Why Events Psychology Is
Useful & Necessary For Energy Psychology
by Silvia Hartmann
I am currently helping to archive some materials from the early days of energy psychology and energy therapies and came across this statement by one of the leading pioneers in the field: "There are typically between 700 and 1900 emotional roots to any specific problem in adults, and somewhat fewer in children."
This was a statement of fact as it was known/believed at the time in 1998; and there are still many people who work with energy psychology today but were originally trained in standard psychology modalities where such beliefs were held to be true.
This also affects "the hunt for aspects" in EFT Emotional Freedom Techniques treatments and lies at the heart of many other protocols which are overly complicated and burdensome.
Events Psychology states that instead of there being "typically between 700 and 1900 emotional roots to any specific problem in adults" there is exactly one.
One event per specific problem. No more and certainly no less, which is also important and I will discuss later in this article.
Now there is truly, a world of difference between the idea that there are "between 700 and 1900 roots" per problem and there being -Â 1.
The enormity of this difference is actually difficult to put in words that can do justice to just how extraordinarily different the world becomes when instead of trying to find hundreds of roots for a problem, we are focusing on finding the one and only root that is indeed the seed, genesis, the only root of the problem.
There is also the other old problem inherited from psychology, which is that there exists the possibility that the client doesn't even have a problem at all - they're making it all up for attention seeking behaviour, they are lying about the problem, there is no problem in the first place, so the potential amount of "roots" could be zero as well.
With this or any variation inherited even by accident in the course of psychology study somewhere in the back of their minds, a practitioner is faced with trying to find roots between 1900 and 0, as there may be no roots at all.
The amount of confusion or uncertainty this generates is quite extraordinary; these notions truly unbalance the practitioner, even if they are entirely unaware that this may be happening, so significantly that the "hunt for roots" is going to be enormously problematic right from the start.
Of course, this uncertainty transfers to the client as well, causing problems in rapport and also problems for the client to try and remember things which might not even exist, or exist in their thousands, or anything in between.
To make this confusion really clear and apparent, let me offer the metaphor of the practitioner as a detective who is called to a crime scene. We find a dead body; but we're not sure if it was murder or suicide, or even death from natural causes, and if it really was murder, to be offered 700 - 1900 potential suspects, all of which had a connection in a conspiracy to this murder, none of which are known, and some, any or none of which may not even exist at all.
If you were the detective, where would you begin to start your enquiry?
In Events Psychology, we take a person's specific problem at face value and begin an investigation. In other words, we simply believe the client beyond all reasonable doubt that they really have the symptoms they describe to us and will act on the information we are given without prejudice. Even if the client "made it all up," by dealing with the made-up problem exactly as though it was real, we may eventually gain the trust of the client enough so they give us a real problem we can both work with. Also, in Events Psychology we make no distinction between any kind of intrapersonal data and treat real memories, false memories, visions, hallucinations, imagination, dreams all in the same structural way. Therefore, the problem of "there could be zero roots" collapses and we can be sure that we are indeed, working with a real person and on their real problems at all times.
Now we know there is some kind of problem that requires an evolution, we can go to work on the cause of the problem.
Events Psychology states clearly that for every specific problem, there is one causative and matching, specific event.
There is not more than one event, or a combination of unfortunate circumstances; for every *specific* problem, there is one specific event that is responsible. Please note that a problem such as "low self esteem" for example is not a specific problem; a specific problem is when the client describes a specific situation in which thoughts, behaviours and emotions occur which lead to the conclusion that they might have low self esteem; for example, being unable to say, "Hello!" to an unknown woman in a bar without starting to sweat, shake and being unable to speak.
The specificity of Events Psychology to localise the occurrence of a problem to an exact situation, or an exact time, date and location, again helps to de-stress both clients and practitioners and gives both something specific to work on, which can be tested by re-running the exact situation in the real world in order to be able to document any progress or evolution as it is called in Events Psychology correctly.
Once we have our specific problem occurrence, we can unfold the one single event which must have caused it to come into being.
This, likewise, is extremely logical, structural and straightforward.
Events Psychology states that the problem itself describes the event that must have happened in order to cause it.
