Disaster Relief Group Treatment
Reported by Roseanna Ellis, L.M.T.
About a month following Hurricane Katrina, Roseanna Ellis was in Selma, Alabama, working with three other practitioners of EFT who had traveled there at the request of a local therapist.
Ellis met the pastor of a local church. She thought EFT might be useful for him to know about, and she started to explain it to him. The best way to explain EFT is to demonstrate it, so she inquired about his personal situation. “Compassion fatigue” is a term used for the physical and emotional exhaustion frequently seen among those who have been helping in a disaster area. The pastor acknowledged that he was feeling extremely stressed, both from compassion fatigue and also from some longstanding personal challenges. He rated his level of stress at a 10 (of 10). Within 15 minutes, his self-reported stress level was 0. Ellis “challenged” him to make himself feel stressed. He couldn’t. Ellis observed, “If this could make years of stress go away within minutes, imagine what it will do for the trauma of the evacuees?” He invited her team of four to come to the church’s Wednesday evening “family night” to work with his congregation, which was hosting a number of hurricane victims. Of approximately 30 people in attendance, 13 were evacuees; the others were regular members of the church.
After the pastor gave a brief introduction, explaining the framework for the evening, the four practitioners each took a role in the presentation. One explained the theory of stress, one introduced EFT, another described its history, and the fourth demonstrated the tapping points. Then the practitioners worked with individuals in front of the group, one at a time. During the course of the two-hour meeting, each practitioner worked with two or three people. Because of the rapid response associated with energy interventions, each person only needed to be treated for between ten and twenty minutes.
A 52-year-old woman, for instance, who had been forced from her home, made each of the following statements, and with tears flowing, rated each as a 10 on the 10-point subjective units of distress scale:
I feel lost.
I feel displaced.
I feel confused and unfocused.
I feel angry.
I feel all alone.
I feel I have no place in this whole world that I can call my home.
No one knows where to reach me because they keep moving us from place to place.
At the end of twenty minutes, focusing on these one at a time, she was calm, in control, and reporting that her distress level with each statement was now at 0 of 10. She stated, “I have the world to choose from for my next home . . . I have always wanted to write my life story and was afraid to, but now I am ready . . . I could have died like some of my friends, but God saved me for a purpose . . . Maybe Katrina was the end of my old life and a renewed beginning.”
Another woman, who worked for a social services agency, was so overwhelmed with the increase in her case load because of Katrina that she wept while describing it, saying that her distress level was up to a 10. Within six or seven minutes, when it had dropped to a 0 while thinking of her job responsibilities, a smile crossed her face, and she shouted happily, “Bring ‘em on baby, bring ‘em on!” Everyone clapped and laughed.
For reasons that are not fully understood, EFT seems to help with pain and physical symptoms as well as psychological issues. One man who worked in front of the group had severe pain in his hips and knees, at a level of 10 of 10. A few minutes of tapping got his self-report down to a 5 on his hips and 3 on both knees. When he had finished, everyone saw him walk off the stage with much greater speed and ease.
Before the individual work with these people, each person in the audience identified a personal area of emotional distress and rated it from 0 to 10. They then put their own issues aside as the individual work was conducted. But with each person on the stage, the audience supported that person’s work by doing the same procedures the person on stage was doing. So if the person on stage was tapping a set of acupuncture points while stating, “feeling displaced,” the audience was doing the exact same tapping and making the exact same statement. Known as “Borrowing Benefits,” this method is repeatedly reported to bring down the distress level for the original issue identified by the audience members, even if there is no treatment that focuses specifically on their own issues. And indeed, every person in the audience at the church indicated at the end of the evening that the initial distress level they had identified had decreased when they again tuned into their original issue. According to Ellis, “It’s a natural to use EFT with a group of people who have shared the same experience, especially one like Katrina. Everyone can relate to the shock, grief, anger, displacement, and fear of the unknown. Then seeing other people quickly calm themselves gives hope. And feeling your own emotions rapidly easing is the start of healing.”
Roseanna Ellis, a Licensed Massage Therapist and Physical Therapy Assistant, practices EFT in New Jersey. She may be reached at [email protected].
