Fred Gallo Interview, Start (Page 1)
Fred Gallo, Ph.D., Energy Psychology, An Interview - Page 2
By Jay Kantor, Ph.D. , Ridgewood, NJ, EFTNJ.Com, 201-461-7347
Appearing on EnergyPsychology.US  

Jay Kantor (JK): How did you get involved in this new field of energy psychology?

Fred Gallo (FG): I had been working psychotherapeutically with people, using approaches such as Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), cognitive therapy, and EMDR -- Eye Movement Desensitization And Reprocessing.  I was getting results for people, but there were some people that just didn't seem to get movement.  I was especially concerned about people with traumas.

      It was at that time that I came across an article by Rodger Callahan (the founder of Thought Field Therapy, the first well-known system of energy psychology) where he talked about treating addictions by having people tap under their eye or under their arm.  I thought that it was absurd.

      I put the article aside and I didn't think about it any more, until I was in a session with a lady who had an addiction to pain medications.  I was trying a procedure called "Rational-Emotive Imagery."  It's a cognitive procedure in which you teach the person to tell themselves something different about their urge, which makes the urge go away.  Actually, it can make the urge go down but it doesn't seem to cure the urge.

      You learn that you're telling yourself something about the urge, and the belief is that it's what you're telling yourself that makes the urge so powerful.  The idea in cognitive therapy is that if you can change what you're telling yourself, you can change how you feel.

      I was trying this with her, and we could get the urge down but it came right back.  We weren't really getting anywhere.  Then I remembered the article I'd read, and I asked her if she'd like to try something.  I said, "Here's what you do. It's really odd, you tap under your eye with your fingers.  You just poke yourself."  Under your eye there's a bony orbit and you just tap on the bony orbit, or you reach under the arm about 6 inches and slap on the side.  She was game, so I took her through this, going back and forth between those points.

      Lo and behold, her urge comes from a self-rating of a 10 down to a 4.  The interesting thing was that, even though it got down to a 4, something we had also made happen with the Rational-Emotive Imagery, this time she couldn't get the urge back up again.  No matter how much she tried, it stayed down at a 4.  I couldn't get it below a 4 either but I figured that there must be something to this, even though I didn't know exactly what it was.  I searched out Callahan and talked to him and started looking at his work.

      I have people come to me in who have had some terrible traumas.  I remember a particular lady who was raped when she was 13 years old, and I never seemed to be able to help her with that.  During therapy, we could try to help her to not think about it.  It seemed to be the root of a lot of her problems.  She would become suicidal and abuse alcohol and drugs.

      I would try to help her think about it differently.  That approach is called "Cognitive Therapy."  In cognitive therapy, I would try to have her see the event in the past and let it go.  It didn't seem like she could let it go, no matter how much I told her to.

      It reminds me of a Monty Python movie in which a woman had an obsession about cutting paper, and she's seeing this psychoanalyst, and he says, "Don't cut paper," like that's supposed to cure her.

      Anyway, this client, who had previously stopped coming for therapy, came back to see me because she was having some problems with her mother.  I decided to try the tapping with her and I asked her to think about the thing she was upset about with her mother.  I took her through the process of tapping on different places on her body, like under her eye, under her arm, and under her collar bone.

             After a few moments of doing this, we're talking about maybe two minutes, it didn't bother her anymore.  She said, "Oh, well, my mother... she's always been like that.  It's no big deal."  She went from one moment of upsetness to

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