SPRINGFIELD, Mo.?
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms-- gone.? At a time when military suicides are making headlines again it's the news so many have hoped for.? The army has averaged a suicide every day in 2012.? PTSD is typically treated with anti-depressants and talk therapy, but an army report released late last year the counseling didn't work for half the soldiers.? A local life coach says she hasn't met a person she can't help yet.
? "The nightmares, daymares, whatever you want to call it.? The shakes, the sweats," they were haunting Justin Hefner when we met him three months ago.? He could barely talk about it.
? "No, no I don't feel comfortable talking about that," he told us then.
? So he started tapping about it.
? "I have this guilt," he repeats, as he taps his face and hands.
? Just a few minutes later: "On a scale of 0 to 10 how much guilt do you feel now?" Life coach Shelah Schenkel asks him.
? "I feel nothing," he replies, suddenly relaxed.
? Hefner says he now feels nothing when he thinks about mistakenly pointing a .50 caliber automatic rifle at an Iraqi child.? In fact he now says he feels nothing at all when he thinks of the war that left him so distraught he couldn't hold a job.
? "I think it changed him," Schenkel tells us.
? She's talking about tapping.? Schenkel is the only certified energy psychologist in the Ozarks.? The therapy she does with Hefner is called EFT.
? "That's an acronym for Emotional Freedom Technique."
? She says it can practically erase the symptoms of PTSD.? It works like acupuncture without the needles.? Depending on what form of energy psychology you subscribe to there are either 12 or 14 major meridians flowing through your body all the time, but you can tap into them by literally tapping on them in certain places.?
? "If you go through a traumatic event or something happens and there's a negative feeling or emotion typically those get locked in in an energy system in your body," says Schenkel.
? EFT is the key to unlocking the memory from the bad feeling it triggers.
? "Everybody thinks it's weird, even the people who do it with me think it's weird," but she swears it works and she has proof.
? "I love life; I feel great, less stress," explains Hefner.? He has a steady job.? Hefner says he finally tapped back into the man he was before the military.
? "It feels damn good," he concludes, grinning.
? Schenkel says the process is different for everyone.? Some have to repeat the tapping and chanting several times in one session until their negative feeling drops to 0 on a scale of 1 to 10.
? The American Pyschological Association as a whole hasn't backed the therapy because of a lack of research on its success rate.? The local chapter of the Wounded Warriors is behind EFT, though.? It's partnering with Schenkel to put on a seminar on PTSD June 27th, which is National PTSD Awareness Day.? It will be held at 1p.m. at the National Guard Armory in Springfield and is free and open to the public.
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