[kej]

>an approach that involves identifying and releasing traumas, attitudes, behavioural patterns, self-perceptions and defense mechanisms that are held in the subconscious mind

Could you elaborate on this part? What does "identifying and releasing" look like, in practice?

[_ywdj]

This is where discussions about this stuff can go off the rails, as the main modality I've used has links to the chiropractic profession (even though I think that profession is highly dysfunctional and many or even most of its practitioners are quacks at best and frauds at worst).

Anyway, the modality I've most used is a technique called NET (neuro-emotional technique), which (I believe) is similar to a practice called Psych-K (I've never done this one but I'm told they're similar). Both of them use muscle-testing to identify incongruences between different aspects of the mind and body (e.g., conflicting/incompatible desires, beliefs or values).

I've also done plenty of Holotropic Breathwork and Ericksonian Hypnosis, some EMDR, some EFT/Tapping, and some use of basic affirmations. Someone else I know well has done a lot of a practice called Family Constellations, as well as another practice that focuses on healing the trauma of birth - though I've not done either of those practices.

[sizzle]

These sound like awesome techniques to have in your toolkit. Any idea if they've been studied in double blinded evidence based trials on patients for efficacy? We need more tools like this at our disposal for cracking the code on the last frontier that is mental health, in addition to the current shotgun approach of flooding our synapses with neurochemicals via SSRIs.

Also wish I could try psychoactives like Psilocybin which many have had life changing positive responses to.

[_ywdj]

Of NET, some small trials by fringe researchers have been conducted [1] (or just planned [2]), but none has had much impact.

This 2017 study [3] seemed to find promising results:

Changes in cerebellar functional connectivity and autonomic regulation in cancer patients treated with the Neuro Emotional Technique for traumatic stress symptoms

...

Results: The results demonstrated significant changes in the NET group, as compared to the control group, in the functional connectivity between the cerebellum (including the vermis) and the amygdala, parahippocampus, and brain stem. Likewise, participants receiving the NET intervention had significant reductions in autonomic reactivity based on heart rate response to the traumatic stimulus compared to the control group.

That result seems to warrant further research, but I can't see it happening at any significant scale.

I've thought/read at length about the state of research into these kinds of modalities, and have concluded that it doesn't and won't happen at scale, due to a combination of these reasons:

- The cost/effort to run a large, controlled trial, including longitudinal research (you'd really need to monitor people over at least 5, but ideally 10+ years to get the best results) would be huge.

- No body with the resources to conduct such a trial is sufficiently motivated to do so, as there's no drug discovery or other outcome that can yield billions of dollars in revenues.

- The chiropractic profession exists at the fringes of medical practice (for generally valid reasons) and is too "hot" for any government or major research institution to want to touch.

The same goes for the work of the researchers I mentioned in other comments; Gabor Maté, Stan/Christina Grof, Peter Levine, Bruce Lipton and others. They've done plenty of qualitative research through their careers, and have written many papers and built solid careers as writers and seminar speakers for sizeable-but-still-niche audiences (of mostly very privileged people with plenty of spare time and money to devote to this kind of healing work). But parlaying that into large-scale studies just never seems feasible, no matter how compelling their findings.

But I think it's profoundly important work, as I'm sure it has the potential to transform the existing psychology/psychiatry fields, so, who knows, maybe something will click one day to make something happen.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site:nih.gov+neuro-emotional...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2646715/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29052102/

[sizzle]

Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough response

[RankingMember]

Hey if worked for you, it worked for you. Thanks for laying it out there regardless of what I think of some of these techniques.