Testimonials

1.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What are your professional credentials?

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I am a licensed psychologist specializing in Health Psychology. Throughout my career, I have searched for the most efficacious intervention systems to apply to my work. People come to me with quite specific symptoms, both direct medical and emotional sequelae to chronic pain or illness development. I have been working with hypnosis for twenty five years and EMDR for about a dozen. About a decade ago, I was giving a workshop in San Diego and was told about E.F.T. My experience with E.F.T. convinced me that energy work was the missing link in Western medicine and psychology.  After researching Eastern medicine for intervention systems, I began studying auriculotherapy which proved hugely beneficial to a majority of my patients. The importance of subtle energy which specifically affects the sympathetic nervous system became apparent. Studies in CES and MET applications then allowed for patients to extend the positive analgesic and other effects of auriculotherapy through self-administered in home treatments using flat wave microcurrent reflecting homeostatic sympathetic wave patterns. This did lead to prolonged relief and sometimes resolution of many chronic pain presentations with cumulative effects over time. However, I continued to look for an intervention system which had a more prolonged or even permanent effect.

2.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What is your professional experience? 

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I have twenty five years experience specializing in behavioral medicine with special interest in the field of chronic pain. This subspecialty has led to multiple national and international lectures and workshops for interdisciplinary societies with specialties in chronic pain and to writing on the subject.

3.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What initially attracted you to ETT?

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I was first exposed to E.T.T. at a national interdisciplinary conference in which Dr. Vazquez gave an introductory presentation. In that workshop, I witnessed a man who had suffered from chronic fatigue for ten years shuffle up to the front.  He was stooped over, with a pale complexion, & within minutes of Steve using the goggles for peripheral eye stimulation, he started crying because he felt energy for the first time in years.  He proceeded to walk back to his seat with an erect posture, energy in his step and color in his face! I watched another woman who was suffering from chronic back pain, experience full amelioration just as briefly through the same method. Dr. Vazquez further expanded upon the lasting effects that could be realized within an E.T.T. approach, and I knew then and there that this was a man I needed to know and an intervention system I needed to learn.

4.     Question by Connie Heaps:  How long and how much have you used ETT?  

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I believe that that first meeting occurred in Sept."04. By attending sequential levels of workshops in Chicago, Austin, and Philadelphia, I was able to complete the bulk of E.T.T. training in relatively short order. I have therefore been integrating it into my practice for approximately three years. I use E.T.T. in my work almost every day. With some patients, E.T.T. work is integrated with other modalities, and some patients have responded extremely well to E.T.T. in exclusion of other approaches

5.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What do you like best about ETT?

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I like all of it. Perhaps what I like best is the depth of it, the speed with which one can get to core issues, the breadth of associations, feelings, and cognitive perspectives an individual can elicit around a particular issue, and the interventions which allow for those different responses to be processed, released or integrated so efficiently. I used to generally avoid dealing with entrenched depression patients, because it frustrated me. Like most therapists, I had seen patients who had been in therapy for years even decades with a variety of therapists using all sorts of different therapeutic stances and intervention systems (e.g. cognitive behavioral, psychodynamic, interpersonal, object relational, etc. etc.). Some of these patients had all the insight in the world, but it hadn't changed their core senses of self or related feelings and beliefs or behavior. With E.T.T., I look forward to dealing with these issues, because I know that when those insights come up within the right biosynthesis of wave band length in the effect of color on the brain (and sometimes the right pulse frequency and right angle accessing the right part of the brain) these core negative entrenched neuronal patterns can be profoundly and lastingly changed.

6.     Question by Connie Heaps:  How do you see ETT to be different from other modalities? 

Answer by Greg Nevens:  As above, E.T.T. seems to allow depth access to negative entrenched neuronal patterns which have often been set up by (loosely defined) traumatic experiences. In my field of behavioral medicine there is more and more recognition that these traumatically based emotional patterns create blockages in the normal somatic as well as psychological flows of subtle energy systems which can result in the etiology and maintenance of chronic illnesses within a diathesis-stress model. This is now a fundamental premise in the fields of "integrative' or "vibrational" medicine. It is the reason that many emerging "energy psychology" techniques have had some measured effect on somatic symptoms as well as the targeted emotional symptoms. However, though these techniques can be very valuable in giving the patients a sense of control over the severity of symptoms expression in both realms, they more rarely seem to resolve the issues through impacting the original source of the energy (and biochemical and neuronal) homeostatic destabilization. It is my experience that E.T.T.  allows us to access and treat those source blockages and related traumas better than any other intervention system I know of.

