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Over the past three years I have used a form of treatment to address various aspects of emotional psychological trauma. These have ranged from child abuse victims to paramedics with PTSD - generally with good success. Within the realms of psychotherapy this comes under the umbrella of energy psychotherapy. This type of approach to trauma is gaining increasing interest and credibility within psychotherapy (with it usual detractors as well).

Podiatrically I have used it on patients whose gait pattern appear, to me, to be inhibited by the trauma experience of, e.g., a fall.

Two cases include:

1. A lady with a broken fibula resulting from a fall on a icy path. Although the injury was healed up there remained a tentative step, an increased unilateral circumduction and antalgic gait. Treatment for the trauma immediatly removed the antalgic gait, reduced the circumduction and improved the weight bearing more towards bilateral eveness.

2. A lady whose gait has been toe / heel, unilaterally, for twenty five years. This followed a fall whilst arising from a hospital bed after a hip replacement. No amount of reasoning or re-education of the gait seemd to give the woman ability to change it. I then treated her for the trauma of the incident twenty five years ago. No great miracle occured but she was, with instruction, immedaitely able to move into a heel toe gait action. She expressed feeling much more stable in this pattern but we did have to spend some time "programming" the mental /physical action of heel toe.

Below is text from a book by Dr Phil Mollon, a british clinincal psychologist, researcher and writer. He works extensively in the British NHS, in America and specialises in treatment for trauma vicitims.

The text comes from his book:

"EMDR and the energy therapies - psychoanlaytical perspectives."

Thought it might interest some, especially as there is developing understanding ( reluctant to use the word evidence at this stage) that use of such energy therapies seems to have beneficial affects upon the autonomic nervous system.

A diagram is found in the text but I could not create it here. Sorry for the length of the article and any pooorly copied grammar etc.

Cheers
Ian

(ps any podiatrist could learn the practical techniqe for this treatment in one weekend. Think of the benefits for our elderly whose experience of their falls may inhibit their confidence in gait.)

“In the twenty first century we now know quite a lot about the psyche-soma and the impact of it upon it of emotional trauma. As wellas the psychodynamic processes identified originally by Freud……….we also (since the moid 1980’s) understand much about the neurobiology and physiology of trauma: cognitive threrapists in the last decade or so have identified the core cognitions that stem from childheood interpersonal trauma; and , in the last few years, the field of energy psychology has shoen how patterns of trauma are encoded within the meridian energy fields of the psychosomatic organization.

All these areas of enquiry have something to contribute to the understanding and treatment of psychological trauma. More over, for many clinicians, the trauma paradigm, with it s associated neurobiological and physiological ramifications, has become the predominant frame work


Levels of the psychosomatic system and levels of intervention

The mind, body and energy system are different interacting components of one psychosomatic system (Damasio, 1994). To some extent these are organised hierarchically. Certainly the brain functions in this way, with the higher cortex exercising inhibiting and modulating influences over lower impulses, reactions and emotions, and Freud, the neurobiologist, also constructed his psychoanalytic model of the mind on this principle. However, these different components of the psychosomatic system probably interact and interface also in ways other than hierarchically, so the following is offered as only a partial and tentative model.

The highest level in the hierarchy is that of the energy system, where significant experiences are encoded, probably holographically as interference patterns (Talbot, 1996; Walther, 1988). The energy system follows quantum rather than Newtonian principles (Goswami, 1997, 2001). This level may have similarity with the morphic fields postulated by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake (1985, 1988, 1999), and may include the meridian system……… It acts, in effect, as a semi permanent blue print for the bodies physiology, for experienced emotion, recurrent cognition and resulting behaviour ….


Like the lowest levels of the system, the energy body is not normally available to consciousness…………..Consciousness is thus not the apex of the system but a midway feature ( at the level of conscious cognition and experienced emotion).

The energy system is influenced by the lower levels, but its information patterning is relatively immune to change from below, particularly from the cognitive level………..Thus, altering a person’s thoughts, or introducing greater intellectual understanding, may leave the energy pattern in tact, resulting in a tendency for the problematic psychosomatic and behavioural pattern to recur.”

By way of follow up the lady who had not walked efficiently for 25 years has just phoned me two weeks later, as I'd suggested. She reports that she has now begun to master the heel toe action, has begun to walk much further in the street than before, feels more confident in her walking and has agreed to try an off the shelf device for her footwear (not my favourite approach but there is very limited finances.)

She has now booked in for some mobilisations with a view to improving awareness of foot action.

She is in her 80's and has needed no further intervention to progress the situation.

Ian

Presented at World Congress of Biomechanics:
Recognising emotions in biomechanical gait patterns with neural nets
D. Janssen, K. FSIling, W.I. SchSIIhorn. University of MEmster, Germany

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Presented at ASB conference:
Full abstract (PDF file)

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