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Rachel Michaelsen, LCSW, D-CEP - Guest
Rachel Michaelsen, LCSW, D-CEP is a licensed clinical social worker in the state of California with over 35 years of clinical experience. Along with providing individual and group psychotherapy, Rachel is a clinical supervisor and consultant, who specializes in energy psychology and sound healing. She is a certified Diplomate in Comprehensive Energy Psychology (D-CEP) and has training in several energy-based therapeutic modalities including Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Havening Techniques, Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT), Tapas Acupuncture Technique (TAT,) Psych-K, Trauma Tapping Technique and other energy medicine techniques. Rachel has developed an Energy Psychology protocol called Release Issues Past and Present which she uses with individuals and in groups and teaches to other mental health providers. When working with clients, Rachel often integrates sound healing by utilizing calibrated tuning forks and chimes to facilitate change. For over 25 years Rachel has been providing training to mental health professionals on a variety of topics including Energy Psychology, Sound Healing, trauma informed care, clinical supervision, law and ethics, telehealth, diagnoses, time and paperwork management, and suicide. Rachel is a past chair of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology’s Humanitarian Committee. |
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W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (00:24):
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally focused couples therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and oppositional and Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:32):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:19):
Today I’ll be speaking with Rachel Michelson, who is a licensed clinical social worker in the State of California with over 35 years of clinical experience, along with providing individual and group psychotherapy. Rachel is a clinical supervisor and consultant who specializes in energy psychology and sound healing. She is a certified diplomate in comprehensive energy psychology and has trained in several energy-based therapeutic modalities, including Emotional Freedom Technique, Havening Techniques, Advanced Integrative Therapy, Tapas Acupressure Technique, PSYCH-K, Trauma Tapping Technique, and other energy medicine techniques. Rachel has developed an energy psychology protocol called Release Issues Past and Present, which she uses with individuals and in groups, and teaches to other mental health providers. Rachel often integrates sound healing by utilizing calibrated tuning forks and chimes to facilitate change. For over 25 years, Rachel has been providing training to mental health professionals on a variety of topics, including energy psychology, sound healing, trauma-informed care, clinical supervision, law and ethics, telehealth, diagnoses, time and paperwork management, and suicide. Rachel is a past chair of the Association of Comprehensive Energy Psychology’s Humanitarian Committee. Let’s listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:40):
Hi, Rachel. Welcome.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (03:42):
Thank you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:43):
Thanks for joining me today. I know you from the supervision, law, and ethics workshop you’ve been doing for the last few years through our nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, which has been great. I’ve been going every year to keep up to date, both for my CEU and for the developments around supervision and law and ethics. I also know that you do work in energy psychology and that you also do some music or sound therapy work. I would love to learn more about all the work that you’re doing, but before we get to that, I always like to hear about how people got to doing what they’re doing — the evolution of their thinking that led them to this work.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (04:29):
Great. Well, it’s a very personal journey because my training and background was very psychodynamic, and I had been in a lot of psychodynamic therapy. I had some chronic health problems and chronic low-grade depression, and I was seeing an acupuncturist, and he had heard of energy psychology. He said, “I think you’d really like this for your clients,” and he was really into it. So he suggested I go to a training or a conference, and I went to a pre-conference. I learned a bunch of techniques and started using them right away. I thought, “Wow, this is moving things really quickly.” Then I did another training and thought, “I think I ought to do this for myself.” So I started working with an energy psychologist, and it really shifted things — it was a huge shift for me personally. But I had seen that with clients as well. So it felt like a whole different way of working and thinking about things. It’s a very trauma-informed way, and it’s also less pathologizing than my experience with other things so I felt really good about it and started doing more and more training, and eventually started training people as well as doing the work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:03):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP: (06:04):
And so, I mean, it’s always kind of cool when you have the healing experience yourself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:10):
Yeah, definitely. Well, that’s great that you’ve both seen it be successful with clients as well as had your own experience of it. So tell me, what is energy psychology? You know, we’re in Northern California here, and there’s lots of different stuff, and I’ve always heard about it and learned a little bit here and there, but I’ve never quite really gotten in depth about it.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (06:33):
Yeah. And what’s interesting is that Northern California has not been a hotbed. I’ve kind of been a weirdo because I’ve been doing this for 20 years, so it’s kind of like, “Oh, there are other parts of the country where you see a lot more.” Although now there are people going, “Oh yeah, I do tapping.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So what is energy psychology? It’s really a way of using the subtle energy that we all have in our body to shift behaviors or issues that aren’t working for people. It can be used for physical stuff, for performance, and it’s very effective with anxiety, depression, PTSD, but really a huge variety of things. So you could think of it as sort of a cognitive-somatic practice. You’re taking a cognitive approach — you’re taking a thought — and thoughts have energy signatures, particularly when someone has trauma.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (07:39):
I also look at trauma in a much broader way. That’s one of the things I’ve learned: what’s the cause of somebody’s depression or their procrastination? If you look historically, you can usually find something that happened in the past. Could be a big “T” or a little “t” trauma that is connected. So if you can figure out the original cause, you can often make huge shifts. A lot of people do EFT; they learn it on TikTok or YouTube, and they’re not really learning clinical EFT, they’re learning self-help EFT, which is great, but it isn’t the full clinical approach.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (08:26):
That’s EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (08:29):
Right. The “emotional” one. Not the other one. I’m always like, what does the “E” stand for in that one? What you’re looking at is the difference between helping someone find some regulation in their nervous system versus getting into the clinical issue and really releasing and breaking up that pattern energetically. There’s a lot of different techniques, so we might be using the subtle energy, the qi, that we see in access through acupressure points that traditional Chinese medicine has been using forever. We also use chakras, which are used in Vedic practices from South Asia. We might use combinations, and some people do just words as energy — and the word changes. That’s always interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (09:27):
Then, if you throw in sound healing-- so you can use sound healing for so many things and I have lots and lots of tuning forks — here are some tuning forks. There are acupuncturists who use tuning forks on acupuncture points. What I found during the pandemic is that I could bring in tuning forks as an addition to what we’re doing. Because it’s easier, people can have their headphones on, and I can either use my mic or put it near the mic in the computer while they’re doing a process on themselves, whether they’re tapping or holding a chakra.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (10:07):
Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (10:08):
And what happens is things do move more quickly. It's kind of fascinating. I started seeing that when I was seeing people in the office and then shifted over. I was like, oh, this is so much easier—put their headphones on and it's right there. And as someone who's not really going to be putting things on people's bodies…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (10:31):
I have done some sound healing, particularly on friends post-surgery, that was really effective on scar tissue and that kind of thing. It made inflammation and swelling go down. So vibration, right? Energy is vibration. Sound is vibration. Yeah. So there are lots of—well, you can see—I have bowls here, chimes, different kinds of chimes. I have this quartz crystal chime, and then I have lots and lots of tuning forks. So different things, theoretically, they each have different purposes. I must say the research is thin.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:15):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (11:17):
So I kind of go with… you know, I've trained with several different schools of sound healing. Some people say, “You have to use this for that,” and other people are like, “Well, just see what feels right and notice the feedback from the client.” That tends to be the way I work. You could have all kinds of evidence-based everything, and then you have someone where what’s supposed to work doesn’t. And then you have to tune into what it is that your intuition is telling you, and what the feedback loop is telling you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:47):
Sure. Well, and I think too… I’m trained in EMDR, and I know that there's oftentimes skepticism around that—how it really works or so on. But it works, and there’s great evidence. I also know there’s some research on energy psychology supporting it. I’m curious about the conceptualization. And again, I may just have a lack of knowledge around energy, chakras, and those points—but can you talk a little bit about what…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (12:23):
What's happening? Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:24):
I guess, how is the energy supposed to be, and what's leading to the problem—like depression or so on? Is the energy blocked, the wrong frequency, or… how does that even work?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (12:38):
So let me just tell you a little bit about the research first, and then I’ll talk about what I think is happening—which is actually a lot like EMDR. So just for people to know, there are over 200 research studies that document the effectiveness of energy psychology. 103 of these are randomized controlled trials. Ninety-five percent use pre- and post-clinical outcomes, and of those studies 99% showed energy psychology to be effective. There are nine meta-analyses that show it to be effective for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. There is a study of veterans, 86% no longer had PTSD symptoms after treatment. There are also eight studies comparing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and energy psychology—energy psychology was either equivalent to or more effective than CBT, and it achieved similar results in less time. Makes you wonder, why isn't everyone using this?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:49):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (13:51):
You know, it's like, I often think, “Wait, why are you spending so much effort? I can get you there faster.” But, you know, the other thing I always say to people is that different techniques work for different therapists. There isn’t really a “best” thing. It’s more about what you gravitate to, what resonates with you—speaking of energy—with who you are and how you practice it.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (14:16):
If people want more information, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology’s website—energypsych.org—has a whole section on research and tons of references. It’s sort of the clearinghouse for everyone internationally doing research. People are starting to do research beyond just tapping—other techniques as well. That’s good to see because it was sort of all gold standard EFT research, which is great, but then there are other people doing other things. There’s a little research on sound healing, not that much, so it’s pretty minimal. So the question you’re asking, which is a great question, how does it actually work? We consider it an exposure therapy because you have somebody who has an issue and it’s causing distress.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (15:18):
You have them tune into the issue—whether it was a car accident, whether the issue was they’re feeling depressed. You’re having them tune into that. And what that does when you tune into it, you think about what happened.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D.:
What does tuning into it mean?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (15:18):
Think about it, remember the assault, remember the car accident, think about when you’re feeling depressed. What happens to the limbic system when you do that? You start to go back to the incident, and you’re going to wake up the alarm system in the amygdala. Now you’re in fight-or-flight again. Then you start doing a treatment. As you do the treatment, you’re calming the nervous system down.
