Positive Health Online

I am a very frustrated psychiatric psychotherapist. I trained several decades ago in the US, when psychiatry was practised as psychotherapy. Over the years, insurance companies forced psychiatrists to specialize in prescribing tranquilizers and antidepressants. At the same time, they cut the compensated session times from 50 minutes once or twice weekly to 20-30 minutes once monthly. This, in British understatement, made it challenging for me to follow my passion and practise psychotherapy.

I explored a variety of healing and self-healing methods for my own stresses and unhappiness on the job, applying the briefer interventions with my patients, when they would allow me to offer a modest psychotherapy intervention along with the medications I prescribed. Helpful methods included relaxation, meditation, imagery, NLP, and spiritual healing, among others. While each of these was helpful with my own stresses, none was applicable within the very limited time frames available.

Eventually, I discovered two therapies that seemed to fit the bill:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which involves stimulating the right and left sides of the body while focusing on an issue about which one would like to feel better; and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which involves tapping a finger on a series of acupressure points on one’s face, chest and hand, while reciting an affirmation.

Both of these are rapidly effective in releasing anxieties, fears, and residues of traumatic experiences. However, both had serious limitations in my practice.

EMDR is so potent in releasing buried emotional traumas that it can produce strong emotional abreactions. These can be re-traumatizing, so it is strongly recommended that EMDR should be used only in the therapist’s office. With only a few minutes of EMDR once monthly, the benefits were very limited.

EFT produced similar releases of emotional traumas, but without the heavy abreactions. At first, it appeared to be just what the I required. However, it soon became clear that EFT too, had serious drawbacks. The long series of acupressure point tapping proved daunting to child clients – particularly if they had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Adults, too, found it difficult to remember the required series of points, and became flustered when they were agitated, and most needed the stress relief but, while flustered, were unable to recall the points needing tapping.

I then discovered ways to combine the two methods, and have named this approach WHEE: Wholistic Hybrid derived from EMDR and EFT. WHEE involves tapping the right and left sides of one’s body while one recites a positive affirmation of one’s choice. WHEE is particularly helpful for self-healing because it works more rapidly than EFT and does not evoke intense emotional releases.

WHEE has proven to be an easily learned and used, potent, rapidly effective, self-healing method that relieves pains of all sorts within minutes, along with associated stress and distress. Once one knows this method, one can treat one’s own pains and stress any time this is needed. The effects of WHEE are rapid, deep and lasting.

I have found WHEE amazingly helpful to people with migraine headaches.

Case A

Melissa, a secretary at a clinic where I worked, had suffered from migraines at least once a week for several years. Her headaches were frequently incapacitating and not responding to medications. Her family doctor had scheduled her for brain scans to rule out the possibility of a brain tumour. Melissa was quick to learn WHEE, learning its use with only a 30-minute session. Applying it at the first sign of a migraine, she was able to completely eliminate her headaches over a period of one month. At a one-year follow-up, she remained free of migraines.

Case B

Grace was a 34 year-old stay at home mother of two young children, married to a manufacturing company senior executive. She had suffered migraines since her teenage years. Her course of healing was more complex. She learned to dialogue with her headaches to learn what her body wanted to tell her: that she was dissatisfied having given up her own career as a teacher, an occupation she loved. She was also unhappy ‘being on call’ for her husband’s business dinners and parties. When she negotiated successfully over these issues with her husband, her migraines decreased in intensity and frequency, but did not abate. Using WHEE, she was able to clear them completely.

WHEE has been marvelously helpful to people with other pains as well, including tension headaches, backaches, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis,  physical trauma and surgery, fibromyalgia, cancer and more. WHEE can also relieve anxieties, fears, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), even when these have been present for many years.

Helpful Websites

EMDR www.emdr.com See references and meta-analyses of research, and details of organizations (e.g. the American Psychiatric Association) which acknowledge EMDR as equivalent to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for severe stress and post-traumatic stress disorder.
EFT www.emofree.com See references for early research and lists of anecdotal reports of diverse problems where EFT has demonstrated benefits.
WHEE www.wholistichealingresearch.com/wheearticles See articles detailing benefits of WHEE for treatment of pains and problems of children, soldiers and others in transition and stress.
Benor Daniel J. 7 Minutes to Natural Pain Release: WHEE for Tapping Your Pain Away – The Revolutionary New Self-Healing Method. Fulton, CA. Energy Psychology Press (in press, August 2008).

Further Information

Dr Benor now practises and teaches WHEE and wholistic psychotherapy in Canada. You can visit www.WholisticHealingResearch.com/ wheearticles.html for more information on Dr Benor.
Dr Benor will be giving workshop in Oxford, London, Bristol and Exeter between October 10-13. For information and registrations in Oxford, London and Exeter, contact Ruth Sewell
heart@ruthsewell.f9.co.uk Tel: 01626-779649.
For workshop in Bristol Contact: Chrissy Holmes: grow@chrissyholmes.com Tel: 0117-9497442.