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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

We'll call him David.

David was a patient of one of my students, Dr. Larry Momaya, a board-certified psychiatrist and brain-imaging expert in Southern California who was motivated to find alternatives to the psychotropic medications he commonly prescribed. Dr. Momaya had studied with me to become a Master Practitioner in 2010. Here is David's story, as Dr. Momaya told it to me:

David was referred to me by his therapist when he was about seventeen or eighteen. When David came to me, he had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADD, and he had some history of drug abuse. While the therapist continued seeing David for therapy, I worked with him on a course of antidepressants and antianxiety meds. David did okay but was never fully symptom free.

After I'd seen David for about three and a half years, he started complaining of severe abdominal pain. The pain continued and worsened, and over the next year, he was referred to a series of specialists, who couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. But they started David on various pain meds: morphine, barbiturates, and finally a fentanyl patch. Nothing really worked. David still suffered, and I could see that the combination of all those meds was taking its toll on him. I reviewed all the medications he was taking and realized that a) they weren't really resolving the physical pain or the emotional issues and b) he was maxed out on the dosages he was taking and running out of options.

So one day I asked David, "Are you open to trying something different for your pain?"

He basically said, "What have I got to lose?"

I ran him through a simple hypnosis technique that reduced his pain from a 10 to a 2. That was really encouraging — for both of us — but I knew we needed to tackle David's problems at the source or they would surface in other ways.

I introduced him to the concept of the Mental and Emotional Release (MER) therapy. David was initially hesitant, but we worked with the process slowly. At each session, he would release more of the negative emotions that had controlled his life up to that point. As we progressed, he was able to reduce his meds, first the antianxiety and antidepressants, then finally the pain medications. Within three months, he was off everything completely and experiencing no physical pain, no anxiety, and no depression.

I attended David's wedding about a year later. He was fully functioning, very happy, and totally free of any medication. This is the type of result we all want for all of our patients. But frankly, before I started introducing MER to my patients, I rarely saw it and definitely didn't see it happening as quickly as this.

Like Dr. Momaya, I've witnessed amazing shifts and outcomes myself, using MER, with a few Davids. I've worked with and taught the Mental and Emotional Release technique for years now, and I've seen it achieve extraordinary results in all kinds of mental and emotional disorders ranging from depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and extreme phobias to simple behavioral issues like procrastination and poor social skills. I've also heard dozens of success stories from other therapists and Master Practitioners I've trained in the MER process. The stories range from clients overcoming alcohol and drug addiction or debilitating anxiety to those breaking through barriers to achieve career success or happiness in their relationships.

And these results happen within hours, not years or months.

As I previously explained, my motivation for writing this book is pretty simple. My mission in life and the mission of my company, the Empowerment Partnership, is to empower the planet. Or more specifically, to help people empower themselves, which will in turn, empower the planet. And I can't think of a better way to help empower the planet than by spreading information that can help heal and empower us all as individuals, can you?

In my experience and in the experience of the many psychotherapists and Master Practitioners who use it, MER is effective, with little to no relapse after treatment is concluded. It's also extremely efficient and often gets positive results within the first session — even with problems like David's that were long lasting or had not responded to other treatments. And that's empowering.

I've written this book to spread the word about the Mental and Emotional Release technique and to give you hope that it is possible to overcome the baggage you carry. Within these pages, you'll get an overview of MER, a basic understanding of the process, and how and why it works as well as it does. You'll read a number of case studies of real-life clients who have sought help with a variety of issues, and you'll see the results they achieved through the process. And at the end of the book, I'll share some of the recent research on MER.

I've written this book in language that's accessible to nontherapists, and it's my intention to give you a good understanding of the Mental and Emotional Release technique in these pages. I hope the case studies inspire you to investigate MER and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) further. Whether you are suffering from a debilitating illness such as depression or looking to enhance your experience of life and performance by releasing negative emotions of anger, fear, sadness, hurt, and guilt, MER may well be the key you're looking for.

But this book will not give you the foundation necessary to really use MER effectively unless you've had training in NLP. And I definitely do not recommend that you attempt to use this technique on yourself or others who have severe disorders such as PTSD or depression unless you're a qualified psychotherapist with extensive training in NLP and MER. If MER sounds like a good option for you, please contact our office at (800) 800-MIND or DrMatt.com to learn about our trainings or find a qualified Master Practitioner to guide you through the MER process.