The research on tapping—EFT, tapping on acupressure points—through fMRI studies and what we see is that cortisol levels drop. And it's like “Oh that’s kind of interesting” so this brings us to memory reconsolidation. So, what happens with memory reconsolidation? You have an upset, you bring it to mind, you set off all the distress in your nervous system and the amygdala gets woken up. And then, you go through tapping, and depending on what you’re doing -- you may be saying things, you may not be saying things, you can be doing reminding phrases, there are so many techniques-- you’ve reconsolidated. Now you’re thinking about the car accident but your body is really calm, so when it goes back into memory, you’re back in a calm state. Which is what’s happening with -- for example, EMDR. It’s the same thing, you’re getting bilateral stimulation. I also use a lot of energy medicine which is not energy psychology, but things that calm the nervous system down.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (17:30):
But you can also do things like put one hand under your arm and one hand over. Now notice that I’m crossing the midline of my body. That is bilateral stimulation. The hand is on the spleen meridian and this hand on the triple warmer meridian energy. So the spleen meridian is the big nurturing yin feminine energy that we all have -- it’s that mother, worry, or caregiver. And what’s the triple warmer? It’s the flight or fight papa protector energy, We all have this yin and yang energy. We’re balancing it.
We hold this position for about a minute, then we go like this. If someone’s really distressed, they can go back and forth until they feel their body just let go, because you balance that distress and that fight or flight and come into a balanced state. And you’re in a much better position to start doing an intervention with someone because they are calm and they’re balanced.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:38):
Sure, sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (18:40):
I’ve seen people where they were so distressed, and I just had them do something simple. I have them do this thing called heart breathing where you put your hands on top of each other, and you put them on your heart chakra, and take three breaths, three breaths, three breaths. And then everything slowed down and started to make sense. Like, they came in and they were all over the place-- dysregulated. And then I’m like “Okay, let’s talk about what’s going on at work” and so on. And then we have a conversation, and we may decide to do some tapping because whatever is happening at work is restimulating something from the past. I just need to be able to manage it better.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:10):
Let’s talk about that example: something happening at work, triggering something from the past, then do you go to work, and are you going to the past memory and then doing some of the EFT around that? Or are you doing the EFT around the present? Or both?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (19:11):
So, my bias is to go to the past. I feel like that’s where the money is. I am going for the biggest ang for my buck. What I did-- you can just work on the distress at work, but you haven’t gotten to what keeps getting restimulated. And if that doesn’t get restimulated, when your boss is dismissive of you, the way that your parents were, and you’re just like “yeah he’s kind of being a jerk” as opposed to “I can’t believe it”.
What I ended up doing-- and it’s sort of the lovely thing --you can learn how to do the gold standard of how to do stuff. And then half of this gets discovered and it’s in clinical practice. So there’s a lot of different ways people tap. There’s Emotional Freedom Technique, there’s Thought Field Therapy, there’s a lot of other variations. And over time I started thinking, I don’t want to waste my time dealing with the upset with the boss until I’ve dealt with what I call the originating trauma. And I also started looking at some of the other methods and thinking “Oh these other methods have really good points but they’re missing something.” And some of them were scripts. And I decided what was everybody getting at. And I developed my own script. And basically what I do with people is say “Okay, what is your issue?” So then I want to go to the root of the issue. There are other methods where they mention the root but they don’t mention it specifically and I like to be really specific when I mention the root. And then I’ll ask if there is a block to clearing it. So that is something that is done in some methods. And what I found is often in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy, you talk about people’s resistance. Which is often kind of pathologized. So what I look at is, is there a block to healing and releasing whatever the issue is. And if there isn’t one, I want to know what the block is. And there’s some standard blocks like “it’s not safe”. Say you were in a car accident, where you were raped. You’re stuck in hypervigilance. It’s not safe because you’re thinking. So if we can clear that belief that it’s not safe, then they can clear the incident of what happened. There’s a really common thing that comes up for people which is it would be disloyal to someone, to their parents, to their sibling, to their ex husband, whoever they feel to heal, which is that sort of survivor guilt. Like, I’m working with someone right now where it’s this thing of like their parent was unhappy in their life. And how can they go be happy and productive that would outdo their mother?
And that is something that you can talk to someone about forever, but if we clear that, then you start to see -- and I’m starting to see progress with her. She’s been very depressed and stuck and just the other day, she’d been going out and doing things. And I’m like “yes! We need to work on that.”
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:19):
So let me kind of think about some of this stuff. I’m going to compare a lot to EMDR just because that’s my frame of reference there.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (23:25):
Your reference.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:25):
Sure. And so not comparing it to any of the approaches, but in EMDR they use something called a float back, or some call it a bridge back, where you’re starting from the trigger with the boss and then kind of connecting with that emotion, and go back through the memories to the earliest one. I like what you’re saying about going to the memory. Because the way I think about it, it’s almost like we’re being surgical—rather than doing EMDR on every traumatic experience you’ve had. Let’s actually see where it’s affecting you in the present, float back from that and in EMDR you’re connecting with the emotion to get to the earliest memory where the person was experiencing that emotion because of the dysregulation. So it sounds like in this, you’re trying to connect back to where that earliest experience was and then do the healing there to then help change things in the present.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (24:28):
Exactly. My bias is to go back to the earliest memory first and see if you can define it. Sometimes people don’t know what it was, and we can just say whatever happened before they had language or before they can remember. But so frequently, people will tell me, “Oh, it’s something that happened a couple years ago,” and I’ll question that. And then it’s like “well, what about in your family?” Suppose someone was in a horrible car accident and they’re afraid to get in a car. We’re just going to go to that car accident. I mean we can find out, was there an earlier car accident? But it was a car accident right? So you have a single issue that happened recently. That’s very different from developmental trauma, where there’s a constant lack of attunement, abuse, where you’ve got loads of stuff.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:28):
Yeah. Complex PTSD.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (25:30):
Right. In which case, you may have an issue now, but you’re going to be doing 25 other issues and it’s connection to this. And you may have multiple blocks to letting yourself clear it for a while, and then it blocks off and goes away. I don’t know if there’s a certain place where people get to a place of trusting themselves to heal and they’ll allow it. I’m not sure. I’m running several groups right now where I use this technique, and when people first come into the group, people have a lot of blocks and after three or four sessions, every so often a block pops up
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:09):
So, a person comes in, you start with where they are in the present, go back to the past, and then you’re verbally asking what the blockage is? Or…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:20):
Actually, many people use testing.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:28):
Is this muscle testing?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:30):
Muscle testing—or, I mean, this is the woo-woo land of this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:35):
Sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:35):
I use a pendulum as well. I do surrogate testing and I’m working online. And I’ll ask somebody, “Do you have any sense of what the earliest memory is? Or when did you ever feel like this in the past? What comes to mind?” They might say, “Well, in high school.” I’ll ask, “Okay, what was happening?” Then you kind of ask them “Do you think of anything that happened earlier?” They’ll go “I don’t know” and then I’ll go “let me just check”. And I’ll just say “Say there’s an earlier trauma related to this current issue”. And sometimes they’ll just go “Oh, well…” and so on. But sometimes they'll go “I don’t know”, and I’ll go “Okay you’ve got chakras in the palms of your hands, you have one on your forehead, you have one on the top of your head. Put your hands there, let yourself breathe.” And we’re just going to ask if there’s anything that’s going to come to mind. Frequently, this opens insight. And they’ll suddenly go, “Oh, in third grade, blah, blah, blah.”