In terms of the specific field of psychotherapy vs. behavioral medicine, I think it is important in terms of the needed expansion of therapists using this intervention system that it is not exclusionary of other paradigms or theoretical stances. My own bias is that the most successful practitioners will have an eclectic theoretical background and stance. E.T.T. offers an intervention system that can only serve to increase the efficacy of any theoretical orientation. Object relational, psychodynamic, interpersonal, and attachment issues come up and are being dealt with constantly within this system and worked through in an extremely efficient way. In terms of the predominant cognitive behavioral model of the times, practitioners will be able to see and diagnostically verify problematic negative thought patterns through the perceptual distortions that accompany them and verify therapeutic effects with the adoption of alternate cognitive processing (even in the form of simple word choice changes) as those distortions improve or resolve (a phenomenon I have certainly witnessed).

7.     Question by Connie Heaps:  Can you describe a particular example of a client’s response to ETT that has stood out in your mind?

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I regularly experience sessions that stand out in my mind, so many that I have recently been trying to write them down in my office if I have time. Most often they slip by. In the last four workdays, I can think of three sessions which stand out as eliciting some profound core shifts through a variety of E.T.T. interventions (photic release, dream processing, and peripheral eye stimulation). One case that stands out today for some reason is of a male fibromyalgia patient who came in complaining of pain as well as ten years of severe depression and anxiety which is consistent with the fibromyalgia complex of symptoms. Within twenty minutes of the first treatment session, he felt his ten year depression lift. This was in response to goggle work finding relief at five o'clock and then superimposing. Pain level also was relieved as would be expected from a biochemical stand point. He had up and down days thereafter, but his true sense of deep depression did not return. Brief depressive periods became more situation specific. Over time, we worked on deeper levels with the light machine, working through abandonment and abuse issues throughout his life and other specific traumas.  This man is presently dealing with severe real life stressors, the greatest predictor of the number and severity of trigger points on any given day is stress level, and of course depression is impacted through norepinephrine destabilization. Yet, he is experiencing no fibromyalgia symptoms and not depressed in the face of these severe life stressors. He is dealing with them directly without somaticizing or retreating into depression as his past history would have predicted. He has developed new more healthy coping mechanisms. I ascribe this remarkable progress to E.T.T., not only the working through of old trauma but the subsequent ability to create new ways of being and coping styles with the creative energy now unblocked by that old trauma. (He wants to write a book entitled: "My Five O'clock World")

8.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What surprised you the most about ETT after you learned to use it?

Answer by Greg Nevens:  What has surprised me the most is both the depth and pervasiveness of the material accessed when the biosynthesis effect is realized (through appropriate wave band/color choice, strobe setting, and optic nerve stimulation angles) and the breadth of potential therapeutic options for working that material through within the intervention system.

9.     Question by Connie Heaps:  What do you think needs to be known about ETT that professionals who are unfamiliar with it should know? 

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I think that many of them need to be encouraged to step outside of their comfortable paradigms and theoretical adherences. At the same time and as stated above, they can be reassured that, whatever their orientation, it can be enhanced and integrated within the  E.T.T. system. Obviously, some research needs to be done verifying the remarkable results that we are all seeing in a variety of areas. The power of this technique on initial introduction can be met with incredulity or outright cynicism. Not only should research, video tape and whatever other mechanism be used to encourage further exploration by these people but their own fears about its power need to be addressed and processed early on by the organization through subjective exposure to and experiential learning of some of the E.T.T. interventions themselves. Steve can only cover and address so much in introductory lectures. Perhaps, as we get a few practitioners in expanded geographic areas, his introductory lectures can be followed by some initial study group offerings by other practitioners to specifically offer this exposure and processing of doubts and fears.

10.  Question by Connie Heaps:  What do you see as the future of ETT? 

Answer by Greg Nevens:  I see the future of E.T.T. as unlimited. However, getting there will require patience and vigilance toward opportunity. Traditional Western medicine stances and of course the extremely powerful pharmaceuticals will not be supportive and may in fact create significant obstacles to growth and acceptance. More conservative and entrenched mental health schools of thought will also be resistant. "Scientific" research will be helpful. Yet, our present scientific bias and myopia toward viewing double bind studies as the only standard of efficacy doesn't lend itself readily to complicated intervention systems like E.T.T. which require a fluidity of selection processes when dealing with the uniqueness of individual patients and a certain artistry on the part of the practitioner. In the long run, our present system is not working and there is a growing groundswell of consumer generated search for new (or very old ) models of health care that improve on the status quo. We are now seeing even conservative hospitals integrating some of these systems which were formerly discounted and given no credence by the establishment. Change is happening and being sought, and I think in the next few years, given the effectiveness we have witnessed with E.T.T. and some synchronicity, this system could and should ride that bus.