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EFT, Severe Mental Illness and a Murderous Impulse

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A Murderous Impulse Page 4

EFT can be used to defuse the original events in the person’s life which created their present uncontrollable impulses in the first place.  In other words, work to heal the problem at its core rather than treating the SYMPTOM of rage, for example. This approach is illustrated perfectly for us by Lori Lorenz’s case in which she did just this and it worked. Notice that Lori didn’t treat the symptom. She didn’t ask her client to accept himself, even though he might explode.  Instead she went straight to the core issue of his relationship with his explosive mother and helped him work on that. While it is tempting to treat the symptom as I did with Roland, and it might even work if the client had sufficient inner controls in place, my recommendation is that we as therapists not take this risk, but rather follow Lori’s path.  If you move straight to the core issue and treat that, the rage will usually take care of itself.

In Roland’s case, since he was so removed from immediate contact with his emotions, it might have taken quite a while for us to get at his core issues using EFT.  We probably wouldn’t have made much, if any, inroads on this in the first session; although in retrospect it might have been worth trying.

To summarize, when dealing with problems which involve a severe disturbance of impulse control, I consider it best to apply EFT in such a way that it heals the distress that lies deep within the client him/herself first.

Another useful tactic can be to treat the rage without using any set-up or reminder phrases at all, just strategic tapping on acupoints.  Roland’s irrational conclusions stemmed from his use of a reminder phrase that involved acceptance of his anger, not from the tapping procedure itself.  However, in Roland’s case, since he was so detached from his emotions, I could not easily have asked him to tap for distress because he was apparently calm about the whole thing. Actually, it was one of the ominous signs he displayed.  Possibly though, I could have located some tensions in his body and had him tap for these and that might have been of help. 

Ann Adams’ use of EFT as a simple relaxation/impulse control method with emotionally disturbed boys in an institutional setting (go to is a perfect example of this use of EFT to control a temper tantrum. Her report brings up another an important question and that is whether there is a difference between the use of EFT for reducing violent impulses in a structured setting such as a rehabilitative institution or prison -- where the client is protected to some extent at least from acting out destructive impulses -- versus its use for out-patients where the only controls in place are the client’s internal ones.

As we know, many behavioral interventions can be highly effective as long as a person remains in an institutional environment, because the institution itself acts as a restraining force, while the same treatment may no longer be effective when that person leaves the protected environment and has to rely once again on his/her own often fragile internal controls.

It may be that using EFT to help a person “accept” such symptoms as explosive, acting out tendencies might conceivably work if the person were confined in a protected environment; however, I personally would not want to take the risk.  Although, I have heard reports from staff there are some institutions where tapping therapy has been used for acceptance of violent impulses with apparent success.  Unfortunately, the staff workers involved could not adequately follow up with the youngsters they had treated after they had left the institution. Therefore, they actually didn’t know whether these boys were able to control their rage when they were released.  Until we learn more about this, I would advise any therapist using EFT for impulse control to apply it in one of the ways I have suggested above, or use some other failsafe method.

In closing I want to say that I have regrets when I think about the mistake I made when using EFT with Roland in the manner I did. However, I console myself with the fact that my alternate treatment plan for him did work out, and I hope that my experience with this can help all of us learn a little bit more about how to apply this remarkable method in the most clinically effective manner.

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington

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