It’s fascinating. I mean I can give you a great example of someone who was procrastinating. He’s always been a procrastinator through college and papers and all this stuff. He was working on a project. He really needed to get it done and he was very frustrated with himself. And so as we have the conversation about it, I said, “What do you think this is about?” And I’ve been working with him for a while, and I know he has a rough relationship with his dad. His dad used to tell him that he was never going to finish anything because he dropped out of something. You know how kids start stuff and then they’re like “No, not for me”. And his dad was like “You’re never going to finish anything”. So I was saying, “What do you think is connected to procrastination?” And he had all these other ideas, and I said, “I wonder if it’s related to that thing your father said to you”. And he goes “Oh my father, you think everything is related to my father.” And I said “Well, I think that had a profound impact on you.” And then he started to tune into it, and then he got kind of teary. He was like “Yeah, no matter what I was never going to meet his expectations.” And that was so profound and we did the process, and then next week he goes “ I finished the project.” I’ve seen that happen with people but there are still other issues connected to his relationship with his father’s disappointment, but we just keep working on them, and things keep shifting.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:54):
It makes me think about EMDR. You do the float back, somatic approaches like Hakomi, you’re kind of feeling that somatic experience and when was the earliest time, or an IFS, you know how long has that part been around. All these different kinds of methods; essentially to use free association to access the right brain and get that early experience that hasn’t been processed or there’s a lot of charge to it or so on. So you’re identifying that, and then you’re doing these different techniques while the person is thinking about or tuning in to that memory, and then that is basically helping to process it, which of course has the ripple effect on the current situation.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (30:47):
Right. You know what is interesting is you could use IFS. I know there was someone, but unfortunately he has passed away, but he was using IFS and energy psychology. So once you figure out the part, then he was using that with the part. I think you can do that with Hakomi. There’s also a method I trained in called Havening. Havening is similar, where you’re basically rubbing the face, arms, and bottoms of the hands. FMRI studies show those three places, you get the most delta waves in the brain. So again, you’re doing the same thing. You’re thinking of the distress, and then you go through this process. And what they do is a little different but you literally distract the person. So someone says “I had this car accident at this intersection” or “I had this injury and I’m afraid to drive”. So think about that, tune into it, then you start havening, and then we do something where we completely distract the brain. Sometimes I’ve done visualizations like “Where would you like to go” and I’ll take them to the beach. Sometimes we do number games if they’re not afraid of numbers. Sometimes I’ll do alphabet games, and I had a client that was a bird watcher, so he did birds A-Z. So while he was doing this it was amazing. I had people do sports stars or baseball stars. But it uses a lot of the brain. You can’t be thinking about the car accident if you're thinking “Who’s a B baseball player that I know.”
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (32:09):
Oh, interesting.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (32:51):
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (32:53):
I used that with someone who wanted to do energy work, and she could not tolerate really telling me more about what happened. She told me enough that I knew what happened, but I was like, all right, just tune into it. “Are you in there?” Then we did this—now tune in again, you can rate it, use the subjective units of distress, and it just releases it, like, oh, now I’m okay.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:20):
Zero to 10. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:21):
Right. So it’s, you know, havening kind of falls under energy psychology. I got introduced to havening through the energy psychology world. All of this stuff is doing the same thing in the brain.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:36):
Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:38):
You know, it’s memory reconsolidation.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:40):
And you were mentioning that the FMRI study with the different pressure points basically--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:47):
Yeah, with the tapping.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:49):
Have they compared that to, I guess, control tapping, like random tapping or so on?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:57):
You know, I’m not sure about that, because acupuncture will also do the same thing when they put the needles in. But they have used a lot of what they call sham points for studies. They’ll have no treatment, a sham treatment, where they aren’t actually tapping on actual points. Then people are tapping on points. And of course, the people who are on sham points do better than the people who are on a waiting list.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Wait list. Because--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:26):
Again, they’re talking, they’re getting some attention.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:30):
Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:31):
Yeah, I don’t know. That would be an interesting study.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:34):
I want to go back to the question about energy and chakras, and I guess just the conceptualization of, like, when things are going right, what’s our energy like? Or, I don’t know if that’s too big of a question or too big.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:51):
Well, the question is, is it flowing, or does it get stuck? So the idea is, when you have a physical problem in Chinese medicine, you’d say, right, that’s where they put the needle in. Oh, your kidney energy is depleted and we need to get it moving. Or your energy is too much—you have excess and we need to calm it down. Well, the same thing is going on when you’re stressed and traumatized and your cortisol’s up: where is that blocked?
Now, we don’t necessarily pick specific points like an acupuncturist. You go there for a health problem, and they’ll be going, oh, well, you know, you’re having symptoms of X, Y, and Z. This is where we’re gonna put needles. So what you end up doing instead is just tapping on all the points. Yeah. EFT there are specific points you tap for specific issues. And people do EFT differently. That’s the other thing that’s a little like--
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:53):
Which one has specific points and which one do you just--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (35:57):
TFT has specific points. Thought Field Therapy, the original was you tap on specific points. So what they did was a lot of testing people who are depressed, they did muscle testing and said, these are the points. You test them, there’s consistency. I haven’t actually taken the TFT training, so that’s the very reader version. EFT came along, and the person who developed that said, well, why make it so complicated? Just tap all the points.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (36:36):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (36:37):
It’s easier to remember. And you know what’s been really great? I was the chair of the Humanitarian Committee for the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology for six years. We had people working in Africa—they were Swedish, they went to Africa, Rwanda, they went to Congo. They developed a very simple sort of TFT but less complex. They basically did all the points, then a little quick breathing thing, and had everyone do all the points. They did the points for more like 15 taps versus five or six taps, and they didn’t have people say anything. Because one is, if you try to make people remember which points, as opposed to you just learn these points and that’s all you have to know. So that was one thing. And the other thing was, you go to a refugee camp, and people are speaking different languages. So you just don’t have language involved. Well, we actually funded a study that was pretty amazing. It was kids who had been child soldiers in the Congo. And those kids were in a rehab camp where they did acrobatics. But the kids actually said, when the people went in and did the training, this was the most helpful thing. And the research shows they had to do 20 minutes a day for three weeks, and you see happiness scores go up, PTSD symptoms go down, and the PTSD went down three months later.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:13):
Wow. And this is from doing the tapping process?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:18):
You’re just tapping.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:19):
Not that— not even going into— not--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:21):
Not clinical. It’s mental health first aid.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:24):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:25):
You just ask the person to tune in briefly to what they’re upset about. And actually, if anyone wants to, there’s a free app called Self-Help for Trauma at the app store. Doesn’t cost any money. It’s in many, many languages. They actually have basic havening on that app too. They have a little cartoon character that does all these things. The cartoon character doesn’t look human or animal or anything.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:53):
And what’s the app called again?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:56):
Self-Help for Trauma. They have a website with that name. And they’ve done work all over Africa, with Syrian refugees, and Syrian refugees coming to Scandinavian countries. They basically ask people to teach five people once they've learned it. They had entire refugee camps where everyone knew it. It’s really amazing spreading and giving people a really simple tool.