If you're a therapist who would like to see more positive results in your work with clients, I encourage you to read the material and review the research in chapter 12. If you think this might be a good complement to your practice, you'll find information on professional training and certification in MER on our website, EmpowermentPartnership.com, or my personal site at DrMatt.com.

Getting this technique out to the psychotherapeutic community right now is critical. In 2011, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration issued the results of their five-year study on mental health in the United States. It found that over forty-five million Americans — approximately one in five adults — suffer from some form of mental illness. According to the CDC, diagnoses of mental illness in children have also risen sharply. That increase might be due in part to changes in diagnostic measures. But the CDC also reports that "suicide is the third leading cause of death in young people between ten and twenty-four, many of whom had mental and emotional disorders."

We're in a mental and emotional health crisis, and we spend an estimated $147.4 billion on mental health care annually in the United States. Yet, according to Glenn Waller, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Sheffield and one of the authors of the 2009 meta-analysis conducted by leading mental health professionals in the United Kingdom and the United States, "A large number of people with mental health problems that could be straightforwardly addressed are getting therapies that have very little chance of being effective."

To me, that is sad — and preventable.

When I was studying to become a Doctor of Psychology, the professor in my health psychology class talked about certain villages in China that approach mental emotional and physical health in a very different way than the typical Western approach. In some of these villages, the doctors are paid every month by the entire village when everyone is healthy. When someone becomes ill, that family is no longer required to pay. The professor looked out us and said, "Imagine a health care system where professionals are paid to keep people healthy rather than making money off of illness."

I grew up in a family that emphasized reframing an issue or looking at things from a different perspective. So I loved the professor's example of such a different perspective than ours, and it got me thinking. Our system pays people to treat and prevent illness. A fundamental cornerstone of health or integrative psychology is wellness promotion as opposed to illness prevention. Those who work in wellness promotion understand that mental and emotional health and well-being are an integral part of that wellness. This is why I believe the technique of MER is so vital: It supports wellness on all levels.

A Brief History of MER

I built the Mental and Emotional Release process on a specific technique, Time Line Therapy, that my father, Dr. Tad James, developed in 1985. He, in turn, based his Time Line Therapy on the neurolinguistic programming theories and practices of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of NLP.

Why is MER based on NLP?

A few years ago, I went back to school to get my PhD in Integrative Health Psychology. At that time, I'd been working with NLP for about twenty-five years and wanted to see if there was another approach to therapy and personal growth that was even better than NLP.

Honestly, I didn't find anything better.

I studied allopathic, complementary, and traditional psychological therapies. But nothing was as effective and efficient in dealing with the broad spectrum of mental and emotional health issues as NLP. So though I've incorporated some information from other therapeutic practices into the NLP trainings I do, I still focus on NLP because it gets results — not just for me, but for the hundreds of therapists I've trained.

The Time Line Therapy technique my father created was so effective that the Council of Psychotherapy in Croatia asked him to train them in it to help deal with the thousands of Croatian victims of the war, who were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. At that time, PTSD — which is ranked as the most extreme of negative emotions, like a phobia on steroids — had hit epidemic proportions in Croatia. The council had tested several therapies to respond to the crisis. But they found that Time Line Therapy was the only one that worked 100 percent of the time with no relapses.

I began working with Time Line Therapy in 1993. Since that time, I've modified the technique to some extent based on feedback from my clients, students, and practitioners to obtain even more impressive results. I now teach this refined technique as the Mental and Emotional Release process to hundreds of students every year in our Master Practitioner courses. The body of incredible results continues to expand.

Comparing MER to Other Therapies

Compared to other types of therapy, Mental and Emotional Release therapy has a number of benefits. First of all, MER is fast. Rather than spending months or years in therapy, most problems and symptoms — even those caused by severe trauma or those that have been ingrained for decades — will literally disappear within one or two sessions, a total of five to eight hours. In fact, one of the odd downsides of the process is that it works so quickly and thoroughly to eradicate long-standing issues that clients have a hard time believing it. They feel symptom free yet may have trouble trusting such a dramatic shift that happened with so swiftly and easily.

