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My 40 Year Flirtation with Energy Psychology:

Confessions of a Scientific Skeptic

Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45 years.
He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places,
Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your
Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men,
women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout
the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a
free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If you enjoy my
articles, please subscribe. I write to everyone who joins my Scribd team.

I grew up in a family that relied on things that you could see, touch, and

construct. My mother was the office manager for a company called Tubular

Structures that made very solid scaffolding out of pipe--the kind you see big burly

men climbing up and down as they paint houses and fix upper story windows.

My step-father was a welder, carpenter, and all around handy-man. He could

build anything and made me a fabulous tree house when I was nine years-old.

But there was darker side to our family history that we rarely talked about. My

biological father was a writer, poet, and stage actor. When I was 5 years old, he

tried to commit suicide and was hospitalized at Camarillo State Mental Hospital,

north of Los Angeles. I tried to understand what happened to him. But my 5

year-old mind couldn’t grasp the idea that he had been taken down by a

mysterious “nervous breakdown” that I certainly couldn’t see and no one seemed

to be able to explain. I never saw him again until the day I graduated college.

Looking back I realize that my whole life has been shaped by these two

competing forces: (1) The world of things we can engage and manipulate with

our 5 senses, the “tubular structures” of the world. (2) The world of energy and
spirit that can cause “nervous breakdowns” as well as inspired writing and

beautiful poetry. My mother always had a fear that I would turn out like my

father and “lose my mind” and she encouraged me to pursue a scientific

education that she hoped would lead me to safety and a good solid profession (“I

wouldn’t mind,” she told me “if you decided to be a doctor.”)

I got the message and went on to college with a pre-med course of study,

majoring in zoology, biology, and biochemistry. I graduated Magna Cum Laude

and got a 4 year, full-tuition fellowship to U.C. San Francisco Medical School and

my future was assured. There was only one glitch. My long lost father showed

up at my college graduation and we spent the summer together prior to my

starting medical school in the fall.

I learned that he had escaped from the mental hospital after being locked up

for more than 7 years (escape was not an easy feat in those days) and had

become a street puppeteer. I was both drawn to his world of feelings, emotions,

and “crazy ideas” (on the spur of the moment we jumped on a bus in Los

Angeles and went to San Diego to see a Shakespeare play.) He also scared me

to death. I knew enough psychology to be aware that he had more than a touch

of “madness” himself.

I did, indeed, start medical school in the fall, but dropped out after three

weeks. It must have seemed a crazy thing to do because they required me to

see a psychiatrist before they’d allow me to leave. Many people would do most

anything to get in to one of the top medical schools in the country and get a free

ride the whole way. Here I was giving the money back and leaving for points
unknown. Pretty crazy, I’ll admit, but it was one of the best decisions I ever

made.

Kicked in the Head by a Horse: Healing the Energy Body?

I decided to attend U.C. Berkeley and graduated with a master’s degree in

Social Work in 1968. I got married, landed a great job as a counselor at a local

hospital, and rented a wonderful house in Pinole, a rural suburb in the East-bay,

across the bridge from San Francisco. Our neighbors had horses that they let us

ride whenever we wanted. Life settled into a blissful routine.

The first summer we were there, we invited our closest friends from college

for a visit. They had a four-year old son who was cute as a bug and

adventurous. While we were recounting stories of success the little boy

wandered off and climbed under the fence into the corral where the horses were.

Before we could catch up to him, a skittish horse kicked him.

By the time the boy’s father reached him he was screaming in anguish with a

red welt rising on his forehead. His mother immediately reached out for the boy.

She comforted him with her words and held one hand up about three inches from

his head and passed her hand back and forth over the wound while the Dad

called for an ambulance. The boy seemed to relax and eventually stopped

crying.

I asked her what she was doing. I wondered how waving her hand over the

boy could be helpful. She kept her hand moving slowly and told me, “Its ‘energy

medicine.’ I’m healing his ‘energy body.’” I nodded like I understood what she

was saying. She turned her attention back to her son and I gave my wife a look
that said, “We love her, but what she’s doing is nuts. You can’t heal your son by

waving at him.”

Well, things turned out O.K. The boy was checked out at the local hospital

and there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage. My scientific mind

concluded that he must not have really been hurt. I relegated “energy medicine”

to some new age mumbo jumbo and forgot all about it.

Can Prayer Heal at a Distance?

One of my buddies from medical school was working on a research project

on “healing at a distance” and wanted me to participate. I told him over and over

again that I wasn’t interested and didn’t believe in distance healing, whatever that

was. He was persistent and to get him off my back I finally agreed to do an

afternoon “training” workshop. We spent a couple of hours doing simple

meditations and visualizations. I couldn’t see how they could be helpful, but they

were relaxing.

Then he had us work in pairs. He had a deck of index cards and we each

were asked to pick one. One person closed their eyes and did the relaxation

exercise and got into a meditative state. The other person read what was on the

card. Each card had a number, the sex, and age of a patient. We were asked to

visualize what the problem might be and to send healing energy to the person.

I couldn’t believe I was really doing this. It seemed ridiculous to me. But I

dutifully did as I was directed. I wanted to humor my friend. I imagined what my

45 year old female subject might look like and imagined myself “scanning” down

her body with my hands to “see” what was wrong with her. I truly wanted to get
this over with so I could go home. Nothing unusual happened as I went down the

front of the body and I proceeded to scan the back of her head on my way down

her body.

When I got to the small of her back, my hands turned icy cold. It was like they

had suddenly been plunged into freezing water. I must have gone pale because

my partner asked me what the matter was. I blurted out, “Something’s wrong

with her 4th lumbar vertebrae.” My partner seemed calm and replied, “Well, pray

for her healing,” which I did my best to do, even though I was still startled that my

hands had gone cold in that one spot.

