A high school student comes into my office. He has been troubled since his best friend committed suicide a few weeks ago. He feels guilty, depressed, unable to focus at school and exhibiting outbursts of anger. In our second meeting, I guide him in repeating a few simple sentences, making statements in the following format: "I retrieve all of my energy bound up in…"; "I remove all not-me energy related to…"; “I retrieve all of my energy bound up in my reactions to…". At the end of the session he no longer feels troubled, guilty or upset by his friend’s suicide. He expresses an appropriate degree of sadness, mingled with acceptance. When I see him a week later, he reports that he has had no more issues with this since our session.

An experienced first-responder who volunteered at "Ground Zero" in September 2011 was traumatized by a number of experiences he had there, has recurring nightmares of each one along with all the other classic symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. One by one, we work on these experiences and these nightmares, utilizing the same sentences as with the boy, and with each session another nightmare disappears and what was a traumatic experience can now be remembered with a feeling of peace and acceptance.

After working extremely hard in a dysfunctional organization, and then losing his job, and normally high-performing salesman has lost his confidence and is exhibiting classic signs and symptoms of depression. I guide him in repeating the same sentences in gradually, each aspect of his experience there that has negatively affected him, is resolved, put away and no longer troubles him. His confidence returns, and he returns to his previous, positive, sense of self.

If you recognize these kinds of rapid, almost "magical" effects, then you are probably familiar with Energy Psychology techniques such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) or TAT (Tapas Acupressure Technique) or any of the other, increasingly numerous ones – or, perhaps, with EMDR.

The particular technique I described above is called Logosynthesis. Developed by Willem Lammers, a Dutch-born Swiss psychologist, it draws from various schools of psychology, but especially Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Transactional Analysis– as well as from the field of energy psychology. It is essentially a “trans-psychological” technique or approach, as it is one of the few psychological approaches that explicitly integrates mind, body and spirit. In fact, the premise of Logosynthesis is that our core self is not located in our minds or bodies, our thoughts or feelings, but in our embodied Essence, which others may call embodied Spirit, or any other name. Most of the problems we experience, and most of our symptoms, are essentially caused by separation or dissociation from our true nature, or Essence. If our sense of self and our deep identity were truly connected to our Essence, we would not feel the fears, or the anxieties we feel. We would not be taking things personally, or fearing abandonment by others.

On the psychological level, in Logosynthesis most problems are seen as being rooted in imprints left by (mostly) early experiences. For example, in the examples above the salesman has been "imprinted" by a variety of things in his work environment, including lack of positive response, being set up to fail, hearing people talking behind his back, etc. which continue to affect him when he is no longer in that environment.

More importantly, and something which speaks to the technique itself, our psychological problems are seen and dealt with in a way that is consistent with what modern science tells us about the nature of reality. Whereas this is barely acknowledged in conventional medicine and psychology, we know that matter is actually made of energy. We are not "biochemical machines" but beings made of energy. Our thoughts, our feelings, and all our internal processes are fundamentally energy. We also know from scientific research that the energy of thought affects matter.

In Logosynthesis, anything which we think about and to which we have a reaction is seen as a literal "thing" – an energy construct - that exists in the present, within our personal space. It involves a mental or sensory representation that we create, and to which we react. When working with Logosynthesis, people are often easily able to tune into this either as an image, as a felt sense, or with any of the other senses. The other defining feature of this technique is that it uses the power of words. Words are energy, which have the power – when spoken with the energy of intention – to create change, to affect energy and matter. This, again, is consistent with modern physics. (For example, see this article on research showing the effect of language on DNA:  http://embracingthecontradiction.org/dna.htm.)

Like all Energy Psychology techniques, Logosynthesis can be used not just as a therapeutic technique, but also in coaching and in self-help, for everything from optimizing well-being and functioning, to dealing with trauma. It can also be used as a practice to systematically resolve negative patterns of thinking and behavior that interfere with our ability to be the best we can be, to feel the best we can feel, to reconnect with our true Self, or Essence. Although there is an ever-increasing body of research evidence for the efficacy of certain Energy Psychology techniques, they are still not accepted generally in the field, and are still considered "experimental". However, in addition to the research evidence, the evidence from clinicians who use them and from the much larger number of people who use them for self-help techniques is quite consistently showing that they are much more effective than anything we have had before.