Several years ago, I demonstrated part of the MER process in one of my workshops. I asked for a volunteer, and a woman we'll call Mona responded. Mona had seen a variety of psychologists for ten years because of her anger issues. Her volatile and almost constant anger had cost her a marriage as well as several jobs, and she was beginning to see that it was affecting her health. But the therapies she tried over the years didn't get rid of this anger, and she had given up completely.

I gave Mona a brief explanation of MER, where we unearth and revisit the root cause of her anger. She agreed to let me guide her through the technique. Ten minutes later, she opened her eyes, with happy tears streaming down her face. She looked at me and said, "My anger has disappeared. Why did I waste all that time in therapy?" That statement was quickly followed by, "Wait, that was too easy. How do I know if it is really gone?"

The discussion I had with Mona after the release took longer than the release itself. I had to explain why it is possible to let negative emotions go, and added that we do it all the time. Three years later, I saw Mona again, and she immediately said, "I am not sure why it was so easy, but it worked."

The positive changes that happen during MER often feel so integrated and natural, clients even have trouble remembering that they ever felt differently. The new shift feels so authentic that it simply feels like who they are, as in the following example:

A student of mine worked with a three-pack-a-day smoker who wanted to quit. George had been a chain smoker for decades but his doctor — and George's wife — finally gave him the ultimatum that he had to quit. For years, George had tried nicotine patches and gum, herbs, even acupuncture. Nothing worked for longer than a day. As he put it, "Cigarettes have me by the throat. There's nothing I can do to stop."

My student took George through some NLP techniques and some hypnosis in one three-hour session. Two weeks later, George returned, complaining that the process hadn't worked. "I'm still smoking," he said.

Surprised, my student asked, "How much?"

"Three cigarettes a day."

My student guided George through a few more processes and arranged for a follow-up call the next week.

That next week, George reported that he had stopped smoking completely. "But it wasn't that MER stuff you did with me," he claimed. "I just decided I wanted to quit. No big deal."

As my student told me, "George didn't even remember that cigarettes had him 'by the throat' a few weeks before that."

Why does it work so quickly?

I'm often asked in class why MER works so easily and quickly. The answer is actually really simple. Think of the last time you got over something. In my trainings, I always ask, "How many of you have ever been afraid of something that you're no longer afraid of? Or alternatively, how many of you have been angry at something that you're no longer angry at?" Without fail, most (if not all) of my students raise their hands.

Next, I'll say, "Great. And how long did it take to get over your anger or fear?" In the twenty-plus years I've done this, the answer from the group always ranges from "immediately" to "twenty years." In a recent training in San Diego, a lady clearly stated that it took her over twenty years to get over the anger related to her ex-husband.

I said, "Great; let's go with this one."

I asked this woman to be a little bit more specific. "From the moment you went from being angry with him to no longer being angry with him, how long did that take?"

She said (as most everyone does), "That was instantaneous."

I then asked, "Wouldn't be fair to say that it took twenty years for you to be ready to let go of the anger? But the moment you were ready to let it go, it happened in an instant?"

And just like everyone else in my experience, she admitted that yes, that was true.

When I was in school, I asked my professor about this. My cognitive psychology textbook said that you can go from having a great day to a completely bad day in an instant. A phobia can be created in an instant. The textbook went on to say that will take decades to overcome a phobia.

So I asked the professor, "Why is it that the neurology of an individual can go from good to bad in an instant, but not from bad to good in an instant?"

His answer was quite interesting. He said many therapists and academic psychologists have lost the focus on the client and now focus on the research instead. He didn't paint this as either good or bad, just a statement of the current affairs in psychology.

He went on to say that he believed I should continue to teach what I teach because it's built on the premise that people go from bad to good instantaneously.

The caveat is, are you ready to let bad go?

No Need to Dig up Old Bodies

Another benefit of MER is that it's not necessary to delve into old content. (As we'll discuss in the next chapter, a practitioner looks for context, not content.) Clients don't have to retell the stories of their old painful wounds or embarrassments. They aren't asked to describe how they were potty trained or every past relationship they ever had. They don't even describe their symptoms in very much detail.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Mental and Emotional Release"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dr. Matt James with Tris Thorp.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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