When we had the fires in 2020 in Northern California, one of our members was up there. She brought it to people and used it there. They were using it during—remember the shootings in Las Vegas? One of our members was there and had already connected with a lot of first responders. Using it with them. So it’s just this really simple thing. You put it on an app, you give it to a bunch of kids, and they put it on their phone and then go use it. You don’t even know. I’ve worked with school social workers who are using it with kids as part of their social-emotional learning.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:12):
Wow. Well, that’s great. Such a simple tool, and there’s research supporting it. That’s amazing. Because I think the efficiency and accessibility for folks in distress, and finding what we can help get to people without a great deal of time or money, and being able to use it on their own is great.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (40:40):
Exactly. And the other thing, and I totally respect EMDR, but you don’t get an abreaction hardly ever with energy psychology.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:52):
Actually, one thing I was wondering, do you get any abreaction where somebody’s kind of, I don’t know, opening something up or whatever?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:02):
I’ve had that happen on occasion. I always tell my clients, if something comes up this week and you’re not sleeping or you can’t stop thinking about stuff, you’re in trouble with me if you don’t call me, because I can help you through that pretty quickly. I don’t want you just suffering all week because you don’t have an appointment for a week. You know how rare that is? I think that’s happened one or two times. Sometimes people get distressed while they’re doing it, but by the end they’re pretty calmed down. I have to say, you don’t jump into trauma until you’ve taught someone to stabilize.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:39):
Sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:40):
So it’s not any different than EMDR.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:43):
Yeah. Or other approaches in that way.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:45):
Right. That’s where I teach people energy medicine techniques or just to use trauma tapping techniques, or the app, or do some havening, just to get those delta waves built up so they can feel calmer. I’ve worked with a client who had been horribly, violently sexually abused at a very early age and had forgotten the whole thing. Then, in her late forties, she went to visit some relatives, and everything came up again. I spent months just teaching her to stabilize. She was waking up at night and having nightmares. She needed to be able to stabilize herself before I could release anything.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (42:40):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (42:41):
I also have a person in a group right now who had a lot of childhood sexual abuse. I’ve had several women in groups, and it’s been amazing just the work that we’ve done. Many of her issues are related to violation. But she has started setting limits with people, and also getting some career stuff that wasn’t in order, wanting to isolate less, and getting out in the world more. That’s just in group therapy—she doesn’t even have a therapist.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:25):
Sure, sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (43:26):
She doesn’t have money for individual therapy. The group is really efficient.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:30):
That’s interesting. Well, it sounds like incredible work. Tell me about the sound treatment pieces you were mentioning. Is that just another technique to help shift the energy around whatever the issue is that’s being tuned into?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (43:50):
Yeah. So what I would say is, when I trained, a lot of the people I trained with were body workers, like acupuncturists. There weren’t too many mental health people. So, how do you do this in mental health? There’s someone at the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology who does a lot of sound work. And what he talks about, and what I agree with, is it’s layering. Someone might be tapping through points while I’m making sound in the background. I might be using something that tends to cause things to release, move more quickly, or calm someone down.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:36):
I was gonna say, can we hear one of the sounds?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (44:39):
Yes. So let's hear this. Anytime you use quartz crystal, it tends to move things. And so here’s more quartz. Those bowls were developed in Silicon Valley, believe it or not.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:12):
Oh, no way.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:14):
I thought they must have come from some other country. No, Silicon Valley quartz. Right—crystals used in computers. These, these guys are, let’s see…
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:24):
And so these quartz crystal bowls are these big kinds of round bowls for the folks who can’t see.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:32):
You can sing them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:35):
What are the bowls called that they oftentimes use in meditation?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:43):
Yeah, I have one of these.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:46):
What are they called?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:47):
Well, they’re just—they call them singing bowls.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:49):
Oh, okay.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:54):
So you could do that. It’s gonna do better if you can’t see it, and it’s not in my hand. And then you’ve got, like, these make lovely sounds. Interestingly, these are supposed to help repair DNA. Who knows…They are nice together.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (46:36):
Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (46:38):
So, you know, I have this triangle that makes this triangle really great in person. If I’m working on someone in person—which I’m not, you know, I’m not doing therapy—I’m just doing a calming sound healing thing, and then you put it over their body, and people just love that thing.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (46:58):
Oh, wow. Yeah. So it’s like a pyramid. And so there’s, like, a square that can go over some…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:04):
Right. You can put it over someone's head. You know, I've been thinking of getting something on the ceiling because I don't want to
drop it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:12):
Yeah. Very interesting. And, well, I mean, I think for anybody who's done meditation where they've had the singing bowl, or, you know, oftentimes in schools they'll have a mindful moment, they'll hit the bowl, and oftentimes that in and of itself can be very centering and calming.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:33):
Right. Well, say, for instance, this right here—that's the ohm, which is the earth grounding energy.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:49):
So it can be very calming. I love the story. I was seeing a couple, and she had a horrendous sexual abuse history. It's really, really awful. He was a really sweet guy, a little bit passive. His childhood was, you know, his parents were sort of not super emotionally connected, but there was no abuse. He was just a really gentle, maybe a little passive guy.
She comes into the session, and she's telling me how horrible he's been to her, and she just can't get off of "he's terrible." And she couldn't tell me what he did. And I'm like, she is completely dissociated.
So I just grounded two forks that were grounding and the weighted forks. You're not going to hear this very well. Oh, that's not a good thing to hit it with. I don't know if you can hear that. So I put that up to her ears, like I activated it a few times
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:57):
They're like a vibrant machine sound. Is that what's happening there?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:01):
Yeah. They're not as fun as the other sounds, but they're really powerful. So I put them up to her ears on both sides—I had two of them—and, you know, that thing that you talk about when the deer comes out of the freeze and they shake? She did that. She went, "Okay, so what are we gonna work on today?" And it was like, okay, this is a different personality that has now come into my office.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:25):
Yeah. Wow. Very interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:27):
And it was like, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to get her to go to her own therapy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:33):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:34):
And, in the end, they broke up. And it was actually lovely. I heard from him a few years later announcing that he was marrying somebody else.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:46):
Okay.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:49):
Yeah. I’ve never heard back from her. She needs to do work; she's not ready for a relationship.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:58):
And sometimes you can't get people where they need to go when you want them to go there.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I know that's so hard too with the couples. I've had that before where there's somebody with trauma, and trying to help them get to another therapist, and they just are not doing it. Sometimes they want to do it with you because you're the only person they feel safe with, and going through the whole process with somebody else. But being able to hold all that sometimes is not--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (50:25):
Too much. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:26):
Yeah. So, well, it was great learning more about energy psychology, and definitely, you know, it's great that it's got all this research support. I am very interested and want to learn more about this. This is wonderful. So, you do some training yourself. Where is—so, do you do that through an organization?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (50:48):
I do. So, there are a couple of things. I do a lot of training through Title IV-E funding, which is money for people working with kids in the system. So I've been training those folks. I will probably be training through the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, but I have a colleague in Canada, and we're doing these trainings together. We also can just do a training if we have enough people interested. We just do training. And so I do have the potential for that.
The other thing I do, and people can email me, since April of 2020, I have been doing free energy sound healings. I used to do them twice a week, and I went down to once a week. They're Monday nights. You can email me, and I'll send people the link, and you can just drop in. It's one of those things on Zoom, and I don't ask you to have your camera on. You don't have to have your name showing; you just have to be muted. People drop in, sometimes they have their camera on, most people don't. It's an hour. You can come late, you can leave early. Some people are usually a half hour into it. I go into just a half hour of sound. I have to tell you, I get great benefits too—I get a half hour and when I'm holding stuff, I'm feeling the vibration from people hearing it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:21):
I'm sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:23):
I did have someone who got one of those bodysuits that they use for video games so you can feel yourself being shot at. And she said it was amazing. They're like $500. So I don't think too many people are going to buy one of those.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:40):
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:41):
I forget what they're called. But yeah, just having headphones over the ears can make a huge difference.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:48):
Wow. Incredible.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:49):
People who were doing that during the pandemic said that they were doing better than before the pandemic.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:56):
Wow.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
So it was like a huge gift, but I got the gift. I feel like doing this work—so many therapists were so freaked out, and I was like, oh, I've just been tapping with everyone in their distress and I've let go of mine. And yeah, I was doing it twice a week—sound healings.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Well, that's wonderful. I will link you to your website, and people can also Google and find your website. Great. It's so wonderful to hear about all this work. It's really incredible. I definitely want to learn more. Thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
Good.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Great. Thanks a lot.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
Bye-bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Take care.
Thank you for joining us today. If you'd like to receive continuing education credits for the podcast you just listened to, please go to therapyonthecuttingedge.com and click on the link for CE. Our podcast is brought to you by the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, where we provide trainings for therapists in evidence-based models through live and online workshops, on-demand workshops, consultation groups, and online one-way mirror trainings. To learn more about our trainings and treatment for children, adolescents, families, couples, and individual adults, with our licensed experienced therapists in-person in the Bay Area, or throughout California online, and our employment opportunities, go to sfiap.com. To learn more about our associateships and psych assistantships and low fee treatment through our nonprofit Bay Area Community Counseling and Family Institute of Berkeley, go to sf-bacc.org and familyinstituteofberkeley.com. If you'd like to support therapy for those in financial need and training and evidence-based treatments, you can donate by going to BACC’s website at sfbacc.org. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so all donations are tax deductible. Also, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have something you're interested in, something that's on the cutting edge of the field of psychotherapy, and you think therapists out there should know about it, send us an email. We're always looking for advancements in the field of psychotherapy to create lasting change for our clients.
