By Jim Birmingham/reporter
NE students were introduced April 25 to a new form of therapy used to rapidly alleviate emotional distress and physical pain.
Professional counselor and family therapist Steven Vazquez spoke about and demonstrated his Emotional Transformation Therapy technique.
“The transformation in ETT refers to the unusual degree of change that occurs when ETT is used,” he said.
When using colors to stimulate certain parts of the brain, the individual experiences a rapid decrease in distress and anxiety, Vazquez said.
he differentiated this form of therapy from others that one might associate with ETT, like light or color therapy.
ETT can help mitigate or remove the client’s issues by developing rapport between the client and therapist, allowing the therapist to guide the client in helping to contain the emotions, in addition to brain stimulation with light.
This technique works because cells in a person’s eyes that receive light, called photoreceptors, convert what one sees into neural impulses, Vazquez said.
The impulses then travel throughout the brain and nervous system.
“If this process is guided well, the exact emotions, memories or thoughts responsible for a particular distress can be brought to complete relief in seconds,” he said. “There’s a speed that’s uncanny here with this work.”
All cells have integral membrane proteins, Vazquez said.
“One class of these IMPs converts vibration such as light into biochemical signals. If a particular wavelength of light matches the targeted emotional or physical state, the experience of resonance is thought to occur,” he said. ”In the case of light resonating with emotion, the result is often a very rapid change in biochemistry.”
Vazquez talked about helping a drug addict entirely remove his cravings.
“In about three minutes, the craving was completely eliminated,” he said. “In three weeks, it was still gone. I saw him eight months later, and the craving was still gone.”
Not everyone quickly benefits, however, Vazquez said. Sometimes it can take multiple sessions before the issues are abated.
Because the ETT form of therapy doesn’t involve prescription drugs, Vazquez said it has the benefit of lacking serious side effects that prescription medication has.
Vazquez demonstrated ETT’s efficacy firsthand to students.
Calling on volunteers, Vazquez helped relieve a student’s worries about money issues and another student’s issues with chronic pain and worries about things at home, as well as helping other audience members.
Vazquez used two techniques on these students: multidimensional eye movement (which involved the use of colored sticks) and spectral resonance technique. he visibly brought about fast changes in the audience members’ levels of anxiety.
Vazquez said the technique doesn’t benefit from the placebo effect.
“We’re going against the placebo effect for it [ETT] to work,” he said. “No one here probably even heard of this before I came here. People don’t expect this to work.”
ETT is used to treat a variety of conditions, like anxiety, phobias, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and addictions, Vazquez said.