After we were done, my friend who was leading the workshop told us what the

ailment was for each person we had prayed for. When he read the number on

my card and said, “this woman has undergoing surgery for a ruptured disk at her

4th lumbar vertebrae,” I nearly fell out of my seat. My scientific mind began

working out how I could have known where the woman’s problem was located. It

didn’t make sense. All I had known was her age and her sex and a number on

the card. My partner didn’t know her ailment so couldn’t have inadvertently

tipped me off.

Not all those in the class had gotten the ailment correct, but a number of us

had. Later we would learn that those who were prayed for actually healed better

than those who had not. You might think this would have made a believer out of

me. It actually scared me to death. I wasn’t ready to expand my mind that far. I

quickly “forgot” the whole thing and my old friend and I drifted apart.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) for My Painfully Stiff Shoulder

 Years later I seriously injured my shoulder playing basketball with the young

guys in my neighborhood. After taking advantage of all the things modern

medicine had to offer, mostly drugs, I was referred for acupuncture treatment

since my shoulder was still stiff and painful. By now I was a bit more open to

complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) approaches.

I knew that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine

(NCCAM) was established in 1991 as the "Office of Alternative Medicine" (OAM)

within the National Institutes of Health. As their mission statement says, they are

“dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative healing practices in the

context of rigorous science; training complementary and alternative medicine

(CAM) researchers; and disseminating authoritative information to the public and

professionals.

The World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

have stated that acupuncture can be effective in the treatment of neurological

conditions and pain. I believed it might help with my shoulder pain, but the

problem was that I was afraid of needles—which may have been part of the

reason I dropped out of medical school. Telling me they were tiny and thin and

wouldn’t hurt, didn’t make my fear go away. I asked my doctor, somewhat

facetiously, if there might be something like acupuncture, but without the

needles.

“Actually, there is,” she told me. “It’s called Emotional Freedom Techniques.

I’ve never tried it myself, but I have a patient who swear that it helps.” She gave

me the contact information for a local practitioner and I made an appointment.

After giving him some initial information, we got started. He asked me to lift my

arm as far as I could, then a little farther, and to rate the degree of pain and

discomfort I felt on a scale of 0 (no discomfort at all) to 10 (excruciating pain). I

gave it an 8. It definitely hurt a lot and I couldn’t move the arm easily.

He then had me do a simple affirmation of love and support for myself even

though I was feeling the pain. “So far, so good,” I thought. “Better than having

needles put in me, but this can’t possibly help to ease the pain.” He then guided

me to tap with my finger tips along a series of “acupoints” which he explained

were the points in acupuncture where the needles might be placed, and were

found to be effective in restoring optimal flow of energy through the body’s

energy pathways.

We went on to do what he called the “Nine-Gamut Procedure” where I moved

my eyes from one side to another while tapping a particular point on my hand. It

seemed a bit strange, but I followed along. We then did another tapping

sequence. The whole thing took no more than 3 or 4 minutes. I was about ready

to laugh the whole thing off when he asked me to once again move my arm and

rate the degree of pain.

To my surprise and utter amazement I was able to move my arm much higher

than before and the pain had dropped from the initial level of 8 to about a 4. We

continued on until the rating got down to a 1 or a 2. I was overjoyed, but sure it

couldn’t last. It took awhile for the pain to go away completely, but after some

additional sessions, I was completely healed. I didn’t really understand why it

worked, but it did. I knew I had to learn more about this “energy” work.
The Promise and the Science of Energy Psychology: Integrating My Two

Worlds.

In 1998 I had read an extraordinary book Molecules of Emotion by Candace

Pert, Ph.D. which opened my eyes to the ways in which the mind and body are

connected. I knew Pert was a neuroscientist who was part of the team that

discovered opiate receptors in the brain and allowed us to better understand

addictions. In this book she said, “I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if

not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component.”

In other words, this hard-nosed neuroscientist was saying that the mind really

does affect the body, and there was solid research suggesting how it might work.

She went on to say that “recent technological innovations have allowed us to

examine the molecular basis of the emotions, and to begin to understand how

the molecules of our emotions share intimate connections with, and are indeed

inseparable from, our physiology. It is the emotions, I have come to see, that link

mind and body.”

Molecules of Emotion was a game-changer for me. It demonstrated clearly

that there was a clear, scientific basis for the ways the mind and body were

connected. My two worlds—the world of matter and the world of energy—were

coming together. The final piece of the puzzle came in the form of another book,

The Promise of Energy Psychology: Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic Personal

Chang, by David Feinstein, Donna Even, and Gary Craig (Craig is the founder of

Emotional Freedom Techniques), with a foreword by Candace Pert and

published in 2005.
 Pert wrote, “The Promise of Energy Psychology is a synthesis of practices

designed to deliberately shift the molecules of emotion. These practices have

three distinct advantages over psychiatric medications. They are noninvasive,

highly specific, and have no side effects.” I was definitely with her on that point.

The book, she notes, “grows out of an earlier highly acclaimed work by a team

of twenty-seven health and mental health professionals led by David Feinstein to

bring the new tools of energy psychology to psychotherapists. This book brings

those methods to anyone who wishes to apply them.”

After reading the book and applying the tools both to myself and many clients

I was seeing, I moved from flirtation to convert. Although I have found that

Energy Psychology offers a set of tools that are highly effective for both men and

women, I have found that they are particularly suited to men. I’ve been a

psychotherapist since 1965 and have found that women seem to take to therapy

more easily than men.

Men have always been more resistant and suspicious of psychotherapy. Not

so, with Energy Psychology. My male clients, as well as my male friends, use it,

love it, and receive great benefit from it. I hope you will as well.