been one of the tools that has helped my colleagues and me to achieve some of the goals mentioned above.
Throughout my extended career, I was never satisfied with the results I was getting in the treatment of anxiety disorders. The usual combination of drugs that are often prescribed with Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) was not as effective for my patients as it was claimed to be in the literature. Most notably, it didn’t produce the results we sought when treating panic disorders, agoraphobias, performance anxieties, and other phobias. Treatment with CBT required many sessions, and often psychoactive drugs had to be taken constantly to avoid relapses.
Then, in 1989, a dear colleague whose sister-in-law had been recently treated for her phobia with what was then called “Callahan TechniquesTM,” was very impressed by the results. He said few treatments were necessary and the results were quick and complete.
It was then that he taught me his version of a phobia tapping protocol. At the time, we mistakenly assumed that the phobia protocol was the complete system! I started using the protocol on patients with a range of disorders: phobias, panic disorders, generalized anxiety disorder, test anxieties, and so forth. The results were overwhelming! We were so impressed with getting fast treatment responses that we decided to study, learn, and verify the treatment in depth with all our medical resources.
For 14 years, with slightly fewer than 50,000 patients, we conducted clinical trials in several centers in two countries. We had a distinguished team of MDs, clinical psychologists, neuroscientists, RNs, and professional researchers. We wanted to measure, within the boundaries of our clinical practice, the efficacy of those brief techniques that required activating traumatic memories while at the same time causing simultaneous multi-sensory overload of subcortical structures.
Our work resulted in what has been called the first large-scale clinical trials that compared the new Brief MultiSensory Activation techniques (BMSA) to the conventional “CBT with drugs.” For reasons that we elaborate in our book on BMSA (Andrade, Aalberse, Sutherland and Ruden, 2006a), we prefer to describe this work as BMSA rather than “tapping” or “energy psychology.” See Andrade, Aalberse, & Sutherland (2006b).
My good friend, David Feinstein, Ph.D., former researcher on psychotherapeutic innovations at the Department of Psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School and author of the Energy Psychology Interactive CD (Feinstein, 2004), which was favorably reviewed recently by the American Psychological Association, has coauthored the resulting report of these trials comparing BMSA and CBT with medication (Andrade and Feinstein, 2003). The findings show that BMSA works better in fewer sessions and lasts longer than other types of therapy.
But as good as those techniques were, we still had our share of failures, even though our techniques dramatically improved the percentage of positive clinical outcomes. Dissociation — in particular, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) — was one of the disorders that we found difficult to treat with tapping alone.
Then one day, while searching an Internet list for persons who used tapping to treat people, we read a post from Dr. Flint about dissociation. He mentioned The Process Healing Method. I was curious and went to his web site, downloaded his instructions and immediately began to apply a basic version of Process Healing in our clinical work.
In just a few weeks, after having treated about three dozen patients, we found Process Healing extremely effective. We began applying it on patients for whom BMSA had failed. To our delight, a huge percentage of those resistant patients started to show results. So, following a previous pattern that had been used successfully for other disciplines, we decided that Process Healing could be similarly tested on a larger patient population.
At the moment of this writing, I have applied Process Healing to 600 patients. I am amazed at this incredible tool. I wrote to Dr. Flint, telling him that I thought he had discovered something very powerful and that its full potential was still to be developed.
Bear in mind that I learned Process Healing by reading Dr. Flint’s instructions and that I practice what could be considered a beginner’s version of Process Healing. However, the results I am getting with Process Healing on all kinds of PTSD, DID, anxiety disorders and every sort of somatization resistant to BMSA are very impressive! To our astonishment, even some kinds of purely physical disorders and complaints respond to Process Healing far better than can be expected from other therapies. If we are able to get such excellent results after studying only basic written instructions, just imagine what the reader of this complete text can expect!
I taught my simple version of Process Healing to about a dozen certified therapists in our group. We are all getting similar results. Namely, Process Healing yields positive clinical responses with 60% of the cases that failed to respond to every other therapy available to us!
Our present strategy is to continue using BMSA techniques with simple cases and to apply Process Healing to BMSA-resistant patients. At the same time, we are beginning to explore Process Healing in other pathologies, such as somatizations, headaches, sexual disorders, other primarily somatic disorders, and so forth.
From a theoretical point of view, the learning model that Dr. Flint uses to explain the Process Healing mechanism makes much sense to me. The process by which parts are invited to join the “Treatment Team” is full of analogies to the teaching process in which parts of the personality with self-limiting information are offered self-em-powering information. No doubt all parts change during the process, and a new and healthier context results.
This text is the founder’s handbook of The Process Healing Method. The book is by no means exhaustive and my guess is that future books will complete and expand it. Dr. Flint has so much to teach that it is impossible to reduce it to a single book.
Based on my experience with Process Healing, I suggest the reader digest this book with curiosity and immediately begin to practice and apply Process Healing with a passion. As my own experience and that of my colleagues have documented, Process Healing produces extraordinary results that are impossible to achieve by any other means of psychotherapeutic treatment. I invite the reader to thoroughly investigate this most fascinating therapeutic technique in the pages ahead.
Joaquín Andrade, MD
Medical Director, JA&A
Montevideo, Uruguay
Introduction
This book is intended as a guide for individuals who want to make changes in their personalities and for professionals who may want to use it in their practice. The purpose of this book is to provide you, the reader, with the understanding I have gained by developing, refining, and working with this treatment method over the past 12 years. Reports from Internet users, colleagues who are using it, and my own experience confirm the Process Healing Method as a respectful, effective, and safe way to treat self-destructive behaviors, beliefs, painful emotions and memories.
This book is both a step-by-step tutorial for how to use the Process Healing Method and a presentation of the theory behind the method. The first three chapters have been available on the Internet since 1998 and have been downloaded or read by several thousand people. These chapters describe the Process Healing Method in enough detail so that many readers have experienced the intervention just by reading the chapters. Many have gained a deeper understanding of themselves and realized positive changes in their lives by using this method.
Throughout this book, the aim is to provide you with enough information, in a “tutorial” style, to guide you in the process of speaking and responding to any barrier blocking treatment. This is an effort to make the book as easy to use as possible for both the nonprofessional and for the mental health professional willing to explore a new treatment approach. This approach is a useful adjunct not only in the mental health profession, but in the medical profession as well.
Some of the constructs in the theory are different from those in common use. It may be helpful to the mental health professional if I point out some of the underlying assumptions of this model of personality development and treatment.
1. The subconscious is a language process independent of conscious and unconscious activity and of all memories. It has capacities