able to take the trauma and the anxiety down to a "0" in a matter of minutes. The resulting relief on the man’s face was immediate and apparent to everyone.

Industrial Crisis Response Case #3

McAninch arrived at the site within a few hours of a train conductor being crushed to death between two railcars. Both the locomotive engineer (the train operator) and the yard master had witnessed the disaster and seen the results. McAninch was able to begin applying the TFT trauma relief techniques on the spot. Within a short time, he had treated the two witnesses and the fiancé of the deceased conductor. He offered sessions as needed over the next several weeks, preparing the engineer to return to his job by taking him around the yard and treating him at various trigger locations, including the spot where he had witnessed the violent death of his long time co-worker and friend. Interestingly, though the engineer was soon trauma-free and guilt-free regarding the accident, it wasn’t until McAninch treated him for the earlier traumatic death of his mother that, as the plant manager remarked, he was again "Carrying himself with a spring in his step, looking up, and ahead."

McAninch notes how in cases of accidental death and injury such as these, unresolved traumas from a survivor’s past are often activated. Treating these helps the present traumatic incident to be more easily and rapidly resolved. McAninch is currently working with the largest industrial union in North America in exploring the possibility of introducing TFT trauma techniques throughout the union.

Jim McAninch is a counselor with "Solutions to Stress, Anxiety & Toxins" in Tarentum, PA, and an Employee Assistance specialist for the United Steelworkers, Local 1138. He is a Certified Trauma Responder, a Certified Employee Assistance Professional, and a Certified TFT Practitioner (Diagnosis Level). He may be reached at jimmymac@so-sat.com.

When someone has lost a loved one, the agony has many dimensions, particularly in cases of violence.  I have learned to focus first on barriers to the survivor's ability to experience a spiritual closeness to the person who has been lost.  Starting anywhere else fails to honor the magnitude of the loss and to recognize the natural difficulties that people have in processing the sudden, senseless death of their loved one.

I learned this in a refugee camp near Oslo, Norway, in May 1999, during the Kosovo war. It turned out to be an invaluable understanding during my subsequent nine trips to Kosovo as well for my work with survivors in Rwanda, the Congo, and other areas of warfare and ethnic violence. My visit to Norway took place nine months prior to my first trip to Kosovo. I treated an ethnic Albanian refugee for his grief following the war death of his mother.  After some initial progress, the muscle tests weren’t revealing any further weaknesses in his energy system, yet he consistently reported that his SUD, which started at 10, had come down only to 5. It never got lower than that.

There are several things practitioners should assess when muscle testing and self-report measures don't correlate, but none of these accounted for my patient's stalled SUD level.  Upon reflection, and after discussion with the refugee camp staff, I concluded that more than wanting relief from his traumatic suffering, the man wanted to retrieve his lost mother or, if that proved impossible, he wanted to hold onto what little he did have that remained of her: his suffering.

Death of a loved one is the most frequent trauma in areas of unnatural disaster. In Rwanda, "presenting problems" that do not include death are rare.  The patient would like to be praising the positive aspects of the lost one’s life, cherishing fond memories, reviewing the wise counsel received from the deceased, and going through the rest of life in a spiritual closeness with that person.  Successful treatment must honor the deceased and enable the survivor to do so. It must enhance closeness between survivor and deceased. 

So the "problem," the focus, becomes something like ''the block to our closeness,'' and the treatment objective is to clear the block.  When the block reaches 0, the closeness reaches 10, and the patient is at peace. Thus, the most important aspect of the traumatic event—the loss of life—is treated purely. Once the block has been cleared, my patients and I then focus on ''the rest of the matter'' or ''any remaining horror," including the evil. I always propose to my patients that we view their issues of grief this way, and it tends to be almost unanimously appreciated everywhere I have been. 

When the survivor is able to hold the beautiful memories and all the person had contributed, and talk about these, we are ready then to move on to the other horrors of the events surrounding the death and loss.

Carl Johnson, Ph.D., ABBP, is a clinical psychologist, founder and director of The Global Institute of Thought Field Therapy, and a retired PTSD specialist with the Veteran's Administration. He lives in Winchester, Virginia, and may be contacted via carl@visuallink.com

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David Feinstein, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, is the national director of the Energy Medicine Institute. Author of seven books and more than fifty professional papers, he has taught at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Antioch College. Among his major works are The Promise of Energy Psychology, The Mythic Path, and Rituals for Living and Dying. His multi-media Energy Psychology Interactive was a recipient of the Outstanding Contribution Award from the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology. For further information, visit www.EnergyPsychEd.com.