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advances in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. At the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, we provide training in evidence-based models, including family systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, emotionally focused couples therapy, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, motivational interviewing, and other approaches through live in-person and online trainings, on demand trainings, consultation groups, and one-way mirror trainings. We also have therapists throughout the Bay Area and California providing treatment through our six specialty centers, each grounded in an evidence-based approach, with our Lifespan Centers, Center for Children and Center for Adolescents, where all the therapists are working systemically; our Center for Couples, where all the therapists are using emotionally focused couples therapy; and our specialty issue centers, our Center for Anxiety, where all the therapists are using CBT and EMDR for trauma; and our center for ADHD and oppositional and Conduct Disorder clinic, where we're integrating those four approaches.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (01:32):
In the institute, we have our licensed, experienced therapists, and for those in financial need, we have an associated nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, where clients can work with associates, psych assistants, and licensed clinicians who are developing their abilities and expertise. Additionally, as part of our nonprofit, we also have the Family Institute of Berkeley, where we provide treatment, training, and one-way mirror trainings in family systems. To learn more about trainings, treatment, and employment opportunities, please go to sfiap.com and to support our nonprofit, you can go to sf-bacc.org to donate today to support access to therapy for those in financial need, as well as training in evidence-based treatment. BACC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations are tax deductible.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (02:19):
Today I’ll be speaking with Rachel Michelson, who is a licensed clinical social worker in the State of California with over 35 years of clinical experience, along with providing individual and group psychotherapy. Rachel is a clinical supervisor and consultant who specializes in energy psychology and sound healing. She is a certified diplomate in comprehensive energy psychology and has trained in several energy-based therapeutic modalities, including Emotional Freedom Technique, Havening Techniques, Advanced Integrative Therapy, Tapas Acupressure Technique, PSYCH-K, Trauma Tapping Technique, and other energy medicine techniques. Rachel has developed an energy psychology protocol called Release Issues Past and Present, which she uses with individuals and in groups, and teaches to other mental health providers. Rachel often integrates sound healing by utilizing calibrated tuning forks and chimes to facilitate change. For over 25 years, Rachel has been providing training to mental health professionals on a variety of topics, including energy psychology, sound healing, trauma-informed care, clinical supervision, law and ethics, telehealth, diagnoses, time and paperwork management, and suicide. Rachel is a past chair of the Association of Comprehensive Energy Psychology’s Humanitarian Committee. Let’s listen to the interview.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:40):
Hi, Rachel. Welcome.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (03:42):
Thank you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (03:43):
Thanks for joining me today. I know you from the supervision, law, and ethics workshop you’ve been doing for the last few years through our nonprofit, Bay Area Community Counseling, which has been great. I’ve been going every year to keep up to date, both for my CEU and for the developments around supervision and law and ethics. I also know that you do work in energy psychology and that you also do some music or sound therapy work. I would love to learn more about all the work that you’re doing, but before we get to that, I always like to hear about how people got to doing what they’re doing — the evolution of their thinking that led them to this work.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (04:29):
Great. Well, it’s a very personal journey because my training and background was very psychodynamic, and I had been in a lot of psychodynamic therapy. I had some chronic health problems and chronic low-grade depression, and I was seeing an acupuncturist, and he had heard of energy psychology. He said, “I think you’d really like this for your clients,” and he was really into it. So he suggested I go to a training or a conference, and I went to a pre-conference. I learned a bunch of techniques and started using them right away. I thought, “Wow, this is moving things really quickly.” Then I did another training and thought, “I think I ought to do this for myself.” So I started working with an energy psychologist, and it really shifted things — it was a huge shift for me personally. But I had seen that with clients as well. So it felt like a whole different way of working and thinking about things. It’s a very trauma-informed way, and it’s also less pathologizing than my experience with other things so I felt really good about it and started doing more and more training, and eventually started training people as well as doing the work.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:03):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP: (06:04):
And so, I mean, it’s always kind of cool when you have the healing experience yourself.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (06:10):
Yeah, definitely. Well, that’s great that you’ve both seen it be successful with clients as well as had your own experience of it. So tell me, what is energy psychology? You know, we’re in Northern California here, and there’s lots of different stuff, and I’ve always heard about it and learned a little bit here and there, but I’ve never quite really gotten in depth about it.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (06:33):
Yeah. And what’s interesting is that Northern California has not been a hotbed. I’ve kind of been a weirdo because I’ve been doing this for 20 years, so it’s kind of like, “Oh, there are other parts of the country where you see a lot more.” Although now there are people going, “Oh yeah, I do tapping.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So what is energy psychology? It’s really a way of using the subtle energy that we all have in our body to shift behaviors or issues that aren’t working for people. It can be used for physical stuff, for performance, and it’s very effective with anxiety, depression, PTSD, but really a huge variety of things. So you could think of it as sort of a cognitive-somatic practice. You’re taking a cognitive approach — you’re taking a thought — and thoughts have energy signatures, particularly when someone has trauma.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (07:39):
I also look at trauma in a much broader way. That’s one of the things I’ve learned: what’s the cause of somebody’s depression or their procrastination? If you look historically, you can usually find something that happened in the past. Could be a big “T” or a little “t” trauma that is connected. So if you can figure out the original cause, you can often make huge shifts. A lot of people do EFT; they learn it on TikTok or YouTube, and they’re not really learning clinical EFT, they’re learning self-help EFT, which is great, but it isn’t the full clinical approach.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (08:26):
That’s EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (08:29):
Right. The “emotional” one. Not the other one. I’m always like, what does the “E” stand for in that one? What you’re looking at is the difference between helping someone find some regulation in their nervous system versus getting into the clinical issue and really releasing and breaking up that pattern energetically. There’s a lot of different techniques, so we might be using the subtle energy, the qi, that we see in access through acupressure points that traditional Chinese medicine has been using forever. We also use chakras, which are used in Vedic practices from South Asia. We might use combinations, and some people do just words as energy — and the word changes. That’s always interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (09:27):
Then, if you throw in sound healing-- so you can use sound healing for so many things and I have lots and lots of tuning forks — here are some tuning forks. There are acupuncturists who use tuning forks on acupuncture points. What I found during the pandemic is that I could bring in tuning forks as an addition to what we’re doing. Because it’s easier, people can have their headphones on, and I can either use my mic or put it near the mic in the computer while they’re doing a process on themselves, whether they’re tapping or holding a chakra.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (10:07):
Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (10:08):
And what happens is things do move more quickly. It's kind of fascinating. I started seeing that when I was seeing people in the office and then shifted over. I was like, oh, this is so much easier—put their headphones on and it's right there. And as someone who's not really going to be putting things on people's bodies…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (10:31):
I have done some sound healing, particularly on friends post-surgery, that was really effective on scar tissue and that kind of thing. It made inflammation and swelling go down. So vibration, right? Energy is vibration. Sound is vibration. Yeah. So there are lots of—well, you can see—I have bowls here, chimes, different kinds of chimes. I have this quartz crystal chime, and then I have lots and lots of tuning forks. So different things, theoretically, they each have different purposes. I must say the research is thin.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:15):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (11:17):
So I kind of go with… you know, I've trained with several different schools of sound healing. Some people say, “You have to use this for that,” and other people are like, “Well, just see what feels right and notice the feedback from the client.” That tends to be the way I work. You could have all kinds of evidence-based everything, and then you have someone where what’s supposed to work doesn’t. And then you have to tune into what it is that your intuition is telling you, and what the feedback loop is telling you.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (11:47):
Sure. Well, and I think too… I’m trained in EMDR, and I know that there's oftentimes skepticism around that—how it really works or so on. But it works, and there’s great evidence. I also know there’s some research on energy psychology supporting it. I’m curious about the conceptualization. And again, I may just have a lack of knowledge around energy, chakras, and those points—but can you talk a little bit about what…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (12:23):
What's happening? Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (12:24):
I guess, how is the energy supposed to be, and what's leading to the problem—like depression or so on? Is the energy blocked, the wrong frequency, or… how does that even work?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (12:38):
So let me just tell you a little bit about the research first, and then I’ll talk about what I think is happening—which is actually a lot like EMDR. So just for people to know, there are over 200 research studies that document the effectiveness of energy psychology. 103 of these are randomized controlled trials. Ninety-five percent use pre- and post-clinical outcomes, and of those studies 99% showed energy psychology to be effective. There are nine meta-analyses that show it to be effective for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. There is a study of veterans, 86% no longer had PTSD symptoms after treatment. There are also eight studies comparing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and energy psychology—energy psychology was either equivalent to or more effective than CBT, and it achieved similar results in less time. Makes you wonder, why isn't everyone using this?