Events Psychology holds that the human mind, energy system, cognitive functions and emotions are structural, and that there are structural reasons for problems in the now which are directly related to the event that caused the problem.
For example, if a person suffers from a spider phobia, it is to be deduced that the original causative event featured a spider or a spider-like insect, or a spider-like representation. If the original event had not featured such a thing, then the current phobia structurally could not exist in the way that it does.
This is truly just simple common sense and can be proven over and over again, with any specific problem of any kind whatsoever; it is structurally impossible to develop a shoe fetish in the absence of an event that featured a shoe, in a manner of speaking.
The problem now has all the forensic clues in its very structure which guide us to the genesis event.
Once a person starts working with Events Psychology in a focused way, their ability to discern the event from the problem grows quickly and exponentially.
For example, if a lady presents with having had two husbands and a boyfriend who were all alcoholics, who all beat her up and who all loved to wear black leather jackets, it becomes instantly obvious that the causative event was most likely a guiding star at a young age with a man who had anger management problems, drank a lot and likewise, wore a black leather jacket.
Who was that man?
The pattern could not possibly have been set up by the lady's uncle who wore tweed, was tea total and a very kind man. Indeed, it was her mother's second husband whom she fell in love with as a teenager in a single Guiding Star event and if one was to compare the photos of her husbands and boyfriends with her stepfather, they would look "eerily similar."
Just as there is a structure to how a problem is created by an event, there is a structure in learning to "read the event from the existing problem." It is a mental ability to perceive the evidence we have before us (how the problem works and when it occurs, specifically) clearly and to track back to its origins from there. This way of thinking like a forensic detective becomes second nature to the practitioner very quickly indeed and is an additional bonus to working with Events Psychology.
It is possible that psychological approaches from the past were as unclear and disjointed as they were because older psychological approaches were modelled on people who had serious mental illnesses and would present with extremely disturbed and disturbing symptoms.
This is highly exacerbated by the influence of stress which causes a breakdown in both internal representations and the ability to think or to remember clearly; it was in the application of energy psychology to people who were not mentally ill that the direct linkages between events and problems became revealed.
In Conclusion
Knowing that for any one specific problem there has to be one - and only one! - specific corresponding event focuses the practitioner's mind in a much more cohesive way and reduces stress across the board, which will transfer across to the client as well.
Believing the client and their description of their specific problem absolutely and without prejudice increases rapport and collapses the destabilising doubts as to whether this problem exists at all.
By dealing with all intrapersonal data in the same structural way, even more doubt and stress is relieved.
By understanding the formation of events, from the event absolute to the metacomments and the behavioural changes after the event, and including an understanding of the structure of trauma, guiding star and the other forms of events, we can use the problem now as "the body of evidence" which can guide us directly to what must have been there or the problem could not possibly present in the way it does today.
All of this together removes doubt, stress, and feeling overwhelmed from the practitioner and allows the practitioner to set a course straight towards finding the causative event, and creating a new event of healing, using the new Energy Psychology approaches and techniques we have at our disposal today.
It is my assertion that as our experience with Energy Psychology grows, we will be able to leave more and more of the entrainments from the old psychological approaches that tried to get by without taking the human energy body into consideration, and in doing so, found themselves with an impossible task on their hands. This led to extremely convoluted techniques and attempts at trying to explain something which is essentially inexplicable without the energy paradigm - why people think, feel and act the way they do.
It is our task now to free ourselves of our remaining entrainments and confusions and learn to use Energy Psychology in a whole new way, creating a new discipline for helping normal people with every day emotional problems which, if left untreated, could descend into mental illness.
A part of this process is to educate the public to the significant differences between Energy Psychology, the new Meridian and Energy Therapies and what they might have seen on TV to represent "psychology and counselling."
This may well be a long road; but I encourage everyone in the field to keep publishing articles, talking to people, giving people a personal experience of our new methods and approaches so we can begin to take human psychology quite literally into the light - a world where energy is a reality, and where human beings and their thoughts, emotions and behaviours are logical, reasonable, rational, explicable - and treatable.
Silvia Hartmann
Author, Events Psychology: How To Understand Yourself, And Other People
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