About Archetype Energy Transformation ©
When I finished my residency in adult psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, I had high degree of confidence in my skill set in both domains of psychopharmacology and psychotherapy. I was fortunate to have trained before the onset of managed-care, at a time when it was possible to keep patients in the hospital for very long periods of time. Several weeks of inpatient treatment, and even up to several months was standard practice. This permitted the training psychiatric resident to develop a very deep understanding of mental illness and of the quite aggressive use of medication to treat these difficult problems. In addition to extensive training in psychotherapy, my program also provided the opportunity for personal psychotherapy and I was in psychoanalysis for several years.
When I began my private practice, and then had the opportunity to treat far more patients, I discovered that there was a small group of patients that typically did not do as well as most of my patients. These patients all had a history of severe trauma, often in childhood. Their symptoms did not clearly remit with standard psychopharmacology and the changes I saw with standard talk therapy were modest and very slow. That intrigued me– and I pursued further training after my residency to see if I could acquire an understanding and treatment methods to help these individuals more effectively.
I had extensive training in clinical hypnosis through the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. I completed a 3 year program in Gestalt therapy at the Gestalt Institute of Philadelphia. Then, in 1995, I was introduced to something completely different-Thought Field Therapy- the first method of treatments now collectively known as the ”energy therapies”· I spent a week with Roger Callahan, PhD in Southern California learning the innovative treatment that he had created. Standard psychotherapy is essentially a psychological exchange between the patient and the therapist. The patient speaks about the problem. The therapist offers a verbal intervention, the content of which depends upon the therapist’s theoretical orientation to psychopathology and psychotherapy. Thought Field Therapy was different. Dr.Callahan discovered that if you have the patient think about the problem and then guide her/him through a sequence of tapping on specific ”acupuncture” points, the problem’s underlying energy will dissolve and the problem will resolve. Often that will happen very rapidly. Bringing this method back to my large practice in Pennsylvania, I saw that began to happen with patient with a trauma history. However, not everyone did as well as others. That in turn led me to look more extensively at other methods, which claimed to change the underlying ”energy” of the symptom. I discovered then that there were actually many of these. For 20 years, I attended many beginning and advanced level intensive seminars in the ”energy therapies”. By the time I retired to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2015, I had had training in about 10 different energy methods. I had created my own synthesis of these methods and my trauma patients were doing better.
Then, in Chapel Hill, came the final step in this professional journey. Asha Clinton, PhD came to a local training center offering several weekends of training in her brilliant method of therapy– a synthesis of Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes with her own version of energy change, which involved working with the energy of ”chakras” rather than the energy of acupuncture points. The psychological changes I saw and the ones I experienced myself during these weekend trainings were very compelling and I was convinced to learn as much as I could from her and to change my method of treatment.
When I resumed a part-time private practice in Chapel Hill, at first in person in a private office and now via telemedicine, I found Dr Clinton’s method to be extremely effective. Combining Dr. Clinton’s psychological ideas with the understanding of biological and physiological processes which come with a medical education, provided a more complete and thorough framework for working with the human ability to respond to and deal with stress and trauma. This final understanding is ARCHETYPE ENERGY TRANSFORMATION ©.