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (13:49):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (13:51):
You know, it's like, I often think, “Wait, why are you spending so much effort? I can get you there faster.” But, you know, the other thing I always say to people is that different techniques work for different therapists. There isn’t really a “best” thing. It’s more about what you gravitate to, what resonates with you—speaking of energy—with who you are and how you practice it.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (14:16):
If people want more information, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology’s website—energypsych.org—has a whole section on research and tons of references. It’s sort of the clearinghouse for everyone internationally doing research. People are starting to do research beyond just tapping—other techniques as well. That’s good to see because it was sort of all gold standard EFT research, which is great, but then there are other people doing other things. There’s a little research on sound healing, not that much, so it’s pretty minimal. So the question you’re asking, which is a great question, how does it actually work? We consider it an exposure therapy because you have somebody who has an issue and it’s causing distress.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (15:18):
You have them tune into the issue—whether it was a car accident, whether the issue was they’re feeling depressed. You’re having them tune into that. And what that does when you tune into it, you think about what happened.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D.:
What does tuning into it mean?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (15:18):
Think about it, remember the assault, remember the car accident, think about when you’re feeling depressed. What happens to the limbic system when you do that? You start to go back to the incident, and you’re going to wake up the alarm system in the amygdala. Now you’re in fight-or-flight again. Then you start doing a treatment. As you do the treatment, you’re calming the nervous system down.
The research on tapping—EFT, tapping on acupressure points—through fMRI studies and what we see is that cortisol levels drop. And it's like “Oh that’s kind of interesting” so this brings us to memory reconsolidation. So, what happens with memory reconsolidation? You have an upset, you bring it to mind, you set off all the distress in your nervous system and the amygdala gets woken up. And then, you go through tapping, and depending on what you’re doing -- you may be saying things, you may not be saying things, you can be doing reminding phrases, there are so many techniques-- you’ve reconsolidated. Now you’re thinking about the car accident but your body is really calm, so when it goes back into memory, you’re back in a calm state. Which is what’s happening with -- for example, EMDR. It’s the same thing, you’re getting bilateral stimulation. I also use a lot of energy medicine which is not energy psychology, but things that calm the nervous system down.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (17:30):
But you can also do things like put one hand under your arm and one hand over. Now notice that I’m crossing the midline of my body. That is bilateral stimulation. The hand is on the spleen meridian and this hand on the triple warmer meridian energy. So the spleen meridian is the big nurturing yin feminine energy that we all have -- it’s that mother, worry, or caregiver. And what’s the triple warmer? It’s the flight or fight papa protector energy, We all have this yin and yang energy. We’re balancing it.
We hold this position for about a minute, then we go like this. If someone’s really distressed, they can go back and forth until they feel their body just let go, because you balance that distress and that fight or flight and come into a balanced state. And you’re in a much better position to start doing an intervention with someone because they are calm and they’re balanced.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (18:38):
Sure, sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (18:40):
I’ve seen people where they were so distressed, and I just had them do something simple. I have them do this thing called heart breathing where you put your hands on top of each other, and you put them on your heart chakra, and take three breaths, three breaths, three breaths. And then everything slowed down and started to make sense. Like, they came in and they were all over the place-- dysregulated. And then I’m like “Okay, let’s talk about what’s going on at work” and so on. And then we have a conversation, and we may decide to do some tapping because whatever is happening at work is restimulating something from the past. I just need to be able to manage it better.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (19:10):
Let’s talk about that example: something happening at work, triggering something from the past, then do you go to work, and are you going to the past memory and then doing some of the EFT around that? Or are you doing the EFT around the present? Or both?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (19:11):
So, my bias is to go to the past. I feel like that’s where the money is. I am going for the biggest ang for my buck. What I did-- you can just work on the distress at work, but you haven’t gotten to what keeps getting restimulated. And if that doesn’t get restimulated, when your boss is dismissive of you, the way that your parents were, and you’re just like “yeah he’s kind of being a jerk” as opposed to “I can’t believe it”.
What I ended up doing-- and it’s sort of the lovely thing --you can learn how to do the gold standard of how to do stuff. And then half of this gets discovered and it’s in clinical practice. So there’s a lot of different ways people tap. There’s Emotional Freedom Technique, there’s Thought Field Therapy, there’s a lot of other variations. And over time I started thinking, I don’t want to waste my time dealing with the upset with the boss until I’ve dealt with what I call the originating trauma. And I also started looking at some of the other methods and thinking “Oh these other methods have really good points but they’re missing something.” And some of them were scripts. And I decided what was everybody getting at. And I developed my own script. And basically what I do with people is say “Okay, what is your issue?” So then I want to go to the root of the issue. There are other methods where they mention the root but they don’t mention it specifically and I like to be really specific when I mention the root. And then I’ll ask if there is a block to clearing it. So that is something that is done in some methods. And what I found is often in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy, you talk about people’s resistance. Which is often kind of pathologized. So what I look at is, is there a block to healing and releasing whatever the issue is. And if there isn’t one, I want to know what the block is. And there’s some standard blocks like “it’s not safe”. Say you were in a car accident, where you were raped. You’re stuck in hypervigilance. It’s not safe because you’re thinking. So if we can clear that belief that it’s not safe, then they can clear the incident of what happened. There’s a really common thing that comes up for people which is it would be disloyal to someone, to their parents, to their sibling, to their ex husband, whoever they feel to heal, which is that sort of survivor guilt. Like, I’m working with someone right now where it’s this thing of like their parent was unhappy in their life. And how can they go be happy and productive that would outdo their mother?
And that is something that you can talk to someone about forever, but if we clear that, then you start to see -- and I’m starting to see progress with her. She’s been very depressed and stuck and just the other day, she’d been going out and doing things. And I’m like “yes! We need to work on that.”
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:19):
So let me kind of think about some of this stuff. I’m going to compare a lot to EMDR just because that’s my frame of reference there.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (23:25):
Your reference.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (23:25):
Sure. And so not comparing it to any of the approaches, but in EMDR they use something called a float back, or some call it a bridge back, where you’re starting from the trigger with the boss and then kind of connecting with that emotion, and go back through the memories to the earliest one. I like what you’re saying about going to the memory. Because the way I think about it, it’s almost like we’re being surgical—rather than doing EMDR on every traumatic experience you’ve had. Let’s actually see where it’s affecting you in the present, float back from that and in EMDR you’re connecting with the emotion to get to the earliest memory where the person was experiencing that emotion because of the dysregulation. So it sounds like in this, you’re trying to connect back to where that earliest experience was and then do the healing there to then help change things in the present.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (24:28):
Exactly. My bias is to go back to the earliest memory first and see if you can define it. Sometimes people don’t know what it was, and we can just say whatever happened before they had language or before they can remember. But so frequently, people will tell me, “Oh, it’s something that happened a couple years ago,” and I’ll question that. And then it’s like “well, what about in your family?” Suppose someone was in a horrible car accident and they’re afraid to get in a car. We’re just going to go to that car accident. I mean we can find out, was there an earlier car accident? But it was a car accident right? So you have a single issue that happened recently. That’s very different from developmental trauma, where there’s a constant lack of attunement, abuse, where you’ve got loads of stuff.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (25:28):
Yeah. Complex PTSD.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (25:30):
Right. In which case, you may have an issue now, but you’re going to be doing 25 other issues and it’s connection to this. And you may have multiple blocks to letting yourself clear it for a while, and then it blocks off and goes away. I don’t know if there’s a certain place where people get to a place of trusting themselves to heal and they’ll allow it. I’m not sure. I’m running several groups right now where I use this technique, and when people first come into the group, people have a lot of blocks and after three or four sessions, every so often a block pops up
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:09):
So, a person comes in, you start with where they are in the present, go back to the past, and then you’re verbally asking what the blockage is? Or…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:20):
Actually, many people use testing.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:28):
Is this muscle testing?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:30):
Muscle testing—or, I mean, this is the woo-woo land of this.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (26:35):
Sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (26:35):
I use a pendulum as well. I do surrogate testing and I’m working online. And I’ll ask somebody, “Do you have any sense of what the earliest memory is? Or when did you ever feel like this in the past? What comes to mind?” They might say, “Well, in high school.” I’ll ask, “Okay, what was happening?” Then you kind of ask them “Do you think of anything that happened earlier?” They’ll go “I don’t know” and then I’ll go “let me just check”. And I’ll just say “Say there’s an earlier trauma related to this current issue”. And sometimes they’ll just go “Oh, well…” and so on. But sometimes they'll go “I don’t know”, and I’ll go “Okay you’ve got chakras in the palms of your hands, you have one on your forehead, you have one on the top of your head. Put your hands there, let yourself breathe.” And we’re just going to ask if there’s anything that’s going to come to mind. Frequently, this opens insight. And they’ll suddenly go, “Oh, in third grade, blah, blah, blah.”
