It takes a long time to start the healing process. I will never heal. There are pieces from me that can never be put back together.
~ Virginia Roberts Giuffre, victim of Jeffrey Epstein from age 16
understand that a victim of sexual abuse would feel this way. Even after years of traditional therapy.
Many women have told me that, in spite of years of talk therapy, they had never even broached the topic of sexual abuse with their therapist. Those who had, got no relief from the trauma. I too can attest that years of psychotherapy, including a three year certification course in Gestalt Therapy, did little to free me of the after effects of sexual trauma.
There is a way to heal. There is a solution.
The most effective solution in my experience is Tapping.
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT and FasterEFT/Eutaptics offer
surprisingly gentle and effective ways of dissolving the negative charge out of painful memories.
One evidence-based treatment is the “tell the story technique.”
Safety is always an issue. So the client often needs to be reminded that the abuse and trauma she suffered, however real, now exists only in the mind. She is in the room with me. She was not safe then. But she is safe now. Safe from harm. Safe from retaliation. Safe to tell her story.
With that assurance, the practitioner asks the client to select a painful memory and rank its emotional charge on a scale of 1 (low intensity) to 10 (high intensity).
Working with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the practitioner might ask whether she would like to start at her first memory of being asked to provide an erotic massage, remove her clothes, or engage in a sex act. Any painful memory.
We ease the client into telling her remembered story by starting at a point before anything uncomfortable took place, so that we’re starting from low intensity.
She narrates the story, in present time, while doing EFT. The moment she feels any increase in emotional intensity we tap on meridian points until it resolves to zero. Each aspect and emotion that comes up is resolved in turn until the client can tell her story as though she were talking over lunch about a scene from a movie she once saw.
As you can see, this approach is as kind and as painless as it gets.
One of the most fascinating facets of this work is that once the emotional impact of sexual abuse – or any issue, for that matter – has been collapsed to zero on the emotional intensity scale, the entire pattern of abuse that may have shaped her life dissolves.
One client, whose sexual abuse started at age seven wrote this . . . after saying she had been “carrying around repressed emotions for 40 years:”
“When I came to you I felt void of emotion and passion, like I was hollow. Our first five sessions changed the trajectory of my life. Tapping reopened my soul by quickly clearing out old wounds that I had carried with me for the majority of my life. I find I’m so much more of me now, much more honest, much more comfortable in my own skin. I don’t hate myself for things that weren’t my fault. I can talk about stuff like I was raped when I was seven without falling apart.”
As you would expect, where abuse happened over a period of time, as in this instance, more than one session will be required.
And yes, Virginia, that is how we put the pieces back together.
Take a look at this brief YouTube interview with a survivor of childhood sexual violence who describes the EFT process as “incredibly freeing” 18 months after a single session.
Resource
The Science of Tapping’s Summary of Scientific Published Studies itemizes no fewer than 52 peer-reviewed outcome studies on trauma. These include randomized controlled clinical trials (RCT) and systematic reviews in peer reviewed journals. Feel free to download the PDF file directly from my website.