Eliminate Emotional Pain: The Case of Barbara

by Fred Gallo PhD

Over the years I’ve seen miraculous results when treating patients. One that comes to the forefront of my mind is a story of a patient whom had gone through many years of suffering before she was finally cured. I saw this patient 10 years ago when I had the opportunity to treat her. Barbara, a 33-year-old woman whom I had treated many years previously returned to receive further help. While the earlier treatment had benefited her, there was an event that occurred in her childhood for which I was not able to help. That event was a rape. As a 13-year-old girl her boyfriend, a few years older than she, raped her. She never told her parents about the rape, but instead suffered silently. She would frequently experience nightmares, turned to drugs and alcohol and in many ways was highly depressed. She believed that she was not worthwhile and, as perplexing as it may seem, she even blamed herself for the rape.

When Barbara returned to see me, she was upset about some recent altercations with her mother. This was causing her to recall a number of distressing memories concerning their relationship. After listening to her concerns, I explained that I had been doing a new form of therapy that involved having patients tap on specific points on their bodies to relieve their problems. I suggested that we do this for her and she was agreeable. Within a matter of minutes she was feeling much calmer, and not distressed in the least about her mother. She felt more positive and hopeful about their relationship.

Next, I broached the subject of the rape, asking if it still bothered her. Immediately Barbara began to cry. She was obviously still distressed about the rape and made many statements about it being her fault, about the fact that she had never listened to her mother and so on. Barbara’s behavior at that moment created the impression that she reentered the 13-year-old girl mind who was traumatized some 20 years before.

With her permission, I guided her to tap at various points on her body: between her eyebrows, under her eyes, beneath her collarbones, on edges of certain fingernails and the like. Within a few minutes of this treatment, I observed a miraculous transformation in Barbara. All signs of distress were erased from her face. There was now calmness, serenity. She reached over to my desk and took a Kleenex and dried the tears from her face. Then she sat calmly, looking at me with a relaxed, peaceful expression. It is an understatement to say that I was amazed at what I was witnessing. I asked Barbara, not very successfully concealing my amazement, "How do you feel?" Her response was a simple, "Fine," as if to say, What makes you ask?

"What about what happened to you?" I asked, referring to the rape. "It’s just something that happened to me when I was a kid," she answered calmly. "You were raped!" I exclaimed. "Doesn’t that bother you now?" Barbara shook her head and simply said, "No it doesn’t." I wanted to test the stability of this apparent transformation, so I asked her again, "Do you still think you were to blame?"

"No," she said congruently. "I wasn’t to blame. If anything, he was. But that’s all over with now." I was totally and utterly amazed! Dumbfounded! Blown away! I had never seen such a remarkable change occur in such a short period of time. I saw Barbara several times after that and also phoned her in follow-up for several years. That trauma has never bothered her since. All the talking we had done previously, all the visualizations, all the attempts at getting her to think more rationally about the rape, all of the previous emoting, etc. — none of it did anything compared to a few minutes of tapping, which quickly changed how she felt and thought about the rape and about herself