It’s fascinating. I mean I can give you a great example of someone who was procrastinating. He’s always been a procrastinator through college and papers and all this stuff. He was working on a project. He really needed to get it done and he was very frustrated with himself. And so as we have the conversation about it, I said, “What do you think this is about?” And I’ve been working with him for a while, and I know he has a rough relationship with his dad. His dad used to tell him that he was never going to finish anything because he dropped out of something. You know how kids start stuff and then they’re like “No, not for me”. And his dad was like “You’re never going to finish anything”. So I was saying, “What do you think is connected to procrastination?” And he had all these other ideas, and I said, “I wonder if it’s related to that thing your father said to you”. And he goes “Oh my father, you think everything is related to my father.” And I said “Well, I think that had a profound impact on you.” And then he started to tune into it, and then he got kind of teary. He was like “Yeah, no matter what I was never going to meet his expectations.” And that was so profound and we did the process, and then next week he goes “ I finished the project.” I’ve seen that happen with people but there are still other issues connected to his relationship with his father’s disappointment, but we just keep working on them, and things keep shifting.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (29:54):
It makes me think about EMDR. You do the float back, somatic approaches like Hakomi, you’re kind of feeling that somatic experience and when was the earliest time, or an IFS, you know how long has that part been around. All these different kinds of methods; essentially to use free association to access the right brain and get that early experience that hasn’t been processed or there’s a lot of charge to it or so on. So you’re identifying that, and then you’re doing these different techniques while the person is thinking about or tuning in to that memory, and then that is basically helping to process it, which of course has the ripple effect on the current situation.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (30:47):
Right. You know what is interesting is you could use IFS. I know there was someone, but unfortunately he has passed away, but he was using IFS and energy psychology. So once you figure out the part, then he was using that with the part. I think you can do that with Hakomi. There’s also a method I trained in called Havening. Havening is similar, where you’re basically rubbing the face, arms, and bottoms of the hands. FMRI studies show those three places, you get the most delta waves in the brain. So again, you’re doing the same thing. You’re thinking of the distress, and then you go through this process. And what they do is a little different but you literally distract the person. So someone says “I had this car accident at this intersection” or “I had this injury and I’m afraid to drive”. So think about that, tune into it, then you start havening, and then we do something where we completely distract the brain. Sometimes I’ve done visualizations like “Where would you like to go” and I’ll take them to the beach. Sometimes we do number games if they’re not afraid of numbers. Sometimes I’ll do alphabet games, and I had a client that was a bird watcher, so he did birds A-Z. So while he was doing this it was amazing. I had people do sports stars or baseball stars. But it uses a lot of the brain. You can’t be thinking about the car accident if you're thinking “Who’s a B baseball player that I know.”
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (32:09):
Oh, interesting.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (32:51):
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (32:53):
I used that with someone who wanted to do energy work, and she could not tolerate really telling me more about what happened. She told me enough that I knew what happened, but I was like, all right, just tune into it. “Are you in there?” Then we did this—now tune in again, you can rate it, use the subjective units of distress, and it just releases it, like, oh, now I’m okay.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:20):
Zero to 10. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:21):
Right. So it’s, you know, havening kind of falls under energy psychology. I got introduced to havening through the energy psychology world. All of this stuff is doing the same thing in the brain.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:36):
Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:38):
You know, it’s memory reconsolidation.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:40):
And you were mentioning that the FMRI study with the different pressure points basically--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:47):
Yeah, with the tapping.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (33:49):
Have they compared that to, I guess, control tapping, like random tapping or so on?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (33:57):
You know, I’m not sure about that, because acupuncture will also do the same thing when they put the needles in. But they have used a lot of what they call sham points for studies. They’ll have no treatment, a sham treatment, where they aren’t actually tapping on actual points. Then people are tapping on points. And of course, the people who are on sham points do better than the people who are on a waiting list.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:25):
Yeah. Yeah. Wait list. Because--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:26):
Again, they’re talking, they’re getting some attention.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:30):
Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:31):
Yeah, I don’t know. That would be an interesting study.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (34:34):
I want to go back to the question about energy and chakras, and I guess just the conceptualization of, like, when things are going right, what’s our energy like? Or, I don’t know if that’s too big of a question or too big.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (34:51):
Well, the question is, is it flowing, or does it get stuck? So the idea is, when you have a physical problem in Chinese medicine, you’d say, right, that’s where they put the needle in. Oh, your kidney energy is depleted and we need to get it moving. Or your energy is too much—you have excess and we need to calm it down. Well, the same thing is going on when you’re stressed and traumatized and your cortisol’s up: where is that blocked?
Now, we don’t necessarily pick specific points like an acupuncturist. You go there for a health problem, and they’ll be going, oh, well, you know, you’re having symptoms of X, Y, and Z. This is where we’re gonna put needles. So what you end up doing instead is just tapping on all the points. Yeah. EFT there are specific points you tap for specific issues. And people do EFT differently. That’s the other thing that’s a little like--
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (35:53):
Which one has specific points and which one do you just--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (35:57):
TFT has specific points. Thought Field Therapy, the original was you tap on specific points. So what they did was a lot of testing people who are depressed, they did muscle testing and said, these are the points. You test them, there’s consistency. I haven’t actually taken the TFT training, so that’s the very reader version. EFT came along, and the person who developed that said, well, why make it so complicated? Just tap all the points.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (36:36):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (36:37):
It’s easier to remember. And you know what’s been really great? I was the chair of the Humanitarian Committee for the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology for six years. We had people working in Africa—they were Swedish, they went to Africa, Rwanda, they went to Congo. They developed a very simple sort of TFT but less complex. They basically did all the points, then a little quick breathing thing, and had everyone do all the points. They did the points for more like 15 taps versus five or six taps, and they didn’t have people say anything. Because one is, if you try to make people remember which points, as opposed to you just learn these points and that’s all you have to know. So that was one thing. And the other thing was, you go to a refugee camp, and people are speaking different languages. So you just don’t have language involved. Well, we actually funded a study that was pretty amazing. It was kids who had been child soldiers in the Congo. And those kids were in a rehab camp where they did acrobatics. But the kids actually said, when the people went in and did the training, this was the most helpful thing. And the research shows they had to do 20 minutes a day for three weeks, and you see happiness scores go up, PTSD symptoms go down, and the PTSD went down three months later.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:13):
Wow. And this is from doing the tapping process?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:18):
You’re just tapping.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:19):
Not that— not even going into— not--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:21):
Not clinical. It’s mental health first aid.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:24):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:25):
You just ask the person to tune in briefly to what they’re upset about. And actually, if anyone wants to, there’s a free app called Self-Help for Trauma at the app store. Doesn’t cost any money. It’s in many, many languages. They actually have basic havening on that app too. They have a little cartoon character that does all these things. The cartoon character doesn’t look human or animal or anything.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (38:53):
And what’s the app called again?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (38:56):
Self-Help for Trauma. They have a website with that name. And they’ve done work all over Africa, with Syrian refugees, and Syrian refugees coming to Scandinavian countries. They basically ask people to teach five people once they've learned it. They had entire refugee camps where everyone knew it. It’s really amazing spreading and giving people a really simple tool.
