[NYAPRS Enews] Healing Therapies Used in Trauma Counseling Target Physical Response

[Briana Gilmore]

The Drumbeat Begins to Change in Mental Health Counseling

Buffalo News; Scott Scanlon, 9/22/2014


I’ve interviewed dozens of mental health professionals and doctors for WNY Refresh during the last year and a half, and at some point during the interview, almost all of them say three of the same things:

• Most people they treat either struggle with mental health challenges themselves or have a family member or close friend who does.

• One of the great challenges in the next generation will be finding ways to more effectively treat mental illnesses and substance abuse, which oftentimes intersect.

• It’s ironic that although so many suffer with those diseases, they continue to carry such a strong stigma.

Crawford is the second Western New York counselor I’ve interviewed in recent weeks who uses holistic approaches to her work; the other is Scotty Burt, a mental health counselor with Cazenovia Recovery Systems.

Both are Reiki masters, who use the technique with the people they treat.

Crawford, subject of today’s In the Field feature in WNY Refresh, uses the singing drums for sound therapy.

Burt, featured in a blog post two weeks ago, also is a drum circle leader.

Many who come in to see Crawford are more comfortable early on asking her for a “holistic healing technique,” she told me this week, but in the end, those people come to understand that it’s important to strengthen your mind, body and spirit.

In other words, the talk therapy almost always follows. And in other words, those who come to see her strengthen their mental health.

Crawford and Burt both have told me that those abused as children, victimized by crime as adults, or suffering with the loss of a loved one respond better to therapy – healing efforts – that includes guided conversation and wordless techniques that let them express their feelings – their pain – in a way that can begin to let it go.

“I’ve taken a lot of the trauma training classes for a certificate,” Crawford said, “and a lot of the professors who were there were talking about recommending to their clients that they get some sort of body work, that it isn’t something you’re going to get through by talking, talking, talking. You’re really going to want to begin to release some of this. It’s literally stored in your tissues, stored in your cells, and you need to begin to release it.”

Crawford holds a master’s in rehabilitation counseling from the University at Buffalo. She’s been a counselor at several private and public agencies since 1975 and for the last two years has taught a continuing education class at UB on using healing energy in mental health counseling. The class has filled to capacity every time it’s been offered, she said, and her students include college professors, social workers, nurses and pastors.

“There’s so much mind-body research that’s being done right now,” she said. “The Reiki and even Tibetan singing bowl research, they’re doing it on a physical level but also an emotional level and they’re really trying to gauge, ‘How much has your anxiety decreased, how much has your depression decreased, are your spirits lifted?’

“I think in 10 years this is going to be something that people are doing across the board.”

As she looks back on her career, were there points she wished you had more tools in the treatment tool box?

“When I was working the last job at Mid-Erie, especially with the trauma victims, I asked permission of the woman from the state, ‘Is this something that I can do?’ There was a lot of hesitation around that. She said, ‘If your nurse supervises you.’ As I was leaving, I had started a couple of different trauma groups and one was for women who had the most serious stuff to deal with. I began to do a little bit of Reiki with them.”

It helped, she said.

Crawford described Reiki as an electromagnetic process used to rebalance the body in a healthier way.

“All of these energy vortexes – these chakras – contain the energy healing system for various parts of your body, your organs, but they’re connected to your emotional system as well,” she said. “That’s why for people who have a lot of trauma, we have real storage issues right around the navel, right around the solar plexus and the sacral chakra. So when people have trauma, it’s usually stored right in the gut.

“As I begin working with somebody in that area I will see a visual visceral response. They’ll be laying there and all of a sudden there will be something like, sniff, sniff, ah. There will be a deep sighing or heaving and that says something to the effect of: ‘Trauma, they’ve got something stored in there.’

“This is a way for us to begin talking about something that maybe you’ve never told anybody about.”

Most insurance companies don’t cover Reiki treatment. And drum circling and Tibetan singing drums? Forget about it.

These are not evidence-based practices that, at this point at least, have weathered the kinds of double-blind research studies as more typical treatments.

The irony of our medical system is that – at this point at least – while the $85 hourly out-of-pocket cost to see Crawford sounds ghastly to some, it’s considerably less than what insurers pay for all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs – the kinds of costs that drive up health insurance premiums for all.

This is the argument advocates of holistic health have made with me.

I’ll admit I’m unconvinced that Reiki can be effective, but have to say I was intrigued by the singing bells.

The power of belief is important, Crawford told me, and the cynical rarely benefit from her alternative treatments.

Believers? That, she maintained, is another story.

“As I was leaving Mid-Erie, I taught some of the women in my trauma group to do Reiki on themselves, and they loved it and they came back with stories: ‘I’m sleeping better.’ ‘I’m not so angry all the time,’ ‘I’m not so jacked up all the time.’ ‘I didn’t feel like I had to reach for that drug today,’” she said.

“This is exactly what happens. It affects you physically, it affects you emotionally. It’s such a good addition to, ‘Let’s talk about it all,’ because it begins to change the energy in your life."
http://refresh.buffalonews.com/2014/09/20/drumbeat-begins-change-mental-health-counseling/
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