When we had the fires in 2020 in Northern California, one of our members was up there. She brought it to people and used it there. They were using it during—remember the shootings in Las Vegas? One of our members was there and had already connected with a lot of first responders. Using it with them. So it’s just this really simple thing. You put it on an app, you give it to a bunch of kids, and they put it on their phone and then go use it. You don’t even know. I’ve worked with school social workers who are using it with kids as part of their social-emotional learning.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:12):
Wow. Well, that’s great. Such a simple tool, and there’s research supporting it. That’s amazing. Because I think the efficiency and accessibility for folks in distress, and finding what we can help get to people without a great deal of time or money, and being able to use it on their own is great.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (40:40):
Exactly. And the other thing, and I totally respect EMDR, but you don’t get an abreaction hardly ever with energy psychology.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (40:52):
Actually, one thing I was wondering, do you get any abreaction where somebody’s kind of, I don’t know, opening something up or whatever?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:02):
I’ve had that happen on occasion. I always tell my clients, if something comes up this week and you’re not sleeping or you can’t stop thinking about stuff, you’re in trouble with me if you don’t call me, because I can help you through that pretty quickly. I don’t want you just suffering all week because you don’t have an appointment for a week. You know how rare that is? I think that’s happened one or two times. Sometimes people get distressed while they’re doing it, but by the end they’re pretty calmed down. I have to say, you don’t jump into trauma until you’ve taught someone to stabilize.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:39):
Sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:40):
So it’s not any different than EMDR.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (41:43):
Yeah. Or other approaches in that way.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (41:45):
Right. That’s where I teach people energy medicine techniques or just to use trauma tapping techniques, or the app, or do some havening, just to get those delta waves built up so they can feel calmer. I’ve worked with a client who had been horribly, violently sexually abused at a very early age and had forgotten the whole thing. Then, in her late forties, she went to visit some relatives, and everything came up again. I spent months just teaching her to stabilize. She was waking up at night and having nightmares. She needed to be able to stabilize herself before I could release anything.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (42:40):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (42:41):
I also have a person in a group right now who had a lot of childhood sexual abuse. I’ve had several women in groups, and it’s been amazing just the work that we’ve done. Many of her issues are related to violation. But she has started setting limits with people, and also getting some career stuff that wasn’t in order, wanting to isolate less, and getting out in the world more. That’s just in group therapy—she doesn’t even have a therapist.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:25):
Sure, sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (43:26):
She doesn’t have money for individual therapy. The group is really efficient.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (43:30):
That’s interesting. Well, it sounds like incredible work. Tell me about the sound treatment pieces you were mentioning. Is that just another technique to help shift the energy around whatever the issue is that’s being tuned into?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (43:50):
Yeah. So what I would say is, when I trained, a lot of the people I trained with were body workers, like acupuncturists. There weren’t too many mental health people. So, how do you do this in mental health? There’s someone at the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology who does a lot of sound work. And what he talks about, and what I agree with, is it’s layering. Someone might be tapping through points while I’m making sound in the background. I might be using something that tends to cause things to release, move more quickly, or calm someone down.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (44:36):
I was gonna say, can we hear one of the sounds?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (44:39):
Yes. So let's hear this. Anytime you use quartz crystal, it tends to move things. And so here’s more quartz. Those bowls were developed in Silicon Valley, believe it or not.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:12):
Oh, no way.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:14):
I thought they must have come from some other country. No, Silicon Valley quartz. Right—crystals used in computers. These, these guys are, let’s see…
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:24):
And so these quartz crystal bowls are these big kinds of round bowls for the folks who can’t see.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:32):
You can sing them.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:35):
What are the bowls called that they oftentimes use in meditation?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:43):
Yeah, I have one of these.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:46):
What are they called?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:47):
Well, they’re just—they call them singing bowls.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (45:49):
Oh, okay.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (45:54):
So you could do that. It’s gonna do better if you can’t see it, and it’s not in my hand. And then you’ve got, like, these make lovely sounds. Interestingly, these are supposed to help repair DNA. Who knows…They are nice together.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (46:36):
Yeah. Interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (46:38):
So, you know, I have this triangle that makes this triangle really great in person. If I’m working on someone in person—which I’m not, you know, I’m not doing therapy—I’m just doing a calming sound healing thing, and then you put it over their body, and people just love that thing.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (46:58):
Oh, wow. Yeah. So it’s like a pyramid. And so there’s, like, a square that can go over some…
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:04):
Right. You can put it over someone's head. You know, I've been thinking of getting something on the ceiling because I don't want to
drop it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (47:12):
Yeah. Very interesting. And, well, I mean, I think for anybody who's done meditation where they've had the singing bowl, or, you know, oftentimes in schools they'll have a mindful moment, they'll hit the bowl, and oftentimes that in and of itself can be very centering and calming.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:33):
Right. Well, say, for instance, this right here—that's the ohm, which is the earth grounding energy.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (47:49):
So it can be very calming. I love the story. I was seeing a couple, and she had a horrendous sexual abuse history. It's really, really awful. He was a really sweet guy, a little bit passive. His childhood was, you know, his parents were sort of not super emotionally connected, but there was no abuse. He was just a really gentle, maybe a little passive guy.
She comes into the session, and she's telling me how horrible he's been to her, and she just can't get off of "he's terrible." And she couldn't tell me what he did. And I'm like, she is completely dissociated.
So I just grounded two forks that were grounding and the weighted forks. You're not going to hear this very well. Oh, that's not a good thing to hit it with. I don't know if you can hear that. So I put that up to her ears, like I activated it a few times
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (48:57):
They're like a vibrant machine sound. Is that what's happening there?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:01):
Yeah. They're not as fun as the other sounds, but they're really powerful. So I put them up to her ears on both sides—I had two of them—and, you know, that thing that you talk about when the deer comes out of the freeze and they shake? She did that. She went, "Okay, so what are we gonna work on today?" And it was like, okay, this is a different personality that has now come into my office.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:25):
Yeah. Wow. Very interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:27):
And it was like, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to get her to go to her own therapy.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:33):
Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:34):
And, in the end, they broke up. And it was actually lovely. I heard from him a few years later announcing that he was marrying somebody else.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:46):
Okay.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:49):
Yeah. I’ve never heard back from her. She needs to do work; she's not ready for a relationship.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (49:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (49:58):
And sometimes you can't get people where they need to go when you want them to go there.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:04):
Yeah. Yeah. I know that's so hard too with the couples. I've had that before where there's somebody with trauma, and trying to help them get to another therapist, and they just are not doing it. Sometimes they want to do it with you because you're the only person they feel safe with, and going through the whole process with somebody else. But being able to hold all that sometimes is not--
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (50:25):
Too much. Yeah.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (50:26):
Yeah. So, well, it was great learning more about energy psychology, and definitely, you know, it's great that it's got all this research support. I am very interested and want to learn more about this. This is wonderful. So, you do some training yourself. Where is—so, do you do that through an organization?
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (50:48):
I do. So, there are a couple of things. I do a lot of training through Title IV-E funding, which is money for people working with kids in the system. So I've been training those folks. I will probably be training through the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, but I have a colleague in Canada, and we're doing these trainings together. We also can just do a training if we have enough people interested. We just do training. And so I do have the potential for that.
The other thing I do, and people can email me, since April of 2020, I have been doing free energy sound healings. I used to do them twice a week, and I went down to once a week. They're Monday nights. You can email me, and I'll send people the link, and you can just drop in. It's one of those things on Zoom, and I don't ask you to have your camera on. You don't have to have your name showing; you just have to be muted. People drop in, sometimes they have their camera on, most people don't. It's an hour. You can come late, you can leave early. Some people are usually a half hour into it. I go into just a half hour of sound. I have to tell you, I get great benefits too—I get a half hour and when I'm holding stuff, I'm feeling the vibration from people hearing it.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:21):
I'm sure.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:23):
I did have someone who got one of those bodysuits that they use for video games so you can feel yourself being shot at. And she said it was amazing. They're like $500. So I don't think too many people are going to buy one of those.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:40):
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:41):
I forget what they're called. But yeah, just having headphones over the ears can make a huge difference.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:48):
Wow. Incredible.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:49):
People who were doing that during the pandemic said that they were doing better than before the pandemic.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (52:56):
Wow.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
So it was like a huge gift, but I got the gift. I feel like doing this work—so many therapists were so freaked out, and I was like, oh, I've just been tapping with everyone in their distress and I've let go of mine. And yeah, I was doing it twice a week—sound healings.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Well, that's wonderful. I will link you to your website, and people can also Google and find your website. Great. It's so wonderful to hear about all this work. It's really incredible. I definitely want to learn more. Thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
Good.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Great. Thanks a lot.
Rachel Michaelson, LCSW, D-CEP (52:57):
Bye-bye.
Keith Sutton, Psy.D. (53:15):